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From New International, Vol. XVI No. 6, November–December 1950, pp. 334–338. [1*]
Transcribed by Ted Crawford.
Marked up up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
There lately appeared a little monograph [1] which reports the fruits of an exceptionally thorough study of the 1917 election for the Russian Constituent Assembly. Written by a scholar with an anti-Bolshevik bias, sponsored by Professor Karpovich of Harvard, himself an emigré and an old member of the Right S-R’s (Socialist-Revolutionary Party) it is astonishing how the arsenal of facts arranged and analyzed by the author fully supports the classic Bolshevik analysis of the Assembly.
Radkey’s work is based on a study of the three previous important investigations, by the S-R statistician, Sviatitski, by Lenin, and, years later, by the Archives of the October Revolution, plus additional material extracted by him from libraries as far apart as Moscow, Prague, Paris, Harvard and Stanford. Some of the returns first unearthed by him are valuable in showing the distribution of political strength in areas not previously accounted for.
The author’s willingness to give credit where credit is due, in view of his own expressed fundamental antipathy toward Bolshevism, is indicated by his judgment of Lenin’s analysis:
“He conscientiously sought in the figures the lessons they contained for his party, whether flattering or otherwise, and his deductions constitute a thorough and penetrating analysis of the results.”
What were these results, in brief form? In the election as a whole the Bolsheviks received 9,844,637 votes and the S-R’s, the tremendous non-Marxist populist party, 15,848,004 votes, out of a total of 41,686,876. Thus the Bolsheviks, in an election held shortly after they had led the seizure of power, obtained only 23 per cent of the total vote. On the other hand, parties which claimed to be socialist – that is, Bolsheviks, S-Rs, Mensheviks, Ukrainian S-Rs, etc. – obtained altogether over 80 per cent of the vote, despite the presence of plenty of bourgeois lists to choose from!
Thus the election demonstrated the overwhelming desire of the worker, soldier and peasant masses for a basic social change, but equally demonstrated that in Russia as a whole the Bolshevik Party did not by itself have majority support. But although the peasants were reluctant to transfer their allegiance away from their traditional party, the SR’s, they were not reluctant about supporting that left wing of their party which in Petrograd, for example, had participated in the seizure of power; and was everywhere, in the local soviets, advocating support of the new Soviet power.
The S-R party was in the process of splitting at the time the elections took place and Bolsheviks have always pointed to the Congress of Peasant Soviets, meeting several weeks after the Constituent elections and assembling representatives of hundreds of local soviets, as an indication of the way the S-R’s actually divided. At this Congress the small Bolshevik Minority established collaboration with a Left S-R majority that voted to support the Soviet power. The Right-S-R’s were snowed under in two weeks of democratic discussion. The evidence of the Peasant Congress has always been accompanied by the Bolshevik contention that the S-R lists for the Constituent elections, being made up months in advance, in view of geographical necessities, were overloaded With the old public figures of the Party, mostly in the right-wing, and that, therefore, the S-R deputies elected to the Constituent on these united lists were not representative of the views of the peasant voters. In sum the Bolsheviks contended that ‘if the S-R split had taken place in time for separate Left and Right lists to campaign throughout the country, the Constituent would have had a majority coalition of Bolsheviks and Left S-R’s. And it is true that if we divide the sixteen million S-R votes in these elections in the same proportions as the Left and Right S-R’s divided at the Peasant Congress (about two to one in favor of the Left), the vote of Bolsheviks plus Left S-R’s would come to 49 per cent of the total, which, in view of scattered votes and the existence of a few additional small pro-Soviet groups, would give the Soviet coalition an easy majority.
It is therefore gratifying to find that Radkey endorses fully the notion of the unrepresentative character of the S-R lists (p.72):
“The election, therefore, does not measure the strength of this element [the Left S-R’s – S.B.]. The lists were drawn up long before the schism occurred; they were top-heavy with older party workers whose radicalism had abated by 1917. The people voted indiscriminately for the S-R label ... The leftward current was doubtless stronger everywhere on November 12 than when the lists had been drawn up ... The writer’s judgments are based on his unpublished dissertation, The Party of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Russian Revolution of 1917 (Harvard University, 1939).”
One thing that does not occur to Radkey in his study is that the Bolsheviks never recognized the validity of the will of an assembly in which a majority was based on the inclusion of nationality groups that desired independence. The Russian Bolsheviks in the days of Lenin and Trotsky took the principle of self-determination of nationalities seriously. Therefore, to them an insurrection of the Russian masses could not be proved a minority coup d’etat by adding to the conservative Russian minority the votes received by nationalist parties in the Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, etc. These countries were free to secede unless a native movement arose and received the people’s support for a program of federation with Soviet Russia.
However, we have indicated that the Bolsheviks and Left S-R’s probably had the support of a majority of the entire electorate, Russian and non-Russian. If one merely eliminates predominantly non-Russian regions, leaving in only the results on Russian areas, including scattered non-Russian minorities within these areas, one finds that the Bolsheviks by them-selves now have 26 per cent of the total vote and that our theoretical Bolshevik-Left S-R combined total, calculated the same way as previously, rises from 49 per cent to 57 per cent! In addition, there were two national minority areas, those of the Letts and of the White Russians, where the Bolsheviks had an absolute majority, so that these two peoples would of their own choice have joined and further strengthened the Soviet regime.
On the basis of Radkey’s statistical studies it will now appear totally ludicrous if anti-Bolsheviks continue to claim that the Soviet government of January 1918, based democratically on locally elected soldiers, workers and peasants soviets, which were multi-party in composition, should have considered the Constituent Assembly that then convened, with its majority combination of Right S-R’s who no longer represented anyone and minority nationality representatives who wanted independence, as entitled to exclusive sovereignty, partial sovereignty, or any consideration whatever other than the treatment they received. A body that meant nothing laid claim to sovereignty over the Russian people – it could only be dispersed. Actually, despite occasional phrases about Bolshevik “despotism,” Radkey can’t help admitting the conclusion his studies point to (p.2):
“Lenin dissolved the Constituent Assembly by force ... Of more fateful significance was the fact that while the democratic parties heaped opprobrium upon him for this act of despotism, their following showed little inclination to defend an institution which the Russian people had ceased to regard as necessary to the fulfilment of its cherished desires.”
Perhaps equal in interest to students of the Russian Revolution is Radkey’s breakdown of the election results in the various provinces and in various local situations, because of the light it sheds on the tempo of revolutionary development and on the problems involved a month before the election in the armed insurrection spearheaded by the Petrograd Soviet. In the immediate sense the revolution was made by two forces – the workers and the soldiers. The soldiers themselves, like the bulk of the Russian people, were peasants – but peasants with a speeded-up revolutionary education through their disgust with the war and their contact with the class-conscious urban proletariat. The Bolsheviks never claimed that they needed a sanctified 51 per cent counting of noses in the whole vast, chaotic country to have the right to overthrow the entirely undemocratic hand-picked Provisional Government of Kerensky. Furthermore, they faced the danger that if they did not act in October to satisfy the urgent pressure of the workers and soldiers, and postponed the insurrection until their agitation had penetrated deeper into the countryside, the revolutionary tide in the advanced centers would bog down in, demoralization and the insurrection would become impossible. The decision of the Petrograd Soviet to take power, therefore, meant that the workers and the advanced peasants (the soldiers) would take the lead in the nation and complete the development of the rest of the peasantry by actually carrying out in life the agrarian reform that the Right S-R’s had al ways promised, but never executed.
In Radkey’s figures can be discerned the confirmation of this whole picture with astonishing consistency:
These were the areas where the October Revolution found its strength, but let us not forget that the areas where national minorities voted nationalist were also, in October, centrifugal forces weakening the Provisional Government which had denied them independence. Thus, for example, if we were to take the most important of all, the Ukraine, and divide up its votes in the sense in which they would have had political meaning on the eve of the insurrection, we would have the following:
|
Nationality parties |
|
4,895,529 |
|
Bolsheviks |
859,330 |
|
|
S-R’s |
1,597,363 |
|
|
Mensheviks, Kadets and minor Russian parties |
640,983 |
When we make our customary appraisal of the majority of the S-R votes as being really Left S-R, we see that practically the whole of the Ukraine had been opposed to the Provisional Government on the basis of either desire for national independence or support of social revolution. The same held true in Armenia, Azerbaijan and even among the Moslem minorities scattered through the Volga and Ural regions. The sole exception was Georgia, the stronghold of Menshevism, but here the Menshevik vote only serves as a sharp reminder of the total extinction of Menshevik influence among the Russian masses. We find that if we omit Georgia, the Mensheviks received 2 per cent of the vote in all Russia! What a striking indication of the radical polarization of the population! Only five months before they had been the equal of the Bolsheviks in urban voting strength. Now they had been wiped out in what Radkey calls elections unpressured by Lenin’s government in any respect.
Also striking is the fact that the relations between Petrograd-neighboring provinces – remote provinces are perfectly mirrored inside the remote provinces when you examine the relations between garrison town – nearby peasant villages – distant villages. Radkey gives a number of examples of the vote in S-R strongholds in the “black earth” region. In the town the garrison votes Bolshevik, the shopkeepers Kadet or Menshevik. In the nearby villages the peasants, though thousands of miles away from the center of events, vote Bolshevik because the garrison soldiers have reached them with their message. As you travel farther away from the town, the S-R’s dominate the villages. In either case the peasant was voting for the same thing – the agrarian revolution.
The sweep of the revolution was also demonstrated by the total lack of influence of the Orthodox Church. Everywhere votes for Orthodox lists were almost nil. Even more strikingly, in remote regions of the Urals where the Old Believer sects were strong, the majority of the peasants voted S-R or Bolshevik and boycotted the Old Believer lists, despite their fanatical religious attachment to these sects.
In short, in every sphere the statistics bear witness to the living force of the Russian Revolution. In every sense Radkey’s study is a new weapon in the hands of revolutionary socialists with which to defend the October Revolution against either dishonest or misinformed critics.
1. The Election to the Russian Constituent Assembly of 1917, by O.H. Radkey. Harvard University Press 1950. 89pp. $2.00.
1*. Saul Berg was a pseudonym of Saul Mendelson.
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