The Rise of the Constitutional Alternative to Soviet Rule in 1918: Provisional Governments of Siberia and All Russia and Their Quest for Allied Intervention (East European Monographs S.)

This volume aims to set the record straight about the Bolshevik victory, and it relates the story of the vanquished, non-Bolshevik political groups who sought the Allied support that was vetoed by President Wilson.

a fresh look at a long neglected topic
Histories of wars, revolutions and great political and social upheavals are written by the victors. This is particularly true about the Bolshevik coup d'etat in Russia in October 1917. This book is about the aftermath of that coup, and it has been written from the point of view of the vanquished. It discuses the rise of the constitutional alternative to Soviet rule in Russia and Siberia during the summer of May 1918, its program and quest for Allied intervention. The alternative, its rise described in PART I, had been deriving its constitutional legitimacy from the results of the election to the All Russia Constituent Assembly, held across the country during November-December 1917. After Lenin dissolved this new supreme law making body of the land on January 6, 1918, and replaced it with one party dictatorship, its elected members, and the parties they represented, remained the legitimate bearers of the sovereign rights of the Russian state, as well as of the liberal and democratic gains of the March 1917 Revolution. PART I traces the rise of this alternative by describing the political and military activities of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, who had won 62% of the seats in the Assembly, and of the Constitutional Democrats. PART I further traces the invitation these two parties had extended the Allies in the middle of May, to send a large military expedition to Russia to help in its political and military rehabilitation. The Provisional Government of Siberia, the constitutional alternative to Soviet rule established in Tomsk, Siberia, in January 1918, had invited the Allies to intervene as early as March 1918. The Zemstvos, the elected Provincial Assemblies of the Far Eastern provinces, had also issued similar invitations by that time. And when on September 23, 1918, a Provisional Government of All Russia was established in Ufa, this most authentic voice of the people of Russia urged the Allies to intervene to assist in the political and military rehabilitation of the country so that Russia could rejoin the Alliance and renew war against the Central Powers. PART II discusses the seizure of the entire Trans-Siberian Railway, from the Volga to Vladivostok, by the Czech Legion between the end of May and of the end August 1918. It also describes the fall of Soviet rule on these vast expanses of land and its replacement by legitimate constitutional authorities and their yearning for Allied assistance. These two auspicious developments made the intervention a practical possibility by enabling the Allied forces to access Central Russia, to be welcomed by a friendly and enthusiastic population. However, the Allies were not permitted to take advantage of this "Spring of Great Opportunities", which had offered itself in Russia and Siberia at that time, because of President Wilson's tenacious opposition to all Allied plans to respond to these invitations and intervene to assist the constitutional alternative to assume its legitimate mandate. The book concludes that the defeat of the constitutional forces and the entrenchment of Bolshevik rule in Russia was not a "historical inevitability", had President Wilson thrown his support behind the constitutionalists during the spring and summer of 1918, as urged upon him by the Allies and by practically all American diplomats and military serving in Russia at that time. Because of its approach, the book contributes to the literature on the new emerging trend in the philosophy of history and its methodology, which is anti-deterministic and counterfactual.