The response to this historic event on the part of the population at large and the intelligentsia augured ill for the country’s future. Russia, events confirmed once again, lacked a sense of national cohesion capable of inspiring the population to give up immediate and personal interests for the sake of the common good. The “popular masses” demonstrated that they understood only private and regional interests, the heady joys of the duvan, which were satisfied, for the time being, by the soviets and factory committees. In accord with the Russian proverb “He who grabs the stick is corporal,” they conceded power to the boldest and most ruthless claimant.
The evidence indicates that the industrial workers of Petrograd, even as they voted for the Bolshevik ticket, had expected the Assembly to meet and give shape to the country’s new political and social system. This is confirmed by their signatures on the various petitions of the Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly, Pravda’s complaints about workers’ support for it,132 and the frenetic appeals combined with threats which the Bolsheviks directed at the workers on the eve of the Assembly’s convocation. And yet, when confronted with the unflinching determination of the regime to liquidate the Assembly, backed with guns that did not hesitate to fire, the workers folded. Was it because they were betrayed by the intelligentsia, which urged them not to resist? If that was the case, then the role of intellectuals in the revolution against tsarism stands out in bold relief: without their prodding, it seems, Russian workers would not stand up to the government.
As for the peasants, they could not care less what went on in the big city. SR agitators told them to vote, so they voted; and if some other group of “white hands” took over, what difference did it make? Their concerns did not extend beyond the boundaries of their volosti.
That left the socialist intelligentsia, which, having gained a solid electoral victory, could act in confidence that the country was behind it. It was doomed by the refusal under any circumstances to resort to force against the Bolsheviks. Trotsky later taunted socialist intellectuals that they had come to Taurida Palace with candles, in case the Bolsheviks cut off power, and with sandwiches, in case they were deprived of food.133 But they would not carry guns. On the eve of the convocation of the Assembly, the SR Pitirim Sorokin (later professor of sociology at Harvard), discussing the possibility of its being dispersed by force, predicted: “If the opening session is met with ‘machine guns,’ we will issue an appeal to the country informing it of this, and place ourselves under the protection of the people.”134 But they lacked the courage even for such a gesture. When, following the dissolution of the Assembly, soldiers approached socialist deputies with the offer to restore it by force of arms, the horrified intellectuals begged them to do nothing of the kind: Tsereteli said that it would be better for the Constituent Assembly to die a quiet death than to provoke a civil war.135 Such people no one could risk following: they talked endlessly of revolution and democracy, but would not defend their ideals with anything other than words and gestures. This contradictory behavior, this inertia disguised as submission to the forces of history, this unwillingness to fight and win, is not easy to explain. Perhaps its rationale has to be sought in the realm of psychology—namely, the traditional attitude of the old Russian intelligentsia so well depicted by Chekhov, with its dread of success and belief that inefficiency was “the cardinal virtue and defeat the only halo.”136
The capitulation of the socialist intelligentsia on January 5 was the beginning of its demise. “The inability to defend the Constituent Assembly marked the most profound crisis of Russian democracy,” observed a man who had tried and failed to organize armed resistance. “It was the turning point. After January 5 there was no place in history, in Russian history, for what had been the idealistically dedicated Russian intelligentsia. It was relegated to the past.”137
Unlike their opponents, the Bolsheviks learned a great deal from these events. They understood that in areas under their control they need fear no organized armed resistance: their rivals, though supported by at least three-fourths of the population, were disunited, leaderless, and, above all, unwilling to fight. This experience accustomed the Bolsheviks to resort to violence as a matter of course whenever they ran into resistance, to “solve” their problems by physically annihilating those who caused them. The machine gun became for them the principal instrument of political persuasion. The unrestrained brutality with which they henceforth ruled Russia stemmed in large measure from the knowledge, gained on January 5, that they could use it with impunity.
And they had to resort to brutality more and more often, for only a few months after they had assumed power their base of support began to erode: had they relied on popular backing, they would have gone the way of the Provisional Government. The industrial workers, who in the fall, along with the garrison troops, had been their strongest supporters, grew disenchanted very quickly. The change of mood had diverse causes, but the principal one was the worsening food situation. The government, having forbidden all private trade in cereals and bread, paid the peasant such absurdly low prices that he either hoarded the grain or disposed of it on the black market. The government did not obtain enough foodstuffs to supply the urban population with anything but the barest minimum: in the winter of 1917–18, the bread ration in Petrograd fluctuated between four and six ounces a day. On the black market, a pound of bread fetched from three to five rubles, which placed it out of the reach of ordinary people. There was massive industrial unemployment as well, caused mainly by fuel shortages: in May 1918 only 12–13 percent of the Petrograd labor force still held jobs.138
To escape starvation and cold, thousands of city inhabitants fled to the countryside, where they had relatives and the food and fuel situation was better. Due to this exodus, by April 1918 the labor force in Petrograd declined to 57 percent of what it had been on the eve of the February Revolution.139 Those who stayed behind, hungry, cold, often idle, seethed with discontent. They resented Bolshevik economic policies which had produced this state of affairs, but they also objected to the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the humiliating peace treaty with the Central Powers (signed in March 1918), the high-handed behavior of Bolshevik commissars, and the scandalous corruption of officials on all but the highest levels of government.
This development had dangerous implications for the Bolsheviks, the more so in that the armed forces on which they had previously relied were all but gone as spring approached. The soldiers who did not return home formed marauding bands that terrorized the population and sometimes assaulted soviet officials.
The growing mood of disenchantment and the feeling that they could not obtain redress from existing institutions, firmly in Bolshevik hands, prompted the Petrograd workers to create new institutions, independent of the Bolsheviks and the bodies (soviets, trade unions, Factory Committees) which they controlled. On January 5/18, 1918—the day the Constituent Assembly opened—representatives or “plenipotentiaries” of Petrograd factories met to discuss the current situation. Some speakers referred to a “break” in worker attitudes.140 In February, these plenipotentiaries began to hold regular meetings. Incomplete evidence indicates one such meeting in March, four in April, three in May, and three in June. The March meeting of delegates representing fifty-six factories, for which records exist,141 heard strong anti-Bolshevik language. It protested that the government, while claiming to rule on behalf of workers and peasants, exercised autocratic authority and refused to hold new elections to the soviets. It called for a rejection of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the dissolution of the Sovnarkom, and the immediate convocation of the Constituent Assembly.