and on what conditions they prefer, to join the federated government and other federations of Soviet enterprise.  These general principles are to be published without delay, and the official representatives of the Soviets are required to read them at the opening of the Constituent Assembly.

The demand for the adoption of this declaration gave rise to a long and stormy debate.  The leaders of the Socialist-Revolutionists and the Mensheviki stoutly contended that the adoption of the declaration would be virtually an abdication of the task for which the Constituent Assembly had been elected by the people, and, therefore, a betrayal of trust.  They could not admit the impudent claim that an election held in November, based upon universal suffrage, on lists made up as recently as September, could in January be set aside as being “obsolete” and “unrepresentative.”  That a majority of the Bolshevik candidates put forward had been defeated, nullified, they argued, the claim of the Bolsheviki that the fact that the candidates had all been nominated before the November insurrection should be regarded as reason for acknowledging the Bolshevik Soviet as superior to the Constituent Assembly.  They insisted upon the point, which the Bolshevik spokesmen did not attempt to controvert, that the Constituent Assembly represented the votes of many millions of men and women,[37] while the total actual membership represented by the Soviet power did not at the time number one hundred thousand!

As might have been expected, the proposal to adopt the declaration submitted to the Constituent Assembly in this arrogant fashion was rejected by an enormous majority.  The Bolshevik members, who had tried to make the session a farce, thereupon withdrew after submitting a statement in which they charged the Constituent Assembly with being a counter-revolutionary body, and the Revolutionary-Socialist party with being a traitorous party “directing the fight of the bourgeoisie against the workers’ revolution.”  The statement said that the Bolshevik members withdrew “in order to permit the Soviet power to determine what relations it would hold with the counter-revolutionary section of the Constituent Assembly”—­a threat which needed no interpretation.

After the withdrawal of the Bolshevik members, the majority very quickly adopted a declaration which had been carefully prepared by the Socialist-Revolutionists during the weeks which had elapsed since the elections in the preliminary conferences which had been held for that purpose.  The declaration read as follows: 

    RUSSIA’S FORM OF GOVERNMENT

In the name of the peoples who compose the Russian state, the All-Russian Constituent Assembly proclaims the Russian State to be the Russian Democratic Federated Republic, uniting indissolubly into one whole the peoples and territories which are sovereign within the limits prescribed by the Federal Constitution.

    LAWS REGARDING LAND OWNERSHIP