Workshop organiser: Yannick Dupraz

Title of paper: "Democratic Support for the Bolshevik Revolution: An Empirical Investigation of 1917 Constituent Assembly Elections" (co-authored with Paul Castañeda Dower).

Abstract - Scholars have long-debated the causes of popular support for the Russian Revolution. We systematically investigate cross-district variation in Bolsheviks’ popularity using voting outcomes of the 1917 Constituent Assembly elections, occurring right after the Bolsheviks seized power and drawing on an electorate of sixty million males and females. We find that the Bolsheviks managed to mobilize more popular support in districts with a greater presence of industrial workers and historically private land, which the Bolsheviks redistributed to peasants, and in districts with garrisons and military hospitals. We provide evidence that the underpinnings of this support conflicted with the Bolsheviks’ vision for reform, making for an unsteady coalition and forewarning the autocratic command economy to come.