Provisional Siberian Government (Vladivostok)
provisional government (1918)
The Provisional Siberian Government (Russian: Вре́менное Сиби́рское прави́тельство, later the Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia), was an ephemeral government for Siberia created by the White movement.
History
Background
The seizure of power by the Bolshevik Party in Petrograd in the Russian Revolution of November 1917 was followed by the dispersal of the Russian Constituent Assembly early in the morning of January 19, 1918 (N.S.), a body which had been dominated by the elected representatives of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR), directed by Victor Chernov. This usurpation of authority by the Council of People's Commissars and the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets did not end opposition to the Bolshevik regime, however.
In December 1917 elections were held to select a Siberian Regional Duma which was to be convened in the city of Tomsk. Owing to the revolutionary temper of the times, the middle class and the bourgeoisie had been excluded from the elections to this body, a decision which was denounced by the centrist Constitutional Democratic Party (known as the K-D, or Kadets). Additionally the Bolsheviks considered the Siberian effort as an attempt to reduce the sovereignty of their own regime and refused to participate with the elections to this Siberian Regional Duma or to recognize the body's legitimacy. With the Monarchist Right and the Center both effectively excluded, and the Bolshevik Left boycotting, the delegates elected to the Siberian regional parliament were dominated by members of Chernov's PSR.
After a delay necessitated by the inability to assemble a quorum of elected representatives, on the night of January 28/29, 1918, some forty delegates finally succeeded in gathering in Tomsk to perform their business. This body expeditiously elected a government known as the Provisional Siberian Government (PSG), with young Socialist-Revolutionary Pyotr Derber elected president. Of the PSG's twenty ministers, only six had been present at the founding meeting of January 28–29. Two had been in Bolshevik prison, and the rest were scattered throughout Siberia and north China and were chosen in absentia, without their prior consent.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2528166. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1917 and 1918.
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This entry incorporates text from “Provisional Siberian Government (Vladivostok)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.