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.”100 The 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 subsequently 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 wilclass="underline"
The march of events and the development of class war in the Revolution has produced a situation in which the slogan “All Power to the Constituent Assembly” … has, in effect, turned into a slogan of the Kadets, the followers of Kaledin, and their accomplices. It is becoming clear to the whole people that this slogan, in fact, means the struggle for the elimination of soviet authority and that the Constituent Assembly, if separated from soviet authority, would inevitably be condemned to political death.… Any attempt, direct or indirect, to view the question of the Constituent Assembly from a formal juridical point of view … signifies betrayal of the cause of the proletariat and a transition to the point of view of the bourgeoisie.
Nothing in this argument made sense. The elections to the Assembly had taken place, not before October 26, but in the second half of November—that is, only seventeen days earlier: in the interim nothing had happened to invalidate Lenin’s verdict of December 1 that they were the “perfect” reflection of the people’s will. The principal champions of the Assembly were not the Kadets and certainly not the followers of the Cossack general Aleksei Kaledin, the latter of whom wanted to topple the Bolshevik regime by force of arms, but the Socialists-Revolutionaries. By turning out in large numbers at the polling stations, the “whole people,” on whose behalf Lenin claimed to speak, had shown, not that they regarded the Assembly as anti-Soviet, but looked to it with hope and expectation. And as for the claim that the Assembly was antithetical to the rule of the soviets, only people with very short memories could have forgotten that a mere seven weeks earlier, as they were reaching for power, the same Bolsheviks had insisted that soviet rule alone would guarantee the convocation of the Assembly. But here, as always, Lenin’s arguments were not meant to persuade: the key phrase occurred toward the end of the article, that further support for the Assembly was tantamount to treason.
Lenin went on to say that the Assembly could meet only if the deputies were subject to “recall”—that is, if it consented to its composition being arbitrarily altered by the government—and if it further acknowledged, without qualifications, “Soviet authority”—that is, the Bolshevik dictatorship:
Outside these conditions, the crisis connected with the Constituent Assembly can be solved only in a revolutionary manner by means of the most energetic, rapid, firm, and decisive measures on the part of Soviet authority.… Any attempt to tie the hands of Soviet authority in this struggle would signify complicity with the counterrevolution.
On these terms, the Bolsheviks agreed to have the Assembly meet on January 5/18, 1918, provided that at least 400 deputies turned up. At the same time they issued instructions for the convocation three days later (January 8/21) of the Third Congress of Soviets.
The Bolsheviks now launched a noisy propaganda campaign, the theme of which Zinoviev stated in a speech to the CEC on December 22: “We know very well that behind the pretext of the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, under the celebrated slogan ‘All Power to the Constituent Assembly,’ lies concealed the cherished slogan ‘Down with the Soviets.’ ”105 This proposition the Bolsheviks made official by having it adopted by the CEC on January 3, 1918.106
The protagonists of the Assembly rallied their forces. They had been put on notice. But in seeking to counter Bolshevik threats, they suffered under a grievous, indeed fatal handicap. In their eyes, the Bolsheviks had subverted democracy and forfeited the right to govern: but their removal had to be accomplished by the pressure of popular opinion, never by force, because the only beneficiary of an internecine conflict among the socialist parties would be the “counterrevolution.” By December, Petrograd knew that on the Don the generals were assembling troops: their purpose could be nothing else but subverting the Revolution and arresting and perhaps lynching all socialists. This was to them a far worse alternative than the Bolsheviks, who were genuine, if misguided, revolutionaries: admittedly too impetuous, too lustful for power, too brutal, but still “comrades” in the same endeavor. Nor could one ignore their mass following. The democratic left was convinced then and in the years that followed that the Bolsheviks would sooner or later come to realize they could not govern Russia alone. Once this happened and the socialists were invited to share power, Russia would resume her progress toward democracy. This political maturation would take time, but it was bound to occur. For this reason, resistance to the Bolsheviks had to be confined to peaceful propaganda and agitation. The possibility that the Bolsheviks were perhaps the real counterrevolutionaries occurred only to a few left-wing intellectuals, mainly from the older generation. Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik leaders never ceased to view the Bolsheviks as deviant comrades in arms: they confidently awaited the time when they would come around. In the meantime, whenever the Bolsheviks came under the assault of outside forces, they could be depended on to rally to their side.