The Bolsheviks were also unhappy over the strong showing of the Kadets, the opposition party they feared the most. Although the Kadets had gained less than 5 percent of the national vote, the Bolsheviks viewed them as the most formidable rival: they had the largest number of active supporters and the most newspapers; they were far better organized and financed than the SRs; and unlike the Bolsheviks’ socialist rivals, they did not feel constrained by a sense of comradeship, dedication to a common social ideal, and fear of the “counterrevolution.” As the only major non-socialist party still functioning in late 1917, the Kadets were likely to attract the entire right-of-center electorate, monarchists included. If one looks at the overall election results one may indeed conclude that the Kadets “had experienced not so much a walloping as a washout.”85 But this would be a superficial conclusion. The nationwide figures concealed the important political fact that the Kadets did very well in the urban centers which the Bolsheviks needed to control to offset their weakness in the countryside and viewed as the decisive battleground in the coming civil war. In Petrograd and Moscow, the Kadets ran a strong second to the Bolsheviks, winning 26.2 percent of the vote in the former and 34.2 percent in the latter. If one subtracted from the Bolshevik total in Moscow the vote of the military garrison, which was in the process of evanescing, the Kadets had 36.4 percent of the vote as against the Bolshevik 45.3 percent.86 Furthermore, the Kadets bested the Bolsheviks in eleven out of thirty-eight provincial capitals and in many others ran a close second. They thus represented a much more formidable political force than one could conclude from the undifferentiated election returns.
These disappointments notwithstanding, the outcome held some consolation for the Bolsheviks. Lenin, who analyzed the figures with the detachment of a commander surveying the order of battle—he even referred to the various electoral blocs as “armies”87—could take comfort in the fact that his party did best in the center of the country: the large cities, the industrial areas, and the military garrisons.88 The victorious SRs drew their strength from the black-earth zone and Siberia. As he was later to observe, this geographic distribution of votes foreshadowed the front lines in the civil war between the Red and White armies,89 in which the Bolsheviks would control the heartland of Russia and their opponents the rimlands.
Another source of satisfaction for the Bolsheviks was the support of soldiers and sailors, especially units billeted in the cities. These troops had only one desire: to get home, the quicker the better, to share in the repartition of land. Since the Bolsheviks alone of all the parties promised to open immediate peace negotiations, they showed for them a strong preference. The Petrograd and Moscow garrisons cast, respectively, 71.3 and 74.3 percent of the vote for the Bolsheviks. The front-line troops in the northwest, near Petrograd, also gave them majorities. The Bolsheviks did not do as well at the more distant fronts, where their anti-war propaganda had less resonance, but even so, in the four field armies for which records are available, they won 56 percent of the vote.90 Lenin had no illusions about the solidity of this support, which was bound to evaporate as the troops headed home. But for the time being the backing of the military was decisive: the pro-Bolshevik troops formed a power that even in small numbers could intimidate the democratic opposition. Analyzing the election results, Lenin noted with satisfaction that in the military the Bolsheviks possessed “a political striking force which assured them of an overwhelming preponderance of forces at the decisive point in the decisive moment.”91
The Sovnarkom discussed the Constituent Assembly on November 20. Several important decisions were taken.92 The opening of the Assembly was postponed indefinitely. The ostensible reason was the difficulty of gathering a quorum by November 28;93 the true reason was to allow the Bolsheviks more time. Instructions went out to provincial soviets to report on all electoral “abuses”; they were to serve as a pretext for “reelections.”94 P. E. Dybenko, the Commissar of the Navy, received orders to assemble in Petrograd between 10,000 and 12,000 armed sailors.95 And perhaps most significantly, it was decided to convene the Third Congress of Soviets on January 8: packed solidly with their supporters and Left SRs, it was to be a surrogate for the Assembly. These measures indicated Bolshevik intentions to abort the Constituent Assembly in one manner or another.
