After the October Revolution the Bolsheviks still did not close the door on the Constituent Assembly. The promise to allow elections was kept; partly because the cancellation of the elections could have alienated a section of the peasantry, partly because it did not have sufficient authority in all areas and districts to stop the elections going ahead, partly because the Bolsheviks would have found it difficult to say no after having called for the election of an Assembly since February, but also because the majority of the Bolshevik leadership was committed to the elections[45]. A section of the leadership (Kamenev and Zinoviev) actually had as its goal, the establishment of a dual-power in Russia – the Constituent Assembly with the Bolsheviks a strong minority within it, and the Soviets with the Bolsheviks a strong majority. Their trajectory over this period – support for the war, against the October Revolution, for a coalition government – was parallel to that of the Left SRs[46], possibly giving the latter hope of determining governmental policy.
Trotsky described the internal situation within the Bolshevik leadership: Lenin was not opposed in principle to the election of a Constituent Assembly, but wanted to postpone it to avoid an Assembly with a Menshevik and SR majority which could pose serious problems for the revolution[47]. Trotsky was to later claim that Lenin had decided that if the Bolsheviks had a majority in the Assembly they would have formally dissolved it and handed all power to the Soviets. Indeed, the democratically elected Petrograd Town Council which had a substantial Bolshevik majority did just that[78].
The first decree, on peace, drafted by Lenin was issued the day after the insurrection, 26 October 1917. On the same day, the decree abolishing private ownership of the land, also drafted by Lenin, was issued. On taking power, and without waiting for the Constituent Assembly, the Soviets introduced a number of measures to destroy the old state, and take the first steps in the construction of the new:
2 November: Right of the peoples of Russia to self-determination and secession.
10 November: Castes and civil hierarchy abolished.
14 November: Decree for workers’ control in industry.
Nationalisation of the banking and credit institutions.
21 November: Right of recall established as a necessary condition for any truly democratic and really representative body.
22 November: Decree passed to replace all serving judges who were, henceforth, to be elected.
9 December: Brest-Litovsk peace talks commence.
11 December: Education taken out of the hands of the church.
14 December: Decree making banking a state monopoly.
16 December: Ranks in the army abolished,
Russo-Belgium Metals Company confiscated.
17 December: Market in living accommodation abolished in the cities,
1886 Electric Company confiscated.
18 December: Civil marriage instituted.
19 December: Divorce instituted.
21 December: Code for revolutionary courts decreed.
24 December: Putilov factories confiscated.
3 January: Russian Federation of Soviet Republics proclaimed,
Decree issued for the constitution and organisation of the Socialist Red Army[48],[49].
These decisions and decrees were being implemented in parallel with the elections to, and convening of, the Constituent Assembly. The decisions taken by the Bolshevik-dominated Soviets determined policy on all the important issues of the day, particularly the two most pressing questions facing Russia: the end to the war and agrarian policy. Simultaneously, the power of the state in the period of the disintegration of the armed forces, was the Red Guard, sailors and army units loyal to the Bolsheviks. In such a situation, the Constituent Assembly could not, realistically, exert any state or governmental authority which did not accord with the policies of the Soviets. But it could become the focus for the campaign against the Soviet regime, and lend legitimacy to anti-Soviet forces. In fact, the Assembly did, indeed, become a rallying point for the so-called democratic forces, all of whom ceded real power to the counter-revolution.
Much of the following material on the elections to, and convening of, the Constituent Assembly is drawn from The Sickle Under the Hammer[50], and Russia Goes to the Polls[51], both by Oliver Henry Radkey. The elections for the Constituent Assembly were held between 12-14 November. The SR Party gained the largest single number of votes, over 22,000,000 from a total of about 42,000,000, and obtained approximately 438 of the 703 seats declared. However, the candidates who made up this block were predominantly middle class intellectuals and army officers who had been selected by a system that effectively excluded the left wing of the party, which would soon break away to become the party of the Left SRs. The split would be over whether to support the October Revolution and, in many areas, the Left SRs constituted the majority of the party membership.
The vote for the Constituent Assembly included all sectors of the population, in or outside the Soviets. The results showed that at the time of the elections, in the west of Russia, from the army front lines through Minsk and across to Smolensk, the solid majority of all peasants supported the Bolsheviks rather than the SRs. The Bolsheviks also held all the major towns and the majority of the soldiers within them. Radkey concludes that this was an under-estimation of Bolshevik support as the dynamic of the revolution was everywhere strongly in favour of the Bolsheviks, even in the SR rural heartlands[52].
Immediately after the elections, in preparation for the first meeting of the Constituent Assembly, the Centre/Right SRs met in Petrograd. By the time they met, the delegates were aware of the enormous number of votes cast by the peasants for SR candidates but were also well aware that nearly all their strength in the urban centres and many barracks had evaporated, going either directly to the Bolsheviks or to the Left SRs. The programme and policies they decided would provide the basis of the SR challenge to the Bolsheviks for power. Four major issues confronted them, the SR’s attitude to the Soviets, peace, land, and the national question[53].
The complete divorce of the Centre/Right SR leadership from reality is best represented by the policy adopted on the agrarian question. Meeting in the face of the Bolshevik land decree which enacted SR policy, they rejected this as far too radical, even though it was clearly what their remaining electoral base – the peasant masses – wanted. Instead they decided that the Constituent Assembly would plan for land socialisation to take place at some, unspecified, future date. In the given situation such prevarication was political suicide. How to explain it? Radkey notes that of all the monies paid into the SR treasury, only 3% came from party organisations, and 97% came from the banks in the form of loans! He suggests that this dependence of a party that called itself socialist and revolutionary, upon the institutions of finance capitalism “may explain more than one puzzling circumstance in the conduct of the party in 1917”[54].
The leadership of the Centre/Right SRs rightly saw the decision of the Bolsheviks to convene the Third Soviet Congress only three days after the opening of the Constituent Assembly, as preparation for closing down the latter, and concluded that they would have to defend the Assembly militarily. The real strength of the SR Party was now revealed; it managed to gather only a few dozen militants who were simply brushed aside by the Red Guards and sailors assigned by the Bolsheviks to “guard” the Assembly. The SR Party failed to mobilise peasants for this venture because they saw the Assembly as a distraction from the seizure and re-distribution of the land. The rapidly-declining number of soldiers still loyal to the SRs were too far away on, for example, the Rumanian front, to help.
Faced with the results of the elections, Lenin published nineteen theses in Pravda on 26 December, which offered serious practical reasons why the Constituent Assembly did not really represent the true opinions of the electorate: the lists of candidates presented did not reflect the split in the SR Party, and those representing possibly the majority of members were a small minority of the candidates; the elections had taken place before the news of the October Revolution had spread to many areas, and certainly before its significance for the land question was realised by the overwhelming majority of the peasants; achieving an end to the war could be attempted only as a result of the October Revolution and this was not yet widely appreciated; there was no right of recall of deputies to correct these imbalances[55].
Lenin half-heartedly justified the Bolshevik demand for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly prior to the October Revolution (it was the highest form of bourgeois democracy), but the situation had changed. Now a government best capable of achieving a painless transition from a bourgeois to a socialist system was required, and a republic of Soviets was most suitable. Of course, this was the direction in which the Bolsheviks had been heading since April 1917, and it is, perhaps, surprising that it took Lenin so long to spell it out. The situation was laid bare in Thesis 14:
“Only the complete victory of the workers and peasants over the bourgeois and landowner … can really safeguard the proletarian-peasant revolution. The course of events and the development of the class struggle in the revolution have resulted in the slogan ‘All Power to the Constituent Assembly!’ – which disregards the gains of the workers’ and peasants’ revolution, which disregards Soviet power, which disregards the decisions of the Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, of the Second All-Russia Congress of Peasants’ Deputies, etc., – becoming in fact the slogan of the Cadets and the Kaledinites and of their helpers. The entire people are now fully aware that the Constituent Assembly, if it parted ways with Soviet power, would inevitably be doomed to political extinction”[56].
All the preparation for the Constituent Assembly came to nothing. The Assembly met on 5 January 1918, but of the 800 elected representatives, fewer than 500 attended, and further credibility was lost when it became known that with the withdrawal of the 150 Bolsheviks and Left SR delegates, fewer than 40% of the elected delegates remained. Sverdlov, for the Bolsheviks, proposed that the Constituent Assembly endorsed the Declaration of the Rights of the Labouring and Exploited Masses drafted by Lenin and adopted by the All-Russian Soviet Executive. The Centre/Right SRs and their allies re-ordered the business of the day by 237 votes to 146 and by-passed the Soviet declaration[57]. In this way the Assembly issued a direct challenge to the Soviet regime by showing itself not prepared to accept the fundamentals of Soviet policy. The Bolsheviks caucused with the Left SRs and then withdrew from the Assembly on their own, to be followed by the Left SRs some time after midnight, after unresolvable differences emerged between them and the Centre/Right SRs over whether to support Soviet peace negotiations.
At 4.40 am on the 6th, the Red Guards and sailors present declared the session closed[58]. The dispersal of the Assembly caused remarkably little response. Only Kharkov City Soviet in all of Russia is known to have passed a resolution condemning the dissolution, although this was later reversed by a meeting of the local provincial Soviet[59]. In the spring the Centre/Right SRs made some half-hearted attempts to revive the Constituent Assembly in Kiev, but this came to nothing.
Before the first meeting of the Constituent Assembly, both the Centre/Right SRs and Left SRs had decided to mobilise their respective peasant support by each convening a Third All-Russian Peasants’ Congress separately from one another. The Centre/Right SR Third Congress of Peasant Soviets opened on 10 January, the Left SR Third All-Russian Congress of Peasant Soviets opened on the 14th, and the Bolshevik Third All-Russian Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviets also opened on 10 January. The Third All-Russian Congress called by the Centre/Right SRs had over 300 delegates. It never properly met because a contingent of sailors and Red Guards dispersed it during the opening ceremonies. That the Centre/Right SRs were already a rump organisation by this time was confirmed by the fact that there was no recorded dissent to the dispersal of this Congress, not even in the SRs’ strongest areas such as Saratov province. The Congress was the SRs’ last national action before political extinction[60]. Events had confirmed Lenin’s opinion that the results of the Constituent Assembly elections did not reflect the reality of the Russian Revolution.
Was the entry of the Left SRs into the government in December a manoeuvre by Lenin to forestall the Constituent Assembly?[61] Of course, timing is important in a revolution, and it may well have been that having the Left SRs in the government bought the Bolsheviks valuable time in which to build up and consolidate their support amongst the peasantry, particularly through the masses of soldiers who had shifted their allegiance from the SR Party to the Bolsheviks and were returning home. However, after July but before October, the Left SRs were gaining rapidly at the expense of Centre/Right of the Party, but were meeting with much less success in holding their lines against Bolshevism. “The picture varied little from one part of the country to another – everywhere the Bolsheviks were going forward and the Left SR’s fighting just to hold their own”[62]. After the Bolshevik government’s Land Decree this process underwent a step change, and the SRs, Left, Right and Centre, never regained their former mass support amongst the peasantry. Prior to the elections Lenin genuinely believed that an alliance with the Left SRs could benefit the revolutionary transition in Russia, but after the elections the argument for such an alliance lost much of its force.
All that Radkey says confirms Lenin’s analysis that;
“… the Russian proletariat won the peasantry from the Socialist-Revolutionaries, and won them literally a few hours after achieving state power; a few hours after the victory over the bourgeoisie in Petrograd, the victorious proletariat issued a ‘decree on land’, and in that decree it entirely, at once, with revolutionary swiftness, energy and devotion, satisfied all the most urgent economic needs of the majority of the peasants, it expropriated the landowners, entirely and without compensation”[63].
With the decision of the Third All-Russian Congress of Peasant Soviets convened by the Left SRs to merge with the Third All-Russian Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, to form the All-Russian Congress of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, the Bolsheviks could legitimately claim that the Soviets represented the vast majority of the working population.
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Thatcher, I. D., Trotsky, Routledge, London and New York, 2003, p94
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Carr, E.H., The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923. Three Volumes. Pelican, 1983, 1:118
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Trotsky, L.D., On Lenin George Harrap and Co., London, 1971, 105-106
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Serge, V., Year One of the Russian Revolution, Pluto Press, London, 1992, p122,
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Cliff, T.C., Lenin: Revolution Besieged, Pluto Press, 1975, p8-11
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Radkey, O.H., The Sickle Under the Hammer, Columbia University Press, New York, 1963
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Radkey, O.H., Russia Goes to the Polls, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1989
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Radkey, O.H., The Sickle Under the Hammer, Columbia University Press, New York, 1963, p280-301
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Radkey, O. H., Ibid, p179-200
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Radkey, O. H., Ibid, p200
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Lenin, V.I., Theses On The Constituent Assembly, December 1917, CW 26:380-382
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Lenin, V.I., Ibid, CW 26:381
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Radkey, O.H., The Sickle Under the Hammer, Columbia University Press, New York, 1963, p396
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Radkey, O.H., Ibid, p413-414
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Radkey, O.H., Ibid, p431
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Radkey, O.H., Ibid, p440-444
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Carr, E.H., The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923. Three Volumes. Pelican, 1983, 1:121
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Radkey, O.H., The Sickle Under the Hammer, Columbia University Press, New York, 1963, p154
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Lenin, V.I., The Constituent Assembly Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, December 1919, CW 30:264
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Trotsky, L.D., Terrorism and Communism, George Allen & Unwin, 1921, pp43 and 76