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 Russianrevolution. Taken as a discreet source, the pamphlet literature offered detailed and accessible arguments thatwere 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 voluminousliterature on the Bolsheviks. The pamphlets examined here provide an alternative, non-Bolshevik, promotionof a constitution of rights that sought to create a political culture that would frame and underpin a republicandemocratic revolutionary settlement. This was the dominant script and predominant expectation of 1917 thatthe victorious October Revolution managed not only to suppress, but to render historically obscure.