(2 of 3)
Late-arriving delegates brought alarming news. Some 10,000 people, demonstrating in the Liteiny Prospekt in support of the Constituent Assembly, had been dispersed by Red gunfire. Witnesses reported that dozens of bodies lay bloodily in the snow. We had hoped that two crack regiments, the Semyonov and the Preobrazhensky would act in defense of the Assembly. Now word came that they had decided to remain neutral; they would neither go into the streets against the demonstrators nor join with them. Like other regular army units, they believed that all that was at stake was a simple misunderstanding between the authority of the Bolshevik regime and that of the Constituent Assembly. The soldiers hoped both bodies could find a way of uniting peacefully. So did the 40 delegates of the "Left" Social Revolutionaries who had decided to collaborate with the Bolsheviks. Lenin was later to describe them as "little fools."
Convulsive Hands. The opening of the Assembly was set for midday, but hours passed. The Bolsheviks protested that all their delegates had not arrived—ignoring the fact that many opposition Deputies were still locked in prison or hiding from the police. We waited patiently through all the delays and redelays until, after a new postponement, we voted to open the Assembly at 4 o'clock, whatever happened. What we did not know was that, by then, the Reds were in full control of the city's streets.
In the Assembly, the SRs filled up the center of the hall. On the right were a few scattered Deputies of the "national-bourgeois" groups. On the left sat the Moslem and Ukrainian Socialists, then came the Left SRs and, finally, the Bolsheviks. Lenin was there. Three nights before, while driving through Petrograd, he had been fired on by assassins and the man beside him had been wounded. But he appeared unruffled as he lolled on the steps of the platform, squeezing his hands convulsively together and, with his huge, blazing eyes, surveying the entire hall from one end to the other.
At 4 o'clock one of us rose and proposed that the senior member open the Assembly proceedings. The "senior" was an SR Deputy, S. P. Shvetsov. He mounted the stage, accompanied by a bestial racket from the left that was to continue for hours. Mingled with the shouts and whistles were howls and yells, stamping of feet and pounding on desktops. The galleries, jammed with members of the Bolshevik party, added to the appalling din.
Bolsheviks leaped to the stage and wrested the Speaker's bell from Shvetsov's hand. The Bolshevik Sverdlov, ringing the captured bell, announced the opening of the Assembly for the second time. After a singing of the Internationale, Sverdlov invited the Deputies to become a rubber-stamp Parliament, warning us that "even from a formal point of view," any opposition to the Soviet regime was, in essence, illegal. Before murdering the Assembly, the Reds were giving it the option of committing suicide.