ABSTRACT
The long-awaited Constituent Assembly finally met on January 5, 1918, and after one meeting was forcibly dissolved the next day by the Bolsheviks. For a long time historians ignored the Constituent Assembly, for any of several reasons: because of its brief life and failure; because they felt that a democratic outcome of the revolution was no longer possible already by late summer or early fall and that it was either “Kornilov or Lenin”; and because of a certain tendency to focus on Lenin and October and ignore the weeks that followed, jumping instead directly forward to the civil war. More recently, however, some historians in the West and in Russia have assigned it greater significance, arguing that both the Assembly and the events leading up to its meeting and dispersal are important topics for investigation, and that its dispersal marks the effective border between the revolution and the civil war that followed. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, scholars in Russia, previously prevented by the Soviet regime from attaching much significance to the Constituent Assembly, have turned to it with interest. Some have advanced arguments for its pivotal role in Russian history – Protasov’s opening sentence even extends that to world history. Post-Soviet scholars in Russia have also been fascinated by the question of “alternatives,” focusing especially on how the horrors of the Stalin years or even the whole Communist experiment might have been avoided had history taken a different path at one point or another during the revolutionary era. The Constituent Assembly is one such point. Protasov directs our attention to the importance of the idea of the Constituent Assembly as a factor in politics throughout 1917, to its significance for any chance for a democratic outcome of the revolution, and raises important questions about its relationship to the long-term political culture of Russia. An important theme of the article is how the Constituent Assembly fits into the Russian political tradition and its implications for current Russian political development, a broader theme that runs through many historical investigations today. For all these reasons, an article reexamining the importance of the Constituent Assembly in the history of the revolution, and which also reflects on its relation to issues facing Russia today, is perhaps an appropriate selection to end this volume.
