V. I. Lenin

Source: ru:PSS/v35; en:CW/CW26; ru:LS/v18;es:MT
Translated: machine translation (DeepSeek) from the Russian; AI-translated.

1. THESES

1. The historical approach of the developing Russian revolution to the conflict between the Constituent Assembly and the Soviet power:

— The Soviets as the only popular force that overthrew the monarchy;

— the growth and consolidation of the Soviets from February 28 up to October 25;

— the elections to the Constituent Assembly before the split among the Socialist-Revolutionaries and before the Great October Socialist Revolution;

— the election of the Socialist-Revolutionaries on the Soviet lists.

3. For a socialist revolution it is not the so-called “all-national” institutions of bourgeois parliamentarism that are necessary, but the class institutions of the working and exploited masses.

The development of the Russian revolution has outlived bourgeois parliamentarism in the course of the struggle and conciliation, having created the Soviet republic as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the poorest peasantry.

Not a step back.

Manuscript of V. I. Lenin’s theses for the draft decree on the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. — January 6 (19), 1918. (Reduced)

4. To the direct and open demand of the Central Executive Committee the Constituent Assembly did not reply...

5. The party of the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks, outside the Constituent Assembly, is waging a frenzied counter-revolutionary struggle against the October Revolution.

6. The result: the Constituent Assembly, in its remaining part, is a cover for the struggle of the counter-revolutionaries to overthrow the Soviet power...

7. The Constituent Assembly is dissolved.

8. This draft decree is to be submitted to the Central Executive Committee today.

2. DRAFT DECREE

The Russian revolution, from its very beginning, brought forward the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies as the mass organisation of all the working and exploited classes, the only one capable of guiding the struggle of these classes for their complete political and economic emancipation.

Throughout the first period of the Russian revolution the Soviets multiplied, grew and gained strength, outliving on their own experience the illusions of conciliation with the bourgeoisie, the deceptiveness of the forms of bourgeois-democratic parliamentarism, and arriving practically at the conclusion that it was impossible for the oppressed classes to achieve emancipation without breaking with these forms and with all conciliation. This break was the October Revolution, which transferred all power to the Soviets.

The Constituent Assembly, elected on the lists drawn up before the October Revolution, was an expression of the old relation of political forces, when the conciliators and the Cadets were in power. The people could not then, when voting for the candidates of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, make a choice between the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, the supporters of the bourgeoisie, and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, the supporters of socialism. Thus this Constituent Assembly, which was to have been the crown of the bourgeois parliamentary republic, could not but stand in the way of the October Revolution and the Soviet power.

The October Revolution, by giving power to the Soviets and, through the Soviets, to the working and exploited classes, aroused the desperate resistance of the exploiters, and in suppressing this resistance it fully revealed itself as the beginning of the socialist revolution. The working classes had to learn from experience that the old bourgeois parliamentarism had outlived its day, that it was absolutely incompatible with the tasks of achieving socialism, that not national, but only class institutions (such as the Soviets) are capable of overcoming the resistance of the propertied classes and of laying the foundations of socialist society. Any renunciation of the full power of the Soviets, of the Soviet Republic won by the people, in favour of bourgeois parliamentarism and the Constituent Assembly, would now be a step backward and a collapse of the entire October Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolution.

The Constituent Assembly, which met on January 5, gave, owing to the circumstances enumerated above, a majority to the party of the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, the party of Kerensky, Avksentyev and Chernov. Naturally, this party refused to consider the absolutely precise, clear and unambiguous proposal of the supreme organ of Soviet power, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, to recognise the programme of Soviet power, to recognise the “Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited People”, to recognise the October Revolution and the Soviet power. By this, the Constituent Assembly severed every tie between itself and the Soviet Republic of Russia. The withdrawal from such a Constituent Assembly of the Bolshevik and Left Socialist-Revolutionary factions, which now constitute an overwhelming majority in the Soviets and enjoy the confidence of the workers and the majority of the peasants, was inevitable.

In fact, the parties of the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks are, outside the Constituent Assembly, waging the most desperate struggle against the Soviet power, openly calling in their organs for its overthrow, describing as arbitrary and illegal the forcible suppression of the resistance of the exploiters by the working classes, which is essential for their emancipation from exploitation, defending the saboteurs who serve capital, and going so far as to make undisguised appeals to terrorism, which has already been started by “unknown groups”. It is clear that the remaining part of the Constituent Assembly can, therefore, serve only as a cover for the struggle of the counter-revolutionaries to overthrow the Soviet power.

For this reason the Central Executive Committee resolves:

The Constituent Assembly is dissolved.