Russia's only free election of 1917 produced an SR majority. The Assembly met on 5 January 1918, sat for a day, and the next morning the doors did not open. It is the clearest photograph of the civil war to come.
A promise deferred
In 1917 the Constituent Assembly was the broadest common ground in Russia. Once the Tsar had fallen, the Provisional Government promised to convene it, yet the election never came. Chaos at the front, cabinet crises and the arithmetic of keeping power for themselves pushed the date back again and again.
Only in November 1917, after the Bolsheviks had taken power, could the Assembly be elected at all. The delay decided everything: the polling opened in the shadow of the men who already held the state.
November 1917: the numbers at the ballot box
The Bolsheviks entered the election with a single list and took roughly 24 per cent of the vote. The Socialist Revolutionaries, the SRs, came first with about 40 per cent. The result did not change who governed in Petrograd, but it fixed the colour of the Assembly.
None of this was a surprise. The country was overwhelmingly peasant, and the SRs were the peasants' party. Most peasant soldiers coming home from the front voted for SR lists as well. Bolshevik strength lay in the cities, in the workers' districts and in the soldiers' soviets.
What the majority stood for
The SR majority was no abstract figure. All through 1917 peasant land committees had been carving up the great estates among themselves, and the peasant expected the Assembly to turn that division into law.
The Bolsheviks issued their land decree in October. It rested largely on the SR land programme, but the SRs wanted to legislate it in their own assembly, with their own votes. Both sides claimed the land and pointed the same peasant towards different doors.
For the peasant the question was concrete: who gives me the land? The Bolsheviks promised by decree, the SRs by act of assembly. The same land was promised twice over, and so the Assembly stripped the government of its strongest card.
5 January 1918: a single day
The Assembly met on 5 January 1918 in Petrograd, at the Tauride Palace. The hall was full. The Bolsheviks and Left SRs were there too, but in a minority. The SR leader Viktor Chernov was elected chairman.
The land law was debated through the night and passed in the small hours. It stayed on paper: the Assembly never met again, so it was never applied.
That one day held a year of argument in miniature. In the hall everyone was talking about land; in the corridor the guards had already been given their positions.
6 January: the doors
The next morning the deputies were not let in. Guards stood at the door and the government announced that the Assembly was dissolved. It had closed twenty-four hours after it convened.
The justification was ready: power belonged to the soviets, and the Assembly was a refuge of the old order. Petrograd offered no great resistance. The Kronstadt sailors who had marched a year earlier under 'All power to the soviets' stood with the Bolsheviks over the dissolution in January 1918.
Some did take to the streets to defend the Assembly. Demonstrations were held in Petrograd on 5 January and the crowds were broken up. But the city was in Bolshevik hands this time, and behind the Assembly there stood neither an army nor a street.
Why it was closed: calculations that overlapped
No single reason lay behind the dissolution. Several calculations led to the same door.
- Legitimacy: the Bolsheviks said power belonged to the soviets. An Assembly with an SR majority would have refuted that claim at every sitting.
- War: the Brest-Litovsk talks were under way. The SRs were fiercely opposed to a separate peace, and the Assembly could have blocked it.
- The machinery of force: the Cheka had been founded in December 1917. By the time the Assembly met, the government had an instrument of repression to hand.
- Time: the sooner the Assembly was closed, the less the voters' verdict would harden into an institution.
Samara and Omsk: the Assembly's second death
The Assembly was dissolved, but its elected members did not disappear. In June 1918, in Samara, in the gap opened by the Czechoslovak Legion's revolt, members of the Constituent Assembly formed a government of their own: Komuch.
Komuch counted itself the Assembly's continuation and kept Kerensky out. It raised a People's Army from volunteer officers and peasants, and in August even the gold reserve at Kazan fell into its hands.
But in the autumn it withdrew to Ufa, and from there to Omsk. In November 1918 Admiral Kolchak staged a coup in Omsk, overthrew the Directory and had the SR leaders arrested. Within a year the idea of the Assembly was buried twice: at the door in Petrograd and at the table in Omsk.
The long shadow of a single day
The Constituent Assembly met for one day, passed one law, and that law was never applied. Russia entered 1919 without an election; the country was in the middle of a civil war and the Bolsheviks never went to the polls again. The constitution adopted in July 1918 gave power to the soviets, and the idea of an assembly had been written out of the text.
What remained was that single day, 5 January 1918: a full hall, a law passed before dawn, and doors that did not open the next morning. For long years afterwards the idea of a general election in Russia waited behind that door.