ABSTRACT
The Mensheviks had denounced the Bolshevik coup as an irresponsible folly and had predicted that the destruction of the existing capitalist structure of industry and trade at that particularly critical moment would plunge the country's economy into complete chaos. But though, in 1917, the Mensheviks deplored Bolshevik folly, they feared the reactionary right much more. Between 29 October and 2 November, 1917, negotiations were conducted under the auspices of Vikzhel between the representatives of all socialist parties including the Bolsheviks. After the failure of the Vikzhel negotiations, the Mensheviks reviewed their position at the Extraordinary Congress of their party on 4 December, 1917. The Mensheviks did not repudiate on principle the notion of a dictatorship of the proletariat; they considered it to be a legitimate state between the bourgeois and the socialist revolutions and even recognised that during that stage terror might be temporarily unavoidable.
