The Assembly was never to reopen. Its violent suppression was a shattering blow to the democratic hopes once placed in the revolution. As Maxim Gorky wrote, ‘For almost a hundred years the finest Russians have lived by the idea of a Constituent Assembly . . . in the struggle for this idea, thousands of the intelligentsia and tens of thousands of workers and peasants have perished . . .’. Now, Lenin and his regime of People’s Commissars had ‘given orders to shoot the democracy that demonstrated in honor of this idea’.
