One of the first places where the Soviet government proceeded to abrogate freedom was the press. On November 8 [October 26] a number of liberal and democratic papers were closed down. A decree of November 9 [October 27] of the Sovnarkom (Council of People's Commissars) on "Freedom of the Press," while empowering the government to ban press organs which "are spreading discord by an obviously slanderous distortion of facts," or by "inciting to criminal acts,” promised, however, to restore freedom of the press in time:

As soon as the new order has been consolidated all administrative measures in regard to the press will be discontinued; full freedom of the press will be established within the limits of responsibility before the court in accordance with the broadest and most progressive law.66

Lenin planned to have the armistice negotiations with Germany conducted by the acting commander-in-chief of the army, Gen. Nikolai Dukhonin, whose headquarters was located in Mogilev. The patriotic army leader, however, refused to obey Lenin's orders. On November 22 [9], 1917, Lenin conversed with Dukhonin by telephone and, receiving an evasive answer, dismissed him:

In the name of the government of the Russian Republic and at the behest of the Council of People's Commissars, we are dismissing you from the post occupied by you for refusing to comply with the orders of the government and for conduct that entails untold hardship for the toiling masses of all countries and for the armies in particular. We order you, under penalty of the war laws, to carry on pending the arrival at the Headquarters of a new Supreme Commander or of a person empowered by the latter to take over affairs from you. Ensign Krylenko has been appointed the new Supreme Commander.67

General Dukhonin was killed by a mob of soldiers. The armistice negotiations then proceeded.

68

Arrests of political opponents started soon after the seizure of power by Lenin's party. Without denying the facts, Lenin promised that his "terrorism" would be milder than the terrorism, for example, of the French revolution. Almost apologetically, he told the Petrograd Soviet, on November 17 [4], 1917:

Yes, we do arrest, and today we arrested the director of the State Bank. We are being reproached for applying terror, but we don't do it as it

Istoriya Sovetskoi Konstitutsii (v Dokumentakh) 1917-1956 (History of the Soviet Constitution (in Documents) 1917-1956) (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatelstvo Yuridicheskoi Literatury (State Publishing House for Juridical Literature), 1957), p. 52.

Lenin, "Razgovor Pravitelstva so Stavkoi po Pryamomu Provodu 9 (22) Noyabrya 1917 g.' (Conversation of the Government with Army Headquarters by Direct Wire, November 9 [22], 1917), Sochineniya, vol. XXVI (1949), p. 278. 68 See ch. III.

was done by the French revolutionists, who guillotined unarmed people; I hope we will not have to apply it, because force is on our side.69

Later that month on December 11 [November 28], 1917, a special decree not only outlawed the liberal Kadet (Constitutional-Democratic) party, but prescribed the arrest of its leaders (the rightist parties had already submerged or disappeared).

MEMBERS of leading bodies of the Kadet Party, which is a Party consisting of enemies of the people, are liable to arrest and trial by revolutionary tribunals.

The Soviets in the various localities are enjoined to exercise special surveillance over the Kadet Party in view of its connection with the Kornilov-Kaledin civil war against the revolution.

This decree enters into effect from the moment of signature.70

The only political party that Lenin was able to win over to his side was the party of Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Defecting from the mother organization, the official Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries succumbed to the radicalizing trends of the time. With no experienced political leaders, this shortsighted party believed that it would help to improve the political course by joining Lenin's regime. It delegated four of its members to serve in the government. This experiment of a coalition with the Communists in a government, one of the first in a long line of similar experiments outside of Russia, proved entirely futile. The influence of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries on Soviet policy was insignificant. They tried to curtail the powers of the new political police, but failed; they unsuccessfully opposed the signing of a peace treaty with Germany. When the BrestLitovsk Treaty was signed, they quit the government on March 15, 1918. Contrary to Communist claims, the victory of the Bolsheviks in 1917 was not the result of a popular uprising, nor did the new regime enjoy the overwhelming support of workers and peasants; actually it was and remained a minority government. The strongest factor in its emergence was the support of the demoralized and tired army, in the first place of the garrisons of the large cities. On this point a number of Soviet writers are unanimous, and Trotsky himself acknowledged that this was so.

. . . A revolutionary situation cannot be preserved at will. If the Bolseviks had not seized the power in October and November, in all probability they would not have seized it at all . . . . A part of the workers

"Lenin, "Rech na Zasedanii Petrogradskogo Soveta Rabochikh i Soldatskikh Deputatov Sovmestno s Frontovymi Predstavitelyami 4 (17) Noyabrya 1917 g." (Speech at the Meeting of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies Along With the Representatives of the Front, November 4 [17], 1917), Sochineniya, vol. XXVI (1949), p. 261.

TO 'Lenin, "Decree for the Arrest of the Leaders of the Civil War Against the Revolution" (December 11 [November 28], 1917), Lenin and Stalin, The Russian Revolution, p. 276.

would have fallen into indifferentism, another part would have burned up their force in convulsive movements, in anarchistic flareups, in guerrilla skirmishes, in a Terror dictated by revenge and despair. The breathingspell thus offered would have been used by the bourgeoisie to conclude a separate peace with the Hohenzollern, and stamp out the revolutionary organizations. Russia would again have been included in the circle of capitalist states as a semi-imperialist, semi-colonial country.”1

"A good detachment of five hundred men,” wrote Nikolai Sukhanov, "would have been entirely sufficient to liquidate Smolny and everyone there."

Boris Souvarine, a French Communist leader of Lenin's time, now an opponent of the Communists, said:

What the Bolsheviks now call the "proletarian revolution" of October 1917 was an armed coup against a defenseless government, led by a military committee on behalf of a minority party. Thereupon, this "revolution from above" was imposed on the peoples of the Empire, who unquestionably desired peace, and on the peasants, who unquestionably wanted the land, but neither of whom wanted either socialism or communism.72

8. The Constituent Assembly and Its Dispersion

Both as a slogan and a program, the Constituent Assembly had been popular in Russia since 1905. The government that took over after the fall of the monarchy was viewed as, and called itself, Provisional, because it was expected to turn over all authority to a Constituent Assembly, the convening of which was one of the Provisional Government's primary duties. In the demand for a Constituent Assembly Lenin's party was no less insistent than other political groups. To organize elections, however, in a large country and in a time of war was a difficult task, and the Kerensky government had had to postpone them more than once. The Bolsheviks protested vehemently against the delay.

Lenin accused Kerensky's government of sabotaging the Assembly:

Our Party alone, having assumed power, can secure the convocation of the Constituent Assembly: and, having assumed power, it will accuse the other parties of procrastination and will be able to substantiate its accusations.73

In a similar vein, Trotsky, on October 20 [7], said: "the bourgeois classes have set themselves the goal of obstructing elections to the Con

Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, vol. III, pp. 154, 155.

72 Boris Souvarine, "October': Myths and Realities," The New Leader, vol. XL, No. 44 (November 4, 1957), p. 17.

73 'Lenin, "The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power," A Letter to the Central Committee and to the Petrograd and Moscow Committees of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (September 25-27 [12-14], 1917), Selected Works (1935 ed.), vol. VI, p. 216.

stituent Assembly." And on November 8 [October 26] Pravda wrote: "Comrades! By your blood you have assured the convention in time of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, master of the Russian land." "

A number of the Soviet decrees of this era noted that definitive decisions on various problems would be made by the future Constituent Assembly.

Having assumed power, Lenin kept to the plan laid down by the Provisional Government, and the elections took place on November 25– 27 [12–14], 1917; the voting procedures were fair and the balloting was conducted, on the whole, without disturbances.75 A total of 41,686,876 votes were cast of which about 11,000,000 were for local parties or parties of national minorities (the Ukrainian parties obtained 4,957,000 votes). The votes for the Russian parties were, in round figures, as follows:

Lenin's party obtained 25 percent of the vote and continued a minority; the moderate socialists had almost double the vote of the Bolsheviks. In the large cities the ratio of Bolshevik votes, while better, did not represent a majority. The Bolsheviks achieved their greatest successes in certain of the front armies. In the Western Front Army, for example, the vote in round figures was:

Bolsheviks____.

Socialist-Revolutionaries.

Kadets____

Others.

653,000 181,000

17, 000 125,000

Total___

976,000

"As quoted in M. V. Vishniak, Vserossiiskoe Uchreditelnoe Sobranie (AllRussian Constituent Assembly) (Paris: Izdatelstvo "Sovremennye Zapiski” (Contemporary Notes Publishing House), 1932), p. 87.

75

'The figures that follow are taken from Oliver Henry Radkey, The Elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly of 1917 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), pp. 16, 36.

Where votes cast by local garrisons were counted separately, the results were similar. In Kozlov, for example, the army units cast 4,045 votes, 3,006 of them for the Bolsheviks.

In the end, of the 707 members elected to the Constituent Assembly, 370 (more than a majority) were of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party and 175 were Bolsheviks; the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, allies of the Bolsheviks, won 40 seats.

Apparently the Bolsheviks, or at least some of their leaders, expected to come out ahead with the help of the Left SR's until they saw the handwriting on the wall as returns from the black-earth zone began pouring in during the second week of the balloting. They realized then that most of the SR deputies would adhere to the centrist or right-wing factions of that huge but disintegrated party; they were seized with alarm and, shrilly accusing the Commission of falsification and other abuses, decreed its arrest on November 23, only to release it a few days later without having substantiated the charges.76

The Soviet government could not, however, simply forbid the Constituent Assembly; it had to convene it at least once. Lenin's tactic, which was approved by the party's leadership, was to submit to the Constituent Assembly a resolution approving the actions of the Soviet regime and acknowledging that all power must belong to the Soviets; if the resolution was rejected, the Constituent Assembly was to be dissolved.

The Constituent Assembly convened on January 18 [5], 1918. The Bolshevik faction submitted a "Draft Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People," the first paragraph of which read:

1. Russia is hereby declared a republic of Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies. All power centrally and locally belongs to the Soviets.

*

the Constituent Assembly considers that its own duty must be limited to establishing a fundamental basis for the socialist reconstruction of society."

77

The January 18 [5] session of the Constituent Assembly was its first and last. The spokesmen of the two socialist parties were Viktor Chernov and Irakli Tseretelli; Lenin, through present, did not address the Assembly.

After much debate the Constituent Assembly majority rejected the Bolshevik platform and voted to record their stand on the war, the agrarian problem, and Russia's form of government. Thereupon the Bolshevik deputies rose in a body and marched out.

To Ibid., p. 49.

"Lenin, "Draft Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People" (January 1918), Lenin and Stalin, The Russian Revolution, pp. 298, 300.