The Constituent Assembly fails to open

On 11 December 1917 (28 November by the Julian calendar) the All-Russian Constituent Assembly was due to meet in the Tauride Palace in Petrograd. The date had been set back in August by the Provisional Government. But the elections went on in many districts until December, and only a small fraction of the deputies reached the capital. Instead of a ceremonial opening there was a rally outside the palace, a private meeting of a few dozen deputies and the Bolsheviks’ first blow against the defenders of the Constituent Assembly. The British chronology of the war states that on 11 December the assembly met in Petrograd and that on 13 December the Bolsheviks dispersed it. The first statement is true only figuratively and the second is wrong: the real dispersal of the Constituent Assembly came only in January 1918.

The Bolsheviks take the initiative

The Council of People’s Commissars could not cancel the elections, having spent the whole summer accusing the Provisional Government of delaying them. It could, however, decide when and how the assembly would meet. At the beginning of December the Bolsheviks took control of the All-Russian Electoral Commission, staffed by people of the old government, and appointed Moisei Uritsky as its commissar. On 9 December (26 November Old Style) Lenin signed a decree under which the assembly could meet only when 400 deputies, half its membership, had registered at the chancellery of the Tauride Palace. It was to be opened by a person authorised by the Council of Commissars, in other words a Bolshevik.

By 11 December about 300 deputies had been elected, and according to Russian researchers 173 had registered. Fewer still were actually present, and many were afraid to come because they faced arrest. That evening the United States ambassador, David Francis, cabled Washington that there were probably about a hundred deputies in Petrograd and that the assembly had not met because Lenin would not allow it until 400 deputies were in the hall.

The rally at the Tauride Palace

The Bolsheviks’ opponents nevertheless decided to mark the appointed day. On 11 December a demonstration marched through the streets of Petrograd under the slogan “All power to the Constituent Assembly!”. According to various accounts more than 10,000 people took part. The procession reached the Tauride Palace, and the guard gave way under the pressure of the crowd. Several dozen deputies went inside, between about 45 and 60 according to various sources, mostly Right SRs of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. They met as a private conference of members of the Constituent Assembly. They decided that without a quorum they could not assume its powers, but resolved to meet daily until enough of their colleagues arrived. Then they dispersed.

The next day sailors of the palace guard prevented a second meeting. The Council of Commissars banned “private meetings” of deputies, and over the following days reliable units, including Latvian Riflemen and sailors of the Baltic Fleet, were brought in to guard the capital and the Tauride Palace. It is presumably these events of 12 December, described in the Western press as the dispersal of the assembly, that found their way into the British chronology under the date 13 December.

The Kadets outlawed

The Bolsheviks’ main target became the Kadets, the liberal party, which had won less than 5 per cent of the vote in the elections but was the second force after the Bolsheviks in both capitals. At 10.30 p.m. on 11 December Lenin signed a decree on the arrest of the leaders of the civil war against the revolution. “Members of the leading bodies of the Kadet party, as a party of enemies of the people, are subject to arrest and trial by revolutionary tribunals,” it declared. Local soviets were to keep the party under special surveillance because of its links with the “Kornilov–Kaledin” civil war against the revolution, that is, with the anti-Bolshevik movement gathering on the Don. The decree came into force on signature, and the newspapers published it the next day.

That same day several Kadet leaders were arrested, among them former ministers of the Provisional Government elected to the Constituent Assembly, Andrei Shingarev and Fyodor Kokoshkin, and Countess Sofia Panina, the former deputy minister of education. Shingarev and Kokoshkin were imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Joseph Stalin is said to have remarked at the time that “we must finish off the Kadets, or they will finish us off”. Even the Bolsheviks’ allies, the Left SRs, who soon joined the government, protested that the decision had been taken without consulting them. Their representative Isaac Steinberg, soon to be commissar of justice, did not defend the Kadets but opposed arresting members of an entire party.

An end postponed

11 December showed how the Bolsheviks intended to deal with a parliament in which they had no majority. The assembly finally met on 18 January 1918 and sat for one day. When it refused to recognise the power of the soviets, it was dispersed, and on 19 January formally dissolved. On the night of 19–20 January, in the hospital to which the sick Shingarev and Kokoshkin had been moved from the fortress, they were murdered by sailors. The first democratically elected assembly in Russian history thus never got to work, although 11 December itself passed in Petrograd without bloodshed.