V. I. Lenin

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

From the very beginning of the Russian revolution the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies came forward as a mass organisation of all the working and exploited classes, the only organisation capable of directing 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 through their own experience. They shed their illusions concerning conciliation with the bourgeoisie, and realised the deceptive nature of the forms of bourgeois-democratic parliamentarism. In practice they arrived at the conclusion that it was impossible to liberate the oppressed classes without breaking with these forms and with all conciliation. That break was the October Revolution, which placed all power in the hands of the Soviets.

The Constituent Assembly, elected on the basis of lists drawn up prior to the October Revolution, was an expression of the old relation of political forces which existed when the power was held by the compromisers and the Cadets. At that time the people, when voting for the candidates of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, were not in a position to choose between the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, the supporters of the bourgeoisie, and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, the supporters of socialism. Thus the Constituent Assembly, which was to have been the crown of the bourgeois parliamentary republic, could not but become an obstacle in the path 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. In the suppression of this resistance the October Revolution fully revealed itself as the beginning of the socialist revolution. The working classes learned by experience that the old bourgeois parliamentarism had outlived its day, that it is absolutely incompatible with the aims of the realisation of socialism, and that not national institutions, but only class institutions (such as the Soviets) are capable of overcoming the resistance of the propertied classes and of laying the foundations of a 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 backwards and would cause the collapse of the entire October workers’ and peasants’ revolution.

When the Constituent Assembly met on January 5, the majority of its members belonged to the Right Socialist-Revolutionary Party, the party of Kerensky, Avksentyev and Chernov. Naturally, this party refused to discuss the absolutely precise, clear and unambiguous proposal of the supreme organ of the Soviet power, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, to recognise the programme of the 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 action the Constituent Assembly severed all connection with the Soviet Republic of Russia. The withdrawal from the Constituent Assembly of the Bolshevik and Left Socialist-Revolutionary groups, which now constitute an overwhelming majority in the Soviets and enjoy the confidence of the workers and the majority of the peasants, was inevitable.

Outside the Constituent Assembly the parties of the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks are waging a most desperate struggle against the Soviet power. In their organs they openly call for its overthrow, and describe as arbitrary and illegal the suppression by force of the resistance of the exploiters by the working classes, a suppression which is essential if the exploited are to be emancipated. They defend the saboteurs who are in the service of capital, and have even gone to the length of undisguised appeals to terrorism, which has already been started by “unknown persons”. It is clear that the remaining part of the Constituent Assembly can, therefore, serve only as a screen for the struggle of the counter-revolutionaries to overthrow the Soviet power.

Accordingly, the Central Executive Committee resolves:

The Constituent Assembly is hereby dissolved.