parliament (Riigikogu) elected under the new constitution in September 1992. Politics March 1990 also saw the election of the Estonian Supreme Soviet, the first multi-party national elections in the Estonian SSR. Unlike the previous Soviet, which consisting largely of members of the Communist Party of Estonia, the new Supreme Council, as it had now begun to call itself, was dominated by the Estonian Popular Front. The main distinctions between the political ideas of the Congress of Estonia and the Supreme Soviet were: The Congress of Estonia stood for the principle of legal continuity of the Republic, in contrast to the "Third Republic" concept (after the First Republic of 1918–1940 and the Soviet Republic of 1940–1991), which was the Supreme Soviet's dominant position; The Congress of Estonia, as the Citizens Committees before it, supported continuity in citizenship, as opposed to extending citizenship to all people with residential registrations (called propiska in Russian) in Estonia in 1990 (sometimes called the 'zero option citizenship' or 'clean state citizenship', ), including more than 300,000 occupation-era migrants from the neighboring Soviet Union. Opposition on issues of substance between the Congress of Estonia and the Supreme Soviet over the first point was the primary reason that the Supreme Soviet did not "proclaim" or "establish" Estonia's independence during the 1991 August Putsch in Russia, but instead, as a compromise, decided to reaffirm it instead. In later discussions, the Congress of Estonia prevailed regarding the aforementioned points. A small number of the members of the Congress of Estonia were Estonians who had gone into exile during World War II, or children of such refugees. Some of the delegates from the United States commented on the similarity of the Citizens Committees of Estonia and Latvia (in the nineties, the Latvians had a movement analogous to the Estonian committees) to the American Committees of Correspondence, which were shadow governments organized by the patriot leaders of the Thirteen Colonies on the eve of the American Revolution. The American Committees of Correspondence played an important role in the events that led to the formation of the United States of America. Later developments After the adoption of the new Constitution in 1992, a new Citizenship Law recognised the citizenship registrations of the Citizens' Committees as the initial legal registry of Estonian citizens. Citizens of the Soviet Union who had filed applications with the Citizens Committees were enabled to be naturalised on the basis