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.

In the mean time, in the country a fierce battle was raging against the
Bolsheviki. It was not, on the part of their adversaries, a fight for
power. If the Socialist-Revolutionists had wished they could have seized
the power; to do that they had only to follow the example of those who were