In 1906, the Tsar decided to grant basic civil liberties and hold elections for a newly created legislative body, the State Duma.

With the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in the February Revolution of 1917, power in Russia passed to a Provisional Government formed by the liberal leadership of the Duma.

The Bolsheviks thus opposed "bourgeois" parliamentary bodies, like the Provisional Government and the Constituent Assembly, in favour of the Soviets (directly elected revolutionary councils of workers, soldiers and peasants) which had arisen after the February Revolution.

The Soviet deputies of the more moderate socialist parties, the Mensheviks and the Right SRs, walked out of the Congress in protest at what they argued was a premature overthrow of the "bourgeois" government in which they had participated.

[20] While losing the urban vote, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party received around 57–58%[inconsistent] (62% with their social democratic allies), having won the massive support of the rural peasantry who constituted 80% of the Russian population.

The lists were drawn up long before the schism [between Left and Right S-Rs] occurred; they were top-heavy with older party workers whose radicalism had abated by 1917.

21 November] 1917, People's Commissar for Naval Affairs Pavel Dybenko ordered to keep 7,000 pro-Bolshevik Kronstadt sailors on "full alert" in case of a convocation of the Constituent Assembly on 9 December [O.S.

A meeting of some 20,000 Kronstadt "soldiers, sailors, workers and peasants" resolved to only support a Constituent Assembly that was "so composed as to confirm the achievements of the October Revolution [and would be free of] Kaledinites and leaders of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie".

[31] The march had not been as large as its organizers had hoped: far fewer soldiers and workers than expected had attended and the demonstration had consisted mainly of middle-class students, civil servants and professionals.

Armed guards were present everywhere in the building, weapons were allegedly pointed at speaking delegates and Viktor Chernov, despite being elected President of the Assembly, feared "a brawl" if he were too assertive.

In spite of the SR plurality, Bolshevik Yakov Sverdlov claimed to open the Assembly on the authority of the Central Executive Committee (of which he was chairman), causing an indignant reaction on the part of non-Bolshevik delegates.

The Deputy People's Commissar for Naval Affairs Fyodor Raskolnikov read a prepared statement and the Bolsheviks and Left SRs walked out.

[35]The Right SRs tried to use the final minutes of the Constituent Assembly to pass socialist measures which they had failed to implement in months of power in the Provisional Government.

The government immediately called the Third Congress of Soviets, which produced a large Bolshevik majority, as a democratic counterweight to the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly.

Radkey argued:Of ... fateful significance was the fact that while the democratic parties heaped opprobrium upon him [i.e. Lenin] for this act of despotism, their following showed little inclination to defend an institution which the Russian people had ceased to regard as necessary to the fulfilment of its cherished desires.

For the Constituent Assembly, even before it had come into existence, had been caught in a back-eddy of the swiftly flowing stream of revolutionary developments and no longer commanded the interest and allegiance of the general population which alone could have secured it against a violent death.

[46]Barred from the Tauride Palace, Constituent Assembly deputies met at the Gurevich High School and held a number of secret meetings, but found that the conditions were increasingly dangerous.

While preparations were under way, the Czechoslovak Legions overthrew Bolshevik rule in Siberia, the Urals and the Volga region in late May-early June 1918 and the center of SR activity shifted there.

However, most of the Siberia and Urals regions were controlled by a patchwork of ethnic, Cossack, military and liberal-rightist local governments, which constantly clashed with the committee.

However, when Viktor Chernov arrived in Samara on 19 September 1918, he was able to persuade the Central Committee to withdraw support from the Directory because he viewed it as too conservative and the SR presence there as insufficient.

[53] This put the Directory in a political vacuum and two months later, on 18 November 1918, it was overthrown by right-wing officers who made Admiral Alexander Kolchak the new leader.

Kaplan referenced the Bolsheviks' growing authoritarianism, citing their forcible shutdown of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, the elections to which they had lost.

[56][57]: 442 After the fall of the Ufa Directory, Chernov formulated what he called the "third path" against both the Bolsheviks and the liberal-rightist White Movement, but the SRs' attempts to assert themselves as an independent force were unsuccessful and the party, always fractious, began to disintegrate.

The Bolsheviks let the SR Central Committee re-establish itself in Moscow and start publishing a party newspaper in March 1919, but they were soon arrested by chekists and spent the rest of the Russian Civil War in prison.

On 26 May 1919, the Allies offered Kolchak their support predicated on a number of conditions, including free elections at all levels of government and reinstating the Constituent Assembly.

Kolchak and Denikin made general promises to the effect that there would be no return to the past and that there would be some form of popular representation put in place.

However, as one Russian journalist observed at the time: [I]n Omsk itself… could be seen a political grouping who were prepared to promise anything that the Allies wanted whilst saying that "When we reach Moscow we can talk to them in a different tone".

[citation needed] After the Bolshevik victory in the Southern Front of the Civil War in late 1920, 38 members of the Constituent Assembly met in Paris in 1921 and formed an executive committee, which consisted of the Constitutional Democrats leader Pavel Milyukov, Progressive Party leader Aleksandr Konovalov, a Ufa Directory member Avksentiev and the head of the Provisional Government Kerensky.

[63] Two more recent books using material from the opened Soviet archives, The Russian Revolution 1899-1919 by Richard Pipes and A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes, give a different version.

In a review of Pipes' work, historian Diane P. Koenker considered his interpretation to be "fundamentally reactionary" and that it presents a sympathetic view of imperial forces, and that it depicted Lenin as a "single-minded, ruthless and cowardly intellectual".