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.
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