Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 26 - From Marx to Mao

DRAFT DECREE ON DISSOLUTION OF CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY435The October Revolution, by giving power to the Soviets,and through the Soviets to the working and exploited classes,aroused the desperate resistance of the exploiters, and inthe crushing of this resistance it fully revealed itself at thebeginning of the socialist revolution. The working classeslearned by experience that the old bourgeois parliamentarysystem had outlived its purpose and was absolutely incompatiblewith the aim of achieving socialism, and that notnational institutions, but only class institutions (such as theSoviets) were capable of overcoming the resistance of thepropertied classes and of laying the foundations of socialistsociety. To relinquish the sovereign power of the Soviets,to relinquish the Soviet Republic won by the people, forthe sake of the bourgeois parliamentary system and the ConstituentAssembly, would now be a step backwards andwould cause the collapse of the October workers’ and peasants’revolution.Owing to the above-mentioned circumstances, the Partyof Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, the party of Kerensky,Avksentyev and Chernov, obtained the majority in theConstituent Assembly which met on January 5. Naturally,this party refused to discuss the absolutely clear, precise andunambiguous proposal of the supreme organ of Soviet power,the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, torecognise the programme of Soviet power, to recognise theDeclaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People,to recognise the October Revolution and Soviet power.By this action the Constituent Assembly severed all tieswith the Soviet Republic of Russia. It was inevitable thatthe Bolshevik group and the Left Socialist-Revolutionarygroup, who now patently constitute the overwhelming majorityin the Soviets and enjoy the confidence of the workersand the majority of the peasants, should withdraw from sucha Constituent Assembly.The Right Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik partiesare in fact carrying on outside the Constituent Assemblya most desperate struggle against Soviet power, calling openlyin their press for its overthrow and describing as arbitraryand unlawful the crushing of the resistance of theexploiters by the forces of the working classes, which isessential in the interests of emancipation from exploita-