Adolph Joffe - 1917 Revolution

1917 Revolution

In 1917, Joffe, freed from the Siberian exile by the February Revolution, returned to the Crimea. Crimean social democrats sent him to the capital, Petrograd, to represent them, but he soon moved to an internationalist revolutionary position, which made it impossible for him to remain in an organization dominated by less radical Mensheviks. Instead, he joined forces with Trotsky, who had just returned from abroad.

In May 1917, Joffe and Trotsky temporarily joined Mezhraiontsy who merged with the Bolsheviks at the VIth Bolshevik Party Congress held between 26 July (all dates are Old Style until February 1918) and 3 August 1917. At the Congress, Joffe was elected a candidate (non-voting) member of the Central Committee, but two days later, on August 5, the Central Committee, some of whose members were in prison, in hiding or lived far from Petrograd and couldn't attend its meetings, made Joffe a member of its permanent ("narrow") bureau. On August 6, Joffe was made an alternate member of the Central Committee Secretariat and on August 20 made a member of the editorial board of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda which was then temporarily called Proletary (Proletarian) for legal reasons.

Joffe headed the Bolshevik faction in the Petrograd Duma (city government) in the fall of 1917 and was one of the Duma's delegates to the Democratic Conference between September 14 and 22. Although Joffe, along with Lenin and Trotsky, opposed the Bolsheviks' participation in the consultative Pre-parliament created by the Democratic Conference, the motion was carried by the majority of Bolshevik deputies at the Democratic Conference and Joffe was made a Bolshevik member of the Pre-parliament. Two weeks later, on October 7, once the more radical Bolshevik faction gained the upper hand, Joffe and other Bolsheviks walked out of the Pre-parliament.

In October 1917, Joffe supported Lenin's and Trotsky's revolutionary position against Grigory Zinoviev's and Lev Kamenev's more moderate position, demanding that the latter be expelled from the Central Committee after an apparent breach of party discipline. Joffe served as the Chairman of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee which overthrew the Russian Provisional Government on October 25–26, 1917. Immediately after the revolution, he supported Lenin and Trotsky against Zinoviev, Kamenev, Alexei Rykov and other Bolshevik Central Committee members who would have shared power with other socialist parties.