ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that despite all its deficiencies, the State Duma played a central role in the Revolution of 1917. The Provisional Government was formed mainly from State Duma members, and it laid the foundation for the broader revolutionary elite. The Revolution was largely parliamentary, with assemblies emerging across the former empire. The All-Russian Constituent Assembly was supposed to resolve the broader imperial crisis. In the context of the war and subsequent hardships, the fragmentation within the Russian public led to the formation of exclusionary communities and the failure of the Constituent Assembly to reassemble the Russian imperial space. The antiparliamentary discourse in its anarchist version, appropriated and modified by the Bolsheviks, contributed to the overthrow of the Provisional Government, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, and the end of the parliamentary period of the Revolution.
