Dispersal of the Constituent Assembly

At dawn on 19 January 1918 (6 January by the Julian calendar), in the Tauride Palace in Petrograd, the commander of the guard, an anarchist sailor, broke up the session of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly. The deputies dispersed, having agreed to meet again in the evening, but they never returned to the chamber. That same day Lenin’s government decided to dissolve the Constituent Assembly, and during the night the supreme organ of Soviet power approved the decision. The assembly that Russia had awaited since the overthrow of tsarism, and which had been chosen in the first universal elections in its history, sat for less than thirteen hours. It was the end of the Russian parliamentary democracy born in the February Revolution.

“The guard is tired”

When the Bolsheviks walked out of the chamber after two in the morning, followed at about four by the Left SRs, there remained the SRs of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, the Mensheviks and representatives of the national parties. They were still a majority of the elected deputies, but they were surrounded by armed soldiers and sailors of the guard, who showed their impatience ever more loudly. Lenin had left the palace after his faction’s departure. According to memoirs, he gave instructions that the assembly was not to be dispersed by force: let the deputies talk as much as they liked, and once they had gone home, no one would be let in the next day. In writing, he ordered the guard to allow no acts of violence against the “counter-revolutionary part” of the assembly, to let everyone leave the palace and to let no one in without a special order.

The commander of the guard was a 22-year-old Baltic Fleet sailor from Kronstadt, Anatoli Zheleznyakov, an anarchist. According to some accounts, it was the People’s Commissar for the Navy, Pavel Dybenko, who allowed him to end the session without waiting for the deputies to tire of their own accord. At about 4.20 a.m., while the draft land law was being read from the rostrum, Zheleznyakov went up to the chairman, Viktor Chernov. According to the stenographic record, he announced that he had received instructions for everyone present to leave the chamber “because the guard is tired”. Chernov replied that the deputies were tired too, but that no tiredness could interrupt the proclamation of the land law that Russia was waiting for. The words “karaul ustal” passed into history as the symbol of that night.

In the final minutes the SRs managed to vote through, without debate, what they had prepared for the session. The assembly adopted the basic articles of the land law, which abolished private ownership of land and handed it over to the people without compensation. This was their answer to the Bolshevik Decree on Land of November. It also passed an appeal to the Allies to open joint negotiations for a general democratic peace, and finally a resolution that the Russian state was the Russian Democratic Federative Republic. It thereby confirmed the proclamation of Russia as a republic by the Provisional Government in September 1917. At 4.40 a.m. Chernov closed the session and set the next one for 5 p.m. the same day. The exhausted deputies went out into the winter morning.

The decree of dissolution

During the day the Council of People’s Commissars took up the question of the assembly’s fate. Lenin set down in points the justification for its dissolution. When the deputies arrived at the Tauride Palace in the afternoon, they found the doors locked. In front of the entrance stood a guard with machine guns and, according to accounts, two light field guns. The soldiers declared that there would be no session. In the evening and during the night of 19–20 January the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the soviets, in which the Bolsheviks and Left SRs had the upper hand, adopted the decree dissolving the Constituent Assembly after a speech by Lenin. Two members voted against and five abstained. The decree was published on 20 January by Pravda and Izvestia.

The justification was simple. According to the decree, the Constituent Assembly had been elected from lists drawn up before the October Revolution, so it reflected the old balance of forces, and voters had been unable to distinguish between the Right and Left SRs. The soviets, which had taken power in October, were, according to the Bolsheviks, a higher form of democracy than “bourgeois parliamentarism”. The assembly had refused to recognise Soviet power and its decrees, and had thus broken with the Soviet republic. What remained of it could now only “serve as a cover for the struggle of the counter-revolution”. “The Central Executive Committee resolves: the Constituent Assembly is dissolved,” the decree concluded.

Murder in the hospital

During the night of 19–20 January a crime was committed that long remained associated with the end of the Constituent Assembly. Two deputies of the Kadet party, former ministers of the Provisional Government Andrei Shingarev and Fyodor Kokoshkin, who had been arrested in December and held in the Peter and Paul Fortress, had been moved on 19 January to the Mariinsky prison hospital because both were ill. In the night a group of sailors and Red Guards burst in and shot them in their beds. Lenin ordered an investigation, but the perpetrators were never tried. The killing of two well-known liberal politicians shocked even some supporters of the new government.

Reactions

No uprising broke out in defence of the assembly. The SR Central Committee had rejected armed action even before the opening, and it now upheld that decision: it judged that Bolshevism rested on workers and soldiers who still trusted it, and that they had to be persuaded rather than fought. The deputies went on meeting secretly for a few more days in flats and in one of Petrograd’s gymnasiums; some left for Kiev, hoping for refuge with the Ukrainian Central Rada, but soon the war reached there too. The shooting at the procession of 18 January angered some of the capital’s workers, and resolutions condemning the government were passed at some factory meetings. Most of the peasants who had voted for the SRs, however, remained indifferent. For them the Constituent Assembly was a distant, urban affair; what mattered most was the land, which they were already dividing up anyway. Historians from Oliver Radkey to Orlando Figes point out that Russian society no longer regarded the assembly as essential to the fulfilment of its demands.

The Bolsheviks quickly set about replacing the Constituent Assembly with a representative body of their own. On 23 January the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets met in the same Tauride Palace. It adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited People that the assembly had rejected and approved the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, and the provision that the Soviet government was provisional and would act only until the assembly was convened was removed from the legislation. In an unfinished note Lenin wrote of the “people from another world” among whom he had spent the “lost day” of 18 January. Leon Trotsky later mocked that the SR deputies had brought candles to the palace in case the electricity was cut off and sandwiches in case they were cut off from food, and so “democracy entered the struggle with dictatorship armed to the teeth with sandwiches and candles”.

Significance

The dispersal of the Constituent Assembly settled the dispute that had been going on since October: whether power in Russia would be exercised by a parliament elected by all citizens or by the soviets, in which the Bolsheviks had a majority. The American historian Richard Pipes believed that in a sense the Bolsheviks took over the government of Russia not so much in October 1917 as in January 1918, because only then did they show that they had no intention of heeding the will of the voters.

The slogan of defending the Constituent Assembly did not disappear. In the summer of 1918 in Samara a group of its deputies formed Komuch, the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly, one of the centres of the struggle against the Bolsheviks in the beginning civil war; Chernov joined it only in the autumn. Soon, however, the upper hand in the White camp was taken by the military, to whom the dispersed assembly was as alien as it was to Lenin. 19 January 1918 remained in Russian history as the day on which the hope of a democratic end to the revolution died.