Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/244

 gle, at times hidden, at times open, but ceaselessly and uncompromisingly, against the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. That struggle was expressed in the desire to postpone its convocation untluntil [sic] the end of the war. That struggle was expressed by a series of postponements of the designated day of convocation of the Constituent Assembly. When finally, more than a month after the formation of the coalition ministry, the date was set for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, a Moscow bourgeois paper announced that it was done under the pressure of Bolshevik influence.

After the 17th of July, when the subservience and the timidity of the Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki secured a "victory" for the counter-revolutionists, there slipped into the Retch a brief but highly significant expression: "as soon as possible" let the Constituent Assembly be convened!

But on July 29, there appeared in the Volya Naroda and in the Russkaya Volya, an article stating that the Cadets demand a postponement of the convocation of the Constituent Assembly upon the pretext that it is "impossible" to call it in so "short" a time, and the Menshevik Tseretelli, fawning before the counter-revolutionists, has already agreed, according to that article, to postpone the Assembly until December 2.

There is no doubt that such a statement could have slipped in only against the desires of the bourgeoisie. It could not afford such "revelations." But the cat was out of the bag. The course of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie after July 17 is accompanied by an immediate step (and an extremely serious step) against the convocation of the Constituent Assembly.

This is a fact. And this fact exposes all the emptiness of constitutional illusions. Unless there is a new revolution in Russia, unless the people refuse to place their trust in the Social-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties—parties which ally themselves with the bourgeoisie—the Constituent Assembly will either never be called or will result in a "Frankfort Chaterbox," a powerless, worthless assembly of petty bourgeois who are frightened to death by the war and by the prospect of the "boycott of power" by the bourgeois class, and who are helplessly vacilating between their fears.

The question of the Constituent Assembly is subordinate to the question of the cause and outcome of the class war between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. It will be remembered how