Page:Karl Kautsky - Georgia - tr. Henry James Stenning (1921).pdf/23

 I have recently met has not made acquaintance with Siberia.

Georgia also, provided the Russian Party with a series of its best leaders and representatives. Jordania, Ramishvily, Tsereteli, Japaridze, Tcheidse, Lomtatidze, Gëgëtchkori, Macharadze and Tchenkeli played in Petrograd a political role not less important than in Tiflis.

The Social-Democratic fraction of the last Russian Duma before the October Revolution chose the same Tcheidse to be its leader. It voted against war credits and adhered to the Zimmerwald Conference. It was Tcheidse who read the Zimmerwaldian manifesto in the Duma. And when the 1917 Revolution created the Workers’ Councils, Tcheidse was chosen President of the Petrograd Workers' Council—a proof of the confidence reposed in him by the Russian proletariat through his parliamentary activity.

By the side of Tcheidse in the Petrograd Workers' Council was the Georgian Tsereteli, who had hastened there from his Siberian place of exile.

The Menshevists were not able to, assert themselves in Russia. They were too weak to carry out their peace policy in opposition to the war policy of the Cadets, in coalition with whom they had formed a ministry, of which Tsereteli was a member; and they could not decide to support the, Bolshevist agitation, which aimed at the dissolution of the Army before the conclusion of peace, and the complete sacrifice of Russia to German, Austrian and Turkish invasion, plundering and conquest.

The middle course which the Menshevists would have pursued was well conceived. But as is so often the case in history when great and irreconcilable oppositions come into conflict, those who worked for the final result which was given by the parallelogram of forces were paralysed by the clash of the antagonisms, and only after the strength of the two extremes had been