The Russian Constituent Assembly Election of 1917
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- Опубліковано 5 чер 2024
- In this series I will be outlining every election in Russian/Soviet history. In this episode, we go over the pivotal Election to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, which began in November 1917.
Timestamps
- 00:00 - Introduction
- 00:07 - Political Issues/Events
- 0:38 - Vikzhel Crisis
- 1:17 - Sovnarkom
- 2:15 - Party updates/campaigning
- 1:17 - Bolsheviks
- 2:32 - Mensheviks
- 2:54 - The SRs
- 3:40 - National SRs
- 3:55 - Kadets and rightists
- 4:05 - Electoral System
- 4:55 - Party lists
- 5:40 - Problems
- 6:40 - The Election
- 7:19 - Results
- 9:31 - Geographic overview
- 10:20 - Turnout
- 10:30 - Conclusion
Inspired by the following series:
- Mr. Beat (American Elections): • Presidential Elections...
- Sam Aronow (Israeli Elections): • Israeli Elections, 192...
Visual sources:
- Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library: www.prlib.ru/
- Anniversary of the Revolution (1918), directed by Dziga Vertov
- Colorized photos: klimbim2014.wordpress.com/
Music source:
- archive.org/details/lp_histor...
Noj links: linktr.ee/nojraps
Instagram: / nojraps
Music Channel: / @nojraps
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Bibliography
- Altstadt, Audrey L. The Azerbaijani Turks: Power and Identity under Russian Rule. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1992.
- Budnitskii, Oleg. Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.
- Daniels, Robert V. Red October: The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Boston, Beacon Hill Press, 1984.
- Figes, Orlando. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution. London: Bodley Head, 2017.
- Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Russian Revolution. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
- Hovannisian, Richard G. Armenia on the Road to Independence, 1918. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1967.
- Institute of Marxism-Leninism. Decrees of the Soviet Authority, 25 October 1917-16 March 1918. Moscow: State Publishing House of Political Literature, 1957.
- Kesici, Ozgecan. “The Alash Movement and the Question of Kazakh Ethnicity.” Nationalities Papers 45, no. 6 (2017): 1135-1149.
- Kotelnikov, K. G. Second All-Russian Congress of Workers and Soldiers' Deputies. Moscow, State Publishing House, 1928.
- Kravchenko, G. V. Russia in 1917-1918: From the Soviets to the Constituent Assembly. Rostov: RGUPS, 2021.
- Mankov, A. V., E. K. Mineeva, A. P. Zykina, and O. O. Dmitrieva. "Simbirsk Department of the "Union of the Revival of Russia": Genesis, Ideology, Political Activity." Voprosy Istorii (2023).
- Pokrovsky, M. N., and Y. A. Yakovlev. All-Russian Constituent Assembly: Documents and Materials. Moscow: State Publishing House, 1930.
- Protasov, Lev. People of the Constituent Assembly: A portrait in the Interior of the Era. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008.
- Protasov, Lev. All-Russian Constituent Assembly: History of Birth and Death. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1997.
- Protasov, Lev. “ The All-Russian Constituent Assembly and the Democratic Alternative: Two Views of the Problem.” In Revolutionary Russia: New Approaches to the Russian Revolution of 1917, edited by Rex A. Wade, 211-242. New York: Routledge, 2004.
- Rabinovitch, Simon. “Russian Jewry goes to the Polls: An Analysis of Jewish Voting in the All‐Russian Constituent Assembly Elections of 1917.” East European Jewish Affairs 39, no. 2 (2009): 205-225.
- Radkey, Oliver. Russia Goes to the Polls: The Election to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, 1917. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
- Russian Provisional Government. Resolution of the Provisional Government of 20 July 1917, "On Approval of Section I of the Regulations on Elections to the Constituent Assembly".
- Saktaganova, Z. G., et al. “The Alash Party: Historiography of the Movement.” Space and Culture 7, no. 4 (2020): 208-218.
- Spirin, L. M. Russia, 1917: From the History of the Struggle of Political Parties. Moscow: Mysl, 1987.
- Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Baku Commune, 1917-1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.
- Vedeneeva, Y. A., and I. B. Borisova. Elections to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly in Documents and Memoirs of Contemporaries. Moscow: Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation, 2009.
- Wade, Rex A. “‘All Power to the Soviets’: The Bolsheviks Take Power.” In Revolutionary Russia: New Approaches to the Russian Revolution of 1917, edited by Rex A. Wade, 211-242. New York: Routledge, 2004.
- Zenkovsky, Serge A. Pan-Turkism and Islam in Russia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960.
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#history #russia #elections
Hey everyone, thanks for checking out the video. Pinning this comment here since I noticed an error at 9:19:
The numbers in the Radkey column were copied incorrectly, from top to bottom it should be: "551,399; 35,520; 32,986; 31,635". So it should look like this:
Jewish National Bloc 498,913 551,399
OESRP 35,196 35,520
Bund 32,986 32,986
Poalei Zion 22,881 31,635
Jewish List 12,422
Zionists 9,984
Jewish People's 8,459
Jewish Public Figure 1,956
Sorry about that, and apologies to Mr. Radkey
no one asked
The fact that something on the scale of the constituent assembly election of 1917 could be completed at all despite immense governmental dysfunction and a goddamn world war is an incredible feat of social organization; it truly was a shame that such an accomplishment would ultimately amount to nothing.
Agreed
1:53
"Are you Team Stalin or Team Trotsky?"
"Team Sverdlov"
Wow the Village Drunk was a pretty popular guy in Examplegrad!
I can't wait to watch his career throughout the rest of the series
I think Oleg was a better choise but oh well
I really enjoy your videos. They remind me of Sam Aronow's Israeli elections videos, whom you thank in the credits so I guess that's where the inspiration came from, which I also liked very much.
Now, it was funny to me seeing how the russians used the same ballot system we use today in my country lol
Can't wait for the next one, keep up the good work ^^
I love this series. Do you have plans to do a similar one about some other country , given that it's difficult to do more parts about Russia (well, unless about the 90s)
Thank you for the support! I've thought about doing a series for other countries, but I feel that since Russia is the country I specialize in, I probably wouldn't be equipped to do such a series for other countries, but I encourage others to do so. I plan to still make videos for the Soviet elections, but they will likely have several elections condensed per video, and focus more on internal political debates/developments, since the one-party nature doesn't make for a very entertaining election. Then I will pick back up in the 1990s with regular election videos.
French elections would be hella interestinf
@@nojrantscan you do a history of the revolution then please if you specialize in it . Your videos are great
90s Russia is my Roman Empire
@@saulgoodmanKAZAKHIt was hell friend.
Truly the most progressive Russian democratic elections of all time!
What a coincidence! I just updated the count for my own script. Of course it wouldn't be a video on the Russian Revolution if no one could agree on the totals:
346 SR
180 Bolshevik
110 Ukrainian SR
18 Menshevik
16 Kadet
12 Alash Orda
10 ARF
7 Musavat
79 other
30 never elected
Haha exactly, it's really impossible to say definitively. I look forward to your video!
Hey, atleast they had elections with parties actually representing social groups, unlike countries with Liberal systems of government but uneducated populations where every election goes a bit like "90% the party that was in power before/just got appointed in the council of ministers; 10% one quadrillion parties with no support base"
It should be noted that for Estonia, at this time, following the October Coup, there is already a parallel, local Estonian government - Maapäev, that would declare independence in February. Elections to the Maapäev had been succesfully held in June, and by and large the Bolsheviks lost that vote. Latter elections organized by Bolsheviks were boycotted.
I can't speak for Latvia, but for Lithuania, it was under German control, and a separate adhoc assembly of national notable would also declare independence in February. As far as Bolshevik reach in Lithuania went, it was by and large constrained to the Jewish population, mainly of Vilnius, but also somewhat Kaunas. The Bolsheviks (nor really SRs) had almost no reach with the peasant, Catholic ethnic Lithuanians.
You're absolutely right that there was a separate Estonian assembly and a considerable resistance movement to the Bolsheviks, although there's a few things to add there. In the election in June, while the Bolsheviks proper had only a small part, Social-Democratic and Laborite parties in general did strongly. Then a few things occurred between June and November: the Bolsheviks legitimately gained support through their agitation and campaigning, but more importantly, just after October the Bolsheviks launched a similar coup in Estonia which largely deposed the assembly.
As we'll see in the next video, many nationalist parties/voters were also tentatively supportive of the government or favored federation over independence, at least until the constituent assembly; the disbandment of the assembly will send these parties strongly against the Bolsheviks in early 1918. So all these factors add to the explanation of why the Bolsheviks, or their tentative allies, did well in this election only for the Bolshevik support to begin to collapse a couple months later.
Ultimately Estonia illustrates the point about Bolshevik support in the Baltics the least well, but I picked it for the visual because it's the only Baltic province we have full data for. Latvia was actually far more supportive of the Bolsheviks - it's estimated they (or more technically the Latvian affiliate party to the Bolsheviks) received 72% of the vote. And as you noted, the Baltics were in a large part also German-occupied or about to face occupation.
Out of curiosity what sort of revolutionary Russian content are you interested in making? Just things about election/politics or say something more socio-cultural?
Edit: Great video as well, you do a great job breaking down the contextual merger/splits in a simple manner. I assume people who dont have much background reading, must find this extremely useful
I plan to make all sorts of videos on that period, not only the elections. I have a couple different ideas written down, some covering culture, art, and just general strangeness, which I hope to make along the way
@@nojrantscan you also do videos about elections in the Soviet Socialist Republics? It can be very interesting to watch how their couple of elections went.
the most fair elections in history, im sure they will be multi-party!@@FilYRU999
And then everything went smoothly
*slaps roof of 1917* did you know we can fit many russian elections in?
Good news, we're finally out of 1917 (we get to move to January now)
Nice video, I was eagerly waiting for this one
Grab the popcorn mom! there's another episode detailing the elections of the russian republic!
This series is really good. Were the videos inspired by a channel called elections israel? Or are both of you taking from the same place style wise/came up with the idea simultaneously?
Yes it's based on both Mr. Beat's series on the US and Sam Aronow/Elections Israel's series, both of which are linked in the description
Yay, new episode.
Thank you, I love your videos as I’m also a big fan of Mr Beat and his US election series and other videos. I love the music and your narration and how you summarise the key information in a way that’s easy to understand.
My only criticism is kind of petty I guess but in my opinion the slides are too fast for me, I’m the kind of guy who has to pause the screen to read title cards and other info but sometimes I’m too slow. If you could keep the slides on the screen for a few seconds longer that would be great, thanks.
Thank you again 🙂
Thank you! I really appreciate the support and feedback. Slowing down the speed is something I'm trying to work on. I think my natural inclination was to make it more fast-paced out of a worry that the videos would get too long and cause people to lose interest, but I'll definitely try to slow it down a bit more going forward. I'm still figuring out how to improve the presentation, and how to strike a good balance of speed and information, so thank you for your comment!
5:10 Was Oleg elected???
"Oleg, leader of the Independent Social-Democratic Labour Party (Olegites), became chairman of the Examplegrad Soviet during the war. He was denounced during the Great Purge, accused of leading a Olegite-Trotskite Bloc. He was shot in 1938..."
Great series!
Thank you!
Great series
Thank you!
What got you interested in old Russian elections? I had this history teacher who moved from the States to study 1800's Russian history and to Russo-Turkish war and I found it fascinating, for someone to be interested in that.
It's hard to say where the fascination began. I always loved history in general, and was particularly drawn to a few specific periods (Soviet history, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Roman Republic, to name a few). Then when I was in school I think becoming more interested in politics, philosophy, and modern political science caused me to gravitate toward the Soviet history as my main focus, since it's the more modern option and has a lot of overlap/implications on contemporary politics. I find elections really interesting to track over time, and binge-watched Mr Beat's and Sam Aronow's series on elections in the US and Israel respectively, and at a certain point I realized I could combine this fascination with elections with my Russian/Soviet expertise. It also helps that in the field of Soviet studies questions about democratic institutions in Russia are of great importance, with a lot of interesting debates being carried out about the Duma, and how democracy could have progressed differently in Russia. In general, the Soviet Union is simply a really unique, intriquing experiment in human history, the likes of which we've never really seen (except maybe China, although that's unique in different ways).
Off topic for this series but would you ever consider a video on Nestor Makhno? Seems like you could do a great summary of the Makhnovshchina
Sure I wouldn't be opposed to that. Although I'm focused on the election series right now, as well as a few other spinoff videos, that could make for a good video later down the line.
Great channel!, its been some time since youtube algorithm recommended something actually good
Thank you! I appreciate it
I beat to this😊
BRRRROOOOOO NOOOOO 💀💀💀💀💀
@@theyabib3323I beat to this to 😈😈
I wonder if we'll ever get to the modern day in this series.
That is the plan
its a shock that for some reason the 1917 election was the last russian election up to 1991 🤔
anyone named Nikolai Hammer has my vote
French elections would be super neat after the Russia series. Awesome stuff
This. Elections during the french revolution were wacky
Ok but what was the position of the Judean People’s Front?
Mommy Spiridonova was cute fr fr
bruh
Do the 1921 Russian Supreme Soviet election next
The 1921 election video will come soon, but there are a few elections before that to cover first
@@nojrants ah cool
It's seeing such an obscure topic get coverage
It isn't obscure really. Just media tends to not cover it since it is rather old and irrelevant
@@Faehenin my opinion the fall of the assembly is important for any democratic revolution and especially any socialist revolution to consider. As for democratic revolutions, the lesson is clear. Defend the project; there will be those within your movement who have other motives. For socialist movements, it's interesting. This assembly wasn't socialist, the SRs and menshevicks weren't just further right than the bolshevicks, the two were on different scales. That's to be expected, peasants were never going to vote for an industrial workers ideology. I think the main lesson is not to revolt in a peasant society, and also that there might be more peaceful ways to deal with a liberal government that young without destroying all semblance of democracy.
The Bolsheviks finally let the proletariat vote and they lost 😂
they lost with the rural peasants lol, the urban proletariat voted for the bolsheviks. did you watch the video?
@@universal_hyssoap you seem to be sore about it, i guess Lenin wasn't as popular as he thought
The SRs didnt exist by that time in the elections and had joined the bolsheviks@andreiz112dn5
@@universal_hyssoap This will be covered a bit in the next video in the reactions to the election. While the urban proletariat preferred the Bolsheviks, the demographic certainly wasn't monolithic. It is estimated by Protasov that the urban population overall voted about 33.6% for the Bolsheviks and 30.4% for other socialists (the rest going to Kadets and small interest groups), implying the Bolsheviks likely rallied a proletarian majority, but a very slight one. Likewise if we consider the soldiers, who were considered proletarian, their vote was split (the front voted 39.5% for Bolsheviks, 40.7% for the SRs). In the countryside, it comes out to 19.3% Bolshevik and 64.8% other socialists overall.
It's also very difficult to make a clean distinction between "urban workers" and "peasants" here. Many urban workers considered themselves (or were closely related to) peasants. Remember that Russia's industrialization had only just begun by this point, so most workers were people who had only just recently left the farms for the cities, or, their families owned/lived on farms and they only transiently were in the cities. This idea, of the workers still being "yokels", was a big part of Russia's proletarian culture at the turn of the century.
Referring to the countryside proper, the Bolsheviks formally considered the batraki (landless farmers) to not strictly be peasants anymore, but semi or honorary proletarians. Combined with other low to middle income farmers (bednjaki), these "allies of the proletariat" amounted to about 80% of the rural population. Given the realities of Russia, and the Bolshevik paranoia of ending as a Paris Commune, there was a great need to bring the peasants into the movement. So while Lenin will rationalize the defeat by saying that the Bolsheviks won the proletariat by a strict definition and that's what counts, the Bolsheviks still recognized that this defeat was problematic.
@@johnjackson8545 I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to, but the SRs most definitely existed at the time of the elections and would continue to exist after. Maybe you're thinking of the Left SRs? They were coming into existence just before the election, and became allied with the Bolsheviks, but were still a distinct group into the following year.
You are mistaken in that you claim that the right SR’s rallied popular support among the peasantry. Papers have demosntrated that it was in fact the opposite: left SRs dominated in localities while in large cities on the executive committees, the right SR’s dominated. So when the election went on, people voted for right SR lists while the agitation they had received was from left SR’s.
Firstly, what I say in the video is that the SR factions took to the peasant assemblies, as in, every faction tried this (left, right, and center). I don't think I said anywhere that the Right only rallied mass support. I will also be explaining the results of the vote and reactions to it a bit more in the next video.
But as for the claim you brought up, I'm not sure which "papers" you are referring to, but I don't think it's that simple. As Radkey and Protasov both talk about, there was mass support for all SR factions overall, as well as conscious differentations in many cases between Right and Left SRs.
In regards to the actual votes themselves there are a few general trends to observe. People tended to vote more for whichever faction they were more familiar with. In general even the faction that retained the main name after the Left versus Right schism correlates to a better. So if in one province the Left and Right fought and the Left ended up splitting off (thus making it "SR versus Left SR") then the Right received more votes, while in another province if the Right split off (thus making it "SR versus Right SR") the Left received more votes.
Although that is not to imply causation, i.e. that people voted just on brand recognition. The faction that split off did so in the first place because they were less popular (being unable to seize the main party). You can actually see this in the video, as in the Petrograd example the general SR list easily defeated the explicitly Right SR list (which also contravenes the idea about the Right dominating in large cities).
The Left SRs were essentially brand new as a separate party - they often lacked separate organizations, they hadn't had the time to win many of these schisms as described above. That means just logistically the Left SRs were not able to contest as effectively, and most of the time didn't produce a separate party list. On the matter of logistics this means the more local/rural districts were less likely to have Left SR representation. Not to mention, the more rural areas would be more inclined to be "conservative" for lack of a better word. So in terms of the actual results, the Left SRs actually did the best in districts where they were firmly established in the big city before hand. The city of Kazan is a good example, where the Left completely trounced the Right SRs.
Now let's move beyond just the results. You could be saying that maybe the Right SRs controlled a district but it was actually the Left SRs doing the agitation, and thus on election day people mistakening voted for the Right SRs when they had actually been galvanized by the Left. For one thing, this takes a lot of agency away from the actual peasants, implying they didn't really know what they were doing. Confusion certainly played a role, but that is an implausible answer.
Again, just logistically the Right was also agitating and simply had more agitators. So just statistically you would expect the Right to be doing more widespread agitation. We also know that the Right had more established in-roads; village chiefs, elders, teachers, etc were more likely to be Right SRs, which had a profound influence. Your thesis is also disproven by the fact that people weren't just voting for the party but for candidates, and we know there were fierce debates in villages and even demands to remove or change candidates. In Tambov for example, the party list was drawn up by debate at a peasants' congress, and in Penza it was approved by the party conference and the Peasants' Soviet. People were very cognizant of their representatives, and left-leaning peasants demanded that Right SRs be removed from lists, and vice versa. So in this context I don't think your explanation is very satisfactory.
@@nojrants According to Badcock (2001), the ideas pushed at the village level often significantly differed from the official positions of the SR Party. Left SR activists typically held more sway at the local level, and the peasants were in favour of the left-style land reform, later embraced by the Bolsheviks. The CC of the SR’s was dominated by Right SR’s. In my own eyes, this would help explain the reasoning behind peasant support for the Bolsheviks during the Civil War (they did not just flock to the right SR’s operating with the Whites until the coup happened). Historians agree that the land reform policies of the Bolsheviks and left SR’s were supported by the peasantry.
Anyways, I have not done anywhere near as much of a literature review as you have on this particular subject, and I am not an expert, so its I will concede on this one, but I retain my suspicions.
@@JudeGamache I was actually thinking of Badcock when I wrote my initial comment funny enough. I think you may be misrepresenting her point slightly, as the idea is that there was a dissonance between the top-most leaders in Petrograd/Moscow and the individual regional branches. So the handful of leaders in Petrograd might be saying one thing, but the SR branch in say Tambov was more flexible and responding to the desires of its constituency. Therefore it's not as simple as saying the party was Right SR but the voters thought they were voting for a Left SR program, rather it's more they thought they were voting for a Tambov SR program. If anything this is an indictment of the handful of people at the top being less responsive to the people below them, whereas on the regional level we see much more flexibility as well as action from the party.
I of course don't deny that the Bolshevik and Left SR land programs were very popular, although it would be incorrect to say that the Right SR platform was vastly unpopular (or even that it was that different if we're being frank). By this point virtually every viable political party agreed on land reform, so it would be difficult to argue people turned away from the Right SRs over that. A more common argument I see is that since all those parties were about the same on that issue, the peasants simply chose the Right SRs since it was the one most familiar/trusted, and the one they thought ensured land reform the most. Technically speaking, the land reform passed at the Constituent Assembly by the Right SRs was even a little more radical than the Bolsheviks at the time, but it never got to be implemented.
It's impossible to know for sure, but the attempts I've seen trying to disentangle how many SR voters actually leaned Right versus Left (Radkey for example) usually conclude something like 60-40 in favor of the Right SRs. As for the question of peasant support during the Civil War, I touch upon this a bit at the end of my most recent video, and will talk about this more in the future.
Sigh... No congresses of peasant deputies?
Beginning in the Third Congress video (which will probably be released tomorrow) I will be mentioning the Peasants' Congress, but I would consider them a separate entity that did not arise to the position of a national government in hindsight, so I haven't covered them in their own right.
I’m getting the strangest feeling of Deja Vu here. . . . .