Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/337

 basis of their own experience, rejecting the idea of the possibility of a compromise with the bourgeoisie and rejecting the deceptive bourgeois democratic parliamentary formalities, coming, in practice, to the conclusion that the liberation of the oppressed classes is impossible unless all such formalities and compromises are rejected. These relations were finally broken by the November Revolution which gave complete power to the Soviets. The Constituent Assembly, elected on the basis of the lists prepared prior to the November Revolution, was the result of the relative party power in force at the time when the government was composed of men favoring a policy of compromise with the Cadets. The people could not at that time, when there were only Social-Revolutionary candidates, differentiate between the supporters of the Right Wing Social-Revolutionists, the supporters of the bourgeoisie, and the Left Wing, supporters of Socialism. Therefore, this Constituent Assembly which was intended to be the crown of the bourgeois parliamentary republic, because of its very composition, had to oppose the November Revolution and the Soviet Government. The November Revolution, which gave power to the Soviets and through them to the workers and exploited class, was strongly opposed by the exploiters. The crushing of this opposition clearly showed the banning of a Socialist revolution. The working class became convinced by their experience that the old parliamentarism had outlived its time, that it could not comply with the realization of the tasks of Socialiism [sic], and that, not the social but only class institutions, such as the Soviets, are capable of crushing the opposition of the propertied classes and to lay the foundations of a Socialistic commonwealth.

The refusal of the Soviets to use their full power and to abandon the Soviet Republic, which is supported by the people, on behalf of bourgeois parliamentarism and of Constituent Assembly, would now be a step backward and lead to the destruction of the November Revolution.

The majority in the Constituent Assembly, which opened on the 18th of this month, is composed of the Social-Revolutionary Party's Right Wing, the party of Kerensky, Avksentyev and Chernov. It is but natural that this party refused to take under consideration the complete, exact and dear proposition of the highest body of the Soviet Government, which proposition in no way could have been misunderstood, and that it refused to accept the proclamation of the rights of the toiling and exploited people and to recognize the November Revolution and the Soviet Government. Thus the Constituent Assembly broke all its ties with Russian Soviet Republic. The