The sensible part of the population of Saratov severely condemned these acts in a series of Manifestos signed by the Printers’ Union, the mill workers, the City Employees’ Union, Postal and Telegraph Employees, students’ organizations, and many other democratic associations and organizations.

The peasants received the coup d’etat with distinct hostility.  Meetings and reunions were soon organized in the villages.  Resolutions were voted censuring the coup d’etat of violence, deciding to organize to resist the Bolsheviki, and demanding the removal of the Bolshevist soldier members from the rural communes.  The bands of soldiers, who were sent into the country, used not only persuasion, but also violence, trying to force the peasants to give their votes for the Bolshevik candidates at the time of the elections to the Constituent Assembly; they tore up the bulletins of the Socialist-Revolutionists, overturned the ballot-boxes, etc.

But the Bolshevik soldiers were not able to disturb the confidence of the peasants in the Constituent Assembly, and in the Revolutionary Socialist party, whose program they had long since adopted, and whose leaders and ways of acting they knew, the inhabitants of the country proved themselves in all that concerned the elections wide awake to the highest degree.  There were hardly any abstentions, 90 per cent. of the population took part in the voting.  The day of the voting was kept as a solemn feast; the priest said mass; the peasants dressed in their Sunday clothes; they believed that the Constituent Assembly would give them order, laws, the land.  In the government of Saratov, out of fourteen deputies elected, there were twelve Socialist-Revolutionists; there were others (such as the government of Pensa, for example) that elected only Socialist-Revolutionists.  The Bolsheviki had the majority only in Petrograd and Moscow and in certain units of the army.  The elections to the Constituent Assembly were a decisive victory for the Revolutionary Socialist party.

Such was the response of Russia to the Bolshevik coup d’etat.  To violence and conquest of power by force of arms, the population answered by the elections to the Constituent Assembly; the people sent to this assembly, not the Bolsheviki, but, by an overwhelming majority, Socialist-Revolutionists.

VII

The Fight Against the Bolsheviki

But the final result of the elections was not established forthwith.  In many places the elections had to be postponed.  The Bolshevik coup d’etat had disorganized life, had upset postal and telegraphic communications, and had even destroyed, in certain localities, the electoral mechanism itself by the arrest of the active workers.  The elections which began in the middle of November were not concluded till toward the month of January.