How did they get away with it? Enthusiasm for the Assembly on close examination was very much an elite phenomenon. The vast majority of Russia's population, the peasants, had achieved their revolution. They had their local soviets and were busy seizing land. Why worry about what was going on in distant Petrograd? Even in the cities, popular support was lukewarm. At the symbolic launch on 28 December a leading socialist ruefully noted that 'the people were certainly not as convinced of the Constituent Assembly's power of salvation as its supporters had reckoned'.32 The demonstrations that day and on 5 January were much smaller and more middle class than had been anticipated. The Petrograd proletariat after ten months of continuous insecurity and turmoil were not about to take on men with guns in pursuit of yet another political innovation, however theoretically
desirable.33
The real failure was on the part of the elite, particularly the non- Bolshevik socialists who won the elections. The sad fact is that it was their very virtues that undid them. They believed in democracy, due process and the rule of law. Confronted with the gangster tactics of the Bolsheviks they had no answer. Yes, they had the support of most of the people, but not with the degree of commitment that would have enabled them to take back the streets. Indeed, in the course of the 'July Days' six months earlier, when the Bolsheviks had come close to subverting the whole authority of the Soviet, the other socialists, unbelievably, had made real efforts to protect them in the subsequent clampdown. The SRs and Mensheviks had spent so many years battling the autocracy arm in arm with their Bolshevik comrades that they simply could not see them as the menace they really were - only beatable by turning their own ruthless tactics against them. In fact, following the suppression of the Assembly, the SR leadership rejected military offers of support; civil war was to be avoided at all costs. Accordingly, in Trotsky's famous phrase, they disappeared into the 'dustbin of history'. Maybe Anton Chekhov caught a deep truth in his portrayal of the ineffectually of the Russian intelligentsia. Or maybe no civilised political class in whatever country could have stood up to the unexampled cynicism and ruthlessness of Lenin's Bolsheviks.
HISTORICALLY INEVITABLE?
Finally, we are left with one huge 'what if'. It took eight months from the February Revolution for the Assembly to be elected, and ten for it to be convened. By that time the Bolsheviks were in power and it was doomed. But in roughly comparable circumstances in France in 1848 it took two months to convene an assembly, and in Germany in 1918 four. We have seen the widespread understanding, after February, of the urgent need to convene the Assembly before it got bogged down in nitpicking arguments about electoral arrangements and all the rest. Suppose the Provisional Government had been able to maintain the momentum, and the elections for the Assembly had taken place either as originally hoped by June or as subsequently timetabled by September?
History would certainly have been different. The interesting question is by how much. Petrograd between April and July saw three Bolshevik-prompted insurrections on the streets. The first, in April, was suppressed by order of the Soviet executive - in effect the non- Bolshevik socialist parties who at this point also joined the Provisional Government, leaving the Bolsheviks as the only active opposition. The second, in June, was pre-empted by essentially the same forces. The third, the 'July Days', could in fact have taken control of Petrograd, but failed through a last-minute (and entirely uncharacteristic) loss of nerve by Lenin. So the Bolsheviks would certainly have had it in their power to take control of the city at the time the Constituent Assembly might have convened.
But the political circumstances would have been very different. The Assembly would, at least initially, have enjoyed a legitimacy and breadth of political support that the Provisional Government never achieved. The winners of the elections to the Assembly would certainly have been, as actually happened in November, the non- Bolshevik socialist parties, notably the SRs. This by itself would have sucked political vitality and support out of the Soviet, which had been the principal pretext for the mayhem the Bolsheviks had been able to cause over the period March to September (the key Bolshevik slogan from April on had been 'All power to the Soviets'). The Bolsheviks, not being in power, would not have been able to cripple and constrain the Assembly in the way they actually did in December/ January. And those nice gentlemen who led the Mensheviks, SRs and so on, and who were astonishingly tolerant of the Bolsheviks even when faced with the outrages of the July Days, may well have been ready to be much tougher in support of the flagship institution for which they had all been working for decades. Lenin, for all his fanaticism, was a careful and shrewd reader of the odds. He would surely have held his hand for at least the first few weeks of the Assembly's existence.
A lot then depends on how the Assembly performs. This was a large (800 members) parliamentary body led by exactly the same ineffectual politicians who in February had submitted their authority to the whims of the Soviet, and, as actually happened in January, had gone quietly when faced with an armed Bolshevik mob. This was not the body, and these were not the men, to steer Russia through a destructive war, rural anarchy, imperial dissolution and a complete collapse of the apparatus of the state. Even countries with much stronger experience than Russia in 1917 of the give and take of representative politics have, when confronted with such crises, moved to some form of 'strong man' rule (Gaullist France, Civil War America, Second World War Britain, for example) with, at best, some form of democratic legitimation. And, as we have noted, Russia's historical experience up to that point was almost exclusively of rule by an autocrat. The bulk of the Russian governing class then, as now, were much more comfortable obeying orders than giving them.
Given his ruthless single-mindedness it is thus not impossible to imagine Lenin's moment coming in another form. He could, at least early on, take over the streets, and he controlled a quarter of the votes in the Assembly itself. Indeed, it is fair to ask why, given that in actuality he disposed of the Assembly with remarkably little difficulty, he should not have been able to do so in this alternative universe as well. The answer is that he might have done, but that the odds were worse. Lenin would not have been in even partial control of the formal machinery of the state. The Assembly would have had longer to establish itself. It might well have earned some credibility by taking on (as it tried to do in its aborted 5/6 January session) the key issues of 'land and peace', which the Provisional Government had not been able to tackle. The Assembly, or the government it appointed, would at the very least have had the time and standing to look for the military support which it entirely lacked in the short moment which history actually gave it. And the Assembly, particularly if it came into existence before the disastrous Kornilov affair in August, would have had a key ally in Alexander Kerensky, who for all his operatic faults was one of the most able and influential politicians of the age. Bolshevism remains a possible outcome, but a significantly less likely one.
What was the alternative? History suggests (as all the Russian revolutionaries were uncomfortably aware) that Russia's strong man was much less likely to come from the left than from the right - the wing of Russian politics with the bulk of effective armed force at its disposal. The next months could well have seen an Assembly unavail- ingly and wordily struggling to grapple with Russia's huge problems as real authority slid in the direction of a 'Russian Napoleon'. Right-wing dictatorship would undoubtedly have been a bitterly disappointing outcome to Russia's first genuine stab at democracy. It would also have materially affected European history outside Russia (one of the key factors driving Hitler's rise was his opposition to Soviet Communism). But it has to be questionable whether it could have been worse than what Russia actually experienced.