November.25
The Provisional Government, having staggered from crisis to crisis over the eight months of its existence, and seen its authority increasingly leach to the Soviet, was finally put out of its misery by the Bolshevik coup on 27 October. It was replaced by an entirely Bolshevik 'Soviet of People's Commissars' (Sovnarkom), headed by Lenin, whose authority at the start looked very precarious. For the opposition parties the coup reinforced the significance of the forthcoming elections to the Assembly as the moment when there would be a democratically elected body able to take authority from the unelected Bolsheviks. Among the Bolsheviks themselves there had, prior to the coup, been some debate about their attitude to the Assembly - with Lenin in particular very clear that maintenance of Soviet power must always take priority over 'bourgeois democracy'.26 But their public position had always been firm support for the Assembly, and indeed an insistence that only they could be relied upon to convene the Assembly in a way that the 'counter-revolutionary' Provisional Government could not. Conscious of the precariousness of their situation, the Bolsheviks, despite some opposition from Lenin, maintained this position after the coup. Sovnarkom in fact decreed that it would only hold authority until the Assembly was convened.
So preparations for the elections went ahead, while the Bolshevik regime gradually consolidated its hold on power. The elections started on 12 November. Due to the size of the country the voting took the next two weeks. There were some minor irregularities and the occupied territories could not vote (the country was still at war). But it was a remarkably clean and well-organised procedure. It was the first free national election in Russian history, and the last for the next seventy years. More than forty million voters (about 50 per cent of those qualified) turned out.
Following the October coup many of the opposition parties tried to turn the election into a referendum on the Bolshevik regime. To the extent that they succeeded, it was a referendum that the Bolsheviks lost. They took about a quarter of the votes (although a huge preponderance in some key places: in particular more than 70 per cent of the military vote in both Moscow and Petrograd). The big winners, unsurprisingly given the social make-up of the country, were the peasants' party - the SRs - who got 40 per cent. The big losers were the right- leaning liberals, the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets), who got less than 8 per cent, but were seen by the Bolsheviks as a key threat because of the relatively large numbers they gained in the cities.
The Bolshevik regime now faced a real problem. The Constituent Assembly would have the democratic legitimacy they lacked. Having barely arrived in power were they now on the way out? They certainly weren't going to go quietly. Already, before the count was complete,
Sovnarkom announced the indefinite postponement of the opening of the Assembly (due on 28 November) and demanded an investigation into electoral 'abuses' that could serve as a basis for 're-elections'. The vast majority of the non-Bolshevik opposition responded by setting up a 'Union for the Defence of the Constituent Assembly'. On the originally planned opening day, 28 November, they organised a large demonstration, and staged a symbolic opening of the Assembly in the Tauride Palace, its intended home.
The Bolsheviks responded brutally. The Tauride Palace was closed off with troops. The demonstrations were denounced as counterrevolutionary. And, in a foretaste of a lot that was to come, the leading right-wing party, the Kadets, was banned, its leaders arrested, and its printing presses smashed. It is no coincidence that at this time (in fact 7 December) the 'Cheka' was established - the Soviet secret police - which operated entirely outside the law and which was the direct antecedent of the KGB.
But this did not solve the problem of what to do about the Assembly, which, in the words of a contemporary observer, was to the Bolsheviks 'like a bone in the throat'.27 The Bolsheviks were still too precariously placed (and internally divided) to set aside the product of more than thirty years of expectation and forty million votes. Lenin came up with his solution on 12 December. He claimed that the elections were invalid. Popular opinion had shifted since they took place. The counter-revolutionary nature of support for the Assembly must be stamped on. The Assembly could meet but its members would be subject to recall by their local Soviets (a licence for opposition deputies to be gradually excluded). A quorum was set of 400 out of 800 members (which meant that, now that the Kadets had been banned, the Bolsheviks could render the Assembly inquorate by withdrawing). And it could only pursue policy lines set out for it by the (Bolshevik- dominated) Soviets.28
The day for convening the Assembly was set for 5 January 1918. The preceding four weeks saw intense propaganda campaigns by both the supporters of the Assembly and its opponents. The Union for the
Defence of the Constituent Assembly agitated in the barracks and the factories and turned out leaflets and newspapers by the hundreds of thousands underlining the democratic credentials of the Assembly and arguing that it was not anti-Soviet. The Bolsheviks headlined the danger of the Assembly being taken over by counter-revolutionaries and, more practically, placed Petrograd under martial law and made sure they had sympathetic troops in place for 5 January.
On 5 January Petrograd was like an armed camp. In particular the area around the Tauride Palace was swarming with troops. Supporters of the Assembly had organised a large demonstration whose members began to march towards the Palace but quickly found themselves under fire - the first time the Bolsheviks turned troops on unarmed demonstrators. Meanwhile Lenin - described by a colleague as 'excited and pale like a corpse . his eyes distended and a flame burning with a steady fire'29 - was in the Palace directing operations. Once it was clear that the demonstration had been dispersed he allowed the Assembly to convene. The atmosphere was close to chaotic. The Bolshevik deputies unitedly jeered anyone else who spoke. The corridors and balconies swarmed with soldiery, often drunken, who for amusement regularly pointed their guns at the speakers. The Bolsheviks introduced a resolution which would in effect have made the Assembly subject to the Soviets, and, when it failed, walked out (making the Assembly inquorate). The Assembly was nevertheless allowed to run on with interminable speeches from respectable revolutionaries until the small hours. At 2 a.m. Lenin, satisfied that he had the situation under control, left. At 4 a.m. the commander of the guard approached Chernov, the chairman of the Assembly, and told him to close the session 'because the guard is tired'.30 Meanwhile additional contingents of menacingly armed men were arriving. Chernov managed to struggle on for twenty minutes and then adjourned the Assembly until the following day. But the following day the Palace was closed and surrounded by troops. The single fully democratic body in all of Russia's history up to that point had lasted for less than thirteen hours.
This was not quite the end of the story. Opposition members of the
Assembly reconstituted themselves in the cities of first Samara, then Omsk, claiming to be the rightful government of Russia. The ultimate inglorious fate of this so-called 'Komuch' is recounted by Evan Mawd- sley in this volume. But the reality was that the long-standing dream of a democratically elected assembly to decide the government of Russia died (or was murdered) in Petrograd on 5/6 January 1918. A prominent historian has argued that this, rather than the October coup, was the real turning point of the revolution.31 This was the moment when the unscrupulous, brutally repressive and anti-democratic character of the Bolshevik regime came fully into view. Russia was now on the road to Stalinism.