The myth of the Constituent Assembly

Among all the numerous legends put into circulation in order to portray the October Revolution in an unfavourable light, that of the Constituent Assembly is perhaps the most persistent. According to this, the Bolsheviks before the revolution had advocated a democratically elected parliament (Constituent Assembly), yet after the revolution they disbanded it. Since they were in a minority, the argument goes, they decided to dissolve the democratically elected parliament and resort to dictatorship. This argument overlooks a number of fundamental questions. In the first place, the demand for a Constituent Assembly – which undoubtedly played a progressive role in mobilising the masses, especially the peasantry, against the tsarist autocracy – was only one of a series of revolutionary-democratic demands, and not necessarily the most important one. The masses were won over to the revolution on other demands, notably ‘Peace, Bread and Land’. These, in turn, became a reality only because they were linked to another demand – all power to the soviets.

The February Revolution failed precisely because it was not capable of satisfying these most pressing needs of the population. The complete impotence of the Kerensky regime was not accidental. It reflected the reactionary character of the Russian bourgeoisie. The capitalist class of Russia was a very weak class, tied hand and foot to the landlords, and subordinate to world imperialism. Only the revolutionary transfer of power into the hands of the most resolutely revolutionary part of society, the working class, made possible the ending of the war and the distribution of land to the peasants. This was the function of the October Revolution.

The calling of elections to the Constituent Assembly the following year was almost in the nature of an afterthought. The Bolsheviks intended to use this to try to mobilise the majority of the peasantry and rouse them to political life. But above all from the standpoint of the peasantry, formal parliamentary democracy is worse than useless if it does not carry out policies that solve their most pressing needs. Under certain circumstances, the Constituent Assembly could have played a progressive role. But in practice, it became clear that this Constituent Assembly could only be an obstacle and a rallying point for the counter-revolution. Here, the slow-moving mechanism of parliamentary elections lagged far behind the swift current of revolution. The real attitude of the peasantry was revealed in the civil war, when the right Social Revolutionaries (SRs) and most of the Mensheviks collaborated with the Whites.

At the time of the October Revolution, the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies represented all that was alive and dynamic in Russian society. The working class voted for the Bolsheviks in the soviets, which were much more democratic than any parliament. At the same time, the soldiers, of whom a big majority were peasants, also voted overwhelmingly for the Bolsheviks.

The figures in table 1.1 show, on the one hand, a growing polarisation between the classes, to the right (note the vote of the bourgeois Kadet party) and the left, and a collapse of the parties of the ‘centre’, the Mensheviks and SRs. But the most striking feature is the sweeping victory of the Bolsheviks, who, from a mere 12 per cent in June were now in an absolute majority. What this shows is that the Bolsheviks had the support of the overwhelming majority of the workers, and a sizeable section of the peasants. In November 1917, the Menshevik leader YO Martov himself had to admit that “almost the entire proletariat supports Lenin”. (Quoted in Liebman, op. cit., p. 218.) Precisely on this basis, the Bolsheviks were able to overthrow the discredited Provisional Government and take power with a minimum of resistance. These facts alone give the lie to the myth of the October Revolution as a coup.

Thus, the democratic legitimacy of the October Revolution was clearly established. But this was not reflected in the elections to the Constituent Assembly, where the Bolsheviks only got 23.9 per cent of the votes (to which must be added the votes of the Left SRs).

Despite this, the Bolsheviks remained firmly in power. Why? The Right SRs had traditionally led the peasants, going back to the time of the Narodniks at the turn of the century. These middle-class elements were the traditional village aristocracy – teachers, lawyers, and the ‘gentlemen who spoke well’. During the First World War, many of them became army officers. At the time of the February Revolution, these democratic revolutionaries exercised a considerable influence among the peasant soldiers. Their vague and amorphous ‘revolutionism’ corresponded to the first stirring of consciousness among the peasantry. But the tide of revolution flows fast. Soon after the February Revolution, the Right SRs betrayed the peasantry by abandoning the programme of peace and the revolutionary struggle for land.

Where could the peasants in uniform turn for support? Once awakened to political life, the peasant masses, especially the most active layer in the army, whose experience of the war raised them to a higher level of understanding than their brothers in the villages, soon came to understand the need for a revolutionary overturn in order to conquer peace, bread and land. This could only be achieved by a revolutionary alliance with the proletariat. The realisation of this fact was registered in the Soviet elections by a sharp swing to the left. By the autumn of 1917, the old Right SR leaders had lost their base among the soldiers, who went over in droves to the Left SRs and their Bolshevik allies.

The elections to the Constituent Assembly were organised in a hurry after the revolution on the basis of electoral lists drawn up before October. The peasantry had not yet had time to understand the processes that were taking place. The split between the left and right SRs had not yet taken place. There was not time for the peasantry as a whole to grasp the meaning of the October Revolution and Soviet power, particularly in the vital fields of land reform and peace. The dynamics of a revolution cannot be easily translated into the cumbersome mechanism of parliamentarism. In the elections to the Constituent Assembly, the inert masses of the backward countryside were thrown into the balance. Weighed down by the ballast of a thousand years of slavery, the villages lagged behind the towns.

These right SRs were not the political representatives but the political exploiters of the peasantry. Implacably hostile to the October Revolution, they would have handed back power to the landlords and capitalists in the kind of democratic counter-revolution which robbed the German working class of power in November 1918. There were two mutually exclusive centres of power. The reactionaries rallied around the slogan: ‘All Power to the Constituent Assembly.’ Faced with this situation, the Bolsheviks, with the support of the Left SRs, did not hesitate to place the interests of the revolution before constitutional niceties. Basing themselves on the soviets, the Bolsheviks dissolved the Constituent Assembly. There was no resistance. This incident now causes an indignant reaction in some quarters. And yet, we are left with a self-evident contradiction. If the Constituent Assembly really represented the will of the masses, why did nobody defend it? Not a hand was raised in its defence, precisely because it was an unrepresentative anachronism. The reason for this was very well explained by the celebrated English historian of the Russian Revolution, E.H. Carr:

The SRs had gone to the polls as a single party presenting one list of candidates. Its election manifesto had been full of lofty principles and aims but, though published on the day after the October Revolution, had been drafted before that event and failed to define the party attitude towards it. Now three days after the election the larger section of the party had made a coalition with the Bolsheviks, and formally split away from the other section which maintained its bitter feud against the Bolsheviks. The proportion between Right and Left SRs in the Constituent Assembly – 370 to 40 – was fortuitous. It was entirely different from the corresponding proportion in the membership of the peasants’ congress, and did not necessarily represent the views of the electors on a vital point which had not been before them. “The people,” said Lenin, “voted for a party which no longer existed.” Reviewing the whole issue two years later Lenin found another argument which was more cogent than it appeared at first sight. He noted that in the large industrial cities the Bolsheviks had almost everywhere been ahead of the other parties. They secured an absolute majority in the two capitals taken together, the Kadets here being second and the SRs a poor third. But in matters of revolution the well-known principle applied: ‘the town inevitably leads the country after it; the country inevitably follows the town.’ The elections to the Constituent Assembly, if they did not register the victory of the Bolsheviks, had clearly pointed the way to it for those who had eyes to see. (E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, Vol. 1, pp. 121-2.)

This was admitted in so many words by Kerensky himself, who wrote the following in his memoirs:

The opening of the Constituent Assembly ended as a tragic farce. Nothing happened to give it the quality of a memorable final stand in defence of freedom. (Alexander Kerensky, The Kerensky Memoirs – Russia and History’s Turning-Point, p. 470.)