Opening of the Constituent Assembly

On 18 January 1918 (5 January in the Julian calendar) the All-Russian Constituent Assembly at last met in the Tauride Palace in Petrograd. The original date, 11 December, had come to nothing: too few deputies were present, and Lenin’s government had made the opening conditional on 400 deputies registering. Now there was a quorum, although the assembly, in which the Socialist Revolutionaries had a majority, was meeting in a city controlled by the Bolsheviks. The day began with shots fired at a march of the assembly’s defenders and ended after midnight with the Bolsheviks and their allies walking out of the hall.

Shots on Liteyny

The march in defence of the Constituent Assembly was organised by the Union for the Defence of the Constituent Assembly, in which mainly Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were active. The military commission of the Socialist Revolutionary Party had counted on the support of part of the garrison, including the Semyonovsky and Preobrazhensky regiments, but the party’s Central Committee rejected an armed rising as an unnecessary risk. The demonstrators were to come unarmed. The authorities banned meetings near the Tauride Palace, and the Bolshevik newspapers portrayed the march as the work of the “bourgeois” and supporters of General Kaledin. The streets leading to the palace were occupied by units of the Red Guard, sailors and reliable regiments of the garrison.

In the morning columns set out from the Field of Mars and from the workers’ districts. They were made up above all of students, officials and members of the intelligentsia, but also of workers from several large factories, among them the Obukhov works. On Liteyny Prospekt, near the junctions with Kirochnaya and Furshtatskaya streets, and in several other places, fire was opened on the marchers. People scattered into gateways and courtyards, and according to the press of the time soldiers and sailors burned the red banners taken from the demonstrators. The number of victims is disputed: various sources speak of anything from a few to about twenty killed and several dozen wounded. The same day supporters of the Constituent Assembly were also fired on in Moscow. A few days later Maxim Gorky compared the shooting, in the columns of his newspaper, to Bloody Sunday in 1905, when tsarist troops fired on workers marching to the Winter Palace.

The session

The proceedings began at about 4 p.m. About 410 deputies were present, of whom the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries together held about 155 seats. Armed soldiers and sailors filled the benches and galleries. The opening itself became a trial of strength. The Socialist Revolutionaries wanted, according to custom, the session to be opened by the oldest deputy, and sent Sergei Shvetsov to the rostrum. The left side of the hall greeted him with stamping, whistling and banging on the desks. Then the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the soviets, Yakov Sverdlov, took the floor and opened the assembly in its name. He read out the Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited People, prepared by Lenin, which proclaimed Russia a republic of soviets and confirmed the Soviet government’s decrees on land, peace and workers’ control. Sverdlov expressed the hope that the assembly would adopt it, which in practice meant recognising the authority of the soviets over itself.

The leader of the Socialist Revolutionaries, Viktor Chernov, a former Minister of Agriculture in the Provisional Government, was elected chairman of the assembly. He received 244 votes. The candidate of the Bolsheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries, Maria Spiridonova, received 153. In his speech Chernov called for the land to be given to the peasants, for peace and for a federation of the peoples of Russia, but said not a word about recognising the authority of the soviets. Shouts and jeers answered him from the Bolshevik benches. The Menshevik leader Irakli Tsereteli also spoke. The Bolshevik Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov told the Socialist Revolutionaries that everything between them was over, because they stood on opposite sides of the barricade. The decisive vote was on the agenda. By a majority of 237 votes to 146 the assembly refused to consider the Bolshevik declaration first and decided to proceed according to its own programme.

The Bolsheviks walk out

At about 11 p.m. the Bolsheviks demanded an adjournment. At a meeting attended by Lenin, who was watching the proceedings from the government box, the leaders of the Bolsheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries decided to leave the assembly. When the session resumed, after two in the morning, the Deputy Commissar for Naval Affairs, Fyodor Raskolnikov, read out a statement by the Bolshevik faction. The assembly had rejected the programme of the Soviet government, and the Bolsheviks, “not wishing for a moment to cover up the crimes of the enemies of the people”, were leaving the hall in order to leave “the final decision on the attitude towards the counter-revolutionary part of the Constituent Assembly” to the Soviet government. After the faction left, some of the guards began to aim their rifles at the deputies in the hall, and those present later recalled that shooting could have broken out at any moment. At about four in the morning the Left Socialist Revolutionaries also left the hall.

The Socialist Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks and the deputies of the national parties remained in the Tauride Palace. The session went on, but the fate of the assembly was already sealed. Towards morning the guard broke up the proceedings, and that same day the Soviet government decided to dissolve the Constituent Assembly. Russia’s first parliament elected by universal suffrage met only once.