After Nicholas II, the Tsar of All the Russias, abdicated following mass demonstrations in Petrograd in March 1917, a committee of political leaders appointed by the Duma formed a Provisional Government.Footnote ¹ At the same time, workers and soldiers created a Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ Deputies (Petrograd Soviet) that both shared power with the Provisional Government and rapidly evolved into the leading component of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets.Footnote ² After the destruction of the Tsarist autocracy, the Provisional Government and Petrograd Soviet thus became the only sources of legitimacy for the Russian state. Since none of the competing social forces mobilized within the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet was strong enough to provide an effective social base, each was stalemated in what turned out to be a paralyzing competition for political dominance. This competition played itself out while the Bolshevik Party infiltrated the factory, the army, and the navy. Once the party was confident of the support of the workers and troops in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks revolted against the Provisional Government, founded the new communist state under the auspices of the Soviet, and thus realized the ideological promise of a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In founding the communist state, the Bolsheviks yoked their claim on sovereignty to the party’s dedication to carrying out a Marxist working-class revolution. They thus inhabited and gave a social purpose to a state apparatus that had been eroding while other social forces contended for control of the government.

The two most important events during the Russian Revolution were the abdication of the Tsar on March 15 and the Bolshevik revolt on November 7.Footnote ³ The first of these was brought on by spontaneous demonstrations demanding food that erupted in Petrograd on March 8.Footnote ⁴ Although these protests were not organized or led by any political party, they were not suppressed because the troops mutinied when ordered to fire upon the demonstrators. The leaders of the Duma soon concluded that only the Tsar’s abdication would placate the demonstrators and thus allow the restoration of public order. After some delay, partially attributable to the fact that the Tsar was away from Petrograd at the time, Nicholas II abdicated in favor of his brother Michael Alexandrovich, the Grand Duke.Footnote ⁵ However, the Grand Duke, although more liberal and progressive than Nicholas, did not believe that he would enjoy enough support to rule effectively and refused to take the throne. That left the Duma leaders in control of the Russian state.Footnote ⁶ Representing the major parties in that chamber, they immediately formed a Provisional Government and dedicated that government to laying the foundation for the formation of a democratic state.Footnote ⁷ The founding of that democratic state was to be carried out through the election of delegates to the Constituent Assembly, which would write a new constitution. The Provisional Government and the promised election of a Constituent Assembly constituted the “democratic path” within the Russian Revolution.Footnote ⁸

The alternative “non-democratic path” was more complicated. At about the same time that the Provisional Government constituted itself as the residual state authority, the workers and soldiers in Petrograd and throughout the rest of Russia were organizing Soviets.Footnote ⁹ Although the Soviets were class organizations (in the case of the soldiers’ Soviets, the vast majority of the members were peasants who had been conscripted into the army), most of the party organizations and leaders favored a democratic state in which even the bourgeoisie would participate.Footnote ¹⁰ The “democratic” and “non-democratic” paths were thus intermingled at the beginning of the revolution because the Provisional Government and the All-Russian Congress of Soviets were both dominated by democratic parties, the former always more so than the latter. However, the relationship between the Soviets and the Provisional Government was often tense because the former pressed a class-based policy agenda (primarily land redistribution and an end to the war) that the more conservative Provisional Government either opposed or was reluctant to enact.Footnote ¹¹

The unelected Provisional Government nonetheless needed the Soviets because it lacked popular legitimacy; the elected Soviets, despite (or perhaps because of) their class basis, enjoyed much greater mass support.Footnote ¹² On the other hand, the Soviets needed the Provisional Government because the officer corps of the Russian army and navy strongly preferred the latter as their commander-in-chief, because the Western powers were willing to recognize the Provisional Government as legitimate (and might well have balked at recognizing the Soviets), and because even the routine operations of the state bureaucracy demanded an expertise that many of the Soviet leaders lacked.Footnote ¹³ Both the Provisional Government and the Soviets anticipated that the election of a Constituent Assembly would resolve their uneasy bifurcation of responsibilities and social bases.

As a result, the Soviets were at first largely devoted to the founding of a democratic state, although the shape that state might have assumed would have been significantly, perhaps dramatically, different from the one preferred by the Provisional Government.Footnote ¹⁴ The major threat to a democratic founding came from the radicalism of the urban masses and the rural peasantry. Workers increasingly demanded influence over the management of factories while landless peasants illegally occupied land owned by the Russian nobility. Profiting from and abetting this radical trend was the Bolshevik Party, which (1) demanded that the Provisional Government hold elections for a Constituent Assembly that would create a new state; (2) organized mass demonstrations under the slogan “All Power to the Soviets”; (3) advocated a tripartite program of land redistribution, immediate peace with Germany and its allies, and “bread” for the people; and (4) insisted on the exclusion of bourgeois parties from all revolutionary political coalitions.Footnote ¹⁵ At the beginning of the revolutionary period, just after the abdication of the Tsar, the Bolshevik Party was insignificant in both size and influence.Footnote ¹⁶ However, as the war ground on and economic conditions steadily deteriorated, the Bolsheviks exploited increasing working-class distress and, later, rising disaffection within the army. Under Lenin’s leadership, the party consistently used tactical positions, such as support for the calling of a Constituent Assembly and participation in Duma elections, to further its ultimate goal of installing a “dictatorship of the proletariat” as the sole repository of state authority.Footnote ¹⁷

The Bolshevik Party thus constituted the “non-democratic” path within the Russian Revolution, gradually adapting the Soviets to its purposes as the party captured the local Soviets that elected its delegates.Footnote ¹⁸ Even though the Bolshevik Party came to power by violently overthrowing the Provisional Government, the right of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” to rule Russia was legitimated by legislative assemblies that were similar in form and content to those that found democratic states. In order to see how and why this was so, we must briefly survey the several transformations in the construction of state institutions between the March demonstrations in Petrograd and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918.

The unfolding of the Russian Revolution can be analyzed in several different ways: as a dynamic competition between the Provisional Government and the All-Russian Congress of Soviets; as political contention between the major political parties; and as the popular mobilization of workers and soldiers behind the political program of the Bolshevik Party. As ways of understanding how the Soviet state was founded, all three of these perspectives are useful, but the most productive is political contention between the major political parties. Each of the party organizations was both strongly committed to a particular ideology and yet riven by internal divisions over the proper interpretation of what that ideology dictated in terms of political action and state formation.

On the right of the political spectrum stood the Kadets, who represented the rural gentry (large landholders) and urban bourgeoisie (e.g., shopkeepers, factory owners and management, and professionals) (see Table 5.1). The Tsarist autocracy had regarded the Kadets as “a liberal if not a radical party” but the Constitutional Democrats became, almost by default, “a bulwark of conservatism” after all the parties to its right disappeared following the Tsar’s abdication.Footnote ¹⁹ In many respects, the Kadets modeled themselves on liberal parliamentary parties in Western Europe.Footnote ²⁰ True to their name, the Kadets were devoted to procedural rigor and an almost meditative attitude toward legislative deliberation, so much so that they seemed at times to endanger their very survival by swaddling themselves in democratic etiquette.Footnote ²¹ As the only major political party that did not advocate socialism, the Kadets drew almost no support from workers, soldiers, and the peasantry. For this reason, and because their ideological commitments made them pariahs to much of the left, the Kadets were entirely locked out of the Soviets. However, the party enjoyed substantial influence in the Provisional Government and still held several ministries in the last Kerensky cabinet before the Bolsheviks revolted.Footnote ²²

The Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks were the two major Marxist parties and shared a working-class base in the major cities.Footnote ²³ The Mensheviks also drew significant support from the urban intelligentsia and white-collar workers in the state bureaucracy. In terms of ideology, the Mensheviks contended that Russia had to pass through a “capitalist/democratic” stage in which the social and economic conditions for socialism would ripen before the proletariat could take power.Footnote ²⁴ Although the Mensheviks were certainly to the left of the Kadets, the two parties were more or less natural allies in the steadily intensifying competition with the Bolsheviks. However, that alignment, along with their support for parliamentary democracy in general, made the Mensheviks vulnerable to Bolshevik charges that the party was a thinly veiled bourgeois organization committed to thwarting the creation of a revolutionary communist state.Footnote ²⁵ When violent street demonstrations in July threatened to pull the Bolshevik Party into premature rebellion against the Provisional Government, Lenin argued that the attempt would fail because the masses still had faith in “the petty bourgeois capitalist-controlled policy of the Mensheviks and SRs [Socialist Revolutionaries].”Footnote ²⁶ From an ideological perspective, Lenin was simply conveying his own interpretation of the political situation within a Marxist schema. However, his interpretation was also easily adapted to the kind of sloganeering that constituted “reason in the streets” because it characterized the Mensheviks, the Provisional Government, and, in fact, any and all opposition to the Bolsheviks as “bourgeois” and therefore “counter-revolutionary.”

The Mensheviks had significant internal disagreements, primarily over continued participation in the war against the Germans. The Internationalist wing opposed continuation of the war and, on this and other issues, often sided with the Bolsheviks. The Defencist wing supported the war and was that much closer to the Kadets in opposition to the Bolsheviks. However, when the Bolsheviks seized power, both Menshevik factions condemned the takeover for ideological reasons (as premature in terms of the historical development of Russia) and as an affront to socialist solidarity.Footnote ²⁷

Menshevik participation in revolutionary politics was largely determined by the party’s doctrinal commitments and the declining popularity those commitments engendered. Menshevik insistence, for example, that Russia pass through a capitalist/democratic stage before reaching socialism committed the party to a reform program that became increasingly unpopular with the Russian masses. As the Bolsheviks relentlessly exploited their differences with this program by offering an immediate, sweeping social revolution as an alternative, the party increasingly drew industrial workers into their own ranks; as a result, the mass base of the Menshevik Party steadily shrank. By November, the party had become a head without a body and the prestige and standing of the Menshevik leadership among the nation’s political elite were almost all that remained of the party’s influence on events.

In response to their rapidly fading popularity in the streets, the Menshevik leadership became increasingly committed to parliamentary democracy as an end unto itself. At first, parliamentary forms appear to have been a means through which the capitalist/democratic stage could be effected by way of enabling bourgeois elements (i.e., the Kadets) to construct the appropriate political economy for the Russian state. However, as the Bolshevik threat became ever more manifest, Menshevik leaders increasingly utilized parliamentary forms as a way of constructing a broad coalition of socialist and non-socialist parties in opposition to the Bolsheviks and containing the threat they presented within formal legislative institutions. Whatever ambivalence the Mensheviks might have felt toward parliamentary democracy in March 1917 had vanished by the time the Constituent Assembly met in January 1918.Footnote ²⁸

The Socialist Revolutionaries enjoyed the support of the vast majority of the Russian peasantry and, because peasants comprised the bulk of the Russian army, of most of the troops mobilized for the war. This mass base made them by far the largest political party until they were suppressed by the Bolsheviks; however, their political program was very narrow, largely focused on the distribution of land to the peasantry.Footnote ²⁹ Although the Socialist Revolutionaries were not a Marxist party, they did subscribe to a radical political ideology and, up until the overthrow of the autocracy, terrorist tactics.Footnote ³⁰ Despite their size and the fervent devotion of their peasant supporters, the Socialist Revolutionaries were seriously handicapped in several ways. First, their support was largely concentrated in the rural expanses of Russia, far from the major cities where most revolutionary action took place. When the Bolsheviks mobilized Petrograd workers for an assault on the Winter Palace in November 1917, for example, there was no way that the Socialist Revolutionaries could oppose them by bringing their own mass base into play.

Second, most peasants had little or no education, had little understanding of social conditions and attitudes outside their villages, and were thus quite unsophisticated in terms of political doctrine or strategy. Although much of the leadership of the Social Revolutionary Party was as educated and urbane as their counterparts in the other parties, the gulf between the Social Revolutionary rank and file and their leaders was very wide.Footnote ³¹ When the Bolsheviks offered an immediate redistribution of land on terms that almost mimicked the Social Revolutionary program and combined that offer with withering criticism of Social Revolutionary support for the Provisional Government and parliamentary democracy, the peasantry flocked to the Bolshevik banner.Footnote ³² There was really only one demand that most peasants made in revolutionary politics, and that demand was that they be allowed to occupy the lands held by the Russian gentry. Much of that occupation ultimately occurred through spontaneous action when the gentry fled to the comparative safety of the cities.

The third and perhaps most debilitating handicap was the lack of unity within the Social Revolutionary Party. The commitment to land redistribution was the only programmatic element that held the party together. And even there unity was elusive because many party members were at least as committed to parliamentary democracy as they were to land reform and thus wanted to wait until the Constituent Assembly had formed a new state before formally redistributing landed estates to the peasantry. Others saw no reason to delay acting upon a demand that was both just on its face and inevitable in its realization. In addition, those Socialist Revolutionaries who were committed to continuing the war with the Germans anticipated that immediate reform would probably mean dissolution of the Russian army as peasant soldiers abandoned their units and rushed home to claim their share of land. In sum, immediate land reform, parliamentary democracy, and continuation of the war were mutually incompatible policies that divided the party into factions, but, unlike the Bolsheviks, there “was no Lenin to place an iron yoke of discipline on [what became an] inchoate organization.”Footnote ³³

As a formal party organization, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries emerged only after the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government. In fact, when elections were held for the Constituent Assembly in late November, the Socialist Revolutionaries fielded lists that still included their more radical colleagues. By that time, however, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries were already acting autonomously by refusing to leave the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets when it endorsed the Bolshevik overthrow. Although they did not formally join the new government, they cooperated with the Bolsheviks in rejecting parliamentary democracy and demanding the immediate redistribution of land. They shared the same social base as their more moderate colleagues, but they were made of much ruder social material than the “sober, well-to-do peasants” and intellectuals who comprised the mainstream leadership of the party.Footnote ³⁴ In Table 5.1, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries are categorized as preferring a proletarian dictatorship to parliamentary democracy, but that attitude toward the formation of the new state was a product more of their emphatic hostility toward parliamentary democracy than of their embrace of a Bolshevik-dominated dictatorship of the proletariat. That hostility kept them out of the Provisional Government. The only locus of power the party/faction enjoyed was in the Soviets.

Most of the leadership of the Bolshevik Party was either in exile or in Siberian prison camps at the beginning of the Russian Revolution. Until the leaders returned to Russia – and, in particular, to Petrograd – the party was not a significant factor in revolutionary politics and its program could only with difficulty be distinguished from that of the Mensheviks. All that changed when Lenin arrived in Petrograd on April 16. Four days later, on April 20, Pravda published his “April Theses,” a set of doctrinal interpretations that subsequently guided the Bolshevik Party from that point until the November uprising.Footnote ³⁵ The second of these theses clearly broke with the orthodox Marxist position assumed by both the Mensheviks and many Bolsheviks.

Rejecting all cooperation with the Provisional Government, Lenin urged his party to actively educate and thus persuade the masses that “the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies is the one possible form of revolutionary government” once it was no longer “subject to the influence of the bourgeoisie.” The fundamental goal of the party was

The clear implication, as Carr put it, was “that the moment when the Bolsheviks, by means of mass education, secured a majority in the Soviet would be the moment of the passing of the revolution into its second, or socialist, phase.”Footnote ³⁶

By late October the Bolsheviks were ready to seize power. By that point they had full control of the most important Soviets (including Petrograd) and of most of the military units in and around Petrograd, as well as broad support among workers in the major cities. On October 22, the Petrograd Soviet passed a resolution of “no confidence” in the Provisional Government and formed a War-Revolutionary Committee that the Mensheviks accurately described as “a staff for seizing power.” Although the political implications were clear, the Bolsheviks made no attempt to conceal these measures, nor did they deny their portent. This was so much the case that the official Kadet newspaper on November 1 started a daily column with the heading “Bolshevik Preparations” for taking power. And one member of the Bolshevik Central Committee publicly remarked that “we are openly preparing an outbreak.”

Chaired by Leon Trotsky, the War-Revolutionary Committee coordinated the deployment of Russian military and naval units. In an almost bloodless coup, the Bolsheviks occupied the major transportation, communication, and government centers on the evening of November 6, and, at 10 o’clock the following morning, they announced that the “Provisional Government is overthrown” and that the “authority of the State has been transferred to the hands of the organ of the Petersburg Soviet of the Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies – the War-Revolutionary Committee, which is at the head of the Petersburg proletariat and garrison.”Footnote ³⁷

In the early morning of November 8, Trotsky announced the fall of the Provisional Government to the Petrograd Soviet. Lenin also spoke to the Petrograd Soviet, explaining that “the overthrow” meant

The Petrograd Soviet then passed a resolution approving the actions of the War-Revolutionary Committee and acknowledged its authority pending the establishment of a Soviet government. All that remained to be done at that point was the capture of the Winter Palace, where a few government ministers were sheltering.

It was no coincidence that the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets was also meeting in Petrograd on the night of November 7–8.Footnote ³⁹ When the Congress passed a resolution assuming authority over the Russian state, the Bolshevik coup thereby became a Soviet government. In its second session on the evening of November 8, the Congress issued a decree:

The Congress then appointed the Soviet of the People’s Commissars (each commissar was responsible for a policy area in much the same way that ministers would be in a parliamentary regime) and named Lenin as chairman.Footnote ⁴¹

When the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets had convened in June, the Bolsheviks had comprised only a little under 13 percent of the delegates (see Table 5.2). As the third largest party, the Bolsheviks were less than half the size of either the Mensheviks or the Socialist Revolutionaries. By November, however, the Bolsheviks could claim almost 60 percent of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, a majority further buttressed by the support of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries (who by then had become a formally organized party).Footnote ⁴² Because the Bolsheviks thoroughly dominated the Congress of Soviets, this became the legislative assembly that founded the Soviet state and, for that reason, was the legislative assembly that capped the “non-democratic” revolutionary path.

The abdication of the Tsar had ended the old regime and thus constituted a revolution. But the transfer of sovereignty to the new Provisional Government was more or less a default result of the Tsar’s abdication and thus did not found a new state. With the important exception of the Bolsheviks, all parties in the revolutionary coalition expected and favored the election of a Constituent Assembly. That assembly would then found the new state by writing a constitution that would both legitimate its rule and instantiate a post-revolutionary settlement. However, elections to the Constituent Assembly were repeatedly postponed by the Provisional Government. They were finally held on November 25, soon after the Bolshevik uprising, and they did not go well for the Bolsheviks.Footnote ⁴³ They elected just under a quarter of the 704 delegates while their chief rivals, the Socialist Revolutionaries, won almost 60 percent of the seats.Footnote ⁴⁴ If the Constituent Assembly had been permitted to draw up a constitution, it would have become the legislative assembly that capped the “democratic” revolutionary path.

However, the Bolsheviks had no intention of permitting the Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution. The purely instrumental reason for their rejection of the assembly was clear: the party controlled the Soviets, much of the army and navy, the city of Petrograd (in which the assembly was to meet), and the major posts in the government ministries. Given that they had already declared their own revolution and now wielded most of the authority of the Russian state, the Constituent Assembly was nothing but a threat to their rule. But the doctrinal justification for Bolshevik rejection of the Constituent Assembly nonetheless sheds light on the party’s understanding of the new Russian state’s social purpose.

Most of the doctrinal principles that informed the party’s strategy originated, of course, with Lenin. While Russia was not yet ready for a communist revolution in March, Lenin believed that conditions were more than ripe by late October.Footnote ⁴⁵ In that short span of time, the economic base of Russia had certainly not changed significantly, so this ripening had little or nothing to do with the fundamental material preconditions for a communist revolution. But the attitude of the Russian masses had changed in ways that strengthened the Bolshevik Party not only in the streets but also in the Soviets, the factories, and the Russian military. There was thus a link between popular public opinion (democracy) and the strategy of the party: the former both legitimated and enabled the latter. When Lenin presented the party’s new land policy to the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets one day after the Bolsheviks seized power, he attributed its doctrinal heterodoxy to the following fact: “As a democratic government, we cannot evade the decision of the popular masses, even if we were not in agreement with it.” Even once the Bolsheviks were in power, the “vital first steps of the regime were … taken under the banner not of socialism, but of democracy.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Lenin wanted to postpone the elections to the Constituent Assembly but was overruled by the party.Footnote ⁴⁷ When the returns revealed a massive defeat, the Bolsheviks considered suppressing the Constituent Assembly by not allowing it to convene. Nikolai Bukharin argued against suppression because, as he put it, “constitutional illusions are still alive in the broad masses.” However, he did advocate expulsion of the Kadets and of a sufficient number of the other delegates so that the assembly would simply ratify the new Bolshevik regime.Footnote ⁴⁸ On December 26, 1917, Lenin anonymously published his “Theses on the Constituent Assembly” in Pravda in which he analyzed the Bolshevik seizure of power the previous month and concluded that the Constituent Assembly was now an anachronism. Because “the constituent assembly is the highest form of the democratic principle” in a “bourgeois republic,” the party’s support for the assembly under the Tsarist autocracy had been “fully legitimate.”

However, once the Tsar was overthrown and a bourgeois government assumed power, the Bolsheviks had properly insisted that “a republic of Soviets is a higher form of democratic principle than the customary bourgeois republic with its constituent assembly” and was, in fact, “the only form capable of assuring the least painful transition to socialism.” On the one hand, once the transition from Tsarist autocracy to parliamentary democracy had occurred, the historic mission of “revolutionary social-democracy” became the instantiation of the dictatorship of the proletariat (in the form of the Bolshevik Party). This instantiation could most effectively be achieved through the agency of the Soviets once the masses became conscious of the actual alignment of class forces and revolutionary possibility. On the other hand, these developments had also encouraged a proper understanding of their own class position among the bourgeoisie and their agents, the Kadets. Their completely reasonable and anticipated hostility to the Bolshevik Revolution had eliminated any “possibility of resolving the most acute questions in a formally democratic way.”

There was thus an inevitable collision looming between the political orientation of the Constituent Assembly and “the will and interest of the toiling and exploited classes who [have begun] the socialist revolution against the bourgeoisie.” For these reasons, Lenin concluded, “any attempt, direct or indirect, to look at the question of the Constituent Assembly from the formal juridical standpoint, within the framework of bourgeois democracy,” was a betrayal of the socialist revolution because it failed to properly “appraise the October rising and the tasks of the dictatorship of the proletariat.” If the Constituent Assembly, once it met, did not unconditionally accept “Soviet power” and support the “Soviet revolution,” the ensuing “crisis … can be solved only by revolutionary means.”Footnote ⁴⁹

On January 2, 1918, the Bolshevik government announced that the Constituent Assembly would convene on January 18; and, on January 4, it set January 21 as the date for the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets. On January 16, two days before the Constituent Assembly was to meet, the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets approved a “Declaration of Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People” and peremptorily demanded that they be adopted by the assembly. The Central Executive Committee also requested that the assembly formally recognize that its members had been elected before the “masses” had risen “against the exploiters.” Because the masses had not “yet experienced the full force of the resistance of the exploiters in defence of their class privileges [and] had not yet undertaken in practical form the building of a socialist society,” they had mistakenly elected delegates whom they now realized did not reflect their true class interests. For that reason, “the Constituent Assembly would think it fundamentally incorrect, even from the formal standpoint, to set itself up against the Soviet power.”

In other words, the Constituent Assembly should naturally conclude that it had become an anachronism and had no other option than to support the Bolshevik regime. The Committee therefore asked the Constituent Assembly to announce: “Supporting the Soviet power and the decrees of the Council of People’s Commissars, the Constituent Assembly recognizes that its tasks are confined to the general working out of the fundamental principles of the socialist reconstruction of society.”Footnote ⁵⁰

When the Constituent Assembly finally convened on January 18, Yakov Sverdlov, acting in the name of the Central Executive Committee, shoved aside the oldest delegate, who, in accordance with tradition, was about to open the proceedings. Sverdlov then presented the Central Executive Committee’s resolutions, asking that they be immediately considered and adopted. The Assembly rejected the resolutions and elected Victor Chernov, a Socialist Revolutionary, as presiding officer (he defeated Marie Spiridonova, a Left Socialist Revolutionary backed by the Bolsheviks). What then followed can be viewed as either one of the most interesting, if aborted, foundings in world history or, alternatively, as a tragic farce. Although a large majority of the delegates were opposed to the new Bolshevik regime, the galleries were crowded with Bolshevik workers and sailors who were armed and had been drinking heavily. They pointed their weapons at the delegates and made threatening catcalls while the Socialist Revolutionaries and delegates belonging to the other minor parties made parliamentary motions, debated resolutions, and otherwise attempted to go about the business of founding a democratic state. After the Bolshevik delegates left the chamber, their seats on the chamber floor were taken by now quite rowdy workers and sailors who continued to insult and provoke the credentialed delegates.Footnote ⁵¹ Finally, the sailor who commanded the military guard in the hall approached Chernov on the dais and told him that the Constituent Assembly must adjourn.Footnote ⁵²

The delegates then hurriedly cleared up the parliamentary business that was before them as “more Bolshevik Troops crowded” into the hall. After twenty minutes or so, they adjourned and left the chamber. Lenin later described this “dispersal of the Constituent Assembly by Soviet authority [as] the complete and open liquidation of formal democracy in the name of the revolutionary dictatorship.”Footnote ⁵³

When the delegates returned to the Tauride Palace the following day, they found armed guards blocking the doors. The Constituent Assembly never met again. As a theoretical commentary on foundings, we should note that the delegates in the Constituent Assembly persistently asserted that they were in touch with and were exercising the will of the Russian people even as their assembly was first surrounded by and eventually physically infested with Bolshevik roughnecks. The symbolic role of the Constituent Assembly in the founding of a Russian state demanded a neutrality toward – almost an insensibility to – the acts of personal intimidation directed at them. Their persistence in adhering to parliamentary protocol in the face of a malicious display of potential violence was not a charade; it was a ritual form necessary to their very identity and purpose. As a ritual that could enact a democratic founding, it was necessary that those delegates believed in what they did and that the consequences of that belief materialized in actual political practice – necessary but not, in this case, sufficient.

On January 19, 1918, the same day that the delegates found the doors to the Tauride Palace blocked by armed guards, the Central Executive Committee announced the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. The Committee attributed its decision to the changing alignment of historical class forces within Russia and the consequent need to cleanse state institutions of bourgeois influence, unequivocally committing those institutions to the control of the dictatorship of the proletariat:

The Bolsheviks did not contest the fact that the delegates to the Constituent Assembly had been democratically elected. Nor did they challenge the notion that a state must be founded in accordance with the “will of the people.” However, they lodged objections against bourgeois interpretations of what a “democratic election” might be and how the “will of the people” should be constituted.

Both challenges originated in the Bolshevik conception of the connection between history and political consciousness. At every historical stage, there was a “correct” correspondence between political consciousness and the material conditions of a class. In March 1917, the proletariat participated in a bourgeois revolution that destroyed the Tsarist autocracy and brought into existence a parliamentary democracy. However, Russian workers were not yet fully conscious of the fact that this parliamentary democracy was but a temporary way station on the road to socialism. Bending to that political reality, the Bolsheviks supported the calling of a Constituent Assembly as a way of unmasking the bourgeois class orientation of the Provisional Government (because the latter was, in fact, reluctant to put at risk state policies, such as prosecution of the war with Germany, by holding elections). Bolshevik support for the Constituent Assembly was thus a means of educating the masses and did not involve a commitment to conventional democratic elections. When this education had created a correct political understanding of the historical moment within the proletariat, the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government.

On the one hand, the Bolsheviks knew that the proletariat had come to correctly understand what should be done because party cadres were in close contact with workers and soldiers who, in many cases, wanted more immediate, radical action than the party thought was prudent. The development of revolutionary consciousness was thus monitored in the streets, the factories, and the barracks. On the other hand, the Bolsheviks wanted, if possible, to demonstrate this consciousness by way of formal, organized political action, action that took the form of the election of delegates by the local Soviets throughout the nation. So, when elections to the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets resulted in a clear majority for the Bolsheviks, this allowed the party to claim that the Congress represented the “will of the people” and could thus legitimate the seizure of power that occurred just before it convened.

The Congress was, of course, a legislative assembly. And, aside from the exclusion of the bourgeoisie from the franchise (a small fraction of the population) and the class basis of constituencies, the Congress was democratically elected. In these respects, the founding of the Soviet state resembled more conventional democratic foundings. But the Bolsheviks grounded their conceptualization of the “will of the people” in a correct, doctrinal understanding of historical class destiny. The proletariat had to approximate that understanding or there could be no socialist revolution. But perfection of that understanding, in terms of how the state should be constructed and how society should be transformed, was the task of the Bolshevik Party as the vanguard of the revolution.Footnote ⁵⁵ Leon Trotsky described what he thought the new socialist individual would become once the party completed its mission:

Among many other things, the proletariat would become doctrinally sound and self-sufficient, able to flourish within the new communist society while fully comprehending its fundamental logic and theoretical grounding.

The party thus became the vehicle for realizing the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as it pursued the construction of the new state and the transformation of society. And, because only the party could act upon a correct understanding of these things, individual preferences, as an expression of individual “wills,” were irrelevant (or even counter-revolutionary).Footnote ⁵⁷ After the party decided upon a policy, often by voting as individuals, political discipline demanded individual conformity with the decision.Footnote ⁵⁸ The party as a collective was the only unit that could identify and act upon a correct understanding of the historical moment.Footnote ⁵⁹

While most foundings are dramatic events that are easily recognized as breaks with the past, the durability of their claims on state sovereignty are often neither immediately obvious nor uncontested. In the Russian Revolution, the legitimation of the Bolshevik uprising by the Second All-Russian Congress in November was, in retrospect, clearly a founding, but many of those who witnessed the event and its immediate aftermath believed that the attempted takeover would fail. As the Bolsheviks consolidated power, there were at least three other legislative assemblies that could conceivably be interpreted as playing a role in the founding of the Soviet state (see Table 5.3). The most dramatic of these was the Bolshevik refusal to allow the newly elected Constituent Assembly to meet in January 1918. Soon after that, the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets both formally denied the legitimacy of the Constituent Assembly and affirmed the Bolshevik takeover in November. By comparison, the adoption of a formal constitution by the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets on July 10, 1918, was almost an afterthought.Footnote ⁶⁰ In fact, Bolshevik doctrine strongly implied that there was no need for a social contract when the party itself both embodied the will of the people and constituted the state. The idea that the party should or could contract with itself was a contradiction in terms.Footnote ⁶¹