The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze

Pravda’s headlines denounced Chernov and Tsereteli as ‘The hirelings of bankers, capitalists, and landlords . . . slaves of the American dollar.’12 Lenin offered a chilling obituary for parliamentary politics. Under the title ‘People from Another World’, he described the anguish he felt at having to attend even one meeting of the Constituent Assembly.13 It was for him the experience of a nightmare. ‘It is as though history had accidentally . . . turned its clock back, and January 1918 became May or June 1917!’ To be plunged from the ‘real’, ‘lively’ activity of the Soviet of workers and soldiers into the world of the Constituent Assembly, was to be plunged into a ‘world of saccharine phrases, of slick, empty declamations, of promises and more promises based . . . on conciliation with the capitalists’. ‘It was terrible! To be transported from the world of living people into the company of corpses, to breathe the odour of the dead, to hear those mummies with their empty “social” . . . phrases, to hear Chernov and Tsereteli, was simply intolerable.’