76
There could be no question, therefore, that Lenin and his party were committed to holding elections, convening it and submitting to the Assembly’s will. But since this Assembly was almost certain to sweep them from power, they had a problem on their hands. In the end, they gambled and won: and only after this triumph, on the ruins of the Constituent Assembly, could they feel confident of never again being challenged by democratic forces.
In assaulting the Constituent Assembly, they could find justification in Social-Democratic theory. The Social-Democratic program adopted in 1903 did call for the convocation of a Legislative Assembly, elected by the people on the basis of universal, equal, and direct voting; but neither the Bolsheviks nor the Mensheviks made a fetish of free elections. Long before the Revolution they were prepared to argue that the ballot box was not necessarily the best indicator of the people’s “true” interests. The founder of Russian Social-Democracy, Plekhanov, delivered at the Second Party Congress in 1903 some remarks on the subject, with which the Bolsheviks were later to taunt their opponents:
76. Voting for the Constituent Assembly: November 1917.
Every given democratic principle must be viewed not abstractly, on its own merits, but in its relationship to that principle which may be called the basic principle of democracy:
salus populi suprema lex
. Translated into the language of a revolutionary, this means that the success of the revolution is the supreme law. And if, for the sake of the revolution, it should become necessary temporarily to restrict the action of one or another democratic principle, then it would be criminal not to do so. As a personal opinion I shall state that one must view even the principle of the universal vote from the point of view of the above-mentioned fundamental principle of democracy. Hypothetically, one can conceive of a situation where we Social Democrats would oppose the universal vote.… If in an outburst of revolutionary enthusiasm the people would elect a very good parliament … then we should try to transform it into a Long Parliament; and if the elections turned out unfavorably, then we should try to disperse it—not in two years, but, if possible, in two weeks.
*
Lenin shared these sentiments and in 1918 would quote them with evident relish.77
The Provisional Government had scheduled the elections for November 12, 1917, which happened to be two weeks after it fell from power. The Bolsheviks hesitated at first whether to adhere to this date, but in the end decided to do so, and issued a decree to this effect.78 But what to do next? While discussing the question among themselves, they interfered with the ability of their opponents to campaign. This was perhaps the principal intention behind the Press Decree and an ordinance issued by the Military-Revolutionary Committee on November 1 placing Petrograd under a state of siege: one of its provision forbade outdoor assemblies.79
77. Electoral poster of the Constitutional-Democrats: “Vote for the Party of National Freedom.”
In Petrograd, the voting for the Assembly began on November 12, and went on for three days. Moscow voted on November 19–21; the rest of the country, in the second half of November. Eligible, according to criteria set by the Provisional Government, were male as well as female citizens twenty years and over. Voting took place over the entire territory of what had been the Russian Empire except for areas under enemy occupation—that is, Poland and the provinces on Russia’s western and northwestern frontiers. In Central Asia the results were not tabulated; the same lapse occurred in a few remote regions. Voters turned out in impressive numbers: in Petrograd and Moscow some 70 percent of those eligible went to the polls, and in some rural areas the turnout reached 100 percent, the peasants often voting as one body for a single ticket, usually the Socialist-Revolutionary. According to the most reliable count, 44.4 million cast ballots. Here and there, observers noted minor irregularities: the garrison troops, who favored the Bolsheviks for their promises of a quick peace, sometimes intimidated candidates of the other parties. But by and large, especially if one considers the difficult conditions under which they were held, the elections justified expectations. Lenin, who had no interest in praising them, stated on December 1: “If one views the Constituent Assembly apart from the conditions of the class struggle, which verges on civil war, then as of now we know of no institution more perfect as a means of expressing the people’s will.”80
Voting was very complicated, given that many splinter parties put up candidates, sometimes in blocs with other parties: the configuration differed from region to region, becoming especially complex in such borderland areas as the Ukraine, where, alongside Russian parties, there were parties representing the local minorities.
Of the socialists, the Bolsheviks alone campaigned without a formal platform. They apparently counted on winning votes with broad appeals to workers, soldiers, and peasants, centered on the slogans “All Power to the Soviets,” and on promises of immediate peace and the confiscation of landlord properties. In electoral appeals they sought to broaden the class basis of their constituency, borrowing the SRs’ un-Marxist term “the toiling masses.” In evaluating the results of the elections, therefore, it must be borne in mind that many and perhaps even most of those who cast ballots for the Bolsheviks were expressing approval, not of the Bolshevik platform, of which they knew nothing because it did not even exist, let alone of the hidden Bolshevik agenda of a one-party dictatorship, never mentioned in Bolshevik pronouncements, but of the rule of soviets, an end to the war, and the abolition of private landholding in favor of communal redistribution, none of which figured among ultimate Bolshevik objectives.
Lenin, hoping against hope, for a while deluded himself that the Left SRs would tear the SR Party apart to such an extent as to give the Bolsheviks a victory.81 The strong showing which the Left SRs made at the Petrograd City Conference in November gave some substance to this hope.82 But in the end it proved unfounded: although the Bolsheviks made a strong showing, especially in the cities and among the military, they came in second place, trailing far behind the Socialists-Revolutionaries. This outcome sealed the fate of the Assembly.
The results of the elections cannot be precisely determined because in many localities the parties and their offshoots ran in coalitions, sometimes of a very complicated nature: in Petrograd alone, nineteen parties competed. The problem is exacerbated by the practice of the Communist authorities, who control the raw data, of lumping together under the categories “bourgeois” and “petty bourgeois” parties and groupings that ran on separate tickets. As best can be determined, the final results were (in thousands) as follows (see table on this page).83
The results, although not entirely unexpected, disappointed Lenin. The peasants, whom he had hoped to attract by adopting the SR land program, not only did not vote Bolshevik: they did not even vote for the Left SRs. One of the arguments the Bolsheviks later used to challenge the validity of the elections was that the split in the SR party had occurred too late for the Left SRs to run on separate ballots. But there exist figures which demonstrate that this argument had no substance. In several electoral districts (Voronezh, Viatka, and Tobolsk) the Left SRs and the mainstream SRs did run on separate tickets. In none of them did the Left SRs win significant support: the tally showed 1,839,000 votes cast for the SR Party and a mere 26,000 for the Left
R
USSIAN SOCIALIST PARTIES: 68.9%
Socialists-Revolutionaries
17,943
(40.4%)
Bolsheviks
10,661
(24.0%)
Mensheviks
1,144
(2.6%)
Left SRs
451
(1.0%)
Others
401
(0.9%)
R
USSIAN LIBERAL AND OTHER
non-socialist parties: 7.5%
Constitutional-Democrats
2,088
(4.7%)
Others
1,261
(2.8%)
N
ATIONAL MINORITY PARTIES
: 13.4%
Ukrainian SRs
3,433
(7.7%)
Georgian Mensheviks
662
(1.5%)
Mussavat (Azerbaijan)
616
(1.4%)
Dashnaktsutiun (Armenia)
560
(1-3%)
Alash Orda (Kazakhstan)
262
(0.6%)
Others
407
(0.9%)
U
NACCOUNTED
4,543
(10.2%)
SRs.84 The Bolsheviks gained 175 out of 715 seats in the Assembly; together with the SR deputies who identified themselves as Left, they had 30 percent of the delegates.*
The Bolsheviks were also unhappy over the strong showing of the Kadets, the opposition party they feared the most. Although the Kadets had gained less than 5 percent of the national vote, the Bolsheviks viewed them as the most formidable rival: they had the largest number of active supporters and the most newspapers; they were far better organized and financed than the SRs; and unlike the Bolsheviks’ socialist rivals, they did not feel constrained by a sense of comradeship, dedication to a common social ideal, and fear of the “counterrevolution.” As the only major non-socialist party still functioning in late 1917, the Kadets were likely to attract the entire right-of-center electorate, monarchists included. If one looks at the overall election results one may indeed conclude that the Kadets “had experienced not so much a walloping as a washout.”85 But this would be a superficial conclusion. The nationwide figures concealed the important political fact that the Kadets did very well in the urban centers which the Bolsheviks needed to control to offset their weakness in the countryside and viewed as the decisive battleground in the coming civil war. In Petrograd and Moscow, the Kadets ran a strong second to the Bolsheviks, winning 26.2 percent of the vote in the former and 34.2 percent in the latter. If one subtracted from the Bolshevik total in Moscow the vote of the military garrison, which was in the process of evanescing, the Kadets had 36.4 percent of the vote as against the Bolshevik 45.3 percent.86 Furthermore, the Kadets bested the Bolsheviks in eleven out of thirty-eight provincial capitals and in many others ran a close second. They thus represented a much more formidable political force than one could conclude from the undifferentiated election returns.
These disappointments notwithstanding, the outcome held some consolation for the Bolsheviks. Lenin, who analyzed the figures with the detachment of a commander surveying the order of battle—he even referred to the various electoral blocs as “armies”87—could take comfort in the fact that his party did best in the center of the country: the large cities, the industrial areas, and the military garrisons.88 The victorious SRs drew their strength from the black-earth zone and Siberia. As he was later to observe, this geographic distribution of votes foreshadowed the front lines in the civil war between the Red and White armies,89 in which the Bolsheviks would control the heartland of Russia and their opponents the rimlands.
Another source of satisfaction for the Bolsheviks was the support of soldiers and sailors, especially units billeted in the cities. These troops had only one desire: to get home, the quicker the better, to share in the repartition of land. Since the Bolsheviks alone of all the parties promised to open immediate peace negotiations, they showed for them a strong preference. The Petrograd and Moscow garrisons cast, respectively, 71.3 and 74.3 percent of the vote for the Bolsheviks. The front-line troops in the northwest, near Petrograd, also gave them majorities. The Bolsheviks did not do as well at the more distant fronts, where their anti-war propaganda had less resonance, but even so, in the four field armies for which records are available, they won 56 percent of the vote.90 Lenin had no illusions about the solidity of this support, which was bound to evaporate as the troops headed home. But for the time being the backing of the military was decisive: the pro-Bolshevik troops formed a power that even in small numbers could intimidate the democratic opposition. Analyzing the election results, Lenin noted with satisfaction that in the military the Bolsheviks possessed “a political striking force which assured them of an overwhelming preponderance of forces at the decisive point in the decisive moment.”91
The Sovnarkom discussed the Constituent Assembly on November 20. Several important decisions were taken.92 The opening of the Assembly was postponed indefinitely. The ostensible reason was the difficulty of gathering a quorum by November 28;93 the true reason was to allow the Bolsheviks more time. Instructions went out to provincial soviets to report on all electoral “abuses”; they were to serve as a pretext for “reelections.”94 P. E. Dybenko, the Commissar of the Navy, received orders to assemble in Petrograd between 10,000 and 12,000 armed sailors.95 And perhaps most significantly, it was decided to convene the Third Congress of Soviets on January 8: packed solidly with their supporters and Left SRs, it was to be a surrogate for the Assembly. These measures indicated Bolshevik intentions to abort the Constituent Assembly in one manner or another.
The government’s announcement indefinitely postponing the opening of the Assembly evoked strong protests from the socialist parties and deputies to the Peasants’ Congress. On November 22–23, a Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly came into being, composed of representatives of the Petrograd Soviet, trade unions, and all the socialist parties except the Bolsheviks and Left SRs.96
The Bolsheviks began their assault on the Assembly by harassing its Electoral Commission (Vsevybor). Under orders of the Sovnarkom, Stalin and Grigorii Petrovskii on November 23 ordered the commission to turn over its files: when it refused, the Cheka took its staff into custody. M. S. Uritskii, who later was to head the Petrograd Cheka, was appointed head of the Electoral Commission for the Assembly, which gave him wide discretion to determine who could attend.97
In response, the Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly decided to open the Assembly on schedule in disregard of Bolshevik orders.98 On November 28, members of the Electoral Commission, just released from prison, began to deliberate in Taurida Palace. Uritskii appeared to inform them they could meet only in his presence, but he was ignored. Supporters of the Assembly gathered demonstratively in front of Taurida: students, workers, soldiers, and striking civil servants, carrying banners “All Power to the Constituent Assembly.” One paper estimated the crowd at 200,000, but the figure seems considerably inflated: Communist sources speak of 10,000.99 On Uritskii’s orders, Latvian Riflemen, the most dependable pro-Bolshevik troops in Petrograd, surrounded Taurida but did not interfere: some told the demonstrators they had come to protect the Constituent Assembly. Inside, forty-five deputies, mostly from Petrograd and vicinity, elected a Presidium.
The next day, armed troops formed a solid ring around Taurida: the Latvian Riflemen were back, augmented by soldiers from the Lithuanian Reserve Regiment, detachments of sailors, and a machine gun company. They kept the crowds at a safe distance, allowing into the building only delegates and accredited journalists. Toward evening, sailors ordered the deputies to leave. The following day the troops barred the entrance to everybody. These events were a rehearsal for the real trial of strength on January 5/18.
Pressing their offensive, the Bolsheviks outlawed the Constitutional-Democratic Party. Already on the opening day of the elections in Petrograd, they had dispatched armed thugs to smash the editorial offices of the Kadet Rech’; it resumed publication as Nash vek two weeks later. On November 28, Lenin wrote an ordinance under the typically propagandistic title “Decree concerning the arrest of the leaders of the civil war against the Revolution.”100The Kadet leaders were declared “enemies of the people” and were ordered taken into custody. That night and the following day, Bolshevik detachments seized every prominent Kadet they could lay their hands on, among them several delegates to the Assembly (A. I. Shingarev, P. D. Dolgorukov, F. F. Kokoshkin, S. V. Panina, A. I. Rodichev, and others). All of them were subsequent
ly released (Panina after a brief and rather comical trial) except for Shingarev and Kokoshkin, whom Bolshevik sailors murdered in the prison hospital. As “enemies of the people” the Kadets could not participate in the Constituent Assembly. They were the first political party outlawed by the Bolshevik Government. Neither the Mensheviks nor the Socialists-Revolutionaries seemed very upset by this action.
Harassment and intimidation did not solve for the Bolsheviks the nagging problem of what to do about the Assembly. Some wanted to resort to force: one week before the elections, V. Volodarskii, a member of the Central Committee, said that “the masses never suffer from parliamentary cretinism,” least of all in Russia, and hinted that the Constituent Assembly might have to be dispersed.101 Nikolai Bukharin thought he had a better idea. On November 29 he proposed to the Central Committee that the Kadets be ejected from the Assembly and then the Bolshevik and Left SR deputies proclaim themselves a Revolutionary Convention: a reference to the French Convention of 1792, which took the place of the Legislative Assembly. “If the others open [a rival body] we shall arrest them,” he explained. Stalin made short shrift of this proposal on grounds of impracticability.102
Lenin had another solution: placate the Left SRs by letting the Assembly convene, then manipulate its membership so as to obtain a more compliant body. This would be done by resorting to “recall,” “a basic, essential condition of genuine democracy.”103 By this device, voters in districts which had chosen undesirable delegates would be persuaded to have them recalled and replaced with Bolsheviks and Left SRs. But this was at best a slow procedure, and while it was being put into effect, the Assembly could pass all manner of hostile resolutions.
Lenin finally made up his mind on this matter on December 12, immediately after reaching an accord with the Left SRs: his decision was made public the next day in Pravda under the title “Theses on the Constituent Assembly.”104 It was a death sentence on the Assembly. The thrust of Lenin’s argument was thai changes in party alignments, notably the split in the SR Party, the shift in class structures, and the outbreak of the “counterrevolution,” all of which had allegedly occurred since October 25–26, had rendered the elections invalid as an indicator of the popular will:
The Russian Revolution Page 84
