The Russian Revolution полностью

The government’s announcement indefinitely postponing the opening of the Assembly evoked strong protests from the socialist parties and deputies to the Peasants’ Congress. On November 22–23, a Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly came into being, composed of representatives of the Petrograd Soviet, trade unions, and all the socialist parties except the Bolsheviks and Left SRs.⁹⁶

The Bolsheviks began their assault on the Assembly by harassing its Electoral Commission (Vsevybor). Under orders of the Sovnarkom, Stalin and Grigorii Petrovskii on November 23 ordered the commission to turn over its files: when it refused, the Cheka took its staff into custody. M. S. Uritskii, who later was to head the Petrograd Cheka, was appointed head of the Electoral Commission for the Assembly, which gave him wide discretion to determine who could attend.⁹⁷

In response, the Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly decided to open the Assembly on schedule in disregard of Bolshevik orders.⁹⁸ On November 28, members of the Electoral Commission, just released from prison, began to deliberate in Taurida Palace. Uritskii appeared to inform them they could meet only in his presence, but he was ignored. Supporters of the Assembly gathered demonstratively in front of Taurida: students, workers, soldiers, and striking civil servants, carrying banners “All Power to the Constituent Assembly.” One paper estimated the crowd at 200,000, but the figure seems considerably inflated: Communist sources speak of 10,000.⁹⁹ On Uritskii’s orders, Latvian Riflemen, the most dependable pro-Bolshevik troops in Petrograd, surrounded Taurida but did not interfere: some told the demonstrators they had come to protect the Constituent Assembly. Inside, forty-five deputies, mostly from Petrograd and vicinity, elected a Presidium.

The next day, armed troops formed a solid ring around Taurida: the Latvian Riflemen were back, augmented by soldiers from the Lithuanian Reserve Regiment, detachments of sailors, and a machine gun company. They kept the crowds at a safe distance, allowing into the building only delegates and accredited journalists. Toward evening, sailors ordered the deputies to leave. The following day the troops barred the entrance to everybody. These events were a rehearsal for the real trial of strength on January 5/18.

Pressing their offensive, the Bolsheviks outlawed the Constitutional-Democratic Party. Already on the opening day of the elections in Petrograd, they had dispatched armed thugs to smash the editorial offices of the Kadet Rech’; it resumed publication as Nash vek two weeks later. On November 28, Lenin wrote an ordinance under the typically propagandistic title “Decree concerning the arrest of the leaders of the civil war against the Revolution.”¹⁰⁰ The Kadet leaders were declared “enemies of the people” and were ordered taken into custody. That night and the following day, Bolshevik detachments seized every prominent Kadet they could lay their hands on, among them several delegates to the Assembly (A. I. Shingarev, P. D. Dolgorukov, F. F. Kokoshkin, S. V. Panina, A. I. Rodichev, and others). All of them were subsequently released (Panina after a brief and rather comical trial) except for Shingarev and Kokoshkin, whom Bolshevik sailors murdered in the prison hospital. As “enemies of the people” the Kadets could not participate in the Constituent Assembly. They were the first political party outlawed by the Bolshevik Government. Neither the Mensheviks nor the Socialists-Revolutionaries seemed very upset by this action.

Harassment and intimidation did not solve for the Bolsheviks the nagging problem of what to do about the Assembly. Some wanted to resort to force: one week before the elections, V. Volodarskii, a member of the Central Committee, said that “the masses never suffer from parliamentary cretinism,” least of all in Russia, and hinted that the Constituent Assembly might have to be dispersed.¹⁰¹ Nikolai Bukharin thought he had a better idea. On November 29 he proposed to the Central Committee that the Kadets be ejected from the Assembly and then the Bolshevik and Left SR deputies proclaim themselves a Revolutionary Convention: a reference to the French Convention of 1792, which took the place of the Legislative Assembly. “If the others open [a rival body] we shall arrest them,” he explained. Stalin made short shrift of this proposal on grounds of impracticability.¹⁰²