Dissolution of the Constituent Assembly

I hold that the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, far from involving a sacrifice of democracy, made democracy more effective. No doubt that assembly had been elected upon the basis of a democratic suffrage, but the elections had taken place before the bourgeois watchwords and the bourgeois-socialist programme of compromise had lost their allurements for the broad masses of the workers. They had taken place before the decisive historic moment in which the November revolution and the acceptance of the soviet government by the organised workers, peasants, and soldiers, had effectively “condemned as partial and inadequate” the programmes of the two opening phases of the revolution and of the parties that had put these programmes forward. It should be added that, during the opening periods, the economic and social power of the possessing classes was still sufficient to exercise considerable influence upon the electoral results. The Constituent Assembly could not possibly be regarded as an unfalsified expression of the opinions and the will of the workers. In so far as in Russia we can speak of a popular will, that will was indubitably incorporated in the decisions of the soviets. Was the provisional soviet government to abdicate its real power in favour of the will-o’-the-wisp democracy of the Constituent Assembly? Was the soviet government to entrust the work of revolution to bourgeois hands, to hands that were itching to fetter, nay to strangle, this unruly intruder? Or was power to be handed over to the social revolutionaries, who had proved too weak to protect the revolution? To take such a step would have been no less foolish than criminal.