Page:Arthur Ransome - The Truth about Russia.djvu/10

 Soviet, by the very body which, in the end, opposed its realisation. The Soviet, in those exhilarating days of March, 1917, declared that without such an assembly the future of Russia could not be decided. The effect of this declaration was to make impossible Miliukov's plan of choking the revolution at birth. Miliukov, in the first days of the revolution, tried by means of quick jugglery with abdications, a regency and a belated constitution, to profit by the elemental uprising of the masses to secure an exchange of authority out of the hands of the Tsar's bureaucracy into the hands of the bourgeoisie. For him, the revolution was to be a tramcar which would stop conveniently at the point where the Cadet party wished to alight. The idea of the Constituent Assembly was like a good big label on that tramcar showing that it had a further destination. It became clear at once that the car would not stop at the point that Miliukov had chosen. The next hope of the bourgeoisie was to keep it moving to prevent it stopping anywhere else until the passengers should be so tired of moving that they would be glad to stop anywhere and would be amenable and peaceable on alighting. The bourgeois parties deliberately postponed the meeting of the Constituent Assembly, since it was clear that, were it to meet at once, its members would be practically identical with those of the Soviet, so that the voice of the bourgeoisie would be unheard in the roar of the waking masses. The aim of the bourgeoisie was (1) to postpone the elections until the electors had wearied of the Soviets, and (2) to postpone such reforms as most concerned the destruction of their own privileges (such as the land reforms) until they could summon a Constituent Assembly whose character would be agreeable to themselves. While the bourgeoisie held this attitude it was natural that the Soviets, and most of all the left party in the Soviets, should use the Constituent Assembly as a means of showing up the duplicity of their bourgeois opponents. Gradually circumstances changed. The bourgeoisie lost hope, and transferred their allegiance to the moderate majority of the Soviets, since they began to realise that the marked increase of Bolshevism heralded something from their point of view even worse than the Constituent Assembly as it would have been in April or May. The extremely flexible representation of the Soviets showed that the masses were coming nearer and nearer to the position of the Bolsheviki, or rather to a readiness to support the Bolshevik leaders in view of the manifest failure of the Coalition Government to get peace or indeed anything else that the masses desired. The Constituent Assembly became now the last hope of the original moderate members of the Soviet executive, who felt the ground of real support in the active political masses slipping from beneath their feet. At this point came the October revolution, when the Coalition, already a ghost, and a discredited ghost, was laid in its grave. Immense Bolshevik majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets, and then in the All-Russian Assembly of Soviets, proved that the mass of active political opinion in the country fully approved of the step that had been taken.