John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

The hopes of those who opposed the Bolsheviks now hinged on the outcome of the national elections being held for a Constituent Assembly. These elections had been long prepared by the Provisional Government (one of the Bolshevik’s most vocal complaints against it was that it had taken so long to hold them) and they were held on a regional “Party List” basis. Voting took place on 12th-14th November in less than ideal circumstances–sporadic fighting was still taking place throughout the Empire and many of the parties participating in the elections could not communicate with the electorate because of press censorship. Nonetheless, the creaking Russian state-machine did its best to deliver a meaningful election. 1The overall result, in Sheila Fitzpatrick’s view, was “the best barometer we have of national popular opinion at the time the Bolsheviks took power”. 2

Using Oliver H. Radkey’s definitive reconstruction of the returns, the elections gave the SRs 15,848,004 votes; the Bolsheviks 9,844,637; the Mensheviks 1,364,826; the Trudoviks 322,078; the Kadets (made illegal shortly after the elections) 1,986,601; and the Cossack party 663,112. The Landowner Party secured only 171,245 votes, with a variety of rightist/Orthodox Christian parties getting even less. Added to this were the nationalist branches of the larger parties, which complicated the overall result but did not detract from the general victory of the SRs, mainly because it was nationalist SRs who came top of the regional lists. In Ukraine, the Ukrainian SR Party secured 1,286,157 votes over the Ukrainian Social Democrats (which stood as one party, not split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks), who secured only 95,117. The “Ukrainian Socialist bloc” (whose socialism was a fusion of SR land redistribution with added nationalism) secured more than either of these. The Muslim nationalist and socialist parties attracted about half a million votes each in those areas where they stood, although they would have obtained more had they not been banned from standing in the central Asian regions where Muslims predominated.

The urban electorates of Petrograd and Moscow returned Bolshevik majorities. In Petrograd the result was Bolsheviks 424,027; Kadets 246,506; SR 152,231; and Menshevik 29,167. In Moscow it was similar–Bolsheviks 366,148; Kadets 263,859; SRs 62,260; and Mensheviks 21,597. These results emphasised the huge polarisation in the cities between the middle class and the working class, and the marginalising of non-Bolshevik socialists. The Kadets only secured this level of support in the great metropolises of Petrograd and Moscow whilst the SRs, relatively weak here, were in a majority nearly everywhere else. In terms of how the 707 deputies of the Assembly would be divided, the result translated into 370 SRs (with about 40 of these Left SR), 175 Bolsheviks, 17 Kadets, 16 Mensheviks, and 99 others. 3

This was a crushing blow to the Bolsheviks, who had “entered with zeal, and sometimes with real enthusiasm, into the election campaign, in which the party militants had shown tremendous activity”. 4They had not expected to lose, and as soon as the results were in they sought to discredit them. The Bolsheviks claimed the overall result did not convey the actuality of post-October Russia as there was a Left SR “party” which was not counted as such. Yet even if it had been recorded as a separate Left SR vote, this would not have increased the Bolshevik vote. 5At the same time they claimed that only those who voted Bolshevik cast meaningful votes anyway, because a vote for Bolshevism derived from advanced class consciousness whilst a vote against them was evidence of lack of class consciousness (except for the Kadets, who did have class consciousness, but of the wrong type). Other votes, whether nationalist, Orthodox, Muslim, Cossack, Jewish socialist, Finnish socialist, Ukrainian socialist etc., were disregarded as backward or misguided.

These were desperate arguments. The result was obvious for all to see. The mainstream SRs–representing a form of popular Narodnik socialism allied to Soviet democracy, a true reflection of the Russian revolutionary tradition of the last fifty years–had won. As Radkey put it, “Three weeks after the October Revolution the Bolsheviks had signally failed to secure popular sanction for their seizure of power and had mustered only one fourth of the electorate behind their banner”. 6

As soon as Lenin received the results he postponed convocation of the Assembly until 18th January, 1918. This gave the government more time to harass, arrest and imprison elected delegates (the Kadet party was made illegal soon after, making its attendance almost impossible). On 13th December, Pravda published Lenin’s “Theses on the Constituent Assembly”, which put the two main grounds of Bolshevik dismissal of the legitimacy of the Assembly. These were 1) that “a republic of Soviets is a higher form of democracy than the usual bourgeois republic with a Constituent Assembly” 7; and 2) the elections returns did not, as Cliff later put it, “correspond to the actual will of the people”, as since October “…the masses had moved further to the left, a change not reflected in the Assembly”. 8

Lenin did not explain how he had more accurately divined the will of the people than a national general election which took place three weeks after 25th October and whose results came in only a month before he wrote. Nor did Sovnarcom offer to re-run the election to produce a more accurate result. Lenin simply asserted that if the Constituent Assembly did not recognise Soviet power and the decrees passed by Sovnarcom since 25th October then “the crisis in connection with the Constituent Assembly can be settled only in a revolutionary way, by Soviet power adopting the most energetic, speedy, firm and determined revolutionary measures”.

Lenin’s initial idea was to declare the Assembly illegal before it could even meet, but the Left SRs would not agree to this. Instead the government targeted many of those elected. After it was announced that convocation of the Assembly would be delayed there was a 100,000 strong demonstration in Petrograd in its support. The march was mostly supported by middle-class Kadets, moderate socialists and mainstream SRs. The fact that the march was part-organised by the Kadet Central Committee, at the same time as prominent Kadets like Miliukov were working with the “Volunteer Army” of the Don Region to overthrow the Bolshevik government, gave Sovnarcom a valid reason to move against the entire Kadet party and in doing so discredit all agitation in favour of the Assembly.

In mid-December several prominent SR leaders, including Chairman of the All-Russian Soviet of Peasant Deputies Nicolai Avkenstyev and the popular satirist Sorokin, were arrested because of anti-Sovnarcom statements. In spite of this, the SRs and Mensheviks prepared for convocation of the Assembly and drew up policy statements for a new government. As they did so Sovnarcom called up its most reliable military units–the sailors of the Baltic Fleet and the crack Lettish Sharpshooters. As 18th January approached the government declared that it had learnt that the “forces of Kerensky and Kaledin” were planning an attack “on Soviet power” that very day, and therefore the city was declared to be in a state of siege and under martial law. Its citizens were forbidden to take part in any marches or rallies. 9

Despite this, on 5th January 50,000 people marched to the Mars Field to rally in support of the Assembly. Although there were some delegations from Petrograd factories, the marchers were mostly white-collar employees, middle-class professionals and students. When the march approached the Tauride Palace it was suddenly fired upon from the rooftops. Some marchers were killed outright. Others were injured when Bolshevik contingents attacked them and tore down their banners. Gorky’s newspaper Novaya Zhizn reported the next day that there were at least fifteen dead and dozens wounded. 10“For almost a hundred years”, wrote Gorky in the newspaper on 9th January,