From May 1903, when the League of Russian Revolutionary Social Democracy Abroad published Lenin’s pamphlet To the Rural Poor – An Explanation for the Peasants of What the Social-Democrats Want[2], the bourgeois-democratic Constituent Assembly was the RDSLP’s declared governmental goal in the Russian Revolution. To the Rural Poor stated that the key to ending the poverty and brutality of peasant life, lay in three demands, the first of which was the convocation of a national Assembly to establish an elected government in place of the Tsarist autocracy. The second was freedom of political expression, and the third was abolition of all forms of serf bondage and for the equality of the peasantry with the other social estates[3].
By early 1905, following the peasant revolts of the previous two years and the upsurge in the towns after Bloody Sunday, SD was faced with how free and fair election of deputies to the Constituent Assembly could be assured. If the purpose of the Constituent Assembly was to get rid of the autocracy, could officials responsible to the Tsar be trusted to convene the Assembly on the basis of universal, direct, and equal suffrage by secret ballot, and ensure real and complete freedom of expression during the elections? Of course not. Lenin concluded that only an interim government that originated from within the revolutionary forces determined to overthrow the autocracy, and committed to the success of the Assembly, could be trusted[4].
The demand for a Constituent Assembly may have been a key part of the Bolshevik programme but, as Lenin pointed out, even the Cadet Party, representing the liberal bourgeoisie, was publicly calling for an elected Constituent Assembly, but with a Tsar, and a two-tier governmental structure with a non-elected upper house, somewhat on the English model. The Cadets proposed that the officials of the autocratic state, with the Tsar Nicholas II still in power, would organise and monitor the elections, and convene the Assembly. Such an expectation, in Lenin’s view, made the Cadets brazen charlatans or hopeless fools.
At the Third (Bolshevik-only) Congress of the RDSLP, April 1905, Lenin emphasised that the Russian proletariat needed a period of the fullest possible political freedom if it was to achieve its ultimate aim of the socialist revolution, and this would require the replacement of the autocracy by a democratic republic[5] to allow (amongst other things) the RDSLP to transform itself into a mass movement of the working class. This republic would be founded in an armed uprising of the people which would overthrow the Tsar and establish a provisional revolutionary government which, in turn, would organise the election of a Constituent Assembly.
The Congress resolved that in the event of a victorious uprising, the RDSLP would participate in any resulting provisional revolutionary government subject to a number of conditions: party control over its representatives, the party would defend, consolidate, and extend the gains of the revolution in the interests of the working class, the party would be irreconcilably opposed to the bourgeois parties, the party would continue to strive for the socialist revolution, etc.[6]. However, it was clear that such conditions could be met, and were intended to be met, within the limits of bourgeois democracy.
To preserve the revolutionary content of the demand for a Constituent Assembly, Lenin now emphasised the associated demands which would give the Assembly its power and authority: the Tsar had to be overthrown by the armed people who would create a provisional revolutionary government whose duty it was to repel the counter-revolution and convene the Assembly. The Bolsheviks were clear that only a provisional revolutionary government based on a victorious popular insurrection could secure free elections and subsequently convene an Assembly that would genuinely express the will of all the people. Only in this way would a democratic republic place supreme authority in the hands of the people. Without this, Russia would have an Assembly that would be little more than a mechanism for allowing the big bourgeoisie to bargain with the Tsar[7],[8].
Lenin’s major work of this period Two Tactics[9], reinforced and extended the arguments put forward in the Third Congress concerning the responsibilities of the RDDPP. One point in particular was repeated: “Its formal purpose must be to serve as the instrument for convening a popular constituent assembly”10.
To avoid confusion on the aims of the RDDPP, and dispel any “absurd, semi-anarchist ideas” that it might attempt to put into effect the maximum programme of the RDSLP, Lenin was quick to emphasise that the tasks of the provisional revolutionary dictatorship would be limited to the RDSLP minimum programme[11]. To confirm that the provisional revolutionary government and the Constituent Assembly would not necessarily have a proletarian character, Lenin pointed out that the armed workers led by the RDSLP would exercise pressure on the provisional revolutionary government, not to overthrow it but to ensure it extended the gains of the revolution until they fulfilled the whole of the RDSLP minimum programme[12].
Of particular interest here, in June 1905, was Lenin’s rejection of the Paris Commune as a model for the forthcoming Russian Revolution, precisely because it had combined the tasks of fighting for a democratic (i.e. bourgeois) republic with those of fighting for socialism. Lowy has correctly pointed out that since Marx’s Civil War in France, May 1871, the Paris Commune had been understood as the first example of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and thus when Lenin wrote in Two Tactics that the Commune was an example not to be emulated, he was clearly limiting the extent of the activities of the provisional revolutionary dictatorship[13]. The Paris Commune was: “a workers’ government that was unable to, and could not at that time, distinguish between the elements of a democratic revolution and those of a socialist revolution, that confused the tasks of fighting for a republic with the tasks of fighting for Socialism, … it was a government such as ours should not be”[14].
Trotsky took a different, more sympathetic view. It may well have been that he had been influenced by Engel’s description of Paris as a city in which large-scale industry and manufacturing was springing up, where worker representatives had provided the dynamic leadership of the Commune, whose decision to take control of these factories and combine them into one union had been the first steps on a process which would have led to “Communism”[79]. The lessons to be derived from the Commune were directly relevant to the Russian working class because, without the mass of handicraft workers present in Paris, and the enormously enhanced social, political and numerical weight of the proletariat, the objective development of the class struggle in Russia confronted the proletariat with the possibility of taking governmental and state power and the first steps towards socialism[15].
In late April and early May 1906, with the experience of 1905 behind him, Lenin attended the Fourth (Unity) Congress of the RDSLP in Stockholm. On the Constituent Assembly and the RDDPP Lenin spelled it out – the urgent task confronting the party was to join with the revolutionary democrats and unite the insurrection by helping to form a provisional revolutionary government. Only in this way could a victorious insurrection completely crush the resistance of the autocracy and its supporters, ensure electoral freedom, convene a Constituent Assembly capable of really establishing the sovereignty of the whole people, and put into effect the minimum social and economic demands of the proletariat. The Soviets of Workers’ Deputies were institutions on which the provisional revolutionary government could be based, and so they must possess their own military forces[16].
Not only were the Soviets to seek to extend their membership to the revolutionary elements of the urban petty bourgeoisie, but Lenin proposed that the RDSLP should enter into temporary fighting agreements with those revolutionary democratic parties which consistently fought for democracy, recognised the armed uprising as a legitimate means of struggle, and were actually trying to bring it about. The major such organisation was the SR Party which closely represented the interests and views of the masses of the peasantry by strongly opposing landlordism and the semi-feudal state. The objective of such temporary fighting agreements was to secure the convocation of a Constituent Assembly by revolutionary means[17], and an essential condition for such unity was a parallel struggle by the RDSLP to ideologically expose the pseudo-socialist character of its allies.
At the Unity Congress, Lenin repeated his view that, irrespective of whether or not the RDSLP was included in the provisional revolutionary government, an armed proletariat led by the RDSLP would bring constant “pressure” to bear upon the provisional government, to protect, consolidate and enlarge the gains of the revolution[18]. In principle, then, even if the RDSLP were excluded from the provisional revolutionary government, the armed proletariat would not seek to overthrow a bourgeois or petty bourgeois government, but limit itself to exerting “pressure” on it.
In the light of the 1905 Revolution, Lenin redrafted the agrarian programme of the RDSLP. He stressed the necessity of the complete victory of the peasant uprising since, without such a victory it would be impossible for the peasants to expropriate all church, monastery, crown and state lands, and the landlords’ estates, and freely divide these amongst themselves. The Constituent Assembly would fulfil the peasants’ dreams by legitimising the land seizures[19], repealing all laws that restricted the peasants selling or renting their land, authorising the reduction of exorbitant rents and annulling all contracts entailing an element of bondage[20].
Lenin’s attitude to the Constituent Assembly remained more or less constant until 1917 as, for example, in 1911 when he wrote:
“As before, the aim of our struggle is to overthrow Tsarism and bring about the conquest of power by the proletariat relying on the revolutionary sections of the peasantry and accomplishing the bourgeois-democratic revolution by means of the convening of a popular constituent assembly and the establishment of a democratic republic”[21].
Similarly in October 1915, when he wrote for the Sotsial-Demokrat his Several Theses Proposed by the Editors[22], he repeated the slogan of a Constituent Assembly, and re-emphasised that it could not stand alone. The war had made the question of who would convene the assembly even more relevant, but his core message was the same; the RDDPP would be victorious only if it overthrew the autocracy, the nobility and the feudal landowners in an insurrection, with the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies the major organs of the insurrection and revolutionary rule until the Constituent Assembly was in place.
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Lenin, V.I., To the Rural Poor – An Explanation for the Peasants of What the Social-Democrats Want,, March 1903, CW 6:361-432
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Lenin, V.I., Ibid, CW 6:427
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Lenin, V.I., The Revolutionary-Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry, April 12 1905, CW 8:293-303
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Lenin, V. I., Draft Resolution on the Provisional Revolutionary Government, April 1905, CW8:397
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Lenin, V.I., The Third Congress of the RDSLP, April 1905, CW 8:396-397
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Lenin, V.I., The Democratic Tasks of the Revolutionary Proletariat, June 1905, CW 8: 513-4 and 517
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Lenin, V.I., Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, June 1905, CW 9:26
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Lenin, V.I., Ibid, CW 9:15-140
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Lenin, V.I., Ibid, CW 9:28
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Lenin, V.I., Ibid, CW 9:29
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Lowy, M., Combined and Uneven Development, Verso, London, 1981, p61
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Lenin, V.I., Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, June 1905, CW 9:80
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Trotsky, L.D., Results and Prospects, New Park Publications, London, 1962, p232
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Lenin, V.I., A Tactical Platform for the Unity Congress of the RDSLP, March 1906, CW 10:155-157
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Lenin, V.I., Ibid, CW 10:158-159
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Lenin, V.I., Ibid, CW 10:156
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Lenin, V.I., Revision of the Agrarian Programme of the Workers’ Party, April 1906, CW 10:189-190
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Lenin, V.I., Ibid, CW 10:194
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Lenin, V.I., ”The Peasant Reform” and the Proletarian – Peasant Revolution, March 1911, CW 17:128
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Lenin, V.I., Several Theses Proposed by the Editors, October 1915, CW 21:401-404
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Engels, F., Introduction to the Civil War in France, Martin Lawrence Ltd., London, 1933, pp14 and 16.