The Constituent Assembly resolves to elect from its midst an authorized delegation which will carry on negotiations with the representatives of the Allied countries and which will present the appeal to jointly formulate terms upon which a speedy termination of the war will be possible, as well as for the purpose of carrying out the decisions of the Constituent Assembly regarding the question of peace negotiations with the countries fighting against us.

    This delegation, which is to be under the guidance of the
    Constituent Assembly, is to immediately start fulfilling the
    duties imposed upon it.

Expressing, in the name of the peoples of Russia, its regret that the negotiations with Germany, which were started without preliminary agreement with the Allied countries, have assumed the character of negotiations for a separate peace, the Constituent Assembly, in the name of the peoples of the Federated Republic, while continuing the armistice, accepts the further carrying on of the negotiations with the countries warring against us in order to work toward a general democratic peace which shall be in accordance “with the people’s will and protect Russia’s interests.”

VI

Immediately following the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly a body of Red Guards shot the two Constitutional Democrats, Kokoshkin and Shingariev, who were at the time confined as prisoners who were ill in the Naval Hospital.  The reason for the brutal murder of these men was that they were bourgeoisie and, therefore, enemies of the working class!  It is only just to add that the foul deed was immediately condemned by the Bolshevik government and by the Soviet of Petrograd.  “The working class will never approve of any outrages upon our prisoners, whatever may have been their political offense against the people and their Revolution,” the latter body declared, in a resolution on the subject of the assassinations.  Two days after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly twenty-three Socialist-Revolutionist members of that body, assembled at the office of their party, were arrested, and the premises occupied by Red Guards, the procedure being exactly as it used to be in the old days under the Czar.

There is a relentless logic of life and action from which there can be no escape.  Czarism was a product of that inexorable process.  All its oppression and brutality proceeded by an inevitable and irresistible sequence from the first determination and effort to realize the principle of autocracy.  Any dictatorship, whether of a single man, a group or class, must rest ultimately upon oppressive and coercive force.  Believing that the means would be justified by the end, Lenine and Trotzky and their associates had suppressed the Constituent Assembly, claiming that parliamentary government, based upon the equal and free suffrage of all classes, was, during the transition period, dangerous to the proletariat; that in its stead a new type of government must be established—­government by associations of wage-earners, soldiers, and peasants, called Soviets.