Elections to the All-Russian constituent assembly in the Belarusian provinces: electoral statistics and new horizons of study

The articlebythe well-knownBelarusianhistorian Oleg G. Bukhovets summarizes the results of studying the elections to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly on the territory of modern Belarus and raises questions about the application of new approaches to the analysis of electoral statistics in 1917. According to the author of the article, the Belarusian provinces of the former Russian Empire, which were distinguished by the polyethnicity and confessional diversity of their population, represent an interesting object of study of both processes and phenomena common to the former Empire, and regional ones peculiar to the Belarusian provinces. In addition, according to his conclusion, electoral statistics on the elections to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, which is the most important and unique source in terms of heuristic potential, is still used very little by researchers. The author comes to the conclusion that the analysis of the pre-election activity of socio-political forces and the results of the 1917 elections in the Belarusian provinces, taking into account the national and confessional heterogeneity of their population, is heuristically extremely important. In particular, such analysis should serve to overcome the already traditional “derivation” of historians’ attention towards the results obtained by the Bolsheviks and Social Revolutionaries in the elections to the Constituent Assembly.