The election of soldier delegates to the first Soviet. From a Bulgarian poster.
Bulgarian:Изборитъ на войнишкитъ дептатн эа първня СъвътъElection of Soldier Delegates to the First Soviet
". . . On November 25 [1917] the elections for the Constituent Assembly began. . . .The results of the election were startling. Out of a total of 41.7 million votes only 9.8 million were polled for the Bolsheviks—24 percent or, at the most, 29 percent if you counted the Left Social Revolutionaries with them. Even in Petrograd and Moscow, even in the army and the navy, Lenin had less than half the vote. The Social Revolutionaries with nearly 20.8 million votes, or 58 per cent of the total, were the big winners. As for the Mensheviks, they had all but vanished from the scene, and the bourgeois parties polled only 1.99 million votes between them."
Russian parties across the political spectrum had called for a freely elected parliament for years. The November, 1917 vote for a Constituent Assembly came a month after Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks seized power from a weak government unable to deliver an end to the war or the distribution of land to those who worked it. Petrograd was the capital and where the revolution was launched. Moscow was also controlled by the Bolsheviks who had strong support in the army and navy, but not as much support as expected.
The Russian Revolution by Alan Moorehead, page 264, copyright © 1958 by Time, Inc., publisher: Carroll and Graf, publication date: 1989
1917-11-25, 1917, November, Constituent Assembly, Vladimir Lenin, Lenin, Petrograd, Moscow, Bolsheviks, Petrograd Soviet, First Soviet soldier delegates
