Empires. I take these two events, and try to show what happened in each case and why the reproaches flung at the Soviets on account of them were due either to misunderstanding or to malice.
The Constituent Assembly.
I suppose in America, as in England, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly was one of the events that best served the people who were anxious to persuade public opinion that the Soviet Government was a government of usurpation holding its own by force, and not representing the will of the people. I think that without any special pleading, it will be possible to bring together facts which put an entirely different light on that event. The mere fact that the parties opposed to the Bolsheviks had spent eight months in murdering the Constituent Assembly, putting off day by day in hopes that the country would change, and that the revolution would come crawling home asking for a quiet life, and leaving the gentlemen to do the work of government, should be set against the short speech of the sailor who told the Assembly it had talked enough, that its guards were tired, and that really it was time to go to bed. It should be remembered that the Constituent Assembly was for neither party an end in itself. For each party it represented a political instrument, not a political aim. It was a tool, not a task. It was thrown away when further use of it would have damaged the purpose for which it was invented. The idea of a Constituent Assembly was first put forward by the Soviet, by the very body which, in the end, opposed its realization. The Soviet, in those exhilarating days of March, 1917, declared that without such an Assembly the future of Russia could not be decided. The effect of this declaration was to make impossible Miliukov’s plan of choking the revolution at birth. Miliukov, in the first days of the revolution, tried by means of quick jugglery with abdications, a regency, and a belated constitution, to profit by the elemental uprising of the masses to secure an exchange of authority out of the hands of the Tsar’s bureaucracy into the hands of the bourgeoisie. For him, the revolution was to be a tram-car which would stop conveniently at the point where the Cadet Party wished to alight.
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