ABSTRACT
For the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), the elections to the Constituent Assembly obviated the necessity for civil war. V. I. Lenin had wanted peace with Germany so that he could dissolve the Constituent Assembly in relative safety and resume the Red versus Green civil war against the SRs, but Trotsky had let him down. In the first rank that meant addressing the questions of peace, land, control of production, and the restructuring of the Russian Republic on federal principles; equally all issues of social policy should be linked to the task of demobilizing the army and industry. Moves towards peace began on 8 November when Lenin called on the last Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army General N. N. Dukhonin to begin armistice talks with the aim of establishing a general armistice on all fronts of the First World War.
