Seizure of Power Through Election Manipulation

in the campaign “Failure of the Political Seizure of the UNR in Kyiv (November – December 1917)”

An attempt to convert an electoral minority into a procedural majority at the congress. Actual support was negligible: in the Constituent Assembly elections "across the country as a whole the Bolsheviks gathered less than 24% of the votes, and in the Ukrainian gubernias only 10%"[1]. Hence the wager on capturing representative bodies: the Central Committee of the RSDLP(b) declared outright that "the transfer of government from the hands of one soviet party into the hands of another party is secured without any revolution, by a simple decision of the Soviets, by a simple re-election of deputies to the Soviets," while the All-Russian Central Executive Committee's decree of 4 December 1917 "On the right of recall of delegates" provided the mechanism for such a replacement[1][2].

ID: C0071.T0133
Start: November 1917
End: December 1917
Contributors: decolonial.ist project

References