The SRs were busy organizing the peasantry. They reconstituted the Peasants’ Union, destroyed after 1905. The Union was favorable to the Provisional Government and its messages to the peasants urged patience and restraint.178 The appeals from the government and the Peasants’ Union had a calming effect: many peasants concluded that their claim to the land would be more secure if obtained legally rather than by force. But the agrarian disorders subsided only in June, after the socialists had entered the Provisional Government and the SR leader, Victor Chernov, took over the Ministry of Agriculture. Even so, the peasants could not be expected to wait forever: by failing to enact a land reform, the government soon dissipated its popularity with the communal peasantry.
To ensure the cities’ food supply, Petrograd introduced on March 25 a state monopoly on trade in cereals. Under its provisions, peasants were required to turn over to government agents surplus grain at fixed prices. But there were no means of enforcing this law and the peasants ignored it, continuing to dispose of their surplus on the open market.
The early agrarian disturbances had a pernicious effect on the armed forces. News at the front of an imminent Black Repartition stimulated the first mass desertions of soldiers who hurried home from fear of being left out.179
To stabilize the situation nothing was more urgently required than a speedy convocation of the Constituent Assembly. Only a body elected on a democratic franchise would have enjoyed incontestable legitimacy and, as such, been able to beat back challenges both from the extreme right and from the extreme left. The electoral complexities admittedly were daunting. Still, the matter was of such urgency that practiced politicians would have realized it was better to convene an imperfect Assembly immediately than a perfect one later. When the July Monarchy in France collapsed in 1848, a Constituent Assembly met in two months to choose the new government. In Germany in late 1918 after defeat in the war, in the midst of social upheavals, the authorities who took over would manage to convene a National Assembly in less than four months. The Russian Provisional Government could not do it in the eight months that it stayed in office.
On March 25, the government appointed a commission of seventy jurists to work out the electoral procedures. They immediately got bogged down in technicalities; weeks passed by without anything being accomplished. Nabokov says, probably correctly, there were always more urgent matters to attend to.180 By postponing the elections, the government not only violated a provision of the eight-point program but laid itself open to charges that it was playing for time until revolutionary passions subsided.181 Its dilatoriness contributed heavily to the government’s eventual overthrow: as we will note, one of the main pretexts the Bolsheviks would use when seizing power in the name of the Soviets was that only a Soviet government could ensure the convocation of a Constituent Assembly.
