Election Results (November 12/25, 1917)
For details see the main article Russian Constituent Assembly election, 1917
More than 60 percent of citizens with the right to vote actually voted for Constituent Assembly. The election yielded the following results:
Party | Votes | Number of deputies |
Socialist Revolutionaries | 17,490,000 | 370 |
Bolsheviks | 9,844,000 | 175 |
Mensheviks | 1,248,000 | 16 |
Constitutional Democrats | 2,000,000 | 17 |
Minorities | 77 | |
Left Socialist Revolutionaries | 2,861,000 | 40 |
People's Socialists | 4 | |
Total: | 41,700,000 | 703 |
However, due to the size of the country, the ongoing World War I and a deteriorating communications system, these results were not fully available at the time. A partial count (54 constituencies out of 79) was published by N. V. Svyatitsky in A Year of the Russian Revolution. 1917-18, Moscow, Zemlya i Volya Publishers, 1918. Svyatitsky's data was generally accepted by all political parties, including the Bolsheviks, and was as follows:
Party | Ideology | Votes |
Russian Socialist Revolutionaries | Socialist | 16,500,000 |
Bolsheviks | Socialist | 9,023,963 |
Ukrainian, Moslem, and other non-Russian Socialist Revolutionaries | Socialist | 4,400,000 |
Constitutional Democrats | Liberal | 1,856,639 |
Mensheviks | Socialist | 668,064 |
Moslems | Religious | 576,000 |
Jewish Bund | Socialist/Ethnic | 550,000 |
Ukrainian Socialist-Federalists | Social Democratic/Ethnic | 507,000 |
Popular Socialists | Social Democratic | 312,000 |
Other Rightist groups | Rightist | 292,000 |
Association of Rural Proprietors and Landowners | Rightist | 215,000 |
Bashkirs | Ethnic | 195,000 |
Poles | Ethnic | 155,000 |
Germans | Ethnic | 130,000 |
Ukrainian Social-Democrats | Social Democratic/Ethnic | 95,000 |
Cossacks | Ethnic | 79,000 |
Old Believers | Religious | 73,000 |
Letts | Ethnic | 67,000 |
Co-operators | Social Democratic | 51,000 |
German socialists | Social Democratic/Ethnic | 44,000 |
Yedinstvo | Social Democratic | 25,000 |
Finnish socialists | Social Democratic/Ethnic | 14,000 |
Belarusians | Ethnic | 12,000 |
Total: | 35,333,666 |
The bottom line was that the Bolsheviks received between 22% and 25% of the vote, albeit as clear winners in Russia's urban centers and among soldiers on the "Western Front" (two-thirds of those soldiers' votes). In the city of Moscow, for example, the Bolsheviks won 47.9% of the votes, the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) 35.7% and the SRs 8.1 percent. While losing the urban vote, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party received around 57-58% (62% with their social democratic allies), having won the massive support of the country's rural peasantry who constituted 80% of the Russian population. However, this is a half truth because the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries did not attend the Constituent Assembly when it convened. Another major factor is the split within the Socialist Revolutionaries which led to support for the Bolsheviks by the leftist SR faction.
Read more about this topic: Russian Constituent Assembly
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