During the Revolution and the Civil War in Russia, moderate socialist political organizations, movements, and parties were called Revolutionary Democracy. This mainly applied to the parties of Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), Mensheviks, Popular Socialists, as well as to a number of national parties that supported the Provisional Government, the convocation of the Constituent Assembly and democratic reforms. They did not accept the October coup, believing that the Bolsheviks usurped power, and the proletarian dictatorship proclaimed by them would take away the rights and freedoms won during the February Revolution, leading the country to anarchy and civil war.

As the first retaliatory measure on the night of October 25–26, 1917, moderate socialists formed the All-Russian Committee for the Salvation of the Motherland and the Revolution. Its members advocated the creation of a homogeneous socialist government of revolutionary democracy. However, all attempts to overthrow the Bolsheviks by force or negotiate with them failed. In November, revolutionary democracy representatives (first of all, the Social Revolutionaries and their supporters) won a majority in the elections to the Constituent Assembly, with which they firmly pinned their hopes for the democratic reconstruction of Russia. To combat the usurpation of power by the Bolsheviks, they created the Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly, however, the Assembly was still dispersed by the authorities on the night of January 5–6, 1918.

The action of the Czechoslovak Legion in the Volga region, the Urals, Siberia, and the Far East in May 1918 led to the liquidation of Soviet power in these territories and allowed the Revolutionary Democracy to form its own governments there. In 1918, the following organizations were formed: the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch) in Samara, the Provisional Regional Government of the Urals, the Provisional Siberian Government (based on the movement of Siberian oblast movement (Siberian Regionalism), the Transcaspian Provisional Government, etc.

During the State Conference in Ufa on September 23, 1918, the Provisional All-Russian Government (Ufa Directorate) led by an SR Nikolay Avksentiev was formed on the basis of a coalition of various anti-Bolshevik forces of the east of Russia. The Directory declared its goal to reunite Russia on a democratic basis. But it existed only until November 18, 1918. On that day, as a result of the Omsk coup, power passed to the Russian government of Aleksander Kolchak, who dispersed the Directory. Some Revolutionary Democracy representatives took up ministerial posts in the Kolchak government, actually joining the White movement. However, most of the Revolutionary Democrats found themselves in opposition to the military dictatorship of the White regimes, participating in armed resistance to them. Thus, formed in late 1919, the Political Center with the Social Revolutionaries playing a key role, overthrew the regime of Aleksander Kolchak in Irkutsk and some other cities of Siberia. Later, the Revolutionary Democracy representatives were part of the governments of state entities in the Far East, the Provisional Government of the Far East (1920), and the Far Eastern Republic (1921), in particular. In the course of the struggle against the Whites, groups and individual figures who sympathized with the Bolsheviks broke away from almost all the parties of the Revolutionary Democracy to join the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) – RCP(b).

Amidst the confrontation between the Reds and the Whites, the Revolutionary Democracy represented a moderate socialist alternative. However, ideological and political heterogeneity, the lack of real military support, and no active support from the population caused the defeat of moderate socialists and the short life of democratic governments during the Civil War in Russia.

Revolutionary Democracy