The guard is tired

Democracy will appear in the Historical Museum in the halls of the State Historical Museum today an exhibition with the whimsical name “12 hours 40 minutes of democracy”, dedicated to the 90th anniversary of the only held meeting of the Constituent Assembly. Remember the "twelve" Alexander Blok? “From the building to the building / extended to the rope. / On the rope - poster: /“ All power by the Constituent Assembly! ”

The convocation of deputies was one of the priority tasks of the Provisional Government. Even after its overthrow, this task did not lose relevance to different political parties. Fearing universal discontent, the Bolsheviks did not dare to cancel the elections to the Constituent Assembly, and the Council of People's Commissars adopted and published a special resolution on Lenin’s signature on their holding. The elections began on November 12, 1917, at the same time the troops faithful to the Bolsheviks were pulled into Petrograd.

After the end of the election campaign, members of the Constitutional Democratic Party were officially declared enemies of the people, repressions and arrests began in relation to the cadets. As a result, the deputies of the cadets, who were about the seventh part of the Constituent Assembly, were neutralized and could not take part in his work. The Bolsheviks, on their own displeasure, received less than a quarter of places during the vote. Yakov Sverdlov invited the gathered in the Tauride Palace to the deputies to declare Russia the Republic of Soviets of workers, soldiers and peasant deputies, that is, to recognize the power of the Bolshevik councils the only legal. The right Social Revolutionaries, the number of which slightly exceeded 40% of all those gathered, refused to discuss this issue, and the Bolsheviks, left -wing Socialist -Revolutionaries and some delegates from the national parties left the hall. The remaining continued work and adopted decisions on the abolition of decrees of the II Congress of Soviets.

There are many detailed evidence of further events. “In Moscow, on January 5, a peaceful demonstration was appointed in defense of the Constituent Assembly,” wrote the Moscow inhabitant Nikita Okunev in his 1918 diary, “but on the eve of Muralov issued an order to disperse demonstrators even by armed force. So it turned out - they shot at the assembled crowds where idle, where real charges. There were no bloodshed again, there were victims, but how many of them to find out? Only the Social Democrat and Izvestia p. and p. d. ”, and on the 7th and today they were not there.” A day later, Okunev will again turn to the diary, finally clarifying the details of what happened for himself: “The Life of the Constituent Assembly was one night ... It ended at 5 a.m. January 6, and at 7 a.m. a decree on his dissolution of it was published. The very meeting happened in an extraordinary and extremely indecent environment: 400 people of the “public” were exclusively Bolsheviks by workers and soldiers who openly threatened the execution and ceremony, and all the speakers that were not like them. By morning, some sailor went to the chairman's rostrum and, slamming Chernov on the shoulder, invited him to finish the meeting, “because the guard was tired” ... What guard is needed over the chosen ones of the king-narod? ”

The subsequently immortal, which included in many works of the Soviet theater and cinema, the replica about the tired guard belonged to the sailor Anatoly Zheleznyakov. A native of the village of Fedoskino, who subsequently, subsequently one of the heroes of the Civil War, he was in a group of anarchists who supported the Bolsheviks, participated in the assault on the Winter Palace, and in January 1918 he was the head of the guard of the Tauride Palace. Of course, the course of events predetermined not only the replica of Zheleznyakov. Acceleration of the Constituent Assembly completed the coup, begun by the Bolsheviks in October 1917. The authors of the exhibition in the State Historical Museum promise to dwell on those moments of the history of the Constituent Assembly that were either forgotten or distorted. “The documents and exhibits of the exhibition recreate the election mechanism in the Constituent Assembly and allow them to evaluate their“ political technology, ”the newspaper correspondent in the museum told. “These were the first universal elections in the history of Russia, the scale of which world practice has not yet known.”

01/29/2008 / Sergey Safonov, the material was published in the newspaper No. 16 dated 01.30.2008.