The Constituent Assembly, like the Kronstandt rebellion of 1921, has been consistently misrepresented by Leninist propagandists. It had been elected under universal suffrage and a free, fair and secret national ballot. The result of the election had produced a populist, agrarian-inclined socialist majority in tune with the long-held desires of most of Russia’s people. The Assembly convened despite the use of repression and violence on the part of a defeated governmental party unwilling to give up power. It selected a veteran anti-Tsarist radical socialist to be its president and it opened with all delegates singing “The Internationale”. Its last act was to pass land reform legislation nationalising landed estates without compensation and redistributing them to peasant communities. It is likely that had it survived it would have reached a better working accord with the Soviets than did the Bolshevik government, under which the Soviets as functioning democratic bodies soon died out. If it was “counter-revolutionary”, it was no more so than the state power that killed it.
The majority of workers and peasants cared far more about ending the war than they did about the fate of the Assembly. Sovnarcom, well aware of this, had sent Trotsky, the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, to negotiate with the Germans at the Polish city of Brest-Litovsk. Immediately after 25th October Sovnarcom agreed a temporary armistice with Germany, but although Russian forces were rapidly demobilising the German army in the east remained intact. After its insistence that Russia engage in proper negotiation about a peace treaty–in which it expected Russia to surrender a large amount of territory or it would cross the armistice line and march straight to Petrograd and Moscow–Trotsky arrived at Brest-Litovsk on 1st December with a remit to drag out the process as long as possible in the hope that, before long, a proletarian revolution would begin in Germany that would make such diplomacy superfluous.
This was extremely optimistic. Although the war was nowhere near as popular in Germany as it had been, Rosa Luxemburg’s Spartacist League, formed after the SPD’s betrayal of internationalism in 1914, had only about 2,000 members and little connection to the organised labour movement. As the war dragged on there were sparks of anti-war activity and in April 1917 200,000 workers across Germany went on strike to protest a cut in war rations. But there was a long distance between such protests and the overthrow of Germany’s military-state machine by a revolutionary party with mass working-class support. In May 1916, Liebknecht was arrested for leading an anti-war protest in Berlin, shortly after followed by Luxemburg and Mehring. Faced with mounting repression within the SPD against members who voiced anti-war sentiments, and an announcement by German trade union leaders that the unions would remain loyal to the government during war-time, the Spartacists and the “centrists” Haase, Bernstein and Kautsky met in January 1917 to consider a way forward.
The outcome was the formation in April 1917 of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), which took about 100,000 of the SPD’s 240,000 members with it when it split away. Born from the war, it was a volatile fusion of anti-war centrists and radical socialists, counting Kautsky, Bernstein, Haase, Hilferding, Mehring, Luxemburg and Liebknecht amongst its key figures. Its manifesto, written by Kautsky, attacked “government socialists” and trade union leaders for having moved to the right and betrayed German workers. The manifesto demanded an immediate amnesty for political prisoners, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, the eight-hour day, and universal suffrage for men and women to all elective bodies. It welcomed Russia’s February Revolution and noted that while the Russian proletariat had established a democratic republic the SPD continued to accept the monarchy.
This was the most important development on the German political scene during the war. The Spartacists knew it–they worked within the USPD as it represented the most radical elements of the German working class. The Bolsheviks, however, condemned the USPD as much as the SPD and pinned their hopes on the Spartacists alone. This totally misinterpreted German politics. The SPD was still the main workers’ party. Although there was little chance of a revolutionary overthrow of the German state, this did not preclude the capture of the state by the SPD or USPD in the event of Germany’s defeat in the war and the formation of a democratic republic. This was as far as most German workers wished to go, leaving the Bolsheviks, as Kamenev and Zinoviev had predicted prior to October 1917, isolated.
Lenin was beginning to sense this. By early 1918 he was urging acceptance of whatever annexationist peace was available rather than take what he called a “blind gamble” on imminent European revolution. Trotsky, at Brest-Litovsk, took a position of “neither war nor peace”, i.e. Russia should simply withdraw from the war without signing a peace treaty with Germany. The nominally independent states of Ukraine and Poland were keen to sign a deal with Germany and thus secure some form of statehood, but Trotsky ignored them and concentrated on specifically Russian concerns. If revolution broke out in Germany, this would all be irrelevant anyway.
The Bolshevik “Left Communists” around Bukharin and Kollontai regarded a treaty with Imperial Germany as a retreat from the Bolshevik commitment to extend the revolution westward. They wanted a “revolutionary war” led by volunteer Bolshevik cadres who would suborn the German army just as they had Kornilov and Krasnov. Lenin considered this a suicidal strategy. Millions of peasant soldiers had deserted, returning home to secure the land promised them by the Land Decree. Reports from factories and urban Soviets were clear that workers did not want to resume the war, revolutionary or otherwise. When Trotsky declared at Brest-Litovsk that although Russia would not sign a peace treaty with Germany it was “leaving the war” and no longer considered itself a belligerent, the result was that the German army immediately marched into Ukraine and northern Russia, meeting absolutely no resistance.
Had it continued its advance, Petrograd would have fallen within days. After titanic arguments within Sovnarcom and the Bolshevik CC, Lenin rammed through his policy of signing any deal on the table as long as it stopped hostilities with Germany. So the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed, with acceptance of all the German conditions. It was a Carthaginian peace, requiring Russian to cede to Germany all of its Baltic territories, Poland, Finland, Ukraine and part of Belorussia. This totaled 1,267,000 square miles of territory and 55 million people (amounting to a third of the old Russian Empire and 34% of its population). It also meant the new Russian government giving up a third of its agriculture, 73% of its iron production and 75% of its coalmines.
The terms of the treaty were accepted at a special Congress of the Bolshevik Party (now renamed the Russian Communist Party, or RCP) in March 1918. The Left SRs, who like the Right SRs represented a mainly peasant constituency, many of whom lived in the territories ceded to Germany, resigned from the government in protest. The Bolsheviks were now utterly alone. With the possibility of rescue by other European revolutions receding, they tightened their grip on the new Russian state machine, which meant tightening their grip on the new society itself.
By October 1917 there were about 900 local Soviets throughout the country controlling virtually every aspect of social life from housing to hospitals, plus more than 2,000 elected Factory Committees. Lenin’s Draft Decree on Workers’ Control had declared that workers’ control was to be carried out “by all workers and employees in a given enterprise, either directly if the enterprise is small enough to permit it, or through delegates to be immediately elected at mass meetings”. But after its publication Sovnarcom clarified that all existing Factory Committees would be subject to an “All-Russian Council of Workers’ Control” (ARCWC). The ARCWC was to be made up of representatives from the Soviets and trade unions, bodies likely to be dominated by Bolsheviks, and for the time being it was the employers, not the Committees, who controlled production. In view of these provisions Brinton concluded, “The Decree on Workers’ Control proved, in practice, not to be worth the paper it was written on”.16