For or against ‘AGREEMENTISM’? In his third and final article in this series Lars T Lih analyses the duel over support for the Provisional Government that divided the Bolsheviks from the Mensheviks before Lenin’s return from exile in Switzerland In Petrograd at the end of March 1917, delegates from soviets all over Russia gathered for the first national meeting of the soviet system. A striking feature of the All-Russian Conference in March was a set of duelling speeches between the Menshevik, Irakli Tsereteli, and the Bolshevik, Lev Kamenev. Despite their party affiliations, these orators were the spokesmen of two wider standpoints that were in fundamental opposition one to the other: ‘agreementism’ vs anti-‘agreementism’. The Menshevik, Tsereteli, was the spokesman for agreementism: that is, the political tactic based on the viability of a working political agreement with the ‘bourgeois’ forces of society. The Bolshevik, Kamenev, was the spokesman for anti-agreementism: that is, the political tactic based on the rejection of any such agreement, and thus