Lenin, meanwhile, was coming round to favour the outright abolition of the Constituent Assembly. On 12 December he published his ‘Theses’ on the subject, in which he argued that Soviet power had cancelled out the need for a ‘bourgeois-democratic’ Assembly. In any case, it was no longer truly representative because of the split in the SR Party and the leftward shift of the masses since October. The ‘class struggle’ and the defeat of the ‘counter-revolution’ demanded the consolidation of Soviet power and, unless the Assembly was ready to recognize this, ‘the entire people’ would agree that it was ‘doomed to political extinction’. It was a declaration of intent to abolish the Assembly, unless the Assembly agreed to abolish itself. Lenin’s ultimatum became the policy of the party, and this in turn became the policy of Sovnarkom. Ten days later, at a meeting of the Soviet Executive, the Bolsheviks and Left SRs both demanded the closure of the Constituent Assembly, unless it resolved to subordinate itself to the Soviets at its opening session on 5 January. A Third Soviet Congress was meanwhile convened for 8 January, two weeks earlier than originally planned, so that, as Zinoviev put it, ‘the oppressed people may pass sentence on the Constituent Assembly’. Lenin drew up a ‘Declaration of the Rights of the Working People’ to be passed by the Constituent Assembly at its opening session. This spurious replica of the Rights of Man proclaimed Russia a Republic of Soviets and endorsed all the decrees of Sovnarkom, including the abolition of private landed property, the nationalization of the banks and the introduction of universal labour conscription.54 It was the death sentence of the Constituent Assembly.
Petrograd was in a state of siege on 5 January, the opening day of the Constituent Assembly. The Bolsheviks had placed the capital under martial law, forbidden public gatherings and flooded the city with troops. Most of them were concentrated near the Tauride Palace, where the Assembly was due to convene. The palace was cordoned off with barricades guarded by Bolshevik pickets. Its forecourt, where Chernov had once been held by the mob, was filled with bivouacs, artillery, machine-guns and field kitchens. It looked like an armed encampment. The Bolsheviks had set up a special military staff and called in their staunchest defenders — the Kronstadt sailors, Latvian Riflemen and Red Guards — to deal with any ‘counter-revolutionary’ actions by the Union for the Defence of the Constituent Assembly.
The Union had at one stage planned to start an uprising, but since they had no real military forces at their disposal, had abandoned the idea at the final moment in favour of a mass demonstration under the slogan of ‘All Power to the Constituent Assembly’. During the morning a sizeable crowd gathered on the Mars Field and, towards noon, began to march in various columns towards the Tauride Palace. Some sources counted 50,000 marchers, but the actual number was probably less. It was certainly not as large as the organizers had hoped: far fewer workers and soldiers turned up than expected, so the crowd was largely made up of the same small active citizenry — students, Civil Servants and middle-class professionals — who had taken part in the earlier march on 28 November. As the demonstrators approached the Liteiny Prospekt they were fired upon by Bolshevik troops, hiding on the rooftops with their machine-guns. Several other columns of marchers, one including workers from the Obukhovsky munitions plant, were also fired on. At least ten people were killed and several dozen wounded.
It was the first time government troops had fired on an unarmed crowd since the February Days. The victims were buried on 9 January, the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, next to the victims of that massacre in the Preobrazhensky Cemetery. The historic parallels did not go unnoticed. Several workers’ delegations turned up for the funeral, and one laid a wreath with the inscription: ‘To the victims of the Smolny autocrats’. Gorky, who had witnessed both massacres, underlined the parallels in Novaia zhizn’. It was the emotional climax of his bitter disillusionment with the revolution:
On 9 January 1905, when the downtrodden, ill-treated soldiers were firing into unarmed and peaceful crowds of workers by order of the tsarist regime, intellectuals and workers ran up to the soldiers — the unwilling murderers — and shouted point-blank in their faces: ‘What are you doing, damn you? Who are you killing?’ …
However, the majority of the Tsar’s soldiers answered the reproaches and persuasions with dismal and slavish words: ‘We’ve got our orders. We know nothing, we’ve got our orders’. And, like machines, they fired at the crowds. Reluctantly, perhaps with a heavy heart, but — they fired.
On 5 January 1918 the unarmed Petersburg democracy — factory and white-collar workers — demonstrated peacefully in honour of the Constituent Assembly.
