Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2022 number

Nowadays, self-government bodies of the city of Yakutsk remain almost unstudied by historians. This work considers the history of self-government in Yakutsk during the Revolution of 1917. The research objective is to analyze the structure of the city government and the electoral process in Yakutsk in 1917 and reveal the factors that influenced this process in the context of political and socio-economic crises. In addition, the focus is to clarify the composition of Yakutsk city self-government bodies. This scientific novelty of research is that it provides for the first time a holistic view of the election organization and the self-government staff of the city of Yakutsk (the City People’s Duma and City Council) based on the principles of historicism, objectivity, consistency, and comprehensiveness. The retrospective method is used as a research tool, making it possible to highlight cause-and-effect relations and regularities in the historical development of the issue. It was found that the elections to Yakutsk City Duma on 18 May, 1917 resulted in three political groups becoming the dominant force: the Social-Democratic, Social-Revolutionary, and Yakutsk Labour Union of the Federalists (YaLUF). The study revealed that the most stable position was that of the Socialist Revolutionary Party: its representatives were at the head of the Yakutsk Committee of Public Security, City Duma, and City Council and entered into an alliance with the national intelligentsia through YaLUF. The Mensheviks have been found to account for an absolute majority in the local branch of the RSDLP actively collaborating with the Social Revolutionaries. The position of the Bolsheviks proved to be considerably weaker. It is worth noting that after the events of October 1917 in Petrograd, the authorities in Yakutsk remained loyal to the Provisional Government and the Constituent Assembly, which had been overthrown by the Bolsheviks.