As soon as Lenin received the results he postponed convocation of the Assembly until 18th January, 1918. This gave the government more time to harass, arrest and imprison elected delegates (the Kadet party was made illegal soon after, making its attendance almost impossible). On 13th December, Pravda published Lenin’s “Theses on the Constituent Assembly”, which put the two main grounds of Bolshevik dismissal of the legitimacy of the Assembly. These were 1) that “a republic of Soviets is a higher form of democracy than the usual bourgeois republic with a Constituent Assembly”7; and 2) the elections returns did not, as Cliff later put it, “correspond to the actual will of the people”, as since October “…the masses had moved further to the left, a change not reflected in the Assembly”.8
Lenin did not explain how he had more accurately divined the will of the people than a national general election which took place three weeks after 25th October and whose results came in only a month before he wrote. Nor did Sovnarcom offer to re-run the election to produce a more accurate result. Lenin simply asserted that if the Constituent Assembly did not recognise Soviet power and the decrees passed by Sovnarcom since 25th October then “the crisis in connection with the Constituent Assembly can be settled only in a revolutionary way, by Soviet power adopting the most energetic, speedy, firm and determined revolutionary measures”.
Lenin’s initial idea was to declare the Assembly illegal before it could even meet, but the Left SRs would not agree to this. Instead the government targeted many of those elected. After it was announced that convocation of the Assembly would be delayed there was a 100,000 strong demonstration in Petrograd in its support. The march was mostly supported by middle-class Kadets, moderate socialists and mainstream SRs. The fact that the march was part-organised by the Kadet Central Committee, at the same time as prominent Kadets like Miliukov were working with the “Volunteer Army” of the Don Region to overthrow the Bolshevik government, gave Sovnarcom a valid reason to move against the entire Kadet party and in doing so discredit all agitation in favour of the Assembly.
In mid-December several prominent SR leaders, including Chairman of the All-Russian Soviet of Peasant Deputies Nicolai Avkenstyev and the popular satirist Sorokin, were arrested because of anti-Sovnarcom statements. In spite of this, the SRs and Mensheviks prepared for convocation of the Assembly and drew up policy statements for a new government. As they did so Sovnarcom called up its most reliable military units–the sailors of the Baltic Fleet and the crack Lettish Sharpshooters. As 18th January approached the government declared that it had learnt that the “forces of Kerensky and Kaledin” were planning an attack “on Soviet power” that very day, and therefore the city was declared to be in a state of siege and under martial law. Its citizens were forbidden to take part in any marches or rallies.9
Despite this, on 5th January 50,000 people marched to the Mars Field to rally in support of the Assembly. Although there were some delegations from Petrograd factories, the marchers were mostly white-collar employees, middle-class professionals and students. When the march approached the Tauride Palace it was suddenly fired upon from the rooftops. Some marchers were killed outright. Others were injured when Bolshevik contingents attacked them and tore down their banners. Gorky’s newspaper Novaya Zhizn reported the next day that there were at least fifteen dead and dozens wounded.10 “For almost a hundred years”, wrote Gorky in the newspaper on 9th January,
the finest Russians have lived by the idea of the Constituent Assembly. In the struggle for this idea, thousands of the intelligentsia and tens of thousands of workers and peasants have perished in prisons, in exile, and at hard labour […] And now the People’s Commissars have given orders to shoot the democracy that demonstrated in honour of this idea.11
Fifty-five years later, with no threat hanging over him, Marcel Liebman wrote in his widely praised study of Leninism that the Bolsheviks had “briskly dispersed” a pro-Assembly demonstration, but otherwise did not elaborate.12
The Constituent Assembly opened at 4pm in the old State Duma chamber of the Tauride in an atmosphere of barely suppressed violence. The SR leader Victor Chernov was elected the Assembly’s President. He tried in vain to make a speech over catcalls from the galleries. The old revolutionary declared that the two main goals of the Assembly were to transfer land ownership to the peasants and to achieve a democratic peace (though it would not sign a separate peace with Germany). Chernov said that the Assembly was willing to submit all its decrees to popular referendum and to work with the Soviets.
Before any further business could be taken, Sverdlov marched to the podium and introduced the “Declaration of the Rights of Working and Exploited People”, which approved all the Decrees already passed by Sovnarcom. He demanded it be immediately voted upon. The Assembly might have accepted the Declaration had it not contained an additional clause clearly designed to provoke its rejection–agreement that the Assembly’s only role was to formulate general principles and that it had no power to legislate. The Assembly therefore rejected the Declaration by 247 votes to 146. After this the Bolshevik delegation withdrew, followed shortly after by the Left SRs.13
Chernov then moved a “Draft Basic Law on Land” prepared by the SR party. The Draft abolished all property rights in land within the Russian Empire; nationalised “all land, mineral wealth, forests and waters currently held by individuals, groups or institutions as property or under another law of estate” without compensation; and placed the right to dispose of it in the hands of central and local government. Chernov had just finished reading the Draft when a Bolshevik sailor stood up at the podium and said, “I have been instructed to inform you that everyone present should vacate the hall as the guard is tired” (it was by now 4am). Chernov asked, “What instruction? From whom?”, to which the sailor replied, “I am the head of the Tauride Palace Guard and I have instructions from Commissar Dybenko”. Chernov told the head of the Guard, “All members of the Constituent Assembly are also very tired, but tiredness must not interrupt the proclamation of the land law for which all Russia has been waiting”.14
This led to more abusive shouting from soldiers in the galleries. Chernov said he did not recognise the instruction and he pressed on with business. At 4.40am, in order to avoid violence, he declared the session closed, to be resumed at 5pm the same day. The delegates left the Tauride. When they returned that afternoon they found the entrance barred by troops and two field guns. Newspapers which printed a true record of what had occurred inside the Assembly were removed from newsstands by armed soldiers, ripped up or burnt. Later that day Sovnarcom passed a decree abolishing the Constituent Assembly.
Three days later, on 9th January, crowds manned a ten-mile-long route for the funerals of those killed in the pro-Assembly demonstration of 5th January, including a banner carried by workers from the Semiennkov factory which proclaimed, “Eternal memory to the victims of the violence of the Smolny autocrats!”. After the demonstration, Menshevik trade union activists were greeted warmly at the factory. Thousands of workers congregated at the Obukhov Works and at other factories throughout the Nevsky district to protest the closing of the Assembly. Even the Vyborg district evinced rumblings of discontent at the shutdown of the Assembly, a sign that the pro-Bolshevik atmosphere of October was already beginning to shift.15 The primary reason the dissolution was achieved so easily was that the peasants, having apparently secured land redistribution through the Land Decree, were no longer concerned about events in Petrograd. Without its mass base the SR party was powerless.