ABSTRACT
The Bolshevik insurrection dealt a fatal blow to the formation of a democratic, all-socialist government that increasing numbers of Mensheviks and SRs (and not a few Bolsheviks, such as Kamenev) had come to support. They walked out of the Second Congress of Soviets in protest against the Bolsheviks’ unilateral action (while Trotsky sneeringly consigned them to the rubbish heap of history). Yet, as Geoffrey Swain has recently argued, a Bolshevik dictatorship was not quite the foregone conclusion that it appears in retrospect. The main protagonist in attempting to salvage an all-socialist government was the Vikzhel, the All-Russian Executive Committee of the Union of Railway Workers.
