A People's Tragedy (106 page)

'sorry parody of a revolutionary parliament'.45

From the first days of the new regime the Bolsheviks had set out to destroy, as 'counterrevolutionaries', all those parties which had opposed the October seizure of power. On 27 October Sovnarkom banned the opposition press. The ban was greeted with outrage.

The Bolshevik moderates voted against it in the Soviet Executive on 4 November; the five resignations from the Bolshevik Central Committee that day, followed by an equal number of resignations from

Sovnarkom, were also partly in protest against the ban; while the Printers' Union threatened a national strike unless the freedom of the press was restored. But none of this was enough to prevent the MRC from sending in Bolshevik squads to smash many of the opposition presses, to confiscate their newsprint and arrest their editors. Most of the opposition papers were simply driven underground and soon reappeared with a slightly altered name. The SR paper,
Volia naroda,
reappeared the next day as
Volia,
and later on as
Narod
.
The socialist paper,
Den' (Day),
appeared as
Morning, Midday,
Afternoon, Evening, Night, Midnight,
and so on.46

* * * The opposition parties were sustained by the hope of political salvation through the Constituent Assembly. It was surely the true voice of the democracy. Every citizen was represented by it, regardless of class, whereas the Soviets were only representative of the workers, the peasants and the soldiers. The opposition believed that the Constituent Assembly was bound to be recognized as the highest sovereign power in the land: not even the Bolsheviks would dare to challenge that. In fact, the Bolshevik leaders were divided over their policy towards the Assembly, though we still do not know enough about their internal debates on this matter. Lenin had always been contemptuous of the ballot box and had made it clear as early as the April Theses that he viewed Soviet power as a higher form of democracy than the Constituent Assembly.

There was no room for the 'bourgeoisie' in the Soviets and, in Lenin's
view,
no room for them either in the revolution. But the seizure of power had been partly justified as a measure to ensure the convocation of the Constituent Assembly: a great deal of fuss had been made about how the Provisional Government was planning not to convene it, and about how only a Soviet government could lead the country to the Constituent Assembly. The Bolsheviks could not renege on their promise without losing face. The moderates in the party, moreover, were all, to varying degrees, committed on principle to the Constituent Assembly. Kamenev, for one, was a consistent advocate of the idea that the Bolsheviks should compete for power within it and, like some of the Left SRs, even favoured the notion of combining Soviet power at the local level with the Assembly as a sovereign national parliament.

Given all this, Lenin had little option but to allow the elections to go ahead. Polling started on 12 November and lasted for two weeks, since the vast size of the country made it necessary to stagger the elections. The campaign was vigorous, sometimes violent, and the turn-out high. Most people knew that it was, in effect, a national referendum on the Bolshevik regime. The SRs received 16 million votes (38 per cent of the total), most of them cast by the peasants in the central agricultural zone and Siberia.

But the ballot papers had not distinguished between the Left SRs, who supported the Bolshevik seizure of power, and the Right SRs, who did not. The split in the party had taken place

too recently for the printing changes to be made, except in one or two places. It is not at all clear, therefore, how much of the SR vote was opposed to the Bolshevik regime, although this was the crucial question of the whole election. The only thing that can be said with relative certainty is that the Left SRs had their main base of support among the younger peasant soldiers, whereas the Right SRs had their stronghold in the older peasants of the village. According to Oliver Radkey, the best authority on this subject, the peasants were more or less split down the middle between the two parties, although the Right SRs probably came out on top in the elections because they retained the bulk of the provincial party organizations and were thus better prepared for the campaign.

The traditional voting habits of the peasantry, whereby the whole village assembly resolved to cast its votes for the same party, certainly favoured the Right SRs, since most of the village elders were inclined towards them. But even if the Right SRs did gain most of the peasant vote, they still lacked an outright majority in the Assembly.

Only the support of the Mensheviks (who won 3 per cent of the vote), the Kadets (5 per cent) and the Ukrainian SRs (12 per cent) would give them that, though such was the gap between the Russian and the Ukrainian SRs on the question of national independence that even this was open to doubt.47

Nevertheless, the election results were a profound setback for the government's claim to rule in the name of the people. The Bolsheviks won just 10 million votes (24 per cent of the total), most of them cast by the soldiers and the workers of the industrial north. In Petrograd and Moscow they won a majority; but in the agricultural south, where their organization was extremely weak, they picked up hardly any votes. The Bolsheviks at once declared the results unfair: local reports on electoral abuses, which were bound to take place in a country as vast and backward as Russia, were rigorously collected and cited as evidence of the need for re-elections. Meanwhile, they stepped up their campaign of intimidation and threats against the defenders of the Assembly. The opening of the Assembly was postponed indefinitely by Sovnarkom on 20 November, just eight days before it was due to convene. On the following day Sovnarkom issued a decree giving electors the right to recall their deputies from all representative bodies, including the Constituent Assembly, provided this was supported by more than half the electorate within a given constituency. This meant, in effect, that Bolshevik activists were given the right to reverse the result of democratic elections by drumming up support in the factories and garrisons. It was obviously aimed against the Kadets, who had done rather well in the cities by rallying the right-of-centre vote. Trotsky defended the bill in the Soviet Executive as a 'painless' alternative to the outright closure of the Assembly in the event of it being opposed to the principle of Soviet power. It was a blatant threat that the Bolsheviks would not tolerate a hostile parliament. 'If the Kadets were to have a majority,' he warned, 'then of course the Constituent Assembly would not be given power.'48 As a physical reminder of this threat, the MRC burst into the Tauride Palace on 23 November and arrested the Assembly's three electoral commissioners. They were held captive and interrogated in the Smolny for six days, before being dismissed and replaced by the Bolshevik Uritsky.

The opposition parties were outraged by these acts of intimidation. It looked as if the Bolsheviks were slowly coming round to the view that the Assembly should either be postponed into the distant future or closed down altogether in the light of their party's poor performance in the elections. They immediately formed a Union for the Defence of the Constituent Assembly and called on their supporters to demonstrate in front of the Tauride Palace on 28 November with a view
to forcing the parliaments opening. Large crowds turned out on that day, though nowhere near as many as the 200,000 claimed by some of the opposition press: a quarter of that number would be a more reasonable estimate, with most of them students, officers and striking Civil Servants, though there were some workers too, such as the printers and skilled artisans. A group of forty-five Assembly deputies, led by Schreider, the indefatigable Mayor of Petrograd, forced their way into the palace through the Bolshevik pickets, the Latvian Riflemen, and proceeded to the first point on the agenda of the parliament, the election of a Presidium. Of course they knew that they lacked the necessary quorum of 400 deputies, but it was at least a symbolic gesture. The next day they found the Tauride Palace surrounded by troops.

The crowds were kept away and, although the deputies were once again admitted, they were soon ordered to leave.

The demonstration was immediately branded as a 'counter-revolutionary' act organized by the Kadets. The Kadet Party was outlawed and denounced, in the Jacobin tradition, as 'enemies of the people'. Dozens of its leaders were arrested, including several delegates to the Constituent Assembly: Shingarev, Kokoshkin, Dolgorukov, Panina, Astrov and Rodichev. Revolutionary justice did not recognize parliamentary immunity.

Most of them were taken to the Peter and Paul Fortress, where they were kept for three months in fairly reasonable conditions (Dolgorukov found time to catch up with his reading and welcomed the freedom from telephone calls), although Kokoshkin and Shingarev both fell sick, the former with TB, and had to be transferred to the prison hospital (where they were later brutally murdered by a group of Bolshevik sailors). The Left SRs opposed the arrests as an act of terror, while Gorky denounced them as a

'disgrace to the democracy'. But the Bolshevik leaders were clearly intent on destroying the Kadets as the 'organized force of the bourgeois counter-revolution'. It was not so much a ban on a political party, as the declaration of civil war on a whole social class.

Justifying the arrests in the Soviet Executive, Lenin called the Kadet Central Committee the 'political staff of the bourgeoisie'. Trotsky

even claimed that since the bourgeoisie was already passing away from the scene of history, the Bolsheviks' measures of violence against it were for its own good, since they would help to put it out of its misery even more quickly: 'There is nothing immoral in the proletariat finishing off a class that is collapsing: that is its right.'49

The arrests of the supposed 'enemies of the people' did not end with the Kadets. Like the Jacobin Terror, to which the Bolshevik leaders continually appealed for justification, they soon spread into the ranks of the revolutionary movement itself. The Kadets were joined in the Peter and Paul Fortress by a number of SR and Menshevik leaders (Avksentiev, Gots, Sorokin, Argunov), as well as some of the leaders of the Peasant Soviet. Orders were even sent out for the arrest of Tsereteli, Dan and Chernov. By the end of December the prisons were so full of these new 'politicals' that the Bolsheviks began to release common criminals in order to make more room. Some of the richer political prisoners, such as the businessmen Tret'iakov and Konovalov, the former Minister of Trade and Industry, were released for a ransom.50

Slowly but surely, the shape of the new police state was starting to emerge. On 5

December the MRC was finally abolished and, two days later, its duties transferred to the Cheka,* the new security organ that one day would become the KGB. From its very inception the Cheka worked outside the law: there was not even a published decree to mark its organization, only the secret minutes of Sovnarkom, to which the Cheka was supposed to be subordinated, although in reality it was virtually beyond political account. Lenin had stressed the need 'for a staunch proletarian Jacobin' to head the new

'Okhrana' and he found that man in Felix Dzerzhinsky, a forty-year-old Pole from the Lithuanian city of Vilnius who had spent half his adult life in various tsarist prisons and who thus perhaps had his own special motive to ensure that all these 'enemies of the people' suffered equally in jail. During his childhood Dzerzhinsky had wanted to be a Jesuit priest and, although he had long ceased to believe in religion, he carried that same fanatical spirit into his campaigns of political persecution. At the Sovnarkom meeting at which it was established he described the task of the Cheka as a merciless war against the internal enemies of the revolution:

We need to send to that front — the most dangerous and cruel of fronts — determined, hard, dedicated comrades ready to do anything in defence of the Revolution. Do not think that I seek forms of revolutionary

* Its full name was the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Struggle against Counter-Revolution and Sabotage.

justice; we are not now in need of justice. It is war now — face to face, a fight to the finish. Life or death.'51

One might well ask why the Bolshevik moderates, who were openly opposed to the use of political terror and enjoyed widespread support among the party rank and file, failed to act as a more effective brake on the Leninist zealots. The answer surely lies in the psychological weakness of the moderates and the autocratic status of Lenin among the party leaders after the 'victory' of October.* None of the Bolshevik moderates had either the courage or the capacity for leadership to stand up against Lenin and run the risk of splitting the party. The five who had been brave enough to resign from the Central Committee on 4 November all sooner or later made their peace with Lenin: Zinoviev, who had always been a coward and an opportunist, was the first to recant on 8

November, and was readmitted to the Central Committee; Kamenev, Miliutin, Nogin and Rykov held out three weeks longer. To a greater or lesser extent, the fundamental weakness of all the moderates was their own intellectualism. While it made them uncomfortable with the idea of the Terror, it also deprived them of the means to take their fight against it beyond the realm of words. Lunacharsky was a perfect example. On 2 November he had burst into tears at a Sovnarkom meeting, and subsequently resigned as Commissar of Enlightenment, after hearing reports that the Bolshevik bombardment of the Kremlin had destroyed St Basil's Cathedral during the fighting in Moscow. 'I cannot bear it any longer,' he had written in
Novaia zhizn'.
'My cup is full. I am powerless to stop this barbarism.' When these reports turned out to be false he had withdrawn his resignation; yet he remained just as frustrated by his impotence against the Bolshevik Terror. Gorky, one of his oldest political friends, who later plagued him with requests to save the country's writers and artists from persecution, summed up the situation of the moderates in a New Year's letter to Ekaterina: It is clear that Russia is heading for a new and even more savage autocracy. Yesterday I called on the 'Commissar of Justice', a decent enough man but, like all the representatives of 'the authorities', utterly impotent. I pleaded with him to release Vernadsky, it seems without success . .. Lunacharsky's behaviour is astonishingly absurd and ludicrous — he is both a