While he had no
intent of keeping his promises if they proved inconvenient, Lenin realized
that power is often too expensive to purchase without writing a few bad
checks. The Bolsheviks added a second slogan, "All power to the Soviets,"
realizing that the soviets were unrepresentative of Russian opinion to
begin with, and had swiftly become the mouthpieces of socialist
intellectuals in general, and themselves in particular. Even so, the
Bolsheviks remained a minority party: at the First All-Russian Congress of
Soviets in the early summer of 1917,
the Bolsheviks won 105 delegates, far less than their 285
seats won by the Social Revolutionaries and the 248 held by the Mensheviks.
After a July Bolshevik coup failed and quite a few Bolsheviks were arrested,
it appeared that Lenin's day might have already come and gone. Lenin
even fled to Finland, leaving the party under the leadership of Trotsky, who
had only joined a few months earlier. Power seemingly eluded Lenin's
grasp, but he would soon get his second chance.