Page:Arthur Ransome - The Truth about Russia.djvu/11

 Then followed the elections to the Constituent Assembly (organised and canvassed before the October revolution), in which there was a majority against the Bolsheviki. The explanation of this is perfectly simple. It lies in the fact that a revolution is a very uncomfortable thing for everybody who takes part in it, and that great numbers of people during the preceding eight months had come to look forward to the Constituent Assembly much as children look forward to the word FINIS at the end of a difficult lesson-book. The Constituent Assembly meant for these people an end to political debate, an end even to political life, an end anyhow to revolution. In every country it is only a small minority that really concerns itself with politics. Outside that minority is a big unconscious voting material, which does not concern itself with active politics, and asks nothing from its Government except to be let alone. This indifferent mass, which took very little part in the living politics of the Soviets, was ready to vote for the Constituent Assembly in a sort of dim belief that those elections mean a return to quiet life, and should therefore be encouraged. It voted much as rich men give alms to a charity. It voted much in the spirit of the rich man who is willing to give alms to a deserving charity for which he would be most unwilling to do any real work. It knew vaguely that the bourgeoisie were fairly bad, and it had also heard that the Bolsheviki were terrible people. It therefore put its votes on the side of those people against whom it had heard nothing in particular. And the result was that the live part of the nation was faced almost at the moment of coming into their own with a legacy in the form of an assembly, the majority in which was made up of the very men whom they had just overthrown. The question was a plain one. Should the conscious workers of the country submit to the dead weight of the unconscious, even if that dead weight were artfully fashioned by their enemies into the form of the very tool with which they had been successfully working? The question was put at a moment of extreme difficulty, when acceptance of the Constituent Assembly would have relieved the Bolsheviki (at the New Year) of tremendous responsibility. It would have been an easy way out, for cowards. But the Bolsheviki were not afraid of responsibility, were not looking for easy ways out, were confident that the whole of the active, conscious population was behind them, and swept the Assembly aside. Not anywhere in Russia did the indifferent mass stir in protest. The Assembly died like the Tsardom, and the coalition before it. Not any one of the three showed in the manner of its dying that it retained any right to live.

The day after the October revolution Lenin proposed and the Assembly carried the declaration on peace with its promise to do away with the secret diplomacy that had kept Russia in the war beyond her strength, and allowed small groups to gamble in the lives of nations. On that day, October 26th