Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/330



The Constituent Assembly was an important issue in the course of the Revolution. It represented an aspiration of democratic Russia, and particularly precious in the eyes of the petit bourgeois democracy. But Coalition Government after Coalition Government had postponed its convocation; Kerensky called conference after conference, and finally issued a call for the Constituent Assembly only under pressure. The Bolsheviki made much of the postponments of the Assembly, not because they considered it important in itself, but because its postponement was an expression of the counter-revolutionary character of the Provisional Government. The Constituent Assembly was an expression of the bourgeois democratic revolution; after the proletarian revolution, it was superfluous. The Soviet Government, however, allowed the Constituent Assembly to convene on January 18.

The situation was instinct with a fatal logic: if the Constituent Assembly accepted the authority of the Soviet Government, it was as an institution unnecessary, and after ratifying the accomplished fact of November 7 it would disperse; if it set itself against the Soviet authority, it was counter-revolutionary and would have to be dissolved by force, if necessary.

The Constituent Assembly was in session one day. It had a majority of Social-Revolutionists of the Right The chairman of the AU-Russian Soviet Executive Committee, Sverdlov, read a declaration declaring Russia a Federal Soviet Republic, and recognizing the authority and measures of the Soviet Government. The declaration was decisively defeated. The Bolsheviki and Social-Revolutionists of the Left, who were about a third of the delegates, thereupon withdrew from the Assembly, after reading the following proclamation:

"The great majority of toiling Russia, the workers, peasants and soldiers, have demanded that the Constituent Assembly recognize the results of the great November Revolution, the Soviets'