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
RUSSIAN 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%) RUSSIAN LIBERAL AND OTHER non-socialist parties: 7.5% Constitutional-Democrats 2,088 (4.7%) Others 1,261 (2.8%) NATIONAL 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%) UNACCOUNTED 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 rivaclass="underline" 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.