It originally included in its ranks people of Menshevik, Bolshevik, Social Revolutionary and Anarchist views, who all, however, accepted a distinction between Russians and Muslims (which in this region meant the Muslim ethnic groups of Tatars and Bashkirs).
They had a view of socialism tied to that of the Islamic ummah and included land reform in their programme.
Following the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, the MSK played a leading role in combating the Harbi Shura forming Red Guard detachments for this purpose.
This conflict reached its height at the Second Pan-Russian Muslim (Tartar) Military Congress, held in Kazan, February and March 1918.
Soviet historians criticsed them for making the term “socialists” encompass the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries.