The Congress of Peasants’ Deputies, which represented four-fifths of Russia’s population, rejected the October coup. It sent no delegates to the Second Congress of Soviets, joining instead the Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland and the Revolution. This opposition was awkward for the Bolsheviks; they had to win over the Peasants’ Congress or, failing that, replace it with another body, friendly to them. Their strategy, which they subsequently repeated in regard to the Constituent Assembly and other democratic but anti-Bolshevik representative bodies, involved three steps. First, they sought to gain control of a given body’s Mandate Commission, which determined who could attend: this enabled them to bring in more Bolshevik and pro-Bolshevik deputies than they would have obtained in free elections. If such a body, packed with their followers, nevertheless failed to pass Bolshevik resolutions, they disrupted it with noise and threats of violence. If that method also failed, then they declared the meeting unlawful, walked out, and set up a rival meeting of their own.
As the elections to the Constituent Assembly, held in the second half of November, would demonstrate, the Bolsheviks enjoyed no support in the rural areas. This bode ill for their prospects at the Congress of Peasants’ Deputies, scheduled for the end of November, where the SRs were certain to pass resolutions denouncing the Bolshevik dictatorship. To prevent this, the Bolsheviks, helped by the Left SRs, tried to manipulate the Mandate Commission demanding that the delegates to the congress, ordinarily elected by provincial and district soviets, be augmented with representatives from military units. This demand had no justification, since the military already were represented in the Soldiers’ Section of the Soviet. But the SRs on the Mandate Commission, eager to placate the Bolsheviks, agreed: as a result, instead of completely dominating the Peasants’ Congress, they had to make do with a bare majority. The final tally of deputies to the Peasants’ Congress showed 789 delegates, of whom 489 were bona fide peasant representatives, chosen by the rural soviets, and 294 were men in uniform handpicked by the Bolsheviks and Left SRs from the garrisons of Petrograd and vicinity. The party affiliation showed 307 SRs and 91 Bolsheviks; the affiliation of the remaining 391 was not stated, but judging by subsequent voting results, a high proportion of them were Left SRs.*
In yet another conciliatory gesture, the SR leadership agreed to giving the chairmanship of the congress to Maria Spiridonova, the leader of the Left SRs. Although the peasants indeed idolized her for her terrorist exploits before the Revolution, it was an ill-considered concession because the impulsive Spiridonova was completely manipulated by the Bolsheviks.
The Second Congress of Peasants’ Deputies opened in Petrograd on November 26 in the Alexander Hall of the Municipal Duma. From the outset, Bolshevik deputies, cheered on by the Left SRs, engaged in disruptive tactics, hooting, screaming, and shouting down speakers from rival parties; for a while they physically occupied the rostrum. The disturbance forced Spiridonova on several occasions to declare a recess.
The critical session took place on December 2. On that day, several SR speakers protested the arrest and harassment of delegates to the Constituent Assembly, some of whom were also elected to the Peasants’ Congress. During one of these speeches, Lenin appeared. An SR, pointing at him, shouted to the Bolsheviks: “You will bring Russia to the point where Nicholas will be replaced by Lenin. We need no autocratic authority. We need the rule of soviets!” Lenin asked to speak in his capacity as head of state, but he was told that since no one had elected him, he could only have the floor as head of the Bolshevik Party. His address denigrated the Constituent Assembly and dismissed complaints of Bolshevik harassment of its deputies. Lenin promised, however, that the Assembly would meet when a quorum of 400 deputies had gathered in Petrograd.
When he left, Chernov moved a resolution which rejected the Bolshevik claim that to acknowledge the authority of the Constituent Assembly was tantamount to rejecting the soviets:
The congress believes that the soviets of workers’, soldiers’, and peasants’ deputies, as the ideological and political guides of the masses, should be the strong combat points of the Revolution standing guard over the conquests of peasants and workers. With its legislative creativity, the Constituent Assembly must translate into life the aspirations of the masses, as expressed by the soviets. In consequence, the congress protests against the attempts of individual groups to pit the soviets and the Constituent Assembly against each other.†
