2.  All electoral committees, all local organizations, the Councils of Workmen’s, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Delegates and the soldiers’ organizations at the front are to bend every effort toward safeguarding the freedom of the voters and fair play at the elections to the Constituent Assembly, which will be held on the appointed date.

If this attitude had been maintained throughout, and had the Bolsheviki loyally accepted the verdict of the electorate when it was given, there could have been no complaint.  But the evidence shows that their early attitude was not maintained.  Later on, as reports received from the interior of the country showed that the masses were not flocking to their banners, they began to assume a critical attitude toward the Constituent Assembly.  The leaders of the Socialist-Revolutionary party were warning their followers that the Bolsheviki would try to wreck the Constituent Assembly, for which they were bitterly denounced in organs like Pravda and Izvestya.  Very soon, however, these Bolshevist organs began to discuss the Constituent Assembly in a very critical spirit.  It was possible, they pointed out, that it would have a bourgeois majority, treating the Socialist-Revolutionists and the Cadets as being on the same level, equally servants of the bourgeoisie.  Then appeared editorials to show that it would not be possible to place the destinies of Russia in the hands of such people, even though they were elected by the “unthinking masses.”  Finally, when it was clear that the Socialist-Revolutionary party had elected a majority of the members, Pravda and Izvestya took the position that the victorious people did not need a Constituent Assembly; that a new instrument had been created which made the old democratic method obsolete.[35] The “new instrument” was, of course, the Bolshevist Soviet.

IV

For the moment we are not concerned with the merits or the failings of the Soviet considered as an instrument of government.  We are concerned only with democracy and the relation of the Bolshevist method to democracy.  From this point of view, then, let us consider the facts.  The Soviet was not something new, as so many of our American drawing-room champions of Bolshevism seem to think.  The Soviet was the type of organization common to Russia.  There were Soviets of peasants, of soldiers, of teachers, of industrial workers, of officers, of professional men, and so on.  Every class and every group in the classes had its own Soviet.  The Soviet in its simplest form is a delegate body consisting of representatives of a particular group—­a peasants’ Soviet, for example.  Another type, more important, roughly corresponds to the Central Labor Union in an American city, in that it is composed of representatives of workers of all kinds.  These delegates are, in the main, chosen by the workers in the shops and factories and in the meetings of the unions.  The anti-Bolshevist Socialists, such as the Mensheviki and the Socialist-Revolutionists, were not opposed to Soviets as working-class organizations.  On the contrary, they approved of them, supported them, and, generally, belonged to them.