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Foreign News: THE DAY DEMOCRACY DIED IN RUSSIA

8 minute read
TIME

Forty years ago this week, the only freely elected Parliament in the history of Russia met in Petrograd. For Russia’s people, the Constituent Assembly was more than just a word. It was the instrument that was to fashion a new, democratic Russia. The Bolsheviks, seizing power in the October Revolution, permitted the elections already arranged by the Kerensky government, because they thought they would win. They were stunned at the results. Across Russia, an astonishing 50% of the eligibles voted; out of a total of 707 delegates, 370 were Social Revolutionaries, only 775 Bolsheviks. Seventeen hours after it met, the Constituent Assembly was destroyed. Mark Vishniak, senior member of TIME’S Russian desk since 1946, was a Social Revolutionary delegate from the district of Yaroslav, and was elected Secretary of the Constituent Assembly. His retrospective account of what happened the day democracy died in Russia:

JAN. 18, 1918 was an ordinary winter’s day in Petrograd. There was neither sun nor wind, nor the specially translucent “Petrograd air.” A heavy snow, long since fallen and not swept away, lay in the streets and on rooftops.

That morning I met with the other Social Revolutionary Deputies at a small restaurant not far from the Tauride Palace. Roll was called. Rosettes of red silk and entry tickets were handed out. We exchanged news and rumors—it was said that the delegates who had been arrested by the Reds were now to be released from the Peter Paul Fortress. This Bolshevik “gesture” was widely commented on. It seemed a clear sign of yielding on the part of an unyielding regime. The situation appeared to be developing more favorably than anyone would have, thought.

Vacillating Peasants. A little past noon we set off, walking in an extended column down the middle of the street. It was less than a mile to the palace. The nearer we approached, the more troops we encountered. Each carried a rille, bristled with grenades, was festooned with cartridge belts. Passers-by stopped as we went past, but seldom spoke. After staring at us with sympathetic eyes, they hurried on their way. As we marched, I conferred with V. M. Chernov, one of the SR party leaders.

The courtyard before the 18th century Tauride Palace was filled with artillery, machine guns, field kitchens. All the gates in the high grillwork fence were bolted except a small wicket gate at the extreme left, where we entered, single file. Each ticket of admission was studied by guards newly arrived from Finland and the Kronstadt naval base. There was a second checkup at the towering entrance to the palace, this time by units of a Latvian rifle brigade famed for its loyalty to Bolshevism and brought to Petrograd by Lenin because “the Russian peasant may vacillate if something happens—what’s needed is proletarian firmness.” At the entrance to the auditorium we passed under a third scrutiny. The footfalls of armed men and the clatter of weapons made the colonnaded hall sound like a barracks.

Late-arriving delegates brought alarming news. Some 10,000 people, demonstrating in the Liteiny Prospekt in support of the Constituent Assembly, had been dispersed by Red gunfire. Witnesses reported that dozens of bodies lay bloodily in the snow. We had hoped that two crack regiments, the Semyonov and the Preobrazhensky would act in defense of the Assembly. Now word came that they had decided to remain neutral; they would neither go into the streets against the demonstrators nor join with them. Like other regular army units, they believed that all that was at stake was a simple misunderstanding between the authority of the Bolshevik regime and that of the Constituent Assembly. The soldiers hoped both bodies could find a way of uniting peacefully. So did the 40 delegates of the “Left” Social Revolutionaries who had decided to collaborate with the Bolsheviks. Lenin was later to describe them as “little fools.”

Convulsive Hands. The opening of the Assembly was set for midday, but hours passed. The Bolsheviks protested that all their delegates had not arrived—ignoring the fact that many opposition Deputies were still locked in prison or hiding from the police. We waited patiently through all the delays and redelays until, after a new postponement, we voted to open the Assembly at 4 o’clock, whatever happened. What we did not know was that, by then, the Reds were in full control of the city’s streets.

In the Assembly, the SRs filled up the center of the hall. On the right were a few scattered Deputies of the “national-bourgeois” groups. On the left sat the Moslem and Ukrainian Socialists, then came the Left SRs and, finally, the Bolsheviks. Lenin was there. Three nights before, while driving through Petrograd, he had been fired on by assassins and the man beside him had been wounded. But he appeared unruffled as he lolled on the steps of the platform, squeezing his hands convulsively together and, with his huge, blazing eyes, surveying the entire hall from one end to the other.

At 4 o’clock one of us rose and proposed that the senior member open the Assembly proceedings. The “senior” was an SR Deputy, S. P. Shvetsov. He mounted the stage, accompanied by a bestial racket from the left that was to continue for hours. Mingled with the shouts and whistles were howls and yells, stamping of feet and pounding on desktops. The galleries, jammed with members of the Bolshevik party, added to the appalling din.

Bolsheviks leaped to the stage and wrested the Speaker’s bell from Shvetsov’s hand. The Bolshevik Sverdlov, ringing the captured bell, announced the opening of the Assembly for the second time. After a singing of the Internationale, Sverdlov invited the Deputies to become a rubber-stamp Parliament, warning us that “even from a formal point of view,” any opposition to the Soviet regime was, in essence, illegal. Before murdering the Assembly, the Reds were giving it the option of committing suicide.

Mute Deputies. The first vote was the crucial one—for the chairmanship of the Assembly. The SRs nominated Chernov; the Bolsheviks, Marya Skpiridonova. Chernov won, 244-151. Apparently, he had the pathetic hope that the Reds might be persuaded to moderation and compromise; his speech was couched in Socialist and international tones, as though attempting to placate the Bolsheviks and appealing for the unity that all Russia desperately wanted. The response was bloodthirsty. “Bullets are the only way!” screamed the Bolsheviks. In answer to Chernov, Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin strode to the platform to cry, “We demand a dictatorship of the toiling classes!” and, “From this platform we proclaim a war to the death on the bourgeois-parliamentary republic.”

By 11 that night it became clear to Lenin that harassment and threats would not prevent the SR majority from enacting a whole series of resolutions that would have the effect of law. His tactic: an order to the Bolshevik Deputies to walk out of the Assembly. After some hesitation, the Left SRs followed them. In the hall, the sailors and Red soldiers now threw off all restraint. They leaped through the barriers, carried their rifles cocked along the corridors, stormed into the galleries. In their seats the Deputies were motionless, tragically mute. We were isolated from the world, just as the Tauride, Palace was isolated from Petrograd, and Petrograd from Russia. Surrounded by tumult, in the wilderness, we were given over to the will of the triumphant enemy.

“Citizen Sailor.” There were moments when it seemed that the troops would end the tension by opening fire. We heard that trucks had been brought up to carry us off as prisoners. We collected candles in case the electricity was cut off. Through it all, we maintained the forms of parliamentary procedure. At 4 in the morning, during a debate on the land law, a sailor climbed up on the platform, went to the podium and stood there for a time as though sunk in thought. Then, abruptly, he pulled Chairman Chernov’s sleeve and announced that, according to instructions he had received, everybody was to leave the hall. An argument began between Chernov and the “Citizen Sailor,” Chernov insisting: “We’ll disperse only if force is used,” and the sailor stubbornly repeating: “The meeting hall must be cleared immediately.”

We had had no food since noon; we were all exhausted; we knew that imprisonment or death or exile lay ahead for most of us. At 4:40 a.m. the first session of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly came to an end. We voted to adjourn and voted a special resolution to meet again at 5 in the afternoon.

The excited crowd left the hall in a slowly moving stream. V. M. Chernov came down from the platform, rolling his papers into a cylinder. We walked off to the coat racks together. The sentries did not stop anyone, but I heard a remark aimed at Chernov: “There’s someone for the point of a bayonet.”

The last word was Lenin’s. In an order to his troops that night, he said: “From tomorrow morning on, no one will be allowed into the Tauride Palace.” The only freely elected Parliament in the history of Russia had lasted less than a single day. Russia subsided into the Soviet night.

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