Elections to Moscow District Dumas were held on . It was the second of the three general elections in Moscow in 1917, between the City Duma election of June 1917 and the All-Russian Constituent Assembly election in November. The Bolshevik Party won a landslide victory, obtaining an absolute majority in 11 out of 17 districts and a plurality in another 3 districts. The Kadet Party finished in second place, able to retain most of their support base from the June 1917 Moscow City Duma election whilst the support for the moderate socialists who had won the June 1917 election collapsed. The electoral participation was low.
1917 administrative district reform Following the 1917 February Revolution, roles previously performed by the Czarist police and city administration in Moscow were taken over by local citizens committees. These citizens committees in turn operated as local organs of the . Over fifty such committees existed by mid-1917. After the election of a new City Duma in June 1917 a process to regulate the local administrations in the city began. On , the Commission on District Dumas was created, in which all major political parties were represented. The Commission on District Dumas was tasked with the reorganization of districts into larger units and technical preparations for district-level elections. The Commission on District Dumas outlined the plan for creating 17 new administrative districts. On the Commission on District Dumas adopted a resolution stating that it was 'considered desirable to hold elections to district dumas on the basis of universal, direct, secret and equal suffrage in September'.
On the Moscow City Duma adopted a resolution deciding to replace the now defunct pre-revolutionary police sectors with 17 administrative districts 'in order to organize the public city life'.Управа района Южнопортовый города Москвы. Формирование района Notably, these geographic boundaries of these 17 new administrative districts did not line up with the boundaries of the 11 soviet districts that had emerged in March 1917.И. Г Тараканова. Центральные архивы Москвы: путеводитель по фондам, Vol. 1. Мосгорархив, 1999. pp. 285-286
By the decision of the Moscow City Duma on , elections for District Dumas (municipal assemblies) to govern the 17 new administrative districts were scheduled for - thus providing roughly a month for the political parties to conduct their election campaigns. Administrative districts with a population of up to 75,000 eligible voters would elected a District Duma consisting of 30 members, districts whose population ranged from 75,000 to 100,000 voters would elect 35 members, districts with from 100,000 to 125,000 eligible voters 40 members, districts with 125,000 to 150,000 eligible voters would elect 45 members, and lastly districts with more than 150,000 eligible voters would elect District Dumas with 50 members.
No.Areas from the previous Czarist administrationNew district nameNo. of District Duma seatsMap of the new districts1.Myasnitskaya Sector in Bely Gorod, Yauzskaya Sector in Zemlyanoy Gorod, Sretenskaya SectorMyasnitsko-Yauzsky District502.Tverskaya Sector in Bely GorodGorodskoi District453.Prechistenskaya Sector and Arbatskaya Sector in Zemlyanoy GorodPrechistensko-Arbatsky District 454.Yakimanskaya Sector in Zemlyanoy GorodKaluzhsky District405.Pyatinitskaya Sector in Zemlyanoy Gorod, without Pyatnitsky District506.Third Precinct of the Rogozhsky Sector, Simonovsky Precinct in the suburbsSimonovsky District357.The First and Second Precincts of the Rogozhsky Sector, a part of the Third Precinct of the Lefortovo Sector, Novoandronyevsky Precinct in the suburbsRogozhsky District458.Second Precinct of Lefortovo Sector, Cherkizovo, BlagushaPreobrazhensky District359.Second and Fourth Precincts of the Meshchansky Sector, a part of the First Precinct of Lefortovo Precinct, Bogorodsky Precinct, the Pogonny-Losiny Ostrov suburbSokolnichesky District4010.Second Precinct of the Yauzsky Sector in Zemlyanoy Gorod, Basmannye Sector, parts of the First and Third Precincts of the Lefortovo Sector, SyromyatnikiLefortovo District5011.Alekseevsky Precinct in the suburbs, as well as the suburbs , , , , , MarfinoAlekseevsky District3012.First and Third Precincts of the Meshchansky Sector, First and Third Precincts of the Sushchevsky SectorMeshchansky District4513.Sushchevsky Sector and Mar'insky Precinct in the suburbsSushchevsky-Mar'insky District5014.Petrovsko-RazumovskoyeButyrsky District3015.new entityPetrovsky District3016.Presnensky SectorPresnensky District4517.Khamovnicheskaya Sector, and suburbs Poklonnaya Gora and Khamovnichesky District45 Листовки Великого Октября: каталог Центрального музея революции СССР. Центральный музей революции СССР. Tip. izd-va "Radio i svi︠a︡zʹ", 1988. p. 219Nikolaæi Nikolaevich Ovsëiìannikov. Октябрьское восстание в Москве: сборник документов, статей и воспоминаний под редакцией Н. Овсянникова. Gosudarstvennoe izdatel§stvo, Moskovskoe otdelenie, 1922. p. 101
Parties in the fray and electoral campaigning
Overall the electoral campaigns were dull and muted, as both the political parties and the electorate showed little interest in the District Duma elections. The Moscow press (dailies like Zemlya i Volya, Vlast Naroda, Vpered, Trud and Svobodny Narod) provided very limited coverage on the election campaign. Most of the high-ranking political leaders were too busy with other national political issues to spend time campaigning a local-level election. Some political parties had presented their slate of candidates in the last minute before the deadline.
On the District Duma Election Commission approved the submitted lists of candidates, marking the formal beginning of the election campaign. 18 lists were registered, but List 9 was removed to avoid confusion with List 6. The parties with the largest numbers of candidates were the Socialist-Revolutionaries (648 candidates), Bolsheviks (558 candidates), Kadets (518 candidates) and the Mensheviks (347 candidates). In two districts there was no Menshevik list in the fray.
By the time of the District Duma election campaign the United Social Democratic faction was in shambles. They had stopped publishing their newspaper Proletary in June 1917 due to financial problems and many of their leaders had now defected to other factions. Nevertheless, they fielded their own slate in 8 districts. They had initially adopted a resolution calling for forming a joint electoral bloc with the Bolsheviks. But the Moscow Committee of the Bolshevik Party vehemently rejected the invitation. The United S-D leader Nikolai Rozhkov then reached out to the Mensheviks, but they also rejected an electoral alliance with Rozhkov's faction (based on experiences of having had a joint electoral bloc with the United S-D in the June 1917 City Duma election). On the right, the Octobrists were still trying to recover from their set-backs in the June 1917 City Duma election and opted not to field any candidature of their own. Instead the Octobrists threw their weight behind the Kadets, supplying the Kadet electoral campaign with significant financial resources.
A notable feature of the Moscow District Duma election was the emergence of several 'non-party' lists; Home-Owners Union (list 7), Business Group (list 11), Union of Apartment Tenants (list 12), Association of Tenants of Rooms, Corners and Beds (list 13), Non-Party Group (list 14), Union of Parents of Students (list 15, for which no votes were recorded in any district), Economic and Business Group (list 16), Group of Public Workers (list 17) and Group of Residents of the Khamovnichesky District (list 18). These groups tended to play on slogans of 'less talk, more action', and arguing that the business acumen of their leaders would make them better representatives than the main political parties. Commenting on the phenomenon of the 'non-party lists' in the Moscow District Duma election, Josef Stalin wrote that "[t]here is no doubt that under the flag of non-party lists are hiding pro-Cadet bourgeois who are afraid to come out openly and who are trying to sneak into district dumas by contraband".
The group that attached more significance to the District Duma election was the Bolshevik Party. The Bolsheviks felt emboldened by the results of the recent Petrograd City Duma election. Following the political line laid out by the Sixth Party Congress, the Moscow Committee of the Bolshevik Party sought to use the election campaign to promote the party line among the masses and mobilized all of its capacities for agitation and propaganda. Bolshevik candidates were reviewed by the Municipal Commission of the Moscow Committee of the party, to be confirmed by a general meeting of the Moscow Committee and Bolshevik deputies.
Mikhail Vladimirsky led the Bolshevik electoral campaign. The trade union leader Mikhail Tomsky helped organize the campaign. The Bolshevik election campaign sought to link the general political line of the party with the every-day issues of workers, soldiers and the urban poor. The Bolshevik election campaign included slogans on housing shortage, bread queues and capitalist sabotage of the Moscow economy. The campaign argued that through local governance, problems of food and economy could be resolved locally in Moscow. The party organ Sotsial-Demokrat reported in detail on work of the District Duma Election Commission. Sotsial-Demokrat''' would repeatedly publish calls for vigilance on electoral irregularities, calling on readers to report any complaints. In parallel to the District Duma election campaign, the Bolsheviks won control over the Moscow Soviet in the election of soviet deputies on .
+ Bolshevik candidates in the 1917 Moscow District Duma electionNo.DistrictTop candidate of the Bolshevik Party 1 Myasnitsko-Yauzsky District 2 Gorodskoi District 3 Prechistensko-Arbatsky District Vadim Podbelsky 4 Kaluzhsky District Georgy Oppokov (Lomov) 5 Pyatnitsky District Josef Fradkin (Boris Volin) 6 Simonovsky District Nikolai Bukharin 7 Rogozhsky District Ivan Skvortsov 8 Preobrazhensky District 9 Sokolnichesky District 10 Lefortovo District Vasily Yesin 11 Alekseevsky District I. P. Frolov 12 Meshchansky District Josef Fradkin (Boris Volin) 13 Sushchevsky-Mar'insky District 14 Butyrsky District 15 Petrovsky District 16 Presnensky District Yemelyan Yaroslavsky 17 Khamovnichesky District Список наших кандидатов, предложенных в гласные Районных Дум. Социал-демократ, September 24, 1917. p. 3
Results Voting took place on , a Sunday.Rosenberg, William G. The Russian Municipal Duma Elections of 1917: A Preliminary Computation of Returns. Soviet Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, 1969, pp. 131–63. JSTORTimothy J. Colton. Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis. Harvard University Press, 1995. pp. 84-85, 92, 819Diane P. Koenker. Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution. Princeton University Press, 2014. pp. 136-137, 210, 212-214В. В. ДЕМИДОВ. Борьба московских большевиков за массы в период выборов в городскую и районные думы в 1917 году. Издание Томского государственного университета, 1952. pp. 74-75, 77, 79, 83, 91-92 There was a high degree of voter abstention. Out of the 1,028,700 eligible voters, some 37% cast their ballots in the election.
Bolshevik victory