To set aside as the day for the elections to the Constituent Assembly the 25th of November, of the year 1917, and as the date for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly the 12th of December, of the year 1917.

Notwithstanding this clear and honorable record, we find Trotzky, at a Conference of Northern Councils of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates, on October 25th, when he well knew that arrangements for holding the Constituent Assembly elections were in full swing, charging that Kerensky was engaged in preventing the convocation of the Constituent Assembly!  He demanded at that time that all power should be taken from the Provisional Government and transferred to the Soviets.  These, he said, would convoke the Assembly on the date that had been assigned, December 12th.

The Bolshevik coup d’etat took place, as already noted, less than three weeks before the date set for the elections, for which every preparation had been made by the government and the local authorities.  It was at the beginning of the campaign, and the Bolsheviki had their own candidates in the field in many places.  It was a foregone conclusion that the Constituent Assembly brought into being by the universal suffrage would be dominated by Socialists.  There was never the slightest fear that it would be dominated by the bourgeois parties.  What followed is best told in the exact language of a protest to the International Socialist Bureau by Inna Rakitnikov, representative of the Revolutionary Socialist party, which was, be it remembered, the largest and the oldest of the Russian Socialist parties: 

The coup d’etat was followed by various other manifestations of Bolshevist activity—­arrests, searches, confiscation of newspapers, ban on meetings.  Bands of soldiers looted the country houses in the suburbs of the city; a school for the children of the people and the buildings of the Children’s Holiday Settlement were also pillaged.  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.  There were hardly any abstentions; 90 per cent. of the population took part in the voting.  The day of the voting was kept as a solemn feast; the priest said mass; the peasants dressed in their best clothes; they believed that the Constituent Assembly would give them order, laws, the land.  In the Government of Saratov, out of fourteen deputies elected, there were twelve