Elections to the Constituent Assembly

On 25 November 1917 (12 November in the Julian calendar), in Petrograd and in most electoral districts of Russia, voting began for the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, known as the Constituent. In keeping with the promise of the February Revolution, it was to decide the form of the state. These were the first universal, equal, secret and direct elections in Russian history, and women voted in them too. They were held in a country sunk in war and chaos, eighteen days after the Bolshevik coup. They were won decisively by the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), the peasants’ party. The Bolsheviks won roughly one vote in four.

Long-postponed elections

The convening of a Constituent Assembly had for decades been the demand of the whole Russian opposition, and from March 1917 the Provisional Government had announced it as its main task. Work on the electoral law, however, went on for months. The elections were first set for September, and in August they were moved to 12 November Old Style, that is 25 November, with the first sitting of the assembly on 28 November Old Style, that is 11 December. The Provisional Government, which in September had proclaimed Russia a republic without waiting for the assembly, did not itself live to see that date. All summer the Bolsheviks had accused it of putting off the elections. Once in power, therefore, they could not cancel them. The Congress of Soviets, in establishing the Council of People’s Commissars, called it a provisional workers’ and peasants’ government, acting until the assembly was convened.

For its time the electoral law was very democratic. All citizens, women and men, had the vote from the age of 20. The country was divided into 81 electoral districts, including separate districts for the fronts and the fleets. Voting was for party lists under proportional representation. The voter placed the ballot of the chosen list in an envelope. A dozen or so all-Russian parties and several dozen national ones took part, putting up more than 7,000 candidates. Only in 39 districts did the vote take place on the appointed date. In many others voting took place at the end of November and in December, and in some remote places not until January 1918. There were no elections in the Polish and Lithuanian lands occupied by the Germans.

Results

Full results were never compiled, because in several districts the voting or the counting was interrupted. According to various historians’ calculations, between over 40 and about 47 million people voted, and turnout is estimated at from under 50 to over 60 per cent. A tally from 70 of the 81 districts gives the Socialist Revolutionary Party about 38 per cent of the vote, and together with the Ukrainian SRs and other related lists about half. The Bolsheviks received about 23–24 per cent. The liberal Constitutional Democratic Party, the Kadets, won less than 5 per cent, and the Mensheviks about 3 per cent, largely in Georgia. Many votes went to national lists: Ukrainian, Muslim, Armenian, Jewish, Cossack. Of the deputies elected, according to the Russian historian Lev Protasov, the SRs had 347, not counting 81 Ukrainian ones, and the Bolsheviks 180.

Behind these figures lay a map of divisions. The Bolsheviks won in the industrial towns and in both capitals. In Petrograd they received about 45 per cent of the vote, against 26 per cent for the Kadets, and in Moscow, which they had taken ten days earlier, almost 48 per cent against 34.5 per cent for the Kadets. In the army they received about 42 per cent of the vote, and on the Northern and Western Fronts, closest to the capital, and in the Baltic Fleet they won an absolute majority. The countryside, however, where about four in five of Russia’s inhabitants lived, voted for the SRs, the party whose programme of land for the peasants it had known for years. The Kadets, the main force of liberal Russia, suffered a crushing defeat, although they retained a strong position in the big cities.

An awkward result

For Lenin, who even before the coup had argued that the power of the soviets stood higher than a parliament elected in a “bourgeois” republic, the result was awkward. The Bolsheviks pointed out that the SR lists had been drawn up before the split in that party. When the Left SRs, who had supported the new regime, broke away from the party, the lists were already closed and voters could not take the split into account. According to the Bolsheviks, the results therefore did not reflect the mood of the country. Their opponents replied that these were the fairest elections in Russian history and that the majority of voters had supported socialist parties opposed to one-party rule.

The dispute was settled by force. The assembly met on 18 January 1918 (5 January Old Style) in the Tauride Palace in Petrograd and elected the SR leader Viktor Chernov as its chairman. When it refused to recognise the power of the soviets and its decrees, the Bolsheviks left the hall. Towards morning the sailors of the guard closed the sitting, and on 19 January Lenin’s government dissolved the Constituent Assembly. Russia’s first freely elected parliament had sat for less than a day.