Parliamentary Alternatives to Red and White Dictatorships: Post-Imperial Assemblies in the Russian Civil War, 1918–1922

The Russian Civil War, itself part of the global imperial crisis, is commonly interpreted as a struggle between two authoritarian projects: the Bolshevik revolutionary dictatorship and the military regimes of the White movement. This lecture argues that the violent imperial transformation also produced a wide range of parliamentary and quasi-parliamentary assemblies that sought to become alternatives to both Red and White dictatorships. Across the collapsing imperial space of the former Russian Empire, political actors attempted to institutionalize political representation through assemblies that drew on the imperial parliamentary experience, revolutionary legitimacy, and regional political structures. The lecture examines and compares several key cases of such institutions across the former Russian Empire. It pays particular attention to attempts to preserve the integrity of post-imperial economic and social spaces by addressing the crisis of sovereignty through a reconfiguration of diversity management, especially with regard to nationality and class. In Ukraine, the Ukrainian Central Rada functioned as a revolutionary body that combined national self-determination with socialist and federalist visions for the post-imperial order. In Siberia, the Siberian Regional Duma sought to provide a representative foundation for regional autonomy and anti-Bolshevik governance. In the South Caucasus, the Transcaucasian Sejm emerged in 1918 as a regional parliamentary body representing Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani political forces. On the Pacific coast, the Far Eastern Republic and its rival regimes also established representative institutions, with Bolsheviks and monarchists participating in several such assemblies. By comparing these cases, the lecture highlights the persistence of anticipated parliamentary solutions to the imperial crisis despite the rise of authoritarian alternatives.

Ivan Sablin is an interim professor of Eastern European History and coordinator of the Ladenburg Research Network “The Aggressor: Self-Perception and External Perception of an Actor Between Nations” in the Department of History at Heidelberg University. He also works as a research fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana, where he heads the Slovenian Research Agency Project “Socialist Management in a Global Context: Technocratic Developments in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, 1955–1991.” In 2018–2023, he led the Research Group “Entangled Parliamentarisms: Constitutional Practices in Russia, Ukraine, China and Mongolia, 1905–2005,” sponsored by the European Research Council, at Heidelberg University. His research interests include the history of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, history of socialisms, and global intellectual history. He is the author of three monographs – Parliaments in the Late Russian Empire, Revolutionary Russia, and the Soviet Union (2024), The Rise and Fall of Russia’s Far Eastern Republic, 1905–1922 (2018), and Governing Post-Imperial Siberia and Mongolia, 1911–1924 (2016) – and research articles in Slavic Review, Europe-Asia Studies, Nationalities Papers, and other journals. Ivan Sablin also co-edited From Empire to Federation in Eurasia (2026), Parties as Governments in Eurasia, 1913–1991 (2022), and Planting Parliaments in Eurasia, 1850–1950 (2021).