ABSTRACT
This essay examines how Russia's constitutional status was discussed in pamphlet literature in the 1917 Russian revolution. Taken as a discreet source, the pamphlet literature offered detailed and accessible arguments that were crucial to comprehending what sort of Russian revolution contemporaries thought they were engaged in. To a considerable degree, historical studies of 1917 have been determined by its outcome, with a voluminous literature on the Bolsheviks. The pamphlets examined here provide an alternative, non-Bolshevik, promotion of a constitution of rights that sought to create a political culture that would frame and underpin a republican democratic revolutionary settlement. This was the dominant script and predominant expectation of 1917 that the victorious October Revolution managed not only to suppress, but to render historically obscure.
