many places. It was a foregone conclusion that the Constituent
Assembly brought into being by the universal suffrage would be dominated by
Socialists. There was never the slightest fear that it would be dominated
by the bourgeois parties. What followed is best told in the exact language
of a protest to the International Socialist Bureau by Inna Rakitnikov,
representative of the Revolutionary Socialist party, which was, be it
remembered, the largest and the oldest of the Russian Socialist parties:

The _coup d'etat_ was followed by various other manifestations of
Bolshevist activity--arrests, searches, confiscation of
newspapers, ban on meetings. Bands of soldiers looted the country
houses in the suburbs of the city; a school for the children of
the people and the buildings of the Children's Holiday Settlement
were also pillaged. Bands of soldiers were forthwith sent into the
country to cause trouble there.... 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_....
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 best
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. 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.

Of course, this is the testimony of one who is confessedly anti-Bolshevist,
one who has suffered deep injury at the hands of the Bolshe