The congress opened on November 7 at 10:40 pm, at the height of the armed uprising that began in Petrograd. The peasant councils and all the soldier-level committees of the army refused to participate in the activities of the congress. The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries condemned the Bolshevik's actions as an "illegal coup". The old composition of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee also condemned the Bolsheviks, saying that