There was an even more profound indifference among the peasantry, the traditional base of support of the SR Party. The SR intelligentsia had always been mistaken in their belief that the peasants shared their veneration for the Constituent Assembly. To the educated peasants, or those who had long been exposed to the propaganda of the SRs, the Assembly perhaps stood as a political symbol of ‘the revolution’. But to the mass of the peasants, whose political outlook was limited to the narrow confines of their own village and fields, it was only a distant thing in the city, dominated by the ‘chiefs’ of the various parties, which they did not understand, and was quite unlike their own political organizations. It was a national parliament, long cherished by the intelligentsia, but the peasants did not share the intelligentsia’s conception of the political nation, its language of ‘statehood’ and ‘democracy’, of ‘civic rights and duties’, was alien to them, and when they used this urban rhetoric they attached to it a specific ‘peasant’ meaning to suit the needs of their own communities.61 The village Soviets were much closer to the political ideals of the mass of the peasants, being in effect no more than their own village assemblies in a more revolutionary form. Through the village and volost Soviets the peasants were already carrying out their own revolution on the land, and they did not need the sanction of a decree by the Constituent Assembly (or, for that matter, the Soviet Government itself) to complete this. The Right SRs could not understand this fundamental fact: that the autonomy of the peasants through their village Soviets had, from their point of view, reduced the significance of any national parliament, since they had already attained their volia, the ancient peasant ideal of self-rule. To be sure, out of habit, or deference to their village elders, the mass of the peasants would cast their votes for the SRs in the elections to the Constituent Assembly. But very few were prepared to fight the SR battle for its restoration, as the dismal failure of the Komuch would prove in the summer of 1918. Virtually all the resolutions from the villages on this question made it clear that they did not want the Assembly to be restored as the ‘political master of the Russian land’, in the words of one, with a higher authority than the local Soviets. In other words, they did not want to be ruled by a central state. As Sokolov later acknowledged from his experience as an SR propagandist in the army:
The Constituent Assembly was something totally unknown and unclear to the mass of the front-line soldiers, it was without doubt a terra incognita. Their sympathies were clearly with the Soviets. These were the institutions that were near and dear to them, reminding them of their own village assemblies … I more than once had occasion to hear the soldiers, sometimes even the most intelligent of them, object to the Constituent Assembly. To most of them it was associated with the State Duma, an institution that was remote to them. ‘What do we need some Constituent Assembly for, when we already have our Soviets, where our own deputies can meet and decide everything?’62
After their defeat in the capital the SRs returned to their old provincial strongholds to rally support for the restoration of democracy. It was to prove a painful lesson in the new realities of provincial life. They found the local peasantry largely indifferent to the closure of the Constituent Assembly and their own party organizations in a state of decay. By basing their party on the support of the peasants, the SRs came to realize that they had built it on sand.
