The PG used the forthcoming Constituent Assembly as an excuse for delaying many important decisions ("this must wait for the Constituent Assembly")--yet at the same time they didn't hold the elections to the Constituent Assembly until it was too late. Oliver Radkey has argued that the election could have been held much sooner, but that the Kadets in particular wanted to delay it because they knew they would do poorly. "Precious weeks were wasted in sterile debates on such subjects as electoral rights for the defunct dynasty, no member of which could have mustered a corporal's guard (better, a general's guard). At first there had been talk of holding the election in August, but August yielded to September, September yielded to October, and it required an ultimatum from Minister-President Kerenski's own party to hold the government to a date in November. Actually, November 25 marked merely the beginning of the electoral process, which dragged on into December and then into January of 1918. It was a miserable performance." *Russia Goes to the Polls: The Election to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, 1917* (second edition, 1990), p. 92.
Was it inevitable that the elections be so delayed? Radkey doesn't think so:
"There are those who contend that the situation both within the country and outside it precluded any satisfactory consultation of the population in 1917. This contention, made in exculpation of the Provisional Government, does not stand the test of history. Two months had been enough to enable France to choose its constituent assembly in 1848. Two months had sufficed for Germany (9 November 1918-January 1919). And two weeks had seen an election held and the Bordeaux assembly convened after the capitulation of Paris (29 January-13 February 1871). Eight months were required for Russia to *begin* to elect its constituent assembly and almost two more for *half* this assembly to convene. But, it will be objected, France and Germany are nation-states and limited in size, whereas Russia is an empire, vast and many-peopled. Actually Russia was in far better condition to elect an assembly in 1917 than France in 1871 or Germany in 1919, countries that were wholly at the mercy of enemy powers as well as being racked by revolution and Germany by near famine. For France even to hold an election required the indulgence of Bismarck. Russia had lost nothing except the outer belt of territories that it had taken from others; hardly anywhere did the enemv stand on truly Russian soil. It is not the unwieldiness or backwardness of Russia that accounts for the difference, it is the will of the respective governments. Those of France and Germany sincerely sought an expression of the national will because of democratic principle and as a means of coping with a desperate situation: that of Russia outwardly deferred to popular sovereignty but was determined to thwart or delay as long as possible anything that might detract from prosecution of the war. It quite failed to see that this course was creating for itself as well as for the assembly a situation that would become not only desperate but hopeless." *Russia Goes to the Polls: The Election to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, 1917* (second edition, 1990), pp. 95-96.
So it was *technically* feasible to hold a Constituent Assembly election well before it was held. *Politically* however one could not force one unless the Menshevik and SR majority in the soviet was willing to break with the Kadets and assume power on its own--which it was not yet willing to do in spring of 1917. As I have noted here before:
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The Mensheviks, however, did have an influence in 1917 out of proportion to their numbers--but IMO it was a bad influence. The problem was that the Mensheviks were dogmatic Marxists--much more dogmatic than the Bolsheviks. As orthodox Marxists, they believed that the Russian revolution was still going through its "bourgeois" stage (after all, it's a backward, peasant nation, not yet ready for socialism, etc.) and that an all-socialist government (which would mean a break with the Kadets) was therefore not desirable. And alas the SR's went along with the Mensheviks on that point. To quote an old soc.history.what-if post of mine:
"As it was, the Mensheviks and SRs were handicapped by the fact that in each case the right wing of the party was dominant, and the left wing did not want to split with it (except, as I noted, some of the extreme left-wing SRs, and even they split only after October). The Right Mensheviks and Right SRs opposed an all-socialist government and insisted on supporting Kerensky (himself nominally an SR though he regarded himself as being above parties) and on maintaining a coalition with the Kadets. In the case of the Right Mensheviks, this was due to a dogmatic Marxism (the Mensheviks were always more "orthodox" about their Marxism than the Bolsheviks): Since by all orthodox Marxist standards, backward Russia was not ready for socialism, it was essential not to alienate the bourgeoisie from the revolution. As for the SRs, they were curiously willing to follow the pro-war, pro-coalition-with-the-Kadets Mensheviks. Oliver Radkey in *The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism: Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, February to October 1917* (New York and London: Columbia UP 1958) notes that the Mensheviks' concept of revolution was "as though made to order" for the right SR's, "whose zeal for war led them above all else to desire a class truce, which could only mean the bourgeois hegemony of the revolution postulated in Menshevik theory" (p.467). But Radkey also adds (pp. 466-7):
"'Yet it was not just the right wing which held the PSR in thralldom to Menshevism. The center was also responsible for this fateful dependency of the larger party upon the smaller, even to the extent of abandoning its own concept of the revolution. Chernov says the SR's were twice late in respect to coalition, first with its formation, and then with its liquidation. But he also tells us, on an earlier occasion when the impression of the overwhelming catastrophe sustained by his party was fresh on his mind, that at the time of the July crisis the question of a socialist government had been posed and had been decided in the negative, partly because the Mensheviks refused to join. A break with Menshevism was by no means desired by many adherents of the center, leftist in inclination. Presumably he numbered himself among these members--he was always friendly to Menshevism. It was at the Tenth Petersburg Conference, however, that he spoke more frankly than on other occasions. He admitted that SR tactics had been framed with reference to Menshevik tactics--sometimes excessively so. He admitted that for the Mensheviks, with their concept of a bourgeois revolution, coalition had been a goal, whereas for the SR's it was only a means. When Tsereteli at the Democratic Conference termed 1905 a failure but this revolution a success, because of the achievement of coalition, Chernov had realized that their paths were fatefully diverging. Need he have waited so long? And why, after the truth finally dawned upon him, should he have thought of Tsereteli as minister of foreign affairs in a government headed by himself?'"
It really seems that although "Populist" parties got more votes than "Marxist" ones in Russia in 1917, *both* wings of the SR's were unduly influenced by the Marxist parties--the Left SR's by the Bolsheviks and the Right and Center SR's by the Mensheviks. The latter is the more curious development, since, as Radkey noted, it meant the dependency of a large party on a smaller one.
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...evik-october-revolution.451353/#post-17559763
