Public Reaction To Closure
Shortly after the closure of the Constituent Assembly, a Right SR deputy from the Volga region argued: "o defend the Constituent Assembly, to defend us, its members - that is the duty of the people." Yet Ronald W. Clark notes that the closure of the Constituent Assembly provoked "comparatively little reaction, even in political circles." Orlando Figes argued: "There was no mass reaction to the closure of the Constituent Assembly. ... The SR intelligentsia had always been mistaken in their belief that the peasants shared their veneration for the Constituent Assembly. ... o the mass of the peasants ... it was only a distant thing in the city, dominated by the 'chiefs' of the various parties, which they did not understand, and was quite unlike their own political organizations."
Figes argues that the Right SRs' allegiance to the Provisional Government had isolated them from the mass of peasants: "Their adopted sense of responsibility for the state (and no doubt a little pride in their new ministerial status) led the Right SRs to reject their old terrorist ways of revolutionary struggle and depend exclusively on parliamentary methods."
Indeed, scholars have argued that the Constituent Assembly had not properly represented the will of the peasantry. The ballots for the Assembly had not differentiated between the Right SRs, who opposed the Bolshevik government, and the Left SRs, who were coalition partners with the Bolsheviks. Thus many peasant votes intended for the Left SRs elected Right SR deputies. In his study of the Constituent Assembly election, O. H. Radkey argues:
The election, therefore, does not measure the strength of this element . 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
Radkey thus argued:
Of ... 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. For the Constituent Assembly, even before it had come into existence, had been caught in a back-eddy of the swiftly flowing stream of revolutionary developments and no longer commanded the interest and allegiance of the general population which alone could have secured it against a violent death.
Read more about this topic: Russian Constituent Assembly
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