1917
January 1918
The Constituent Assembly is dispersed
Russia did hold a national election. The Bolsheviks lost it, and then ended it.
Elections to the Constituent Assembly in November 1917 were the broadest vote the empire had seen. Socialist Revolutionaries, the peasant party, won the largest share. Bolsheviks were a strong minority, dominant in Petrograd and Moscow and among soldiers, not in the country as a whole. The Assembly met on 5 January 1918.
After one session the Bolsheviks and Left SRs walked out. Sailors under orders closed the building. Demonstrators supporting the Assembly were fired on. Lenin had already written that a republic of soviets was a higher form of democracy than a constituent assembly. The practical translation: a body the party did not control was not allowed to sit. This is the cleanest answer to the claim that October was the Russian people choosing Bolshevism at the ballot box.
Where to check it · Oliver Radkey, The Election to the Russian Constituent Assembly of 1917; Lenin’s December 1917 theses on the Assembly.