[a] Organized as a result of events in the February Revolution, the elections took place two months after they had been originally meant to occur.

[1] Some modern Marxist theoreticians have contested the view that a one-party state was a natural outgrowth of the Bolsheviks' actions.

[5] George Novack stressed the initial efforts by the Bolsheviks to form a government with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and bring other parties such as the Mensheviks into political legality.

[6] Tony Cliff argued the Bolshevik-Left Socialist Revolutionary coalition government dissolved the Constituent Assembly due to a number of reasons.

They cited outdated voter-rolls that did not acknowledge the split within the Socialist Revolutionary Party and the assembly's conflict with the elected Russian Congress of the Soviets as an alternative, democratic structure.

[7] The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly was also approved by the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and anarchists; both groups were in favour of a more extensive democracy.

The Bolsheviks demanded immediate elections, whilst the Socialist-Revolutionaries wanted to postpone the vote for several months for it not to collide with the harvest season.

On July 20, 1917, the Provisional Government issued a decree awarding voting rights for women aged 20 years and above.

[10] In May the political parties agreed on main principles of the election (proportional representation, universal suffrage and secret ballot).

Nevertheless, the new government pledged to go ahead with the election and that its rule remained provisional until its authority would be confirmed by the Constituent Assembly.

[23] Moreover, whilst the SRs enjoyed widespread support among the peasantry, the party lacked a strong organizational structure in rural areas.

Along with the Mensheviks, the SRs supported the notion of engaging with other European socialist politicians to find a settlement to the ongoing World War.

[24] Notably in some of the locations leftist and rightist SR lists were separately presented (Baltic Fleet, Petrograd, Kazan), the leftists prevailed over the rightists, leading D'Agostino (2011) to argue that had separate right/left SRs lists been presented nationwide the peasantry could have opted for the left (considering that there were no major difference between the factions on their agrarian programmes).

[28] Smith points out that though the association with Soviet power strengthened the PLSR popularity in the countryside, the schism did not transform the PLSR overnight into a large and well-organized political party, and during the following months of 1918 the PSR managed to regain control over some of the soviets and local branches it lost to the left.

[29] In 1917 the Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) had begun to allow mass membership, without consulting with Lenin.

[30] On July 1, 1917 the Central Committee sent out an instruction to local party organizations to build a broad democratic unity ahead of the elections, to reach out to Menshevik-Internationalists, left-wing SRs and trade unions.

The moderates in the Central Committee held the opinion that the Constituent Assembly should become the supreme body to decide the future path of Russia.

In an article edited after the elections, he stated that the proletariat cannot achieve victory if it does not win the majority of the population to its side.

But to limit that winning to polling a majority of votes in an election under the rule of the bourgeoisie, or to make it the condition for it, is crass stupidity, or else sheer deception of the workers.

In order to win the majority of the population to its side the proletariat must, in the first place, overthrow the bourgeoisie and seize state power; secondly, it must introduce Soviet power and completely smash the old state apparatus, whereby it immediately undermines the rule, prestige and influence of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeois compromisers over the non-proletarian working people.

Thirdly, it must entirely destroy the influence of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeois compromisers over the majority of the non-proletarian masses by satisfying their economic needs in a revolutionary way at the expense of the exploiters.

[25] In a fifth of the constituencies, pro-war Mensheviks and Internationalists ran on competing slates and in Petrograd and Kharkov the defencists had set up their own local organizations.

[36] Whilst the Kadets emerged as the main losers in the election, they did take a sizable share of the votes in the largest cities.

[35] The cooperative societies held an emergency congress on October 4, 1917, at which it was decided that they would contest the Constituent Assembly elections directly.

[36] In the Petrograd election district, the list of cooperative candidates included only one notable figure, Alexander Chayanov.

[45] Four days ahead of the vote the newspaper Qazaq published the Alash programme, including a call for a democratic federal republic with equality of nationalities.

[19] The candidates on these lists had vowed to form a common bloc in the Constituent Assembly and implement decisions of the All-Russian Jewish Congress.

[55] His article was included in the one-year anniversary symposium of the Russian Revolution organized by the SR party (Moscow, Zemlya i Volya Publishers, 1918).

Notably is lacked details from the Olonets, Estonian, Kaluga, Bessarabian, Podolsk, Orenburg, Yakutsk, Don governorates, as well as Transcaucasus.

[61] The All Russian Constituent Assembly (Всероссийское Учредительное собрание, Vserossiyskoye Uchreditelnoye sobraniye) convened only for 13 hours, from 4 p.m. to 5 a.m., 18–19 January [O.S.