Chapter XXI: On the Rocks of Uncompromise

The Constituent Assembly met under the Bolshevik guns of Smolney Institute. Although it was the hope and fear of the Russian Republic, it came and went in the space of twelve hours. It was born in bloodshed, and died in bloodshed, and with it died the last hope of the moderate Socialist and the bourgeoisie.

Its brief moment of existence began at four o’clock on the afternoon of January 18, and it was dispersed at four o’clock the next morning by the “Do svidanya!” of a Russian sailor, who sleepily informed the members it was time to go home.

Eleven months had passed since the first joyous shout of free Russia had filled the Petrograd streets with “Long live the Constituent Assembly!”

First one faction had carried this banner aloft, and discarded it; and then another. The group in power always feared it. During the days of the various coalition cabinets, the radicals clamored for immediate convocation. The last phrase that Trotzky uttered, when he and his followers bolted from the Council of the Republic at the first stormy sitting of that body, was, “Long live the Constituent Assembly!”

When the Bolshevist Revolution gave all power to the Soviet, the opposition Socialists, the Cadets (Constitutional Democrats), and even such monarchists as still ventured an opinion, rallied around the standard of the Constituent Assembly, and marked its date for the fall of the People’s Commissaries. Many people who had opposed and delayed its meeting suddenly became its staunchest supporters. It was to be the final test of strength.

The Bolsheviki had announced that it could not meet until four hundred members had convened, and placed armed guards at the palace entrances to see their decree was carried out.

The Assembly was scheduled to meet Tuesday, December 11, and the day was declared a national holiday. The shops and banks closed, and thousands of municipal employees, students, cadets, government and bank employees, and a few workmen and peasants, marched with banners to the palace, singing revolutionary songs as they went.

At three o’clock in the afternoon, the thirty-five delegates already arrived gathered around a great mahogany table in the library, and resolved to declare the Constituent Assembly open. Mayor Shreider, of the dissolved city Duma, the oldest member present, was chosen to speak the words.

Saroken, one of the delegates, reported that Shingareff, Kokoshkin, and Prince Dolgorukoff had been arrested, and proposed a thoroughly Russian method of meeting the situation.

“We must refrain from protesting against their arrest, and refrain from demanding their freedom,” he said. “We have simply to recognize that they are free. Only the weak can protest, and only those who have no power need to demand. We are powerful. We have not to demand nor protest. Members of the Constituent Assembly _can not_ be arrested. Therefore they are free.”

Roditcheff, who had been a member of three Dumas under the Tsar, remained unconvinced by this logic, and demanded a protest. It was written.

Chernoff accused the Bolsheviki of being like the Mahommedans, who wanted to burn all the books but the Koran, on the ground that all things necessary to be said were said in the Koran, and all other books must either say something different, in which case they should be burned, or must say the same thing, which would be a waste of words.

“The Constituent Assembly, if it is against the Bolshevik, it would not represent the people, if it is for the Bolsheviki, it will merely repeat what they have already done,” he said.

Trotzky and Lenin had no hesitancy in declaring that, unless the Constituent Assembly was Bolshevik, it would not represent the people, and therefore must be dissolved.

They said, quite truthfully, that the Assembly was chosen according to election laws made by the coalition government, and conducted by officials representative of that group, and of the political rather than of the economic ideal.

The Revolution that overthrew Tsarism was basically a political revolution. That which established the dictatorship of the proletariat was fundamentally economic. Between the political and the economic revolutions, the demands of the masses had undergone a sweeping change. The Constituent Assembly, in spite of its socialistic membership, and its claim of being the only elective group in Russia, was a bequest of the political Revolution.

More than a month elapsed between the time of that abortive meeting of thirty-five members, and the date of the actual opening of the national gathering.

Petrograd awaited the hour with faint hope and much misgiving.

On January 16, the “Extraordinary Commission for the Protection of Petrograd” declared the city in a state of siege, and issued the following proclamation:

TO THE POPULATION OF PETROGRAD!

The Extraordinary Commission for the Protection of Petrograd is in possession of information that counter-revolutionists of all shades, united in the struggle against the Soviet authorities, have scheduled their demonstration for January 18--the day of the opening of the Constituent Assembly.

It has also become known that the leaders of these counter-revolutionary plots are Filonenko, Savinkoff, and Kerensky, who arrived in Petrograd, coming from the Don from Kaledin.

The organization of the counter-revolutionists is being supported through considerable funds by the Moscow and Petrograd bankers and speculators.

The Extraordinary Commission has taken appropriate measures for the maintenance of strict revolutionary order in the capital.

Making this public to all citizens of Petrograd, the Extraordinary Commission calls their attention to the following:

(1) Petrograd is in a state of siege, and all attempts of pogroms will be suppressed by armed force.

(2) Any insubordination to the orders of the representatives of people’s authorities will entail stringent measures of reprisal.

(3) Any attempt of groups of counter-revolutionists to penetrate into the district of the Tauridian Palace or the Smolney, beginning with January 18, will be energetically stopped by armed force.

(4) Comrades and Citizens, loyal to the authority of the Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Soviets, are called upon to retain complete calm, to support the maintenance of strictest order everywhere, and not to participate in demonstrations, meetings, and street crowdings, in order not to suffer accidentally should it prove necessary to apply armed force against the counter-revolutionists.

EXTRAORDINARY COMMISSION FOR THE PROTECTION OF PETROGRAD.

January 16, 1918, 11 P. M.

Despite this proclamation, plans for a demonstration went on, and we were all prepared for trouble.

A box in the Tauride Palace had been placed at the disposal of Colonel Raymond Robins, and he asked me to join his party.

It was ten o’clock on the morning of the 18th when we left the War Hotel. With us were Edgar T. Sisson of the United States Department of Public Information, and the Russian, Alex Gomberg. We drove first to the Foreign Office, where Trotzky’s secretary, who was to be the fifth of the group, awaited us.

On the snow-covered stones a crowd of officers with red banners formed in marching order. Across the Winter Palace Square came a Cossack of the “Wild” Division, in flying cape of shaggy fur. He was astride a tiny black pony, and rode with the perfect ease of men of the Urals. A Red Guard, who sat an uneasy and unaccustomed seat upon a fractious horse, tried vainly to overtake him. They were a striking pair of black silhouettes against the snow-clad world that morning.

We drove back to the Nevsky. At the Mikhailovskaya we met another group of demonstrators, preparing to march to the Grave of the Brotherhood on Marsovo Pola, where the victims of the first Revolution were buried. Most of them were striking bank employees, and, as they stood there waiting to go forward, they argued with the soldiers who lined the sidewalks, urging them to march for the Constituent Assembly.

The street-cars were stopped on account of the snow. Forty or fifty conductors, men and women, in gold-braided uniforms of blue broadcloth, were clearing the tracks with wooden shovels. Deliberately or unconsciously, they formed an effective block to the paraders. An officer asked them to move. Their answer was short and final:

“We won’t get out of the way for the bourgeoisie!”

We turned in the direction of the Marsovo Pola. As we came within sight of it, we heard a volley of machine-gun fire in the direction of the Liteiny. The white field was deserted. Garlands of green were looped around the huge mound, and the red wreaths were like splotches of blood against the white snow. A parade marshal, with a red band around his arm, stood at one corner, the center of a small and excited group.

“Where are the people?” Colonel Robins asked him.

“They won’t let them come,” he said. “They are shooting them down in the streets.”

We drove along the Liteiny in the direction of the firing. At the Kirotchnia, we came suddenly upon a group of Red Guards and sailors, brandishing ominous guns. They rushed about, tossing orders at one another, their faces flushed with excitement.

“Murderers! Murderers!” shouted a woman, shaking her fist in their direction.

“Murderers! Murderers!” echoed a dozen other women, who turned blazing eyes upon them.

Scattered all over the snow were broken and splintered wooden poles--all that remained of the proud banners that a few minutes before had proclaimed “All Power to the Constituent Assembly” and “Long Live the Boss of Russian Land!”

We did not need to ask what had happened. The broken poles told the story.

Down the Liteiny and into the Furstadtskaya our little Siberian pony pulled the sleigh across the bloodstained snow. Men and women huddled in doorways. Their coats were dusted with white, and as they brushed one another off they talked in frightened voices. Some of them were ghastly pale, in spite of the biting chill of the winter morning. The wounded had been carried upstairs to a Red Cross hospital, and the dead--fifteen was the day’s toll, according to official reports next morning--had also been removed.

The paraders had penetrated within the forbidden zone. They had refused to heed the orders of the guard to stop. A hand-to-hand fight followed. Some one fired a shot. There was another and another, and in a moment the havoc was complete. Fifteen human beings had died to save the Revolution. Perhaps fifteen others had killed to save the Revolution. Both groups were fighting for the same thing, but the word spelled a different set of meanings to each.

It was noon when we pulled up before the Tauride Palace. More than a century ago the great yellow building was flung there by the wave of Catherine’s hand or the scratch of her quill pen, and dedicated to the needs of the favorite of the hour. It lay across three or four city blocks, shining in a new coat of yellow calcium. White snow covered roofs and cornices like deep frosting, and spilled over the edge in a fringe of lacy icicles.

Behind the upper windows, hidden from public gaze, were six machine-guns, with tapes loaded for use. Within a moment’s call, the gunners waited for action. Behind the ornate iron fences, Red Guards and sailors paced ceaselessly back and forth.

We made our way through a procession of sentries into the Palace, up the broad staircases, across a wide lobby, and into a huge ball-room. Great circles of light were reflected on the polished floor from the mammoth candelabra hung on the frescoed ceiling somewhere up near the sky. There were guards and more guards, stairs and more stairs, until at last a sailor politely forced us into a box overlooking the Assembly.

The auditorium was a great square room surrounded by balconies and roofed with glass. The seats were arranged like a fan in widening circles. They were cushioned with red leather, and strips of red carpet ran like ribs toward the tribunal, where slender bay trees stretched their green arms against the white columns. Here red-leather-cushioned couches marked the places where the many mighty men of Russaia’s past had sat. Here, in due time, came the People’s Commissaries.

Trotzky was away at Brest-Litovsk. Kolontai, Commissary of Public Welfare, was the first to take her place. She came in with a large brief-case under her arm, and paused for a moment to search the crowd for comrade faces. Krylenko, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, was just behind her, hurrying in with that quick, nervous stride so familiar to all of us who frequented the corridors at Smolney. Krylenko was always going somewhere in a great rush, and we never saw much of him except a grotesque and fleeting picture of his long, narrow back, and the little short legs that carried it.

Lunarcharsky, the Commissary of Education, came next. Volodarsky--whom one Russian called “The little bell that always echoes Trotzky”--and half a dozen lesser lights slipped quietly into their seats. Last of all came Lenin, his merry brown eyes bright and his face serene.

The hours went on. We punctuated them with many glasses of tea. Nothing happened. Three o’clock came. I wandered out on the balcony, and looked down upon the ball-room, where men and women paced back and forth across the inlaid floor. They seemed like pygmy people beside the massive columns. The bigness of the North and the splendor of departed ages was in that room. The largeness of a great materialistic dream was there, and the work of countless little men tossed into the building at the command of a single woman. The little men and the big woman had long since crumbled to dust. To-day other little men--the inheritors of the builders, the masons and carpenters, peasants and factory workers--were here. They were the one tremendous fact of the moment.

Back in the assembly room, more and more seats were filled. Chernoff was there. I had last seen him sitting dejectedly in a corner at the Peasants’ Convention, shaking his head, while his tiny arch-enemy, Marie Spiridonova, swayed the meeting to her will. In a few minutes these two were again to be pitted against each other. Tseretelli, whose dark, sad face and tragic eyes had not been seen in public places since the dissolution of the Council of the Republic, had also come.

At four o’clock a bell rang, and a member of the “Right S. R.”--the conservative wing of the Socialist Revolutionists--asked that the oldest man in the convention be chosen to open the Assembly. The right side of the house arose and vigorously applauded the suggestion.

The members of the left sat stolidly in their seats and hammered their desks, shouting, “Sverdloff! Sverdloff!” For fully five minutes they pounded without ceasing, their closed fists making a din that drowned every other sound. The white-haired, white-whiskered old man who had taken his place on the rostrum looked from left to right in a bewildered way, and finally yielded the gavel to Sverdloff.

The Bolsheviki had won the first round in the fight. The Assembly was to be officially opened by the government.

Sverdloff was the chairman of the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviet. He was a small, pale, dark little chap, quick moving and fiery spirited. He began by saying that, as in their time the French bourgeois revolutionists made a declaration of the rights of man, so the Socialist members of this new time must make their own declaration, fitting the hour and the new demand. He followed with a statement of the Bolshevik program of land to the peasants, control of industry by the workers, government by the Soviets, recognition of the People’s Commissaries by the Constituent Assembly, and immediate general democratic peace.

The Bolsheviki punctuated his speech with vigorous applause. The right Socialists expressed themselves equally emphatically by stolid silence.

When he finished, a delegate proposed that the Assembly sing the “International.” It was a challenge no Socialist could refuse. They arose to a man. This was the first and last time, in that stormy twelve hours’ session, that they were united upon any single point.

The Cadet members had all remained away. Every man in the room was a Socialist. But worlds of unbridgable distance kept them apart. Combination and compromise were utterly impossible. The Bolsheviki had all the powers of possession, reinforced by the unanimous backing of the Russian bayonets. The conservatives had a feeble and helpless majority.

The right S. R.’s proposed Chernoff as chairman of the Assembly. Squertsoff, an old Moscow schoolmaster, nominated Marie Spiridonova in a brief challenge of uncompromise.

“Everything is ended between us,” he said. “You are with the Cadets and the bourgeoisie. We are with the workers!”

In their choice of leaders, both parties were flinging wide to catch the Russian peasant. They were reaching into the thatched huts of White Russia and the log cabins of Siberia, and they were using the two human beings who could be counted upon to make the greatest appeal to the men who gather round the Russian stoves at night, and talk politics in simple peasant fashion.

Some one suggested, as a compromise, that there be two chairmen. It was voted down. Krylenko proposed that Kerensky be elected. Some one else indignantly declared it was no time to joke.

The vote was counted. From the box I watched the tellers dropping the tiny marbles from one bowl into another. My note-book was open upon my lap. Every time a marble dropped I made a mark. When the last vote was counted, I turned to Colonel Robins:

“It’s Chernoff!” I said. “He has 244 votes to Marie Spiridonova’s 151.”

The others had not noticed what I was doing, and they looked up, wondering whether I had suddenly become clairvoyant or merely gone mad. I showed them my pen-scratchings. From the platform, the chairman confirmed my figures.

After the election the flood-gates of speech were opened. Denunciation followed denunciation. The evening hours ran on to midnight, and with each passing hour the possibility of compromise seemed farther and farther away.

Chernoff’s opening speech was greeted with cries of “Deloy! Deloy!” (Down! Down!) The empty space in the back of our box was filled up with men. A dark, swarthy-skinned factory worker, with sullen eyes, that flamed red and went black by turns, sat just behind me. Poised on the railing was a Bolshevik sailor, who interrupted frequently with shouts of “Korniloff! Kaledin! Kerensky! Counter-revolutionist!”

In the adjoining box Trotzky’s sister, Madame Kameneff, sat, surrounded by soldiers with new revolvers in shining cases strapped at their hips. In the room where the Right S. R.’s held their meetings, a machine-gun spoke a silent but none the less ominous warning.

Every one of those four hundred delegates was a human bomb, ready to explode at any second. Lenin alone seemed unperturbed. He stretched himself out on one of the red-carpeted steps of the tribunal, and, hidden from the eyes of the crowd, went calmly to sleep.

The only speaker to whom the radical members paid the slightest attention was Tseretelli. To me he was the heroic figure of the day. He pleaded a lost cause, but he made a brave last stand. His position was uncompromising on the main issue, and therefore impossible; but he talked with a sincerity and straightforwardness that commanded the respect, if not the agreement, of his opponents.

After his speech, the Bolsheviki demanded from the Constituent Assembly confirmation of the decrees already passed regarding peace, land, and control of industry. Most of all, they demanded recognition of the Soviet government as the supreme power. They asked that the question of the government be settled first.

The conservative majority voted to consider war and peace first, the land question next, and finally a federative republic, thus postponing the fatal issue. With this, the Bolsheviki demanded the right of intermission for party caucus. It was granted.

Two hours passed. Nothing happened. The members of the Right grew impatient. The Chairman reopened the meeting, and Skobeleff, former Minister of Labor, demanded the appointment of a commission to investigate the bloodshed of the day.

Representatives of the Left filed back to their seats. A Bolshevik member read a statement declaring that the majority of the Constituent Assembly had refused to accept the demands of the People’s Commissaries, which were the demands of the toiling masses and the economic revolution, and in so doing had become a counter-revolutionary body.

With that the Bolsheviki left the hall. The Left S. R.’s, headed by Marie Spiridonova and a handsome young revolutionist named Komkoff, remained to offer a resolution that the Constituent Assembly recognize the peace steps of the People’s Commissaries. The delegates refused. Instead, they passed a resolution asking, in the name of the Constituent Assembly, that all countries at war come to an agreement for a general democratic peace.

A sudden commotion arose. Two men were on their feet, hurling ugly names at each other. One drew a revolver. Some one grabbed him and pressed him quickly into his seat. The difference of opinion was a personal one. For a terrible minute the crowd sat breathless. The guards in the balcony, thinking a real fight was about to begin, loaded their guns. Quiet returned in a flash, and the chairman went on with the meeting; but the incident had not helped to loosen the taut nerves. The Left S. R.’s got up quietly from their seats, and departed from the convention as the Bolsheviki had done.

For half an hour the meeting continued. A resolution proclaiming the Federated Republic of Russia was passed. The question of nationalization of land without compensation was introduced. Before the discussion had progressed far, the guard ordered the meeting closed.

“I was appointed to defend the Constituent Assembly,” said the commissary of the palace. “This meeting has now become simply a party caucus, and we suggest that you retire to the headquarters of the Right S. R.”

The guard yawned. President Chernoff demurred. The guns once more began to assume ominous positions.

“Why should we wait? We should arrest all! We should kill the counter-revolutionist Chernoff!” came in angry murmurs from factory workers and soldiers.

The delegates looked from one to another. Some one moved a resolution to adjourn until five that afternoon. It was promptly adopted.

The murmurs of “Counter-revolutionist!” grew louder and louder. The soldiers and sailors flocked down the stairs, and crowded around the delegates. Some of the Bolshevik members who had remained in the ball-room surrounded Chernoff, and took him in safety through the hostile throng to the gate.

Every man who walked out in the gray morning knew that the Constituent Assembly was at an end.

It was foredoomed to just this fate. Its existence hung upon one point--the acceptance or rejection of a government of people’s commissaries. For the moderate Socialists to have accepted the Bolsheviki, whose leaders they had denounced as usurpers and traitors and whose work they had been sabotaging, would from their standpoint have been impossible.

For the People’s Commissaries to have permitted themselves to be rejected would have been to acknowledge themselves a body of adventurers, and all of their decrees mere scraps of worthless paper.

I have never met in any country any group of men possessed of such power as theirs who would have acted otherwise.

The Constituent Assembly contained the seeds of a great governmental experiment, but they were scattered upon the rocks of uncompromise, and there could be no harvest.

At midnight Albert Williams was talking to Madame Kolontai.

“How long do you think the Constituent Assembly will last?” he asked.

“Comrade, don’t you think it has lasted too long already?” she answered.