Viktor Chernov, now a footnote in political history, should have been the leader of Russia. He was at the head of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, which vastly outperformed the Bolshevik Party in the Constituent Assembly elections of 1917. Yet Chernov would serve in elected office for a mere 13 hours, on just one evening in January of 1918, before the assembly he chaired was dissolved and declared illegal by Vladimir Lenin.
By the early 1920s, the Bolsheviks had consolidated power throughout the nation and instituted an authoritarian dictatorship. They claimed to represent the interests of the Russian underclass, despite having lost the only election where that underclass had freely voted. Yet Leninâ??s party may actually have had a legitimate claim to the Russian government.
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