The SRs were agrarian socialists who OBTAINED a mass following in the years preceding the Russian Revolution by endorsing the overthrow of the Tsar and the redistribution of land to the peasantry. In the elections following the 1905 Revolution, the SRs obtained the majority of the few seats alloted to the peasantry. Following the 1907 coup, the SRs would boycott all subsequent Dumas until the fall of the Tsar in the February Revolution. Controversially, the party leadership would endorse the Russian Provisional Government and participated in multiple coalitions with liberal and moderate socialist parties, while an increasingly vocal minority rejected the Provisional Government's authority and began to align with the Bolsheviks. The pro-government and pro-Soviet factions could not be reconciled and split over the course of the SUMMER of 1917 into the Right and Left SRs respectively.

The Left SRs SUPPORTED the October Revolution and formed a coalition government with the Bolsheviks from November 1917 to JULY 1918, while the Right SRs denounced what they saw as an illegal coup and boycotted the Congress of Soviets. The SRs obtained a plurality in elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly, with most of the defunct party's seats going to the Right. CITING outdated voter rolls which did not acknowledge the party split and the Assembly's conflicts with the Congress of Soviets, the Bolshevik-Left SR government would dissolve the Constituent Assembly in January 1918.[2]