ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the antiparliamentary period of the Russian Revolution, which began with the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the convocation of the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets in January 1918. The Bolshevik leadership attempted to create a modern representative system that was not parliamentarian. Despite the adoption of a constitution, Soviet Russia was run through a highly bureaucratized system and extraconstitutional agencies controlled by the party's Central Committee, becoming one of the first single-party states in the world. The functions of the Congress of Soviets and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, which were supposed to be the supreme bodies, were relegated to the symbolic realm. The Bolsheviks’ discourse on parliaments and the Soviet assemblies was self-contradictory. They dismissed parliaments as instruments of “bourgeois” rule but continued to use “parliament” as a metaphor for Soviet assemblies. The regimes alternative to the Soviet state continued to seek legitimacy in parliamentarism, relying on or creating parliamentary and quasi-parliamentary assemblies. The idea of reassembling the whole of Russia through the Constituent Assembly remained potent during the Civil War. Besides, many new ethno-national and regional state formations continued to support parliamentarism for their futures.
