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Landowners, capitalists, military officials, and Intellectuals were united with the peasants and artisans, to an even greater extent than in the early stages of the First Revolution. Conservatives and Moderates joined with Social Democrats and Socialist-Revolutionists in opposition to the corrupt and oppressive régime.
It was quite certain that a great many Soviets had refused to send delegates, and that many thousands of workers, and these all anti-Bolsheviki, had simply grown weary and disgusted with the whole struggle. Whatever the explanation might be, the fact remained that of the 676 delegates 390 were generally rated as Bolsheviki, while 230 were Socialist-Revolutionists and Mensheviki.
Thanks in part to the vigorous propaganda of such leaders as Plechanov, Deutsch, Bourtzev, Tseretelli, Kerensky, and many others, and in part to the instinctive good sense of the masses, support of the war by Socialists of all shades and factions except the extreme Bolsheviki and the so-called "Internationalist" sections of Mensheviki and Socialist-Revolutionists became general.
The Bolsheviki had the majority only in Petrograd and Moscow and in certain units of the army. To violence and conquest of power by force of arms the population answered by the elections to the Constituent Assembly, the people sent to this Assembly, not the Bolsheviki, but, by an overwhelming majority, Socialist-Revolutionists.
Bands of soldiers were forthwith sent into the country to cause trouble there.... The bands of soldiers who were sent into the country used not only persuasion, but also violence, trying to force the peasants to give their votes for the Bolshevik candidates at the time of the elections to the Constituent Assembly; they tore up the bulletins of the Socialist-Revolutionists, overturned the ballot-boxes, etc.... The inhabitants of the country proved themselves in all that concerned the elections wide awake to the highest degree.
In the announcement of their withdrawal from the Constituent Assembly when it assembled in January the Bolshevik members admitted that the Socialist-Revolutionists had "obtained a majority of the Constituent Assembly." The attitude of the Bolsheviki toward the Constituent Assembly changed as their electoral prospects changed.
There were in the Cabinet five Social Democrats, two Socialist-Revolutionists, eight Constitutional Democrats, and two non-partisans. It was therefore as far as its predecessors from meeting the standards insisted upon by many radical Socialists, who, while not Bolsheviki, still believed that there should be at least an absolute Socialist predominance in the Provisional Government.
The bands of soldiers, who were sent into the country, used not only persuasion, but also violence, trying to force the peasants to give their votes for the Bolshevik candidates at the time of the elections to the Constituent Assembly; they tore up the bulletins of the Socialist-Revolutionists, overturned the ballot-boxes, etc.
Kerensky, Savinkoff, Filonenko and other Socialist-Revolutionists of the government or semi-government class participated in this conspiracy, but each and every one of them at a certain stage of the altering circumstances betrayed Korniloff, for they knew that in the case of his defeat, they would turn out to have been on the wrong side of the fence.
Second, as Marie Spiridonova abundantly demonstrated at an All-Russian Soviet Conference in July, 1918, the Bolshevik government did not honorably live up to its agreement with the Socialist-Revolutionists of the Left.
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