Having abandoned Petrograd, the Congress met in Moscow – the 1,232 delegates, 795 Bolsheviks, 283 Left Socialist Revolutionaries, 25 Socialist Revolutionaries of the Centre and no more than 32 Mensheviks.43 On 14 March, Lenin delivered an impassioned oration in which he called upon Russia to ‘size up in full, to the very bottom, the abyss of defeat, partition, enslavement, and humiliation into which we have been thrown’, all the better to steel the will for ‘liberation’.
