their demands to end the war immediately, as well as their support for fast land reform and originally even ethnic claims (to introduce Estonian as an official language parallel to Russian). During the summer of 1917, elected Bolshevik members along with their supporters, achieved a controlling majority in the Tallinn city council. By the end of 1917 Estonian Bolsheviks were stronger than ever - holding control over political power and having significant support - remarkably more than in Russia. In the elections into the Russian Constituent Assembly their list got 40,2% of the votes in Estonia and four of six seats allocated to Estonia. The support for the party did however start to decline, and the Constituent Assembly election of January 1918 was never completed. Moreover, the party faced the situation in which it had difficulty building alliances. Their opponents, the Democratic Bloc, was able to initiate cooperation with the Labour Party, Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. Those parties supported different ideas but were united around the demand for an independent or Finland-linked Estonia and wished to distribute land to small farmers. In the first question the Estonian Bolsheviks, although having introduced Estonian as an official language after their takeover, promoted the idea of Estonia as a part of Soviet Russia. In the land reform policy, Estonian Bolsheviks continued to support immediate collectivisation. Bolshevik rule in Estonia was ended by the German invasion in the end of February 1918. The party branch continued to function in exile in Russia. After the German revolution in November 1918, when an independent Estonian national government took office, the Estonian Bolsheviks supported the Lenin's Soviet Russian regime's armed invasion against the new democratic country. By this time the level of local Estonian popular support for the Bolsheviks had markedly fallen, and they failed to mobilise mass support for "revolutionary warfare". A pro-Leninist puppet government ("Estonian Workers' Commune") was set up in areas occupied by the Red Army, but it had very limited influence. At this time the party branch had been reorganized into the Central Committee of the Estonian Sections of the RCP(b) (). After the war a reorientation was found to be necessary (since Estonia was now an independent state) by the central leadership of the RCP(b) and thus on the November 5, 1920 the Communist Party of Estonia (EKP) was founded as a separate party. In the rigged 1940 Estonian parliamentary election,