The Russian Revolutionary Constitution and Pamphlet Literature in the 1917 Russian Revolution

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.