In January 1918, the long-awaited Constituent Assembly convened. Those supporting Lenin and the Bolsheviks were a minority in the Assembly, and, after the Assembly's first day, Soviet militiamen with bayonets dispersed the gathering. Lenin defended the move by saying that "the people" would soon realize that the Constituent Assembly opposed their interests and that by abolishing the Assembly the Bolsheviks were fulfilling their goal of "All power to the Soviets."
The Bolsheviks were still extending their rule to areas distant from the capital. In February, the Bolsheviks won a majority of the votes in the provincial capital of Archangel, where Allied ships were docked, while elsewhere in the province they won only 22 percent of the vote against 63 percent for the moderate SRs. Bolshevik control spread to small cities and towns east of the Ural Mountains, across Siberia -- an area without large farming estates and class tensions. And the Bolsheviks won in the city of Vladivostok, on the Pacific Coast, where railway or dock workers resided.
Through January and February, armed detachments of workers and poor peasants continued to confiscate food that farmers had stored, with armed clashes occurring between resisting farmers and the requisition teams. The Bolsheviks distributed food only to those who supported the Soviets, while, in some areas, hungry gangs were making forays into neighboring villages and waylaying people who were carrying bread.
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