Of the socialists, the Bolsheviks alone campaigned without a formal platform. They apparently counted on winning votes with broad appeals to workers, soldiers, and peasants, centered on the slogans “All Power to the Soviets,” and on promises of immediate peace and the confiscation of landlord properties. In electoral appeals they sought to broaden the class basis of their constituency, borrowing the SRs’ un-Marxist term “the toiling masses.” In evaluating the results of the elections, therefore, it must be borne in mind that many and perhaps even most of those who cast ballots for the Bolsheviks were expressing approval, not of the Bolshevik platform, of which they knew nothing because it did not even exist, let alone of the hidden Bolshevik agenda of a one-party dictatorship, never mentioned in Bolshevik pronouncements, but of the rule of soviets, an end to the war, and the abolition of private landholding in favor of communal redistribution, none of which figured among ultimate Bolshevik objectives.
Lenin, hoping against hope, for a while deluded himself that the Left SRs would tear the SR Party apart to such an extent as to give the Bolsheviks a victory.81 The strong showing which the Left SRs made at the Petrograd City Conference in November gave some substance to this hope.82 But in the end it proved unfounded: although the Bolsheviks made a strong showing, especially in the cities and among the military, they came in second place, trailing far behind the Socialists-Revolutionaries. This outcome sealed the fate of the Assembly.
The results of the elections cannot be precisely determined because in many localities the parties and their offshoots ran in coalitions, sometimes of a very complicated nature: in Petrograd alone, nineteen parties competed. The problem is exacerbated by the practice of the Communist authorities, who control the raw data, of lumping together under the categories “bourgeois” and “petty bourgeois” parties and groupings that ran on separate tickets. As best can be determined, the final results were (in thousands) as follows (see table on this page).83
The results, although not entirely unexpected, disappointed Lenin. The peasants, whom he had hoped to attract by adopting the SR land program, not only did not vote Bolshevik: they did not even vote for the Left SRs. One of the arguments the Bolsheviks later used to challenge the validity of the elections was that the split in the SR party had occurred too late for the Left SRs to run on separate ballots. But there exist figures which demonstrate that this argument had no substance. In several electoral districts (Voronezh, Viatka, and Tobolsk) the Left SRs and the mainstream SRs did run on separate tickets. In none of them did the Left SRs win significant support: the tally showed 1,839,000 votes cast for the SR Party and a mere 26,000 for the Left
RUSSIAN SOCIALIST PARTIES: 68.9% Socialists-Revolutionaries 17,943 (40.4%) Bolsheviks 10,661 (24.0%) Mensheviks 1,144 (2.6%) Left SRs 451 (1.0%) Others 401 (0.9%) RUSSIAN LIBERAL AND OTHER non-socialist parties: 7.5% Constitutional-Democrats 2,088 (4.7%) Others 1,261 (2.8%) NATIONAL MINORITY PARTIES: 13.4% Ukrainian SRs 3,433 (7.7%) Georgian Mensheviks 662 (1.5%) Mussavat (Azerbaijan) 616 (1.4%) Dashnaktsutiun (Armenia) 560 (1-3%) Alash Orda (Kazakhstan) 262 (0.6%) Others 407 (0.9%) UNACCOUNTED 4,543 (10.2%)
SRs.84 The Bolsheviks gained 175 out of 715 seats in the Assembly; together with the SR deputies who identified themselves as Left, they had 30 percent of the delegates.*
