The Russian Revolution: Chapter 4: The Constituent Assembly

Click here to access this chapter by Rosa Luxemburg from her book The Russian Revolution that she wrote in prison in 1918 a few months before she and Karl Liebknecht, left-wing members of the German Social Democratic Party, were assassinated. 

(For present day readers difficulties are presented in the book with the (now) obscure references she makes to events that were well known in her time. The notes help somewhat. She writes in the style of German writers of this era by using complex sentences. Also this English translation of her book was published in 1940, and I think it likely poses some problems for present day readers. Nevertheless her insights shine through these difficulties.)

Luxemburg argues in this chapter that the Bolsheviks were inconsistent with regard to constituent assemblies. They promoted them initially, but after the completion of the takeover of the government, they had no further use for them.  

It is a fact that Lenin and his comrades were stormily demanding the calling of a Constituent Assembly up to the time of their October victory, and that the policy of ragging out this matter on the part of the Kerensky government constituted an article in the indictment of that government by the Bolsheviks and was the basis of some of their most violent attacks upon it. Indeed, Trotsky says in his interesting pamphlet, From October to Brest-Litovsk, that the October Revolution represented “the salvation of the Constituent Assembly” as well as of the revolution as a whole. “And when we said,” he continues, “that the entrance to the Constituent Assembly could not be reached through the Preliminary Parliament of Zeretelli, but only through the seizure of power by the Soviets, we were entirely right.”

And then, after these declarations, Lenin’s first step after the October Revolution was ... the dissolution of this same Constituent Assembly, to which it was supposed to be an entrance. What reasons could be decisive for so astonishing a turn?

After reporting the rationales that the Bolshevik leaders offered, she makes a counter argument:

Since the Constituent Assembly was elected long before the decisive turning point, the October Revolution, and its composition reflected the picture of the vanished past and not of the new state of affairs, then it follows automatically that the outgrown and therefore still-born Constituent Assembly should have been annulled, and without delay, new elections to a new Constituent Assembly should have been arranged.

She will address this anti-democratic stance of the Bolsheviks more completely in a later chapter.