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

437SPEECH ON THE DISSOLUTIONOF THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY DELIVEREDTO THE ALL-RUSSIA CENTRAL EXECUTIVECOMMITTEEJANUARY 6 (19), 1918Comrades, the clash between Soviet power and the ConstituentAssembly results from the entire course of theRussian revolution, which was confronted by the unprecedentedtask of reconstructing society on socialist lines. Afterthe events of 1905 there could be no doubt that tsarism’s daywas over and that it had scrambled out of the pit only becauseof the backwardness and ignorance of the rural population.The Revolution of 1917 was marked on the one hand by thetransformation of the bourgeois imperialist party into arepublican party under the pressure of events, and on theother hand, by the emergence of democratic organisations,the Soviets, that had been formed in 1905; even then thesocialists had realised that the organisation of these Sovietswas creating something great, something new and unprecedentedin the history of world revolution. The Soviets,created solely by the initiative of the people, are a form ofdemocracy without parallel in any other country of theworld.The revolution produced two forces—the union of themasses for the purpose of overthrowing tsarism, and theorganisations of the working people. When I hear the enemiesof the October Revolution exclaim that the ideas of socialismare unfeasible and utopian, I usually put to them aplain and simple question. What in their opinion, I ask, arethe Soviets? What gave rise to these organisations of thepeople, which have no precedent in the history of the developmentof world revolution? Not one of them has been ableto give a precise answer to this question. Defending the