Russian Constituent Assembly

• 1. Introduction

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  The Russian Constituent Assembly met for exactly thirteen hours. It opened at four in the afternoon on what should have been a historic day for Russian democracy. By five the following morning, it was over. Armed guards lined the halls of the Tauride Palace in Petrograd. Weapons were allegedly pointed at delegates as they spoke. An Anarchist sailor named Anatoli Zhelezniakov approached the elected president of the assembly and delivered a message that has become one of the more darkly comic lines in modern political history: he was tired, he said, and proposed that Chernov close the meeting and let everybody go home.

  What followed was the dissolution of the only nationally elected democratic legislature Russia would have for decades. The questions that surround those thirteen hours have never fully been resolved. Was the Constituent Assembly already a dead institution by the time the doors were locked? Did the elections that produced it faithfully represent what Russians actually wanted? And did the Bolsheviks destroy a fragile democracy, or merely bury something that had already stopped breathing?

  The story of the Russian Constituent Assembly stretches across years of revolutionary agitation, a bitterly contested election, and a civil war fought in part over whether the assembly could ever be called back to life.

• 2. Long Road to a Constitution

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  A demand for an elected constituent assembly had been at the center of every Russian revolutionary program well before 1917. It was not a radical idea. Its supporters spanned the political spectrum from liberals to socialists, all of whom agreed that only such a body could legitimately write a new constitution for Russia.

  In 1906, Tsar Nicholas II made a partial concession by granting basic civil liberties and establishing the State Duma as a legislative body. The concession was incomplete from the start. The Duma had no authority to write a new constitution or to abolish the monarchy, and its powers drifted toward the Constitutional Democrats rather than the socialist parties. The government dissolved the Duma in July 1906 and again in June 1907. After the second dissolution, the election law was rewritten to favor the landed and ruling classes, and the Duma was widely regarded as a body that did not speak for Russia's peasants and workers.

  After 1907, whatever the Duma managed to accomplish was frequently vetoed by the emperor or blocked by the appointed upper house of the Russian parliament. The demand for a genuinely representative constituent assembly, elected by universal suffrage, kept gathering force throughout those years, waiting for a moment when the old system could no longer hold.

• 3. The Provisional Government's Gamble

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  When Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in the February Revolution of 1917, power passed to a Provisional Government composed of parliamentary figures last elected to the Fourth Duma in 1912. The name was deliberately temporary. These men claimed only provisional authority until an elected Constituent Assembly could establish a permanent government.

  The legitimacy of the new government rested explicitly on the coming assembly. Even Grand Duke Michael, Nicholas's brother, had refused to take the throne without the consent of an elected constituent assembly. It was broadly accepted that no other body had the authority to change Russia's form of government.

  But the Provisional Government kept delaying. It promised to organize elections once the First World War ended. Then, in July 1917, it declared Russia a republic and set up a body called the Council of the Russian Republic, sometimes called the Preparliament, to oversee election preparations. Monarchists condemned the republican declaration as illegitimate. The left accused the government of using it to weaken the Soviets. The government was squeezing itself from both sides, and it had still not held the elections it had promised. When the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government in October 1917, elections for the Constituent Assembly were already scheduled. The new Soviet government allowed them to proceed.

• 4. The Vote and Its Ambiguities

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  More than sixty percent of eligible Russians voted in the November 1917 election for the Constituent Assembly. The Socialist Revolutionaries won around forty percent of the counted vote, and the Bolsheviks received between twenty-two and twenty-five percent overall. In the city of Moscow, the Bolsheviks took 47.9 percent, while the Constitutional Democrats drew 35.7 percent and the SRs only 8.1 percent. Rural Russia told a different story: the SRs swept the peasantry, who made up eighty percent of the population, winning roughly fifty-seven to fifty-eight percent of the national vote with their social democratic allies.

  The numbers, however, masked a structural problem. The SR party had split in November 1917, after the ballot lists had already been drawn up, into a pro-Bolshevik Left SR faction and an anti-Bolshevik Right SR faction. Voters who wanted to support the Left SRs had no way to do so; their votes went instead to whichever SR candidate happened to be on the list. The historian O. H. Radkey argued that the lists had been drawn up before the schism and were weighted toward older party workers whose radicalism had faded, and that the leftward current among peasants was likely stronger on election day than the lists reflected.

  Lenin made this point publicly. His Theses on the Constituent Assembly, published anonymously in the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, argued that a party which had held its largest following among the people from May to October 1917 had run on unified election lists in the middle of October, only to split in November after the elections and before the assembly met. He called any purely formal, legal approach to the question a betrayal of the proletariat's cause.

• 5. Thirteen Hours in the Tauride Palace

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  On the morning of the assembly's scheduled opening, a large crowd marched through Petrograd toward the Tauride Palace in support of the Constituent Assembly. Soldiers loyal to the Bolshevik-Left SR government opened fire on the crowd and dispersed it. Fewer soldiers and workers had come than the organizers had hoped; the demonstration was composed mainly of middle-class students, civil servants, and professionals.

  Viktor Chernov, elected president of the assembly with 244 votes against 153 for Maria Spiridonova of the Left SRs, feared a physical confrontation if he was too assertive. The delegates had arrived carrying candles and sandwiches, anticipating that the Bolsheviks might cut off the lights or their food supply. Leon Trotsky later wrote that this was how democracy entered the struggle with dictatorship: heavily armed with sandwiches and candles.

  The Bolshevik Yakov Sverdlov opened the session on the authority of the Central Executive Committee rather than waiting for the assembly itself to organize. The Bolsheviks placed the Second Soviet Congress's decrees before the assembly for endorsement; they were rejected by 237 votes to 136. It became clear the assembly would not endorse Soviet government or agree to new elections. During a recess, the Bolsheviks and Left SRs decided to dissolve it. Fyodor Raskolnikov read a prepared statement, and the two factions walked out. Lenin left for bed, telling soldiers not to use force but simply to wait until the deputies left on their own. The remaining deputies spent their final minutes passing a land reform law, declaring Russia a democratic federal republic, and appealing for a democratic peace. They scheduled their next meeting for five in the afternoon and dispersed at 4:40 a.m. The doors were locked the next day.

• 6. Why the Public Did Not React

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  Ronald W. Clark observed that the closure of the Constituent Assembly provoked comparatively little reaction, even in political circles. Orlando Figes went further, arguing that no mass reaction followed and that the SR intelligentsia had always been mistaken in their belief that the peasants shared their devotion to the Constituent Assembly. To most peasants, Figes argued, it was a distant thing in the city, dominated by party leaders they did not understand, quite unlike their own political organizations.

  Figes also pointed to how the Right SRs had spent months in the Provisional Government embracing parliamentary methods and distancing themselves from the militant tactics that had once made them a peasant movement. Their adopted sense of responsibility for the state, and perhaps pride in their ministerial status, had led them to depend exclusively on parliamentary procedures. The result was that they had drifted away from the very people they claimed to represent.

  O. H. Radkey framed the silence differently. He argued that while democratic parties heaped condemnation on Lenin for an act of despotism, their followers showed little inclination to defend an institution that the Russian people had ceased to regard as necessary to their cherished desires. The assembly had, even before it met, been caught in a backwater of the swiftly moving revolutionary current and no longer commanded the allegiance that alone could have protected it. A Right SR deputy from the Volga region called on the people to defend the assembly and its members as their duty. The people did not answer.

• 7. Komuch and the Civil War Struggle

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  Barred from the Tauride Palace, surviving assembly deputies held secret meetings at the Gurevich High School, but conditions grew increasingly dangerous. Some tried to relocate to Kiev, which was then under the control of the Tsentralna Rada, but Rada forces had to abandon the city, effectively ending the assembly as a coherent body.

  The Socialist Revolutionary Central Committee met in January 1918 and voted against armed resistance, judging that Bolshevism still rested on workers and soldiers who had not yet lost faith in it. Instead the SRs and their Menshevik allies returned to Soviet bodies and waited for re-elections to shift the balance. Soviet elections in the winter and spring of 1918 did often produce pro-SR majorities, but the Bolshevik government simply refused to recognize results that went against it and dissolved the offending Soviets. One Tula Bolshevik leader, N. V. Kopylov, wrote to the Bolshevik Central Committee admitting that his faction had been forced to block new elections and not recognize those that had not gone their way.

  On the 8th of June 1918, five assembly members formed the All-Russian Constituent Assembly Committee, known as Komuch, in Samara and declared themselves the supreme authority in the country. The committee had the backing of the Czechoslovak Legions, whose revolt had overthrown Bolshevik rule across much of Siberia, the Urals, and the Volga region in late May and early June. Komuch eventually grew to around ninety members and controlled much of the Volga-Kama region. When Viktor Chernov arrived in Samara on the 19th of September 1918, he persuaded the SR Central Committee to withdraw support from the broader anti-Bolshevik coalition known as the Ufa Directory, which he considered too conservative. Two months later, on the 18th of November 1918, right-wing officers overthrew the Directory and made Admiral Alexander Kolchak its successor.

• 8. The Assembly's Final Accounting

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  After the Ufa Directory fell, Viktor Chernov tried to position the SRs as a third force opposed to both the Bolsheviks and the White Movement, but the party fractured. Nikolai Avksentiev and Vladimir Zenzinov went abroad with Kolchak's permission. On the left, some SRs reconciled with the Bolsheviks. Chernov's attempted uprising against Kolchak in December 1918 was put down. By February 1919, the SR Central Committee decided the Bolsheviks were the lesser of two evils and ceased armed resistance against them.

  The Bolsheviks allowed the SR Central Committee to re-establish itself in Moscow and begin publishing a newspaper in March 1919, then arrested its members. They spent the rest of the Russian Civil War in prison. Their leaders were sentenced to death at a 1922 trial, though the sentences were suspended. Chernov fled Russia.

  On the 26th of May 1919, the Allied powers offered Admiral Kolchak their support on conditions that included free elections and reconvening the Constituent Assembly. Kolchak accepted most conditions on the 4th of June 1919 but refused to reconvene the assembly elected in November 1917, arguing it had been chosen under Bolshevik conditions and the elections had not been fully free. The Allies accepted his reply on the 12th of June 1919, and the demand to restore the original assembly was dropped. After the Bolshevik victory on the Southern Front in late 1920, thirty-eight assembly members gathered in Paris in 1921 and formed an executive committee that included Pavel Milyukov, Aleksandr Konovalov, Avksentiev, and Alexander Kerensky. Like other emigre organizations, it had no power to act.