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to assume that these were composed mainly of Bolshevik sympathizers).67 This proved to be sufficient so we will never know what would have happened if the Left SR had gained a majority. My guess is that the Congress would have been surrounded by troops loyal to the Bolsheviks and disbanded.
It was the assassination of German Ambassador Mirbach that finally transformed the Soviets into one party institutions. By July of 1918 the toilers who had initially supported peace with the Germans had come to see Brest-Litovsk as a great betrayal. In the Ukraine there was growing resistance against the brutal puppet government set up by the Germans. The Left SRs decided to provoke war with Germany by assassinating the German ambassador. This was not a revolt as Cliff claims68 for the LSR had no intention of overthrowing the government69. At least not directly. A German invasion could only have been met by partisan warfare and the Bolsheviks would have been reduced to just one group of partisans like everyone else. The Bolshevik state would have been destroyed - something the Left SRs would have welcomed.
It was a subtle strategy but one that was dangerously wrong. While the Left SR delegates denounced the Bolshevik the Left SR armed wing prepared for armed resistance, not for insurrection but to foil the expected Bolshevik repression. Then a bomb was thrown into the Germany Embassy killing the ambassador. The assassination did not however provoke war but instead gave the Bolsheviks the pretext to break the Left SRs. And once the the Left SRs had been forced underground there was no legal opposition to speak of left.
Cliff explains the decline in Soviet power as due to their unwieldiness.70 More relevant was that Congresses dominated by one party (eg 6th Congress 933 Bolsheviks versus 16 others71) bound by discipline were unlikely to be more than a rubber stamp when their party was the government. Cliff explains the decline in local soviets as a result of the civil war72 but more important these soviets were by now so unrepresentative of those who nominally elected them that they were dependent on Moscow to keep them in power.73
Stalinism is often a synonym for rule by terror. There is little dispute that Lenin's Bolsheviks used terror. The defence of Lenin usuly claims that for him teror was an emergency measure forced on him during the civil war. But here again political executions predated the outbreak of full scale civil war.
To pretend these killings never occurred as does Cliff needs blind faith but there is a tenable apologia for the Bolsheviks. That (and this the view of Price an eyewitness) the killings were the responsibility of freelance anarchists and maximalists.
An example is the murder of Kokoshkin and Shingarev. These were two ex ministers of the Provisional government. That they were in prison at all was an injustice and for this reason Stienberg the Left-SR Komisar of Justice wanted to release them and as a first stage moved [next page]