of the peasantry, while next came the Bolsheviks, who drew their chief support from the workmen in the towns and from the soldiers. The Mensheviks and the Cadets came in with negli- gible numbers, the latter with 15 out of a total of 600.
The Bolsheviks were not satisfied with such results. As soon as it became clear that they had not won in the gamble for votes, they began to revile the " parliamentarism " of the Constituent Assembly and of all national organizations as opposed to class groups. When the members of the Constituent Assembly came to Petrograd, and tried to get into the Taurida Palace, they were met by armed guards and ejected from the building. Leading members of the Cadet party, Countess S. Panina, Shingarev and Kokostsev, were arrested as " enemies of the people " and thrown into the dungeons of the Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. Anorderforthe arrest of Chernov and Avk- sentiev was also issued, but they could not be found. At last, on Jan. 1 8 1918 the opening sitting of the Constituent Assembly was held. Trusty heroes from the Kronstadt fleet, with loaded rifles, surrounded the deputies from all sides; the galleries were packed with a howling mob. In spite of this, the election of the President resulted in a defeat for the Bolsheviks and the Social Revolutionaries of the Left allied with them. Their candidate, Marie Spiridonova, received 158 votes against V. Chernov, who got 244. Nor did the Assembly consent to register all the decrees handed in by the Bolsheviks and to abdicate its legisla- tive power in favour of the Soviets. The armed rulers were not disposed to bow before the recalcitrant Assembly. After sitting one day, it was dissolved and ejected from the Taurida Palace.
By way of justification for this act of treacherous violence, it was maintained that the Constituent Assembly did not reflect the " will of the Revolution," that the " masses " had moved away from the standpoints represented by the party lists, and that, altogether, " formal democracy " has no right to decide in times of Revolution: the leadership ought to belong to the advanced organizations conscious of their aim and intent on achieving it. It was not difficult even for " nebulous " Social Revolutionaries of the Centre and Right to refute these sophisms. They urged with perfect truth that the will of the Revolution in this case meant simply the arbitrary sway of a gang of reckless adventurers, that the Assembly, in spite of all its defects, was the one authorized institution entitled to speak for Russia, an institution which had been recognized and made use of by the Bolsheviks as long as it suited the purposes of their propaganda. But what force had arguments in the face of rifles? The soldiers had run away from the front in order to rob and kill in the name of the Revolution: no one was ready to satisfy and to glorify them to the same extent as the Bolsheviks. Hence there was ample "pragmatic" justification for the Bolsheviks' coup d'etat. Naturally the first acts of the new era were decrees of the Executive Council proclaiming the abolition of private prop- erty and the resolve to conclude a democratic peace.
Peace of Brest Litovsk. Two parties were necessary in order to conclude that honourable peace " without annexations and indemnities " which the Bolsheviks announced before having informed themselves of the views of the other party as to the conditions of such a peace. Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev and their colleagues had, however, made up their minds about certain points, so that the ordinary negotiations were for them only a formal act, attractive in so far as they enabled their sans culotte delegation to exchange salutations and to sit at the same table with the diplomatists and soldiers of powerful empires. The Bolsheviks had long ago made their choice between the belliger- ents; they expected and preferred the victory of the Germans, who had served them and provided them with funds in the hour of need. Hypocritical invitations to the Allies to follow in their wake at Brest Litovsk could deceive no one as to their choice. And as they had done more than anyone to corrupt and disband the Russian army, they knew perfectly well that they had noth- ing to oppose General Hoffmann, when the latter chose to " bang his boot on the table " (Trotsky). Some show was made in their newspapers of strikes in Austria and in Berlin, but it was clearly a case of discussing terms with an opponent who
had disarmed you and may dispatch you at his pleasure. No wonder that Baron Kiihlmann, after accepting the formula of an honourable peace " without indemnities and annexations " on the basis of the self-determination of peoples, required the rep- resentatives of the Soviet Republic to cede Poland and Courland to the Central Empires, to recognize Finland, Esthonia and Latvia as independent States, to give up the Ukraine on both shores of the Dnieper, and to pay a contribution of 300 million rubles. Trotsky tried to get away with a theatrical gesture; he and his colleagues declared that they could not sign such a humiliating peace, and they departed in noble style. Even this little pretence was not vouchsafed to them. General Hoffmann ordered some German divisions to advance, and the revolution- ary army was at once on the run. The delegation of Soviets had to come back crestfallen and to sign a second more dishonourable edition of the Treaty of Brest Litovsk. Lenin was in no way disturbed: he explained to the Third Congress of the Soviets that the Germans had their knees on Russia's chest and that it was no use struggling. Breathing space must be had at any price, in the hope of a further fulfilment of Zimmerwald predic- tions. The Congress ratified the Brest Litovsk document by a large majority, and a German envoy, Count Mirbach, was sent to Moscow to watch over the exact fulfilment of conditions by the vanquished. Trotsky, who is particularly fond of repeating, at every turn of his account of these affairs, such phrases as " we know " or " we expected," may well claim that this degra- dation had been foreseen and to a great extent brought about by his party. But the breathing space required by Lenin was provided, not by the Brest Litovsk peace, which was the opening move for the complete enslavement of Russia by the Germans, but by the unexpected fact that the Allies did not succumb, in spite of the treacherous conduct of the Bolsheviks. The Marx- ist prognostics of the victory of Germany as the nation best organized in a technical and economic sense was shown to be fallacious. The staying power of the Austrian, Bulgarian and German armies proved to be less than that of the soldiers of France, Great Britain and the United States. The victory of the Allies saved Russia from the consequences of Brest Litovsk. The Rule of the Communists. In spite of the fact that the elections to the Constituent Assembly had resulted in an over- whelming majority for the Social Revolutionists, the drastic way in which Lenin and his companions had satisfied the popular demands for peace at any price, for land and for proletarian privileges, ensured to them the more or less fervid support of the masses. The lower classes enjoyed the defeat and humiliations of their betters even apart from direct advantages and even at the cost of some discomfort for themselves. The pent-up resent- ment and envy of generations found vent in acts of brutal violence and disorder. It was pleasant to see maids of honour sweeping the streets, and generals insulted and sometimes murdered by their soldiers. We are told of cases when the descendants of serfs dug out the skeletons of their former squires from their graves and threw them into sewers. It was an act of frenzy on the part of revolted slaves when the commander-in-chief, Dukhonin, was torn to pieces at his headquarters and Ensign Krylenko installed in his place, or when, later, the heroes of the great war Ruzsky and Radko Dmitriev were massacred in Piatigorsk because they did not truckle under the threats of the disbanded soldiery. The officers slaughtered in Helsingfors, in Kronstadt, in Kiev, in Sevastopol, paid with their blood for the disaster of Tsushima, the Sukhomlinov misrule, the cruel dis- cipline of the Old Army. As a result, Bolshevik domination spread over the land like a forest fire, and all attempts at resist- ance proved unavailing against its elemental progress. The cadets of the military schools of Moscow held the Kremlin for a few days with great gallantry, but they were betrayed by Ihe head of the Moscow garrison; he surrendered them to the Com- munists " for the sake of peace." Occasional resistance in other towns was put down with even greater ease. The personnel of many administrative institutions went on strike, and attempted to stalemate the usurpers by refusing to serve under them: the strikers were reduced to obedience after a couple of months by
