V. I. Lenin

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

[January 31 (18), 1918]

A number of laws, decrees and ordinances of the Soviet government contain references to the Constituent Assembly and its legislative character.

After the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly by the Central Executive Committee and the endorsement of this step by the Third All-Russia Congress of Soviets, all these references automatically lapse and are annulled.

Therefore the Third All-Russia Congress of Soviets resolves: all references to the future Constituent Assembly shall be removed from all new editions of decrees and laws of the Soviet government.

The decree, written by Lenin, was proposed by Y. M. Sverdlov at the concluding session of the Third All-Russia Congress of Soviets on January 31 (18), 1918. According to the reporter’s account in No. 15 of *Pravda* of February 1 (January 19), 1918, only the third (last) paragraph of the decree was adopted at the congress; the first two paragraphs (which are slightly crossed out in the manuscript) are not given in the account. The decree was not printed in the official verbatim report, which contains only Sverdlov’s speech in the spirit of the decree as printed here and the statement that the proposal was adopted without debate. Only two or three Right Socialist-Revolutionaries voted against it (see *Third All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies*, Petersburg, 1918, p. 85).

The document was most probably written at the congress session itself on January 31 (18), 1918, before Lenin’s concluding speech.