In the early morning of January 19, 1918, the armed guards of the Tauride Palace, acting on the orders of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, interrupted the session of the Russian Constituent Assembly.
The election of a Constituent Assembly to determine the future political system of the Russian state was one of the principal slogans of the February 1917 revolution, and the Provisional Government (whose “provisional” status indicated its eventual replacement by the Assembly) immediately set out to prepare for the vote. The election was initially supposed to take place on September 30, but the government decided to postpone it until November 25. Had it not been for this postponement, the entire course of 20th century Russian history would probably have been very different. Nonetheless, even the Bolsheviks, who seized power in the October coup d’etat, did not dare to cancel the vote because of the high degree of public support for the Constituent Assembly.