‘The dictatorship of the democracy’? The council of people’s commissars as Bolshevik-left socialist revolutionary coalition government, December 1917-March 1918

In its early months the Soviet republic was governed by the Council of People’s Commissars as a dual-party coalition cabinet composed of Bolsheviks and Left S.R.s. This article examines the period of their collaboration in central government, a phase often sidelined in general studies of the Russian Revolution, and attempts a fuller and more positive reassessment of the activity of the coalition. The focus is on the practical functioning of coalition politics inside the council of people’s commissars, or ‘Sovnarkom’, from December 1917 to March 1918, and the formal and informal methods through which the Left S.R.s were able to exercise some degree of influence over government.