As Marxists, we have never been idol-worshippers of formal democracy. In
a society of classes, democratic institutions not only do not eliminate
class struggle, but also give to class interests an utterly imperfect
expression. The propertied classes always have at their disposal tens
and hundreds of means for falsifying, subverting and violating the will
of the toilers. And democratic institutions become a still less perfect
medium for the expression of the class struggle under revolutionary
circumstances. Marx called revolutions "the locomotives of history."
Owing to the open and direct struggle for power, the working people
acquire much political experience in a short time and pass rapidly from
one stage to the next in their development. The ponderous machinery of
democratic institutions lags behind this evolution all the more, the
bigger the country and the less perfect its technical apparatus.
The majority in the Constituent Assembly proved to be Social
Revolutionists, and, according to parliamentary rules of procedure, the
control of the government belonged to them. But the party of Right
Social Revolutionists had a chance to acquire control during the entire
pre-October period of the revolution. Yet, they avoided the
responsibilities of government, leaving the lion's share of it to the
liberal bourgeoisie. By this very course the Right Social Revolutionists
lost the last vestiges of their influence with the revolutionary
elements by the time the numerical composition of the Constituent
Assembly formally obliged them to form a government. The working class,
as well as the Red Guards, were very hostile to the party of Right
Social Revolutionists. The vast majority of soldiers supported the
Bolsheviki. The revolutionary element in the provinces divided their
sympathies between the Left Social Revolutionists and the Bolsheviki.
The sailors, who had played such an important role in revolutionary
events, were almost unanimously on our side. The Right Social
Revolutionists, moreover, had to leave the Soviets, which in
October--that is, before the convocation of the Constituent
Assembly--had taken the government into their own hands. On whom, then,
could a ministry formed by the Constituent Assembly's majority depend
for support? It would be backed by the upper classes in the provinces,
the intellectuals, the government officials, and temporarily by the
bourgeoisie on the Right. But such a government would lack all the
material means of administration. At such a political center as
Petrograd, it would encounter irresistible opposition from the very
start. If under these circumstances the Soviets, submitting to the
formal logic of democratic conventions, had turned the government over
to the party of Kerensky and Chernov, such a government, compromised and
debilitated as it was, would only introduce temporary confusion into the
political life of the country, and would be overthrown by a new uprising
in a few weeks. The Soviets decided to reduce this belated historical
experiment to its lowest terms, and dissolved the Constituent Assembly
the very first day it met.
For this, our party has been most severely censured. The dispersal of
the Constituent Assembly has also created a decidedly unfavorable
impression among the leading circles of the European Socialist parties.
Kautsky has explained, in a series of articles written with his
characteristic pedantry, the interrelation existing between the
Social-Revolutionary problems of the proletariat and the regime of
political democracy. He tries to prove that for the working class it is
always expedient, in the long run, to preserve the essential elements of
the democratic order. This is, of course, true as a general rule. But
Kautsky has reduced this historical truth to professorial banality. If,
in the final analysis, it is to the advantage of the proletariat to
introduce its class struggle and even its dictatorship, through the
channels of democratic institutions, it does not at all follow that
history always affords it the opportunity for attaining this happy
consummation. There is nothing in the Marxian theory to warrant the
deduction that history always creates such conditions as are most
"favorable" to the proletariat.
It is difficult to tell now how the course of the Revolution would have
run if the Constituent Assembly had been convoked in its second or third
month. It is quite probable that the then dominant Social Revolutionary
and Menshevik parties would have compromised themselves, together with
the Constituent Assembly, in the eyes of not only the more active
elements supporting the Soviets, but also of the more backward
democratic masses, who might have been attached, through their
expectations not to the side of the Soviets, but to that of the
Constituent Assembly. Under such circumstances the dissolution of the
Constituent Assembly might have led to new elections, in which the party
of the Left could have secured a majority. But the course of events has
been different. The elections for the Constituent Assembly occurred in
the ninth month of the Revolution. By that time the class struggle had
assumed such intensity that it broke the formal frames of democracy by
sheer internal force.
The proletariat drew the army and the peasantry after it. These classes
were in a state of direct and bitter war with the Right Social
Revolutionists. This party, owing to the clumsy electoral democratic
machinery, received a majority in the Constituent Assembly, reflecting
the pre-October epoch of the revolution. The result was a contradiction
which was absolutely irreducible within the limits of formal democracy.
And only political pedants who do not take into account the
revolutionary logic of class relations, can, in the face of the
post-October situation, deliver futile lectures to the proletariat on
the benefits and advantages of democracy for the cause of the class
struggle.
The question was put by history far more concretely and sharply. The
Constituent Assembly, owing to the character of its majority, was bound
to turn over the government to the Chernov, Kerensky and Tseretelli
group. Could this group have guided the destinies of the Revolution?
Could it have found support in that class which constitutes the backbone
of the Revolution? No. The real kernel of the class revolution has come
into irreconcilable conflict with its democratic shell. By this
situation the fate of the Constituent Assembly had been sealed. Its
dissolution became the only possible surgical remedy for the
contradiction, which had been created, not by us, but by all the
preceding course of events.