And happiness was so possible

100 years ago, the Bolsheviks dispersed the Constituent Assembly. Valeria Novodvorskaya - about the lost and unfulfilled

"February. Get ink and cry. Write about February sobbing. Boris Pasternak did not say this about the February Revolution, but it is precisely such feelings that this great missed chance arouses in us every year. Now is the time to remember everything <...>

According to Vasily Shulgin, in 1917 "the authorities did not support themselves" ... In February 17, the monarchists and generals cowardly persuaded Nicholas II to abdicate, Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich swore allegiance to the Provisional Government, the police hid, the III branch fell apart, the army (and Kornilov including) was inactive. Blok's estate was on fire along with the library, Rakhmaninov's piano was thrown out of the window, soldiers killed officers and fled from the front to kill landowners and illegally seize their land. Eight months of Pugachevism, senseless and merciless, ended with an iron Bolshevik dictate and red terror.

And the Cadets and Octobrists existed in a different, their own, metropolitan world, as we do now - within the Moscow Ring Road. Together with the Progressives, the Enes (remnants of the Narodniks) and the Mensheviks, they were preparing for the elections to the Constituent Assembly. It all ended with their outlawing, massacres, and the "Internationale" sung on the first and last day of the Constituent Assembly, which managed to decide on a ban on the sale of land, but did not protect their colleagues, the Cadet deputies. The dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, as well as the execution of a demonstration in support of it in Petrograd on January 5, 1918, was not the end of democracy (it ended with the closure of "bourgeois" newspapers and repressions against the Cadets), but the collapse of "socialism with a human face" with a bold point in the form of suppression Kronstadt.

But then Russia had something that we don’t have now: the peasantry, eager to work on their land, a truly private business, from artisans to large companies, there were non-state trade unions, there was a zemstvo, the habit of local self-government, civil society.

The Cadets and Octobrists did not have enough "popular opinion", they did not manage to prove anything to the country. Russia knew the Social Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks, liberalism and Westernism were the lot of the few. Just like now. Just as then the peasants and workers did not know Count Witte and Nabokov and Petrunkevich, so now the absolute majority is not ready to love Gaidar and Chubais and go to Manezhka demanding the release of the MBH and the continuation of Gaidar's reforms. The indignant people come to the square not for this.

Someone must ideologically fight the childhood disease of leftism, the viruses of Nazism and the imperial syndrome

The February chance was ruined by the lack of representation of the educated classes and professions. The Cadets and Octobrists did not create communities of lawyers, teachers, professors, students, officers and merchants under the slogans of liberalism. If the Provisional Government had this support, the Soviets would not outweigh it.

We, thank God, do not need a Constituent Assembly. We have a constitution, what makes a territory a state, and which some desperate democrats are proposing to abolish in order to improve it. There are literate, partly Internet people. Someone must gather him under the holy banner, where it will be inscribed: “Freedom. Own. Legality". Someone must ideologically fight against the childhood disease of leftism, the viruses of Nazism and the imperial syndrome. Otherwise, even after the fall of our dusty, discredited government, we will have to remake the historical phrase of the deputy Purishkevich: "Putin is not terrible, debauchery is terrible."

First published in NT #44–45, December 26, 2011