As a result of the unification of a number of populist circles and groups at the end of 1901 - beginning of 1902. The Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) formed a party. Although the Socialist Revolutionary Party formally declared its existence in 1902, it took organizational form at its 1st founding congress, held at the end of December 1905 - beginning of January 1906, at which its program and the Temporary Organizational Charter were adopted. Additions to the charter were made only in 1917.

Before the First Russian Revolution, the party had over 40 committees and groups, uniting approximately 2–2.5 thousand people. But already at the end of 1906 and beginning of 1907. The party consisted of more than 65 thousand people. In terms of its social composition, the party was predominantly intellectual. Pupils, students, intellectuals and employees made up more than 70% of it, and workers and peasants - about 28%. The party's printed organ is the newspaper "Revolutionary Russia".

Among the representatives of the essays are V. M. Chernov, developer of the party program; E.K. Breshkovskaya, G.A. Gershuni, S.N. Sletov (S. Odd), A.A. Argunov, N.I. Rakitnikov, etc.

The highest body of the party was the congress, which was to be convened at least once a year. But during the entire existence of the party, only four congresses were held - two during the first revolution and two in 1917. The direct leadership of the party was carried out by the Central Committee, consisting of 5 people. The Central Committee appointed the responsible editor of the Central Press and its representative to the International Socialist Bureau.

Under the Central Committee, special commissions or bureaus were created - peasant, workers', military, literary and publishing, technical, etc., as well as the institute of traveling agents. The charter also provided for such an institution as the Party Council. It was composed of members of the Central Committee, representatives of the regional, Moscow and St. Petersburg committees. The council was convened as needed to discuss and resolve urgent issues of tactics and organizational work.

Everywhere, local organizations, committees and groups were created by party leaders. The established Socialist Revolutionary organization had a union of propagandists, an agitation meeting and technical groups (printing and transport) involved in the publication, storage and distribution of literature. The organization was built from top to bottom, i.e. first a committee arose, and then its members created lower divisions.

The tactics of the Social Revolutionaries included propaganda and agitation, organizing strikes, boycotts and armed actions - up to the organization of armed uprisings and the use of individual political terror. However, they viewed terror as a “last resort”. It was carried out by a small “Battle Group”, which initially numbered 10-15, and during the revolution of 1905-1907. - 25-30 people. The “Combat Group” was led by Yevno Azef and Boris Savinkov. They organized the murders of a number of major government officials - Minister of Public Education N. P. Bogolepov (1901), Ministers of Internal Affairs D. S. Sipyagin (1902) and V. Ya. Pleve (1904), Governor General of Moscow Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich ( 1905).

The Socialist Revolutionary program declared: the overthrow of the autocracy and the establishment of a democratic republic, the autonomy of regions and communities on a federal basis, the widespread use of federal relations between individual nationalities, the recognition of their unconditional right to self-determination, the introduction of their native language in all local public and state institutions, universal suffrage without differences of gender, religion and nationality, free education, separation of church and state and freedom of religion, freedom of speech, press, assembly, strikes, inviolability of person and home, the destruction of the standing army and its replacement with a “people's militia”, the introduction of an 8-hour working day, the abolition of all taxes “falling on labor”, but the establishment of a progressive tax on the income of entrepreneurs.

The agrarian question occupied a central place in the Socialist Revolutionary program. The Social Revolutionaries demanded that land be taken away from private property. But they did not advocate for its nationalization, but for “socialization,” that is, transferring it not to the state, but to the public domain. The Social Revolutionaries believed that the land should be managed by communities, which would distribute it for use according to the “labor” norm among all citizens of the republic, for whom independent labor on the land is the main source of existence. In the future, the socialization of agricultural production was envisaged through the use of various forms of cooperation among farmers.

The creation of labor associations was intended not only in the field of agriculture. The Socialist Revolutionaries saw this as the creation of a socialist form of economy. They advocated the preservation of the peasant community as the basis for creating social relations in the countryside of a socialist nature.

The revolution, according to V.M. Chernov, came prematurely, when there were no actual forces prepared to defeat the autocracy. The Russo-Japanese War accelerated its advance, and military defeats caused confusion among the government. Thanks to this, the revolutionary movement “jumped far above the real balance of forces,” an explosion of indignation created a “false appearance” of the dominant position in the country of the “left.” The revolution did not have power, but it believed in it and made the government believe in this power.

Being the driving force of the revolution, the proletariat, according to the Socialist Revolutionaries, was ready to destroy, but, like the peasantry, was not prepared for creative work.

Everyone knows that as a result of the October Revolution and the subsequent Civil War, the Bolshevik Party came to power in Russia, which, with various fluctuations in its general line, remained in leadership almost until the collapse of the USSR (1991). The official historiography of the Soviet years instilled in the population the idea that it was this force that enjoyed the greatest support of the masses, while all other political organizations were, to one degree or another, striving for the revival of capitalism. This is not entirely true. For example, the Socialist Revolutionary Party stood on an irreconcilable platform, in comparison with which the position of the Bolsheviks sometimes looked relatively peaceful. At the same time, social revolutionaries criticized the “combat detachment of the proletariat” led by Lenin for usurping power and oppressing democracy. So what kind of party was this?

One against all

Of course, after many artistic images created by the masters of “socialist realistic art”, the Socialist Revolutionary Party looked ominous in the eyes of the Soviet people. The Social Revolutionaries were remembered when the story was about the 1918 murder of Uritsky, the Kronstadt uprising (rebellion) and other facts unpleasant for the communists. It seemed to everyone that they were “grist to the mill” of the counter-revolution, seeking to strangle Soviet power and physically eliminate the Bolshevik leaders. At the same time, it was somehow forgotten that this organization waged a powerful underground struggle against the “tsarist satraps”, carried out an unimaginable number of terrorist attacks during the period of two Russian revolutions, and during the Civil War caused a lot of trouble to the White movement. Such ambiguity led to the fact that the Socialist Revolutionary Party turned out to be hostile to almost all warring parties, entering into temporary alliances with them and dissolving them in the name of achieving its own independent goal. What did it consist of? It is impossible to understand this without familiarizing yourself with the party program.

Origins and creation

It is believed that the creation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party occurred in 1902. This is true in a sense, but not entirely. In 1894, the Saratov Narodnaya Volya Society (underground, of course) developed its own program, which was somewhat more radical in nature than before. It took a couple of years to develop the program, send it abroad, publish it, print leaflets, deliver them to Russia and other manipulations associated with the emergence of a new force in the political firmament. At the same time, a small circle at first was headed by a certain Argunov, who renamed it, calling it the “Union of Socialist Revolutionaries.” The first measure of the new party was the creation of branches and the establishment of stable connections with them, which seems quite logical. Branches were created in the largest cities of the empire - Kharkov, Odessa, Voronezh, Poltava, Penza and, of course, in the capital, St. Petersburg. The process of party building was crowned by the appearance of a printed organ. The program was published on the pages of the newspaper “Revolutionary Russia”. This leaflet announced that the creation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party had become a fait accompli. This was in 1902.

Goals

Any political force acts guided by a program. This document, adopted by the majority of the founding congress, declares the goals and methods, allies and opponents, the main and those obstacles to be overcome. In addition, principles of governance, governing bodies and conditions of membership are specified. The Social Revolutionaries formulated the party's tasks as follows:

1. The establishment in Russia of a free and democratic state with a federal structure.

2. Granting equal voting rights to all citizens.

4. The right to free education.

5. Abolition of the armed forces as a permanent state structure.

6. Eight-hour working day.

7. Separation of state and church.

There were a few more points, but in general they largely repeated the slogans of the Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and other organizations that were just as eager to seize power as the Socialist Revolutionaries. The party program declared the same values ​​and aspirations.

The commonality of the structure was also evident in the hierarchical ladder described by the charter. The form of government of the Socialist Revolutionary Party included two levels. Congresses and Councils (during the inter-congress period) made strategic decisions that were carried out by the Central Committee, which was considered the executive body.

Social Revolutionaries and the agrarian question

At the end of the 19th century, Russia was a predominantly agricultural country in which the peasantry made up the majority of the population. The class in particular and the Social Democrats in general were considered politically backward, subject to private property instincts, and assigned to its poorest part only the role of the closest ally of the proletariat, the locomotive of the revolution. The Socialist Revolutionaries looked at this issue somewhat differently. The party program provided for the socialization of the land. At the same time, the talk was not about its nationalization, that is, its transition into state ownership, but also not about distributing it to the working people. In general, according to the socialist-revolutionaries, true democracy should not have come from the city to the village, but vice versa. Therefore, private ownership of agricultural resources should have been abolished, their purchase and sale should have been prohibited and transferred to local governments, which would distribute all the “goods” according to consumer standards. All together this was called the “socialization” of the land.

Peasants

It is interesting that, while declaring the village the source of socialism, she treated its inhabitants themselves quite carefully. The peasants have never really been particularly politically literate. The leaders and ordinary members of the organization did not know what to expect; the life of the villagers was alien to them. The Social Revolutionaries “sickened at heart” for the oppressed people and, as often happens, believed that they knew how to make them happy better than they themselves. Their participation in the councils that arose during the First Russian Revolution increased their influence both among peasants and workers. As for the proletariat, there was a critical attitude towards it too. In general, the working masses were considered amorphous, and much effort had to be made to unite them.

Terror

The Socialist Revolutionary Party in Russia gained fame already in the year of its creation. Minister of Internal Affairs Sipyagin was shot by Stepan Balmashev, and this murder was organized by G. Girshuni, who led the military wing of the organization. Then there were many terrorist attacks (the most famous of them are the successful assassination attempts on S. A. Romanov, uncle of Nicholas II, and Minister Plehve). After the revolution, the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party continued its murderous list; many Bolshevik figures became its victims, with whom there were significant disagreements. No political party could compete with the AKP in its ability to organize individual terrorist attacks and reprisals against individual opponents. The Social Revolutionaries actually eliminated the head of the Petrograd Cheka, Uritsky. As for the assassination attempt committed at the Mikhelson plant, this story is vague, but their involvement cannot be completely ruled out. However, in terms of the scale of mass terror, they were far from the Bolsheviks. However, perhaps if they came to power...

Azef

Legendary personality. Yevno Azef led the military organization and, as was irrefutably proven, collaborated with the detective department of the Russian Empire. And most importantly, both of these structures, so different in goals and objectives, were very pleased with him. Azef organized a series of terrorist attacks against representatives of the tsarist administration, but at the same time surrendered a huge number of militants to the secret police. Only in 1908 did the Socialist Revolutionaries expose him. What party would tolerate such a traitor in its ranks? The Central Committee pronounced the verdict - death. Azef was almost in the hands of his former comrades, but was able to deceive them and escape. How he managed this is not entirely clear, but the fact remains: he lived until 1918 and died not from poison, a noose or a bullet, but from kidney disease, which he “earned” in a Berlin prison.

Savinkov

The Socialist Revolutionary Party attracted many adventurers in spirit who were looking for an outlet for their criminal talents. One of them was someone who started his political career as a liberal and then joined terrorists. He joined the Social Revolutionary Party a year after its creation, was Azef’s first deputy, took part in the preparation of many terrorist attacks, including the most resonant ones, was sentenced to death, and fled. After the October Revolution he fought against Bolshevism. He laid claim to supreme power in Russia, collaborated with Denikin, and was acquainted with Churchill and Pilsudski. Savinkov committed suicide after his arrest by the Cheka in 1924.

Gershuni

Grigory Andreevich Gershuni was one of the most active members of the military wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. He directly supervised the execution of terrorist acts against Minister Sipyagin, the attempted assassination of the governor of Kharkov Obolensky and many other actions designed to achieve people's well-being. He acted everywhere - from Ufa and Samara to Geneva - doing organizational work and coordinating the activities of local underground circles. He was arrested, but Gershuni managed to avoid severe punishment, since he, in violation of party ethics, stubbornly denied his involvement in the conspiratorial structure. In Kyiv, a failure nevertheless occurred, and in 1904 the verdict followed: exile. The escape led Grigory Andreevich to Parisian emigration, where he soon died. He was a true artist of terror. The main disappointment of his life was Azef's betrayal.

Party in the Civil War

The Bolshevikization of the Soviets, implanted, according to the Socialist Revolutionaries, artificially, and carried out by dishonest methods, led to the withdrawal of party representatives from them. Further activities were sporadic. The Social Revolutionaries entered into temporary alliances, either with the whites or with the reds, and both sides understood that this was dictated only by momentary political interests. Having received a majority, the party was unable to consolidate its success. In 1919, the Bolsheviks, taking into account the value of the organization’s terrorist experience, decided to legalize its activities in the territories they controlled, but this step did not in any way affect the intensity of anti-Soviet protests. However, the Socialist Revolutionaries at times declared a moratorium on speeches, supporting one of the fighting parties. In 1922, members of the AKP were finally “exposed” as enemies of the revolution, and their complete eradication began throughout Soviet Russia.

In exile

The foreign delegation of the AKP arose long before the actual defeat of the party, in 1918. This structure was not approved by the central committee, but nevertheless existed in Stockholm. After the actual ban on activities in Russia, almost all the surviving and free members of the party ended up in exile. They concentrated mainly in Prague, Berlin and Paris. The work of foreign cells was headed by Viktor Chernov, who fled abroad in 1920. In addition to “Revolutionary Russia,” other periodicals were published in exile (“For the People!”, “Modern Notes”), which reflected the main idea that gripped the former underground workers who had recently fought against the exploiters. By the end of the 30s they realized the need for the restoration of capitalism.

The end of the Socialist Revolutionary Party

The struggle of the Chekists with the surviving Socialist Revolutionaries became the theme of many fiction novels and films. In general, the picture of these works corresponded to reality, although it was presented distortedly. In fact, by the mid-20s, the Socialist Revolutionary movement was a political corpse, completely harmless to the Bolsheviks. Inside Soviet Russia, the (former) Social Revolutionaries were mercilessly caught, and sometimes social revolutionary views were even attributed to people who never shared them. Successfully carried out operations to lure particularly odious party members to the USSR were aimed rather at justifying future repressions, presented as yet another exposure of underground anti-Soviet organizations. The Socialist-Revolutionaries were soon replaced by Trotskyists, Zinovievites, Bukharinites, Martovites and other former Bolsheviks who suddenly became objectionable. But that's a different story...

The Socialist Revolutionary Party was once one of the most massive in Russia. She tried to find a non-Marxist path to socialism, which was associated with the development of peasant collectivism.

The process of forming the Socialist Revolutionary Party was lengthy. The founding congress of the party, held on December 29, 1905 – January 4, 1906. in Finland and approved its program and temporary organizational charter, summed up the ten-year history of the Socialist Revolutionary movement.

The first Socialist Revolutionary organizations appeared in the mid-90s of the 19th century: the Union of Russian Socialist Revolutionaries (1893, Bern), the Kiev group and the Union of Socialist Revolutionaries in 1895–1896. The SSR was organized in Saratov and then moved its headquarters to Moscow. In the second half of the 90s. Socialist Revolutionary-oriented organizations arose in Voronezh, Minsk, Odessa, Penza, St. Petersburg, Poltava, Tambov and Kharkov.

The name “socialist-revolutionaries” was adopted, as a rule, by those representatives of revolutionary populism who had previously called themselves “People’s Will” or gravitated towards them. The name “Narodnaya Volya” was legendary in the revolutionary environment, and abandoning it was not a formality, a simple change of labels. This was reflected, first of all, in the desire of revolutionary populism to overcome the deep crisis that it was experiencing at that time, its search for itself and its niche in the revolutionary movement in conditions that had undergone significant changes compared to the 70-80 years of the 19th century.

In 1900, the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which united a number of Socialist Revolutionary organizations in the south of Russia and therefore was often called the Southern Socialist Revolutionary Party, announced itself with the publication of the Manifesto.

The Union of Socialist Revolutionaries also expanded its borders. His groups appeared in St. Petersburg, Yaroslavl, Tomsk and a number of other places. The program of the Union was drawn up back in 1896, and printed in 1900 under the title “Our Tasks”.

The embodiment of the unifying trend in emigration was the formation in 1900 in Paris, on the initiative of V.M. Chernov, of the Agrarian Socialist League (ASL). It was significant primarily because it proclaimed work among the peasantry as the next issue of the revolutionary cause.

In the matter of ideological definition and organizational unity of the Socialist Revolutionary movement, the periodical press played a noticeable role: the emigrant monthly newspaper “Nakanune” (London, 1899) and the magazine “Bulletin of the Russian Revolution” (Paris, 1901), as well as the newspaper “Revolutionary Russia” of the Union of Socialists- revolutionaries, the first issue of which appeared in early 1901.

The message about the formation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party appeared in January 1902 in the third issue of Revolutionary Russia. During 1902, Socialist Revolutionary organizations in Russia joined the party. Before the First Russian Revolution, the party had over 40 committees and groups, uniting approximately 2–2.5 thousand people. In terms of its social composition, the party was predominantly intellectual. Pupils, students, intellectuals and employees made up more than 70% of it, and workers and peasants - about 28%.

Organization was one of the weaknesses of the Socialist Revolutionary Party throughout its history and one of the reasons for its displacement from the historical stage by the Bolsheviks. The Social Revolutionaries, according to their leader V.M. Chernov, constantly “sinned” towards “organizational nihilism” and suffered from “organizational laxity.” The basis of the party was its local organizations: committees and groups, formed, as a rule, on a territorial basis. The established local organizations (and this was extremely rare) usually consisted of propagandists united in a union, agitators who made up the so-called agitator meeting, and technical groups - printing and transport. Organizations were most often formed from the top down: first a leadership “core” emerged, and then the masses were recruited. Internal ties in the party, vertical and horizontal, have never been strong and reliable, they were especially weak in the period preceding the First Russian Revolution.

Initially, the party apparently did not even have its own special central body. This was reflected, on the one hand, by the originality of the very matter of forming the party, and on the other, by the predominance of supporters of organizing the party on the principle of federation. The technical functions of the Central Committee were performed to a certain extent by the most powerful local organizations, which were the Saratov organization until the end of 1902, and after its defeat - Ekaterinoslav, Odessa and Kiev.

The Commission for Relations with Foreign Countries, consisting of E.K. Breshkovskaya, P.P. Kraft and G.A. Gershuni, gradually became the Central Committee, without general party sanction. They also took on the functions of internal party traveling agents. In the summer of 1902, Gershuni, without agreement with other members of the Central Committee, co-opted E.F. Azef into its composition. The ideological and, to some extent, organizational center of the party was the editorial board of Revolutionary Russia. Since collective leadership existed only formally, individuals played a large role in the party. Among them, M.R. Gots stood out. He was the representative of the Russian party center abroad, and had the right to co-opt the Central Committee in the event of its complete failure. Not without reason, he was sometimes called the “dictator” of the party and it was noted that in 1903-1904. he and Azef “controlled the entire party.” V.M. Chernov was mainly an ideological leader and was not particularly involved in organizational issues.

As the functions of the party expanded, special structures appeared in it. In April 1902, with a terrorist act by S.V. Balmashov, the Combat Organization, the formation of which Gershuni began even before the formation of the party, announced itself. In order to intensify and expand party work in the countryside, in 1902, after peasant uprisings in the Poltava and Kharkov provinces, the Peasant Union of the Socialist Revolutionary Party arose.

In terms of theory, the Socialist Revolutionaries were pluralists. The party, they believed, could not be like a spiritual sect or be guided by one theory. Among them were supporters of the subjective sociology of N.K. Mikhailovsky, and followers of the then fashionable teachings of Machism, empirio-criticism, and neo-Kantianism. The Socialist Revolutionaries were united by their rejection of Marxism, especially its materialist and monistic explanation of social life. The latter was considered by the Social Revolutionaries as a set of phenomena and events that are equally dependent and functionally connected with each other. They did not recognize its division into material and ideal spheres.

The only necessary condition for staying in the party was belief in its ultimate goal - socialism. The basis of the Socialist Revolutionary ideology was the idea they adopted from the old populists about the possibility of a special path for Russia to socialism, without waiting for the prerequisites for this to be created by capitalism. This idea was generated by the desire to save the working people, primarily the multi-million Russian peasantry, from the torment and suffering of capitalist purgatory and quickly introduce them to the socialist paradise. It was based on the idea that human society in its development is not monocentric, but polycentric. By rejecting the idea of ​​monism and believing in Russia’s special path to socialism, populism and the Socialist Revolutionaries were to some extent related to the Slavophiles. But in their social and ideological essence, the Narodniks, and especially the Socialist-Revolutionaries, were not Slavophiles or their heirs. V.M. Chernov explained the special position of Russia in the world and its special path to socialism not by such irrational qualities inherent in the Russian people as spirituality, conciliarity, Orthodoxy, but by the established international division of labor: Russia seemed to him “Eurasia”, standing on the brink between one-sided industrial and primitive agrarian “colonial” countries.

The Socialist Revolutionary idea that the fate of socialism in Russia cannot be linked with the development of capitalism was based on the assertion of a special type of Russian capitalism. In Russian capitalism, according to the Socialist Revolutionaries, in contrast to the capitalism of developed industrial countries, negative, destructive tendencies prevailed, especially in agriculture. In this regard, agricultural capitalism cannot prepare the prerequisites for socialism, socialize the land and production on it.

The peculiarities of Russian capitalism, as well as the autocratic police regime and the persisting patriarchy, determined, in the opinion of the Socialist Revolutionaries, the nature and grouping of social and political forces in the Russian arena. They divided them into two opposing camps. In one of them, the highest bureaucracy, nobility and bourgeoisie united under the auspices of the autocracy, in the other - workers, peasants and intelligentsia. Since for the Socialist Revolutionaries the division of society into classes was determined not by their attitude to property, but by their attitude to labor and sources of income, then in one of the named camps we see classes that received their income, as the socialists believed, through the exploitation of other people’s labor, and in the other - living by their labor.

The nobility was considered by the Social Revolutionaries as a historically doomed class, inextricably linked with the autocracy, dictating its policies to it. The conservatism of the Russian bourgeoisie was explained by its supposedly artificial origin through the imposition of capitalism “from above,” as well as by the privileges it received from the autocracy, its excessive concentration, which gave rise to oligarchic tendencies, its inability to compete in the foreign market, where its imperialist aspirations could only be realized with the help of the military force of the autocracy

The Social Revolutionaries considered the peasantry to be the main force of the second, labor camp. It, in their eyes, was “a little less than everything” in terms of its numbers and its significance in the economic life of the country and “nothing” in terms of its economic, political and legal status. The only way of salvation for the peasantry was seen in socialism. At the same time, the Socialist Revolutionaries did not share the Marxist dogma that the path of the peasantry to socialism necessarily lies through capitalism, through differentiation into the rural bourgeoisie and the proletariat and the struggle between these classes. To prove the inconsistency of this dogma, it was argued that peasant labor farms are not petty-bourgeois, that they are stable and capable of withstanding competition from large farms. It was also proven that the peasants were close in status to the workers, that together with them they constituted a single working people. For the working peasantry, the Socialist Revolutionaries believed, a different, non-capitalist path of development towards socialism was possible. At the same time, due to the development of bourgeois relations in the countryside, the Socialist Revolutionaries no longer had the old Narodnik unconditional faith in the socialist nature of the peasant. The Social Revolutionaries were forced to admit the duality of his nature, the fact that he was not only a worker, but also an owner. This recognition put them in a difficult position in search of ways and possibilities for introducing the peasants to socialism.

The Social Revolutionaries noted that the standard of living of the Russian proletariat was higher than that of the majority of the peasantry, and much lower than that of the Western European proletariat, that it did not have civil and political rights. At the same time, it was recognized that due to its high concentration in the most important economic and political centers and social activity, it poses a constant and most serious danger to the ruling regime. The connection between Russian workers and the countryside was especially emphasized. This connection was not seen as a sign of their weakness and backwardness, or as an obstacle to the formation of their socialist consciousness. On the contrary, such a connection was assessed positively, as one of the foundations of class “worker-peasant unity.”

The main mission of the intelligentsia was seen to be to bring the ideas of socialism to the peasantry and proletariat, to help them realize themselves as a single working class, and to see in this unity the guarantee of their liberation.

The Socialist Revolutionary program was divided into a minimum program and a maximum program. The maximum program indicated the ultimate goal of the party - the expropriation of capitalist property and the reorganization of production and the entire social system on socialist principles with the complete victory of the working class, organized into a social revolutionary party. The originality of the Socialist Revolutionary model of socialism lay not so much in the ideas about the socialist society itself, but in what Russia’s path to this society should be.

The most important minimum requirement of the program was the convening of a Constituent Assembly on a democratic basis. It was supposed to eliminate the autocratic regime and establish free popular rule, ensuring the necessary personal freedoms and protecting the interests of working people. The Socialist Revolutionaries considered political freedom and democracy a prerequisite for socialism and an organic form of its existence. On the issue of the state structure of the new Russia, the Socialist Revolutionaries advocated the “greatest possible” use of federal relations between individual nationalities, recognition of their unconditional right to self-determination, and broad autonomy of local self-government bodies.

The central point of the economic part of the Socialist Revolutionary Minimum Program was the requirement for the socialization of the land. The socialization of land meant the abolition of private ownership of land, the transformation of land not into state property, but into public property. Land was withdrawn from trade, and its purchase and sale were not allowed. Land could be obtained at a consumer or labor rate. The consumer norm was calculated only to satisfy the necessary needs of its owner. The socialization of the land served as a connecting bridge between the Socialist Revolutionary programs of minimum and maximum. It was seen as the first stage in the socialization of agriculture. By abolishing private ownership of land and removing it from trade, socialization, as the Socialist Revolutionaries believed, punched a hole in the system of bourgeois relations, and by socializing the land and placing the entire working population on equal terms in relation to it, it created the necessary prerequisites for the final stage of socialization of agriculture - socialization of production through various forms of cooperation.

Regarding tactics, the party program briefly stated in general terms that the struggle would be waged “in forms corresponding to the specific conditions of Russian reality.” The forms, methods and means of struggle that were used by the Social Revolutionaries were varied: propaganda and agitation, activities in various representative institutions, as well as all types of extra-parliamentary struggle (strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, uprisings, etc.).

What distinguished the Socialist Revolutionaries from other socialist parties was that they recognized systematic terror as a means of political struggle.

Before the outbreak of the First Russian Revolution, terror overshadowed other activities of the party. First of all, thanks to him, she gained fame. The militant organization of the party carried out terrorist attacks against the Ministers of Internal Affairs D.S. Sipyagin (April 2, 1902, S.V. Balmashov), V.K. Pleve (July 15, 1904, E.S. Sozonov) and governors - Kharkov I.M. Obolensky (June 26, 1902, F.K. Kachura), who brutally suppressed peasant unrest in the spring of 1902, and Ufa - N.M. Bogdanovich (May 6, 1903, O.E. Dulebov .

Although the Social Revolutionaries carried out mass revolutionary work, it did not have a wide scope. A number of local committees and groups were engaged in propaganda and agitation activities among city workers. The main task of Socialist Revolutionary propaganda and agitation in the countryside, carried out orally and through the dissemination of various types of literature, was, firstly, to acquire among the peasants supporters of socialist ideas who could later lead peasant revolutionary movements; and secondly, the political education of the entire peasant mass, preparing them to fight for a minimum program - the overthrow of the autocracy and the socialization of the land. However, in all the main areas of mass work, the Socialist-Revolutionaries in the pre-revolutionary period were significantly inferior to the Social Democrats.

With the formation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, disagreements within it were not eliminated. Moreover, they sometimes became so aggravated that the party found itself on the verge of a split. One of the controversial issues was the issue of terror and its organization. It arose due to the fact that from the spring of 1903 there were no terrorist attacks for more than a year and the Combat Organization did not show itself in any way. The provocateur Azef, who headed the organization after the arrest of G.A. Gershuni, was in no hurry to use it for its intended purpose, hiding behind various excuses of a technical and organizational nature. Those dissatisfied with the inactivity of the Combat Organization demanded the decentralization of terror, the deprivation of the BO of autonomy and a privileged position in the party, and the establishment of effective control over it by the Central Committee. Azef stubbornly opposed this.

The originality of the Socialist Revolutionary concept of revolution lay, first of all, in the fact that they did not recognize it as bourgeois. In their opinion, Russian capitalism, due to its weakness and excessive dependence on the government, was not capable of “pressing” so much on outdated social relations as to cause a national crisis. The ability of the bourgeoisie to become the head of the revolution and even to be one of its driving forces was also denied. The opinion was also expressed that the bourgeois revolution in Russia was prevented by the “revolution from above”, the reforms of the 60-70s of the 19th century. Then, allegedly, space was given for the development of capitalism, and then the “serf autocracy” turned into a “noble-bourgeois monarchy.” The Social Revolutionaries did not consider the revolution to be socialist either, calling it “social”, transitional between bourgeois and socialist. The revolution, in their opinion, should not have been limited to a change of power and redistribution of property within the framework of bourgeois relations, but should have gone further: to make a significant hole in these relations, abolishing private ownership of land through its socialization.

The Socialist Revolutionaries saw the main impulse of the revolution not in the “pressure of developing capitalism,” but in the crisis of agriculture, laid down by the reform of 1861. This circumstance explained the enormous role of the peasantry in the revolution. The Social Revolutionaries also resolved the main issue of the revolution in their own way—the question of power. They abandoned the Narodnaya Volya Blanquist idea of ​​seizing power by socialist revolutionaries. The concept of the Socialist Revolutionaries did not envisage a socialist revolution as such. The transition to socialism had to be accomplished in a peaceful, reformist way, based on the use of democratic, constitutional norms. Through democratic elections, the Socialist Revolutionaries hoped to gain a majority, first locally, and then in the Constituent Assembly. The latter was supposed to finally determine the form of government and become the highest legislative and administrative body.

Already in the First Russian Revolution, the attitude of the Social Revolutionaries to the Soviets of Workers', Peasants' and Soldiers' Deputies was determined. In them they did not see the embryo of a new revolutionary power, did not consider them capable of performing state functions, and considered them as unique trade unions or bodies of self-government only for one class. According to the Social Revolutionaries, the main purpose of the Soviets was to organize and unite the dispersed, amorphous working masses.

The main demands of the Socialist Revolutionaries in the revolution were the demands of their minimum program. If before the revolution the main task of the party was to educate the masses of socialist consciousness, now the task of overthrowing the autocracy has come to the fore. Their activities became not only larger-scale, more energetic, but also more diverse. Party agitation and propaganda became wider and more intense.

There were also changes in the terrorist activities of the party, which continued to receive significant attention. The form of terror used has changed. Azef’s efforts virtually paralyzed the activities of the Combat Organization, the last significant act of which was the murder in February 1905 of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, the Tsar’s uncle, the former Governor-General of Moscow, one of the inspirers of the government’s reactionary course. In the fall of 1906, the BO was temporarily disbanded and in its place several flying combat detachments were created, which committed a number of successful terrorist attacks. Terror has become decentralized. It was widely used by local party organizations against middle and lower-level government officials. The Social Revolutionaries actively participated in the preparation and conduct of revolutionary actions (strikes, demonstrations, rallies, armed uprisings, etc.) in the city and countryside, among the civilian population, as well as in the army and navy. They also tested themselves in the legal, parliamentary arena of struggle.

The activities of the Socialist Revolutionaries among the workers had significantly outgrown the framework of pre-revolutionary circle work. Thus, in the fall of 1905, Socialist Revolutionary resolutions often received a majority at rallies and meetings of workers of the largest St. Petersburg factories. The citadel of Socialist Revolutionary influence at that time was the famous Moscow textile factory - Prokhorovskaya Manufactory.

The peasantry remained the subject of special attention of the Social Revolutionaries. Peasant brotherhoods and unions were formed in the villages. This work was carried out especially widely in the Volga region and the central black earth provinces. The policy of the Social Revolutionaries towards the peasantry, already during the period of the first revolution, was affected by their lack of the Old Narodnik belief that the peasant by nature is a socialist. This held back the Socialist Revolutionaries, did not allow them to completely and completely trust the peasant initiative. They feared that the results of this initiative would diverge from their socialist doctrine, lead to the strengthening of peasant private ownership of land and complicate its socialization. This weakened the will and determination of the Socialist Revolutionary leadership, forcing it to be more inclined to solve the agrarian question “from above”, through legislation, than “from below”, by seizing land by peasants. Condemning “agrarian terror,” the party leadership at the same time tolerated its preachers in the party until they themselves left it in 1906, forming the core of the Union of Socialist Revolutionaries into Maximalists. Doubts about the socialist commitment of the peasants were probably reflected in the fact that there were no peasants in the Socialist Revolutionary governing bodies, with the exception of the lower ones; village, volost and sometimes district. And first of all, one should look for an explanation in the doctrinaire Socialist Revolutionaries for the fact that during the period of the revolution the final merger of the Socialist Revolutionaries with the peasant movement never took place.

The Social Revolutionaries, like the Bolsheviks, recognized that the revolution must not only be organized, but also armed. During the Moscow armed uprising, the Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party hastily created a Combat Committee, which was able to create two dynamite workshops in St. Petersburg, but they were immediately handed over by Azef, who was a member of the committee. This ended the Socialist Revolutionary attempt to prepare an uprising in St. Petersburg. The Social Revolutionaries took an active part and played a prominent role in a number of armed uprisings against tsarism, especially in Moscow in December 1905, as well as in Kronstadt and Sveaborg in the summer of 1906.

The Social Revolutionaries spoke out in favor of a boycott of the legislative Bulygin Duma and took an active part in the All-Russian October strike. The Manifesto of October 17, 1905, issued by the Tsar under the pressure of a strike and promising political and civil freedoms, expansion of voting rights to the State Duma and giving it legislative powers, was met with ambiguity by the Socialist Revolutionaries. The majority of the party leadership was inclined to believe that Russia had become a constitutional country and, therefore, it was necessary to make adjustments to tactics and abandon terror, at least for a while. The most persistent supporter of ending the terror and dissolving the Combat Organization was its head, Azef. The minority, one of whose prominent representatives was Azef’s deputy B.V. Savinkov, on the contrary, advocated strengthening terror in order to finish off tsarism. Ultimately, the central terror was suspended and the Combat Organization was effectively dissolved.

After October 17, the Party Central Committee preferred “not to force events.” He and his representatives in the St. Petersburg Council of Workers' Deputies were against the introduction of an 8-hour working day by turnout, against the “passion for strikes,” including against the call for a December general political strike with its transformation into an armed uprising. Instead of tactics to spur the revolution, the Socialist Revolutionaries proposed using the freedoms declared by the October 17 Manifesto to expand the base of the revolution by strengthening agitation, propaganda and organizational work among the masses, especially among the peasantry. Formally, such tactics were not without meaning. At the same time, there was a latent fear that revolutionary extremism would disrupt the sequence of development of the revolution, frighten the bourgeoisie and it would refuse to accept power.

The Socialist Revolutionaries were also active supporters of the boycott of the Duma elections. The elections nevertheless took place, and a significant number of peasant deputies found themselves in the Duma. In this regard, the Socialist Revolutionary leadership radically changed its attitude towards the Duma, so as not to interfere with its work, it was even decided to temporarily stop terrorist activities. The subject of special attention of the Social Revolutionaries was the peasant deputies who entered the Duma. With the active participation of the Socialist Revolutionaries, a Duma faction was created from these deputies - the Labor Group. However, in terms of their influence on peasant deputies in the Duma, the Socialist Revolutionaries were inferior to the people's socialists, representatives of the right wing of neo-populism.

The Second State Duma turned out to be the only one that the Socialist-Revolutionaries did not boycott. The greatest success of the Social Revolutionaries in the Second Duma was that they managed to collect more than three times more signatures for their agrarian project than for the First Duma project. And although the Duma group of Socialist Revolutionaries was closely supervised by the Party Central Committee, nevertheless, its activity was, according to the general party assessment, “far from brilliant.” She caused discontent in the party, primarily because she did not pursue the party line consistently and decisively enough. The party leadership threatened the government to respond with a general strike and armed uprising if it encroached on the Duma, and their deputies declared that they would not submit to its dissolution and would not disperse. However, this time everything was limited only to words. During the revolution, the social composition of the party changed significantly. The overwhelming majority of its members were now workers and peasants. However, as before, the party’s policy was determined by the intellectual composition of the AKP leadership.

After the defeat of the revolution, the Socialist Revolutionary Party, like other Russian revolutionary and opposition parties, found itself in a state of crisis. It was caused primarily by the failure that these parties suffered in the revolution, as well as by the sharp deterioration in the conditions of their activity in connection with the triumph of reaction.

In their tactical calculations, the Socialist Revolutionaries proceeded from the fact that the revolution, in principle, did not change anything, and the third June coup d'etat returned the country to its pre-revolutionary state. The State Duma, elected under the new electoral law, was considered by them as a constitutional fiction. From this assessment of the political situation in the country, the conclusion was made that, firstly, the reasons that caused the first revolution remain, and that a new revolution is inevitable. Secondly, that it is necessary to return to previous forms, methods and means of struggle, boycotting the anti-people State Duma.

Along with the tactics of boycott and otzovism was the “militism” professed by the Socialist Revolutionaries. The Third Party Council, which met shortly after the June 3rd coup, spoke in favor of a boycott of the Duma, and at the same time called strengthening the military cause a priority task. In particular, this meant the creation of combat squads, their training of the population in the methods of armed struggle, and partial performances in the troops. At the same time, it was noted that a general uprising cannot be a specific goal in the near future. The decision to strengthen central terror was unanimously approved.

However, as the inertia of the revolution faded and public life returned to its usual, peaceful course, the inconsistency of the Socialist Revolutionary calls for a return to combat tactics became increasingly apparent. A more realistic trend began to take shape in the party, led by a young member of the Central Committee N.D. Avksentiev, Doctor of Philosophy, one of the editors of the party’s central organ, the newspaper Znamya Truda. At the First All-Party Conference, held in August 1908 in London, he, speaking as co-rapporteur of V.M. Chernov on the issue of the current situation, insisted on abandoning the tactics of “partial military actions” and preparations for an armed uprising and considered it necessary to rely on propaganda and organizational work and central terror. Chernov and his supporters managed to defend the paragraph of the resolution on combat training only with a minimal margin and in a truncated form. Only strong party organizations engaged in “serious socialist work” were now allowed to engage in combat training. Like the Third Council, the conference unanimously spoke out in favor of strengthening central terror, and a strike “at the center of centers,” i.e., an attempt on the life of Nicholas P., was also considered quite ripe.

However, the decisions of the London Conference and the IV Council that approved them remained on paper. Enormous moral damage to the party and terror was caused by V.L. Burtsev’s exposure of E.F. Azef. At the beginning of January 1909, the Central Committee of the AKP officially declared him a provocateur. B.V. Savinkov’s attempt to recreate the Combat Organization, morally rehabilitate terror and prove that it existed and exists regardless of provocation was unsuccessful.

The general crisis that struck the Socialist Revolutionary Party during the inter-revolutionary period also included the organizational decline of the party. Already in 1908, V.M. Chernov noted that “the organization has melted, disappeared,” the party has moved away from the masses, many of its members are leaving work, emigration has reached “terrifying proportions.” Many members of the party were arrested, including such prominent figures as E.K. Breshkovskaya, N.V. Tchaikovsky, O.S. Minor and a number of others. Seat of the Central Committee. and the publications of the party’s central newspapers “Znamya Truda” and “Land and Freedom” were again transferred abroad. The leadership of the party was weakened by the fact that at the V Party Council, held in May 1909, the old composition of the Central Committee, consisting of the most capable, experienced and authoritative people in the party (V. M. Chernov, N.I. Rakitnikov, M.A. Natanson, A.A. Argunov and N.D. Avksentyev). The advantage of the members of the new Central Committee elected by the Council was only that they were not associated with Azef. In all other respects they were inferior to the former Tsekovites. In addition, most of them were soon arrested. The situation was further aggravated by the fact that a number of prominent party figures, primarily V.M. Chernov and B.V. Savinkov, actually distanced themselves from current party work and focused almost entirely on literary activities. Since 1912, the Party Central Committee stopped showing any signs of life.

Due to its own crisis state and lack of connections with the broad masses, the Socialist Revolutionary Party had virtually no influence on the beginning of a new revolutionary upsurge. However, the growth of revolutionary sentiment in the country contributed to the revival of the Social Revolutionaries. In St. Petersburg, their legal newspapers “Trudovaya Golos” began to be published, then with various epithets - “Thought” (“Cheerful Thought”, “Living Thought”, etc.) Their activity also intensified among the workers. On the eve of the war, their organizations existed in almost all large metropolitan plants and factories, and they were often created by the workers themselves without the participation of Socialist-Revolutionary intellectuals. At this time, Moscow and Baku were also centers of Socialist Revolutionary work. In addition, organizations were revived in the Urals, Vladimir, Odessa, Kyiv, and the Don region. Influential were the organizations of port and ship workers on the Volga and sailors of the Black Sea merchant fleet.

Socialist Revolutionary work among peasants was carried out in a number of provinces: Poltava, Kyiv, Kharkov, Chernigov, Voronezh, Mogilev and Vitebsk, as well as in the North Volga region, the Baltic states, the North Caucasus and in many cities and villages of Siberia. However, the payoff from this work was not nearly as impressive as its “geography.” To a certain extent, this explained the fact that the village “as an active force of the social movement,” according to the correct remark of the Socialist Revolutionary “Cheerful Thought,” was “absent” in the new revolutionary upsurge.

The growth of the next national crisis, the growth of the revolutionary movement and the revival of the activities of the Socialist Revolutionaries strengthened the tendency among them to consolidate their forces and to recreate the party. However, the outbreak of war interrupted this trend.

The outbreak of the World War posed new difficult questions for the Socialist Revolutionaries: why the war began, how socialists should react to it, is it possible to be both a patriot and an internationalist, what should be the attitude towards the government that has become the head of the fight against an external enemy, is class struggle acceptable during the period war and if so, in what form, what should be the way out of the war, etc.?

Since the war not only extremely complicated party ties, especially with foreign countries, where the main theoretical forces of the party were concentrated, but also exacerbated ideological differences, the Socialist Revolutionaries were unable to develop a common platform in relation to the war. The first attempt to develop such a platform was made at the very beginning of the war. In August 1914, in Switzerland, in the town of Bozhi, a private meeting of prominent party figures took place (N.D. Avksentyev, A.A. Argunov, E.E. Lazarev, M.A. Natanson, I.I. Fondaminsky, V. M. Chernov and others) on the issue of “the line of conduct in conditions of a world war.” Already at this meeting, the range of opinions and disagreements that the war gave rise to among the Socialist Revolutionaries was revealed. With all the richness of this spectrum, two points of view were clearly identified - defencist and internationalist.

The majority of the meeting participants (Avksentyev, Argunov, Lazarev, Fondaminsky) declared themselves to be consistent defencists. They believed that socialists must defend their homeland against foreign imperialism. Without denying the possibility of political and class struggle during the war, the defencists at the same time emphasized that the struggle should be conducted in such forms and by such means that it does not undermine national defense. The victory of German militarism was seen as a greater evil for civilization and the cause of socialism in Russia and throughout the world. The Socialist Revolutionary Defenseists saw the best way out of the war in the victory of the Entente. Russia's participation in this bloc was welcomed, since it was assumed that the alliance of tsarism with Western democracies would have a beneficial effect on it, especially after the end of the war.

A consistent internationalist position at the meeting was defended only by M.A. Nathanson, who believed that workers do not have a fatherland and socialists, even during war, should not forget that the interests of the ruling classes and the interests of the people remain opposed. V.M. Chernov’s position was left-center. He believed that the tsarist government was not waging a defensive, but a war of conquest, defending dynastic rather than popular interests, and therefore the socialists should not provide it with any support. They are obliged to oppose the war, restore the Second International, and become a “third” force that, by putting pressure on the two imperialist blocs locked in a bloody duel, will achieve a just peace without annexations and indemnities. But neither Nathanson, nor even more so Chernov, in their anti-war and internationalist speeches, went to Leninist extremes: calls for turning the imperialist war into a civil war and the defeat of their government.

In the Foreign Delegation of the Party Central Committee, the representation of internationalists and defencists turned out to be equal, and as a result, the activities of this only all-party governing body at that time were almost completely paralyzed.

The leaders of the internationalist movement (M.A. Nathanson, N.I. Rakitnikov, V.M. Chernov, B.D. Kamkov) were the first to begin promoting their views and ideological consolidation of their supporters. At the end of 1914 they began publishing the newspaper “Thought” in Paris. In its first issues, theses by V.M. Chernov were published, in which the position of the Socialist-Revolutionary Internationalists on a set of issues relating to war, peace, revolution and socialism was theoretically substantiated.

The origin of the war was associated primarily with the entry of capitalism into the “national-imperialist phase,” during which it acquired one-sided industrial development in developed countries. And this, in turn, gave rise to another abnormality - one-sided industrial Marxist socialism, which was extremely optimistic about the prospects for the development of capitalism and underestimated its negative, destructive sides, completely linking the fate of socialism with this prospect. Marxist socialism assigned only the role of an appendage to triumphant industry to agriculture and the countryside as a whole. Also ignored were those layers of the working population that were not employed in industry. According to Chernov, this socialism viewed capitalism as a “friend-enemy” or “enemy-friend of the proletariat,” since the proletariat was interested in the development and prosperity of capitalism. The dependence of the growth of the well-being of the proletariat on the development of capitalism became the main reason for the “massive nationalist fall from grace of socialism.” The conditions for overcoming the crisis of socialism were seen in the purification of Marxist socialism from the deeply penetrating negative influences of the “one-sided industrialist and national-imperialist phase of capitalist development,” that is, in the replacement of Marxist socialism with integral Socialist Revolutionary socialism.

Among such negative influences, the idealization of the proletariat by Marxists was mentioned first of all. Such a proletariat as Marxism portrays it, Chernov wrote, does not exist. In fact, there is not just one international proletariat, welded together by class solidarity, independent of differences in race, nation, gender, territory, state, qualifications and standard of living, imbued with irreconcilable hostility to the existing system and to all forces of oppression and exploitation, but many proletariats, with a number of private contradictions between them and with a certain relative solidarity with the ruling strata. As a result, the conclusion was drawn that socialists should not make an idol out of any working class, including the proletariat, and the socialist party should not be identified with the proletarian party. Chernov emphasized that ending the war and achieving a just peace without annexations and indemnities can only be achieved through the united efforts of all working people; and the duty of every socialist and every socialist party is to unite the socialist forces scattered by the war.

Guided by such considerations, Chernov and Nathanson participated in the international conferences of socialist internationalists - Zimmerwald (1915) and Kinthal (1916). Chernov noted that the participants in these conferences pursued different goals. Some, including Chernov himself, viewed them as a means of awakening and uniting all international socialism, others (Lenin and his supporters) - as a means of breaking with it and founding a narrower “sectarian International.” Only M.A. Nathanson (M. Bobrov) signed the “Manifesto” of the Zimmerwald Conference. Chernov refused to sign this document due to the fact that his amendments in the spirit of the Socialist Revolutionary view of war and socialism were rejected.

At the same time, when the Zimmerwald Conference was taking place, the defencist-SRs organized a meeting in Geneva with the Russian social-democratic defencists. The “Manifesto” of this meeting stated that “freedom... cannot be achieved except by following the path of national self-defense.” The call for the defense of one’s fatherland was justified by the fact that Germany’s victory over Russia, firstly, would turn the latter into a colony, which would hamper the development of its productive forces and the growth of the consciousness of the working people, and consequently, the final death of tsarism would be delayed. Secondly, the defeat of tsarism will have the most severe impact on the position of the working people, since payment of indemnity will cause an increase in taxes. Hence the conclusion was drawn that the vital, economic interests of the people require socialists to actively participate in the defense of the country.

At the same time, the defencists assured that their position did not mean internal peace, reconciliation with the government and the bourgeoisie during the war. The possibility was not even excluded that the overthrow of the autocracy would be a precondition and guarantee of Russia's victory in the war. But at the same time, it was pointed out that it was necessary to avoid revolutionary outbreaks, not to abuse strikes, to think about what their consequences would be, whether they would harm the cause of the country’s defense. The best application of strength for a socialist was considered to be active participation in all public organizations working for the needs of the war: military-industrial committees, zemstvo and city institutions, rural self-government bodies, cooperatives, etc. The weekly newspaper “ became the mouthpiece of the defencist bloc of Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats. Call”, published in Paris from October 1915 to March 1917.

Defensiveness prevailed especially at the beginning of the war. However, as, on the one hand, the inability of the autocracy to ensure effective defense of the country and to prevent economic ruin and financial crisis was revealed, and on the other hand, the movement in opposition to the autocracy gained strength, defencism not only lost its influence, but also underwent certain changes, became more radical and developed into revolutionary defencism. Signs of such an evolution are found in the decisions of the illegal meeting of the populists, held in July 1915 in Petrograd at the apartment of A.F. Kerensky.

It said that “the moment has come to fight for a decisive change in the system of public administration.” The slogans of this struggle were to be: amnesty for all victims of political and religious beliefs, civil and political liberties, democratization of public administration from top to bottom, freedom of professional, cooperative and other organizations, fair distribution of taxes among all classes of the population. With regard to the State Duma, it was said that it was powerless to lead the country out of the crisis, but until the convening of “true popular representation,” its platform must be used to organize the people’s forces. The Labor Group, whose leader was the Socialist-Revolutionary A.F. Kerensky, was to become the spokesman for the decisions made by the meeting.

However, ideological and tactical discord and organizational fragmentation persisted among the Socialist Revolutionaries even after the meeting. Instability and even contradiction in views and moods were characteristic not only of the Socialist-Revolutionaries-intellectuals, but also of the Socialist-Revolutionaries-workers. This was clearly manifested in the position of their working group of the Central Military-Industrial Committee during the elections in Petrograd and at the meetings of this group. Some criticized the defeatism of the Bolsheviks; others called for defense and coalition with the bourgeoisie who opposed tsarism; still others expressed solidarity with the Zimmerwaldites.

The ideas of the left Socialist Revolutionary Internationalists at the beginning of the war did not enjoy any noticeable influence, but as the external and internal situation of the country worsened and the political crisis grew, they found more and more supporters. Thus, in January 1916, the Petrograd Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party stated that “the main task is to organize the working classes for a revolutionary revolution, because only when they seize power will the liquidation of the war and all its consequences be carried out in the interests of labor democracy.”

The war further aggravated the organizational crisis of the Socialist Revolutionaries. According to V.M. Zenzinov, a member of the Central Committee elected at the V Party Council, during all the years of the war “there were almost no Socialist Revolutionary Party organizations anywhere.” However, the ideas of the party retained their roots, potential strength and significance. Thousands of Socialist Revolutionaries and their supporters, active in 1905 - 1907, did not disappear during the inter-revolutionary decade, but only dispersed organizationally. The “forges” of the Socialist Revolutionary cadres of agitators, propagandists and organizers during this period were prisons, hard labor and exile. Those Social Revolutionaries who formally left the party did not break their spiritual connection with it. Working in various legal organizations, they expanded the field of Socialist Revolutionary ideological influence. On the whole, the leading core of the party remained, taking refuge in emigration. Only taking all this into account can one understand the amazing metamorphosis that occurred with the Socialist Revolutionaries in a short time after the victory of the second Russian revolution in February 1917.

SRs-members of the Russian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (written: “s=r-ov”, read: “Socialist Revolutionaries”). The party was formed by uniting populist groups as the left wing of democracy in late 1901–early 1902.

In the second half of the 1890s, small populist groups and circles, predominantly intellectual in composition, existed in St. Petersburg, Penza, Poltava, Voronezh, Kharkov, and Odessa. Some of them united in 1900 into the Southern Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, others in 1901 into the “Union of Socialist Revolutionaries.” The organizers were former populists (M.R. Gots, O.S. Minor, etc.) and extremist-minded students (N.D. Avksentyev, V.M. Zenzinov, B.V. Savinkov, I.P. Kalyaev, E. S. Sozonov and others). At the end of 1901, the “Southern Socialist Revolutionary Party” and the “Union of Socialist Revolutionaries” merged, and in January 1902 the newspaper “Revolutionary Russia” announced the creation of the party. The founding congress of the party, which approved its program and charter, took place, however, only three years later and was held from December 29, 1905 to January 4, 1906 in Imatra (Finland).

Simultaneously with the establishment of the party itself, its Combat Organization (BO) was created. Its leaders - G.A. Gershuni, E.F. Azef - put forward individual terror against senior government officials as the main goal of their activities. Its victims in 1902–1905 were the ministers of internal affairs (D.S. Sipyagin, V.K. Pleve), governors (I.M. Obolensky, N.M. Kachura), as well as the leader. book Sergei Alexandrovich, killed by the famous Socialist Revolutionary I. Kalyaev. During two and a half years of the first Russian revolution, the Socialist Revolutionaries committed about 200 terrorist acts ().

In general, party members were supporters of democratic socialism, which they saw as a society of economic and political democracy. Their main demands were reflected in the Party Program drawn up by V.M. Chernov and adopted at the First Founding Congress of the Party at the end of December 1905 - beginning of January 1906.

As defenders of the interests of the peasantry and followers of the Narodniks, the Socialist Revolutionaries demanded the “socialization of the land” (transferring it into the ownership of communities and establishing egalitarian labor land use), denied social stratification, and did not share the idea of ​​​​establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat, which was actively promoted by many Marxists at that time. The program of “socialization of the earth” was supposed to provide a peaceful, evolutionary path of transition to socialism.

The Social Revolutionary Party Program contained demands for the introduction of democratic rights and freedoms in Russia - the convening of a Constituent Assembly, the establishment of a republic with autonomy for regions and communities on a federal basis, the introduction of universal suffrage and democratic freedoms (speech, press, conscience, meetings, unions, separation of the church from state, universal free education, the destruction of the standing army, the introduction of an 8-hour working day, social insurance at the expense of the state and the owners of enterprises, the organization of trade unions.

Considering political freedom and democracy to be the main prerequisites for socialism in Russia, they recognized the importance of mass movements in achieving them. But in matters of tactics, the Socialist Revolutionaries stipulated that the struggle for the implementation of the program would be carried out “in forms corresponding to the specific conditions of Russian reality,” which implied the use of the entire arsenal of means of struggle, including individual terror.

The leadership of the Socialist Revolutionary Party was entrusted to the Central Committee (Central Committee). There were special commissions under the Central Committee: peasant and workers. military, literary, etc. Special rights in the structure of the organization were vested in the Council of members of the Central Committee, representatives of the Moscow and St. Petersburg committees and regions (the first meeting of the Council was held in May 1906, the last, the tenth in August 1921). The structural parts of the party also included the Peasant Union (since 1902), the Union of People's Teachers (since 1903), and individual workers' unions (since 1903). Members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party took part in the Paris Conference of Opposition and Revolutionary Parties (autumn 1904) and the Geneva Conference of Revolutionary Parties (April 1905).

By the beginning of the revolution of 1905–1907, over 40 Socialist Revolutionary committees and groups were operating in Russia, uniting about 2.5 thousand people, mostly intellectuals; more than a quarter of the composition were workers and peasants. Members of the BO party were engaged in the delivery of weapons to Russia, created dynamite workshops, and organized fighting squads. The party leadership was inclined to consider the publication of the Manifesto on October 17, 1905 as the beginning of the constitutional order, so it was decided to dissolve the BO of the party as not corresponding to the constitutional regime. Together with other left-wing parties, the Social Revolutionaries co-organized the Labor Group consisting of deputies of the First State Duma (1906), which actively participated in the development of projects related to land use. In the Second State Duma, the Socialist Revolutionaries were represented by 37 deputies, who were especially active in debates on the agrarian issue. At that time, the left wing separated from the party (creating the “Union of Socialist-Revolutionary Maximalists”) and the right wing (“People’s Socialists” or “Enesy”). At the same time, the size of the party increased in 1907 to 50–60 thousand people; and the number of workers and peasants in it reached 90%.

However, the lack of ideological unity became one of the main factors explaining the organizational weakness of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in the climate of political reaction of 1907–1910. A number of prominent figures, and above all B.V. Savinkov, tried to overcome the tactical and organizational crisis that arose in the party after the exposure of the provocative activities of E.F. Azef at the end of 1908 - beginning of 1909. The crisis of the party was aggravated by the Stolypin agrarian reform, which strengthened the sense of ownership among the peasants and undermined the foundations of Socialist Revolutionary agrarian socialism. In a climate of crisis in the country and in the party, many of its leaders, disillusioned with the idea of ​​​​preparing terrorist attacks, focused almost entirely on literary activities. Its fruits were published by legal Socialist Revolutionary newspapers - “Son of the Fatherland”, “Narodny Vestnik”, “Working People”.

After the victory of the February Revolution of 1917, the Socialist Revolutionary Party became completely legal, influential, mass, and one of the ruling parties in the country. In terms of growth rates, the Socialist Revolutionaries were ahead of other political parties: by the summer of 1917 there were about 1 million people, united in 436 organizations in 62 provinces, in the fleets and on the fronts of the active army. Entire villages, regiments and factories joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party that year. These were peasants, soldiers, workers, intellectuals, petty officials and officers, students who had little idea about the theoretical guidelines of the party, its goals and objectives. The range of views was enormous - from Bolshevik-anarchist to Menshevik-ENES. Some hoped to gain personal benefit from membership in the most influential party and joined for selfish reasons (they were later called the “March Socialist Revolutionaries”, since they announced their membership after the Tsar’s abdication in March 1917).

The internal history of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1917 is characterized by the formation of three currents in it - right, center and left.

The right Socialist Revolutionaries (E. Breshko-Breshkovskaya, A. Kerensky, B. Savinkov) believed that the issue of socialist reconstruction was not on the agenda and therefore believed it was necessary to focus on issues of democratization of the political system and forms of ownership. The right were supporters of coalition governments and “defencism” in foreign policy. The Right Socialist Revolutionaries and Popular Socialist Party (since 1917 – the Labor People's Socialist Party) were even represented in the Provisional Government, in particular A.F. Kerensky was first the Minister of Justice (March-April 1917), then the Minister of War and Navy (in the 1st and 2nd coalition governments), and from September 1917 - the head of the 3rd coalition government. Other right-wing Social Revolutionaries also participated in the coalition composition of the Provisional Government: N.D. Avksentyev (Minister of Internal Affairs in the 2nd composition), B.V. Savinkov (administrator of the Military and Naval Ministry in the 1st and 2nd composition) .

The Left Socialist Revolutionaries who disagreed with them (M. Spiridonova, B. Kamkov and others, who published their articles in the newspapers “Delo Naroda”, “Land and Freedom”, “Banner of Labor”) believed the current situation was possible for a “breakthrough to socialism”, and therefore they advocated the immediate transfer of all land to the peasants. They considered the world revolution capable of ending the war, and therefore some of them called (like the Bolsheviks) not to trust the Provisional Government, to go to the end, until democracy was established.

However, the general course of the party was determined by the centrists (V. Chernov and S.L. Maslov).

From February to July-August 1917, the Socialist Revolutionaries actively worked in the Councils of Workers', Soldiers' and Sailors' Deputies, considering them "necessary to continue the revolution and consolidate fundamental freedoms and democratic principles" in order to "push" the Provisional Government along the path of reforms, and at the Constituent Assembly - to ensure the implementation of its decisions. If the right Socialist Revolutionaries refused to support the Bolshevik slogan “All power to the Soviets!” and considered a coalition government a necessary condition and means for overcoming the devastation and chaos in the economy, winning the war and bringing the country to the Constituent Assembly, then the left saw the salvation of Russia in a breakthrough to socialism through the creation of a “homogeneous socialist government” based on a bloc of labor and socialist parties . During the summer of 1917 they actively participated in the work of land committees and local councils in various provinces of Russia.

The October Revolution of 1917 was carried out with the active assistance of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. Decree on land, adopted by the Bolsheviks at the Second Congress of Soviets on October 26, 1917, legitimized what was done by the Soviets and land committees: the seizure of land from landowners, the royal house and wealthy peasants. His text included Order on land, formulated by the Left Social Revolutionaries on the basis of 242 local orders (“Private ownership of land is abolished forever. All lands are transferred to the disposal of local councils”). Thanks to the coalition with the left Socialist Revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks were able to quickly establish new power in the countryside: the peasants believed that the Bolsheviks were the very “maximalists” who approved of their “black redistribution” of the land.

The Right Socialist Revolutionaries, on the contrary, did not accept the October events, regarding them as “a crime against the homeland and the revolution.” From the ruling party, after the Bolsheviks seized power, they again became the opposition. While the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries (about 62 thousand people) transformed into the “Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries (Internationalists)” and delegated several of its representatives to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the right wing did not lose hope of overthrowing the power of the Bolsheviks. In the late autumn of 1917, they organized a revolt of cadets in Petrograd, tried to recall their deputies from the Soviets, and opposed the conclusion of peace between Russia and Germany.

The last congress of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in history worked from November 26 to December 5, 1917. Its leadership refused to recognize “the Bolshevik socialist revolution and the Soviet government as not recognized by the country.”

During the elections to the Constituent Assembly, the Socialist Revolutionaries received 58% of the votes, at the expense of voters from the agricultural provinces. On the eve of its convening, the right-wing Socialist Revolutionaries planned the “seizure of the entire Bolshevik head” (meaning the murder of V.I. Lenin and L.D. Trotsky), but they were afraid that such actions could lead to a “reverse wave of terror against the intelligentsia.” On January 5, 1918, the Constituent Assembly began its work. The head of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, V.M. Chernov, was elected its chairman (244 votes against 151). The Bolshevik Ya.M. Sverdlov, who came to the meeting, proposed to approve the document drawn up by V.I. Lenin Declaration of the Rights of Workers and Exploited People, but only 146 deputies voted for this proposal. As a sign of protest, the Bolsheviks left the meeting, and on the morning of January 6 - when V.M. Chernov read Draft Basic Law on Land– forced to stop reading and leave the room.

After the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, the Socialist Revolutionaries decided to abandon conspiratorial tactics and wage an open struggle against Bolshevism, consistently winning back the masses, taking part in the activities of any legal organizations - Soviets, All-Russian Congresses of Land Committees, Congresses of Women Workers, etc. After the conclusion of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty in March 1918, one of the first places in the propaganda of the Social Revolutionaries was occupied by the idea of ​​​​restoring the integrity and independence of Russia. True, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries continued in the spring of 1918 to look for compromise ways in relations with the Bolsheviks, until the creation of the Committees of Poor People and the confiscation of grain from the peasants the Bolsheviks overflowed their cup of patience. This resulted in the rebellion on July 6, 1918 - an attempt to provoke a military conflict with Germany in order to break the shameful Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and at the same time stop the development of the “socialist revolution in the countryside,” as the Bolsheviks called it (the introduction of surplus appropriation and the forcible confiscation of grain “surplus” from the peasants). The rebellion was suppressed, the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party split into “populist communists” (existed until November 1918) and “revolutionary communists” (existed until 1920, when they decided to merge with the RCP (b)). Separate groups of left Socialist Revolutionaries did not join either one or the other newly formed parties and continued to fight the Bolsheviks, demanding the abolition of emergency commissions, revolutionary committees, committees of the poor, food detachments, and surplus appropriation.

At this time, the right Socialist Revolutionaries, having proposed in May 1918 to begin an armed struggle against Soviet power with the goal of “planting the banner of the Constituent Assembly” in the Volga region and the Urals, managed to create (with the help of rebel Czechoslovak prisoners of war) by June 1918 in Samara a Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch) headed by V.K. Volsky. These actions were regarded by the Bolsheviks as counter-revolutionary, and on June 14, 1918 they expelled the Right Socialist Revolutionaries from the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.

From that time on, the right Socialist Revolutionaries embarked on the path of creating numerous conspiracies and terrorist acts, participated in military revolts in Yaroslavl, Murom, Rybinsk, in the assassination attempts: June 20 - on the member of the presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee V.M. Volodarsky, on August 30 on the chairman of the Petrograd Extraordinary Commission ( Cheka) M.S. Uritsky in Petrograd and on the same day - on V.I. Lenin in Moscow.

The Socialist Revolutionary Siberian Regional Duma in Tomsk declared Siberia an autonomous region, creating a Provisional Siberian Government with a center in Vladivostok and a branch (West Siberian Commissariat) in Omsk. The latter, with the approval of the Siberian Regional Duma, transferred government functions in June 1918 to the coalition Siberian government headed by former cadet P.A. Vologodsky.

In September 1918 in Ufa, at a meeting of anti-Bolshevik regional governments and groups, the Right Socialist Revolutionaries formed a coalition (with the Cadets) Ufa Directory - the Provisional All-Russian Government. Of its 179 members, 100 were Social Revolutionaries; many well-known figures of past years (N.D. Avksentyev, V.M. Zenzinov) joined the leadership of the directory. In October 1918, Komuch ceded power to the Directory, under which the Congress of Members of the Constituent Assembly, which did not have any real administrative resources, was created. In those same years, the Government of Autonomous Siberia operated in the Far East, and the Supreme Administration of the Northern Region operated in Arkhangelsk. All of them, which included right-wing Social Revolutionaries, actively abolished Soviet decrees, especially those relating to land, liquidated Soviet institutions and considered themselves a “third force” in relation to the Bolsheviks and the “White Movement”.

The monarchist forces, led by Admiral A.V. Kolchak, were suspicious of their activities. On November 18, 1918, they overthrew the Directory and formed the Siberian government. The top of the Socialist Revolutionary groups that were part of the Directory - N.D. Avksentyev, V.M. Zenzinov, A.A. Argunov - were arrested and expelled by A.V. Kolchak from Russia. They all reached Paris, marking the beginning of the last wave of Socialist Revolutionary emigration there.

The scattered Socialist Revolutionary groups that remained out of action tried to compromise with the Bolsheviks, admitting their mistakes. The Soviet government temporarily used them (not to the right of the center) for its own tactical purposes. In February 1919, it even legalized the Socialist Revolutionary Party with its center in Moscow, but a month later the persecution of the Socialist Revolutionaries was resumed and arrests began. Meanwhile, the Socialist Revolutionary Plenum of the Central Committee tried in April 1919 to restore the party. He recognized the participation of the Social Revolutionaries in the Ufa Directory and in regional governments as a mistake, and expressed a negative attitude towards foreign intervention in Russia. However, the majority of those present believed that the Bolsheviks “rejected the basic principles of socialism - freedom and democracy, replaced them with the dictatorship of the minority over the majority, and thereby excluded themselves from the ranks of socialism.”

Not everyone agreed with these conclusions. The deepening split in the party was along the lines of recognizing the power of the Soviets or fighting against it. Thus, the Ufa organization of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, in an appeal published in August 1919, called for recognizing the Bolshevik government and uniting with it. The “People” group, led by the former chairman of the Samara Komuch V.K. Volsky, called on the “working masses” to support the Red Army in the fight against Denikin. Supporters of V.K. Volsky in October 1919 announced their disagreement with the line of the Central Committee of their party and the creation of the group “Minority of the Socialist Revolutionary Party”.

In 1920–1921 during the war with Poland and the offensive of General. P.N. Wrangel, the Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party called on, without stopping the fight against the Bolsheviks, to devote all efforts to the defense of the homeland. He rejected participation in the party mobilization announced by the Revolutionary Military Council, but condemned the sabotage of volunteer detachments that carried out raids on Soviet territory during the war with Poland, in which staunch right-wing Socialist Revolutionaries and, above all, B.V. Savinkov participated.

After the end of the Civil War, the Socialist Revolutionary Party found itself in an illegal position; its numbers sharply decreased, most organizations collapsed, many members of the Central Committee were in prison. In June 1920, the Central Organizational Bureau of the Central Committee was created, uniting the members of the Central Committee who survived the arrests and other influential party members. In August 1921, the last in the history of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, the 10th Party Council, was held in Samara, which identified the “organization of the forces of labor democracy” as the immediate task. By this time, most of the prominent figures of the party, including one of its founders V.M. Chernov, had long been in exile. Those who remained in Russia tried to organize a non-party Union of the Working Peasantry and declared their support for the rebellious Kronstadt (where the slogan “For Soviets without Communists” was raised).

In the conditions of the post-war development of the country, the Socialist Revolutionary alternative to this development, which provided for the democratization of not only the economic but also the political life of the country, could become attractive to the broad masses. Therefore, the Bolsheviks hastened to discredit the policies and ideas of the Socialist Revolutionaries. With great haste, “cases” began to be fabricated against former allies and like-minded people who did not have time to leave abroad. On the basis of completely fictitious facts, the Socialist Revolutionaries were accused of preparing a “general uprising” in the country, sabotage, destruction of grain reserves and other criminal actions; they were called (following V.I. Lenin) “avant-garde of reaction.” In August 1922, in Moscow, the Supreme Tribunal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee tried 34 representatives of the Socialist Revolutionary Party: 12 of them (including old party leaders - A.R. Gots and others) were sentenced to death, the rest received prison sentences from 2 to 10 years . With the arrest in 1925 of the last members of the Central Bank of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, it practically ceased to exist in Russia.

In Revel, Paris, Berlin, and Prague, the Socialist Revolutionary emigration, led by the Foreign Delegation of the Party, continued to operate. In 1926 it split, as a result of which groups emerged: V.M. Chernov (who created the “League of the New East” in 1927), A.F. Kerensky, V.M. Zenzinov and others. The activities of these groups had almost come to a standstill by the early 1930s. Some excitement was brought only by discussions about events in their homeland: some of those who left completely rejected collective farms, others saw in them similarities with communal self-government.

During the Second World War, some emigrant Socialist Revolutionaries advocated unconditional support for the Soviet Union. Some leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party participated in the French resistance movement and died in fascist concentration camps. Others - for example, S.N. Nikolaev, S.P. Postnikov - after the liberation of Prague agreed to return to their homeland, but, having received “sentences”, were forced to serve their sentences until 1956.

During the war years, the Paris and Prague groups of the Socialist Revolutionary Party ceased to exist. A number of leaders moved from France to New York (N.D. Avksentyev, V.M. Zenzinov, V.M. Chernov, etc.). A new center of Socialist Revolutionary emigration was formed there. In March 1952, an appeal appeared from 14 Russian socialists: three Socialist Revolutionary Party members (Chernov, Zenzinov, M.V. Vishnyak), eight Mensheviks and three non-party socialists. It said that history had removed from the order of the day all controversial issues that divided the socialists and expressed the hope that in the future “post-Bolshevik Russia” there should be one “broad, tolerant, humanitarian and freedom-loving socialist party.”

Irina Pushkareva

The party turned into the largest political force, reached the millionth mark in its numbers, acquired a dominant position in local governments and most public organizations, and won the elections to the Constituent Assembly. Its representatives held a number of key positions in the government. Her ideas of democratic socialism and a peaceful transition to it were attractive. However, despite all this, the Social Revolutionaries were unable to resist the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks and organize a successful fight against their dictatorial regime.

Party program

The historical and philosophical worldview of the party was substantiated by the works of N. G. Chernyshevsky, P. L. Lavrov, N. K. Mikhailovsky.

The draft party program was published in May in issue No. 46 of Revolutionary Russia. The project, with minor changes, was approved as the party program at its first congress in early January. This program remained the main document of the party throughout its existence. The main author of the program was the main theoretician of the party V. M. Chernov.

The Social Revolutionaries were the direct heirs of the old populism, the essence of which was the idea of ​​​​the possibility of Russia's transition to socialism through a non-capitalist route. But the Socialist Revolutionaries were supporters of democratic socialism, that is, economic and political democracy, which was to be expressed through the representation of organized producers (trade unions), organized consumers (cooperative unions) and organized citizens (democratic state represented by parliament and self-government bodies).

The originality of Socialist Revolutionary socialism lay in the theory of socialization of agriculture. This theory was a national feature of Socialist Revolutionary democratic socialism and was a contribution to the treasury of world socialist thought. The original idea of ​​this theory was that socialism in Russia should begin to grow first of all in the countryside. The ground for it, its preliminary stage, was to be the socialization of the earth.

Socialization of land meant, firstly, the abolition of private ownership of land, but at the same time not turning it into state property, not its nationalization, but turning it into public property without the right to buy and sell. Secondly, the transfer of all land to the management of central and local bodies of people's self-government, starting from democratically organized rural and urban communities and ending with regional and central institutions. Thirdly, the use of land had to be equalizing labor, that is, to ensure the consumption norm based on the application of one’s own labor, individually or in partnership.

The Socialist Revolutionaries considered political freedom and democracy to be the most important prerequisite for socialism and its organic form. Political democracy and socialization of the land were the main demands of the Socialist Revolutionary minimum program. They were supposed to ensure a peaceful, evolutionary transition of Russia to socialism without any special socialist revolution. The program, in particular, talked about the establishment of a democratic republic with inalienable rights of man and citizen: freedom of conscience, speech, press, assembly, unions, strikes, inviolability of person and home, universal and equal suffrage for every citizen from 20 years of age, without distinction gender, religion and nationality, subject to a direct election system and closed voting. Broad autonomy was also required for regions and communities, both urban and rural, and the possible wider use of federal relations between individual national regions while recognizing their unconditional right to self-determination. The Socialist Revolutionaries, earlier than the Social Democrats, put forward a demand for a federal structure of the Russian state. They were also bolder and more democratic in setting such demands as proportional representation in elected bodies and direct popular legislation (referendum and initiative).

Publications (as of 1913): “Revolutionary Russia” (illegally in 1902-1905), “People's Messenger”, “Thought”, “Conscious Russia”.

Party history

Pre-revolutionary period

In the second half of the 1890s, small populist-socialist groups and circles existed in St. Petersburg, Penza, Poltava, Voronezh, Kharkov, and Odessa. Some of them united in 1900 into the Southern Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, others in 1901 - into the “Union of Socialist Revolutionaries”. At the end of 1901, the “Southern Socialist Revolutionary Party” and the “Union of Socialist Revolutionaries” merged, and in January 1902 the newspaper “Revolutionary Russia” announced the creation of the party. The Geneva Agrarian-Socialist League joined it.

In April 1902, the Combat Organization (BO) of the Socialist Revolutionaries declared itself in a terrorist act against the Minister of Internal Affairs D.S. Sipyagin. The BO was the most secretive part of the party. Over the entire history of the BO (1901-1908), over 80 people worked there. The organization was in an autonomous position within the party; the Central Committee only gave it the task of committing the next terrorist act and indicated the desired date for its execution. The BO had its own cash register, appearances, addresses, apartments; the Central Committee had no right to interfere in its internal affairs. The leaders of the BO Gershuni (1901-1903) and Azef (1903-1908) were the organizers of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and the most influential members of its Central Committee.

In 1905-1906, its right wing left the party, forming the Party of People's Socialists, and the left wing, the Union of Socialists-Revolutionaries-Maximalists, dissociated itself.

During the revolution of 1905-1907 there was a peak in the terrorist activities of the Socialist Revolutionaries. During this period, 233 terrorist attacks were carried out, from 1902 to 1911 - 216 assassination attempts.

The party officially boycotted the elections to the State Duma of the 1st convocation, participated in the elections to the Duma of the 2nd convocation, to which 37 Socialist Revolutionary deputies were elected, and after its dissolution again boycotted the Duma of the 3rd and 4th convocations.

During the World War, centrist and internationalist currents coexisted in the party; the latter resulted in the radical faction of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries (leader - M.A. Spiridonova), who later joined the Bolsheviks.

Party in 1917

The Socialist Revolutionary Party actively participated in the political life of the Russian Republic in 1917, bloced with the Menshevik defencists and was the largest party of this period. By the summer of 1917, the party had about 1 million people, united in 436 organizations in 62 provinces, in the fleets and on the fronts of the active army.

After the October Revolution of 1917, the Socialist Revolutionary Party managed to hold only one congress in Russia (IV, November - December 1917), three Party Councils (VIII - May 1918, IX - June 1919, X - August 1921 g.) and two conferences (in February 1919 and September 1920).

At the IV Congress of the AKP, 20 members and 5 candidates were elected to the Central Committee: N. I. Rakitnikov, D. F. Rakov, V. M. Chernov, V. M. Zenzinov, N. S. Rusanov, V. V. Lunkevich, M. A. Likhach, M. A. Vedenyapin, I. A. Prilezhaev, M. I. Sumgin, A. R. Gots, M. Ya. Gendelman, F. F. Fedorovich, V. N. Richter, K. S. Burevoy, E. M. Timofeev, L. Ya. Gershtein, D. D. Donskoy, V. A. Chaikin, E. M. Ratner, candidates - A. B. Elyashevich, I. I. Teterkin, N. N. Ivanov, V. V. Sukhomlin, M. L. Kogan-Bernstein.

Party in the Council of Deputies

The “Right Social Revolutionaries” were expelled from the Soviets at all levels on June 14, 1918 by a decision of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. The “Left Socialist-Revolutionaries” remained legal until the events of July 6-7, 1918. On many political issues, the “Left Socialist-Revolutionaries” disagreed with the Bolshevik-Leninists. These issues were: the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty and agrarian policy, primarily surplus appropriation and the Brest Committees. On July 6, 1918, the leaders of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who were present at the V Congress of Soviets in Moscow, were arrested, and the party was banned (See Left Socialist Revolutionary uprisings (1918)).

By the beginning of 1921, the Central Committee of the AKP had virtually ceased its activities. Back in June 1920, the Social Revolutionaries formed the Central Organizational Bureau, which, along with members of the Central Committee, included some prominent party members. In August 1921, due to numerous arrests, the leadership of the party finally passed to the Central Bureau. By that time, some of the members of the Central Committee, elected at the IV Congress, had died (I. I. Teterkin, M. L. Kogan-Bernstein), voluntarily resigned from the Central Committee (K. S. Burevoy, N. I. Rakitnikov, M. I. . Sumgin), went abroad (V. M. Chernov, V. M. Zenzinov, N. S. Rusanov, V. V. Sukhomlin). The members of the AKP Central Committee who remained in Russia were almost entirely in prison. In 1922, the “counter-revolutionary activities” of the Social Revolutionaries were “finally publicly exposed” at the Moscow trial of members of the Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. parties (Gots, Timofeev, etc.), despite their protection by the leaders of the Second International. As a result of this process, the party leaders (12 people) were conditionally sentenced to death.
Of all the leaders of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, only the People's Commissar of Justice in the first post-October government, Steinberg, managed to escape. The rest were arrested many times, were in exile for many years, and were shot during the years of the Great Terror.

Emigration

The beginning of the Socialist Revolutionary emigration was marked by the departure of N. S. Rusanov and V. V. Sukhomlin in March-April 1918 to Stockholm, where they and D. O. Gavronsky formed the Foreign Delegation of the AKP. Despite the fact that the leadership of the AKP had an extremely negative attitude towards the presence of significant Socialist Revolutionary emigration, quite a lot of prominent figures of the AKP ended up abroad, including V. M. Chernov, N. D. Avksentyev, E. K. Breshko-Breshkovskaya , M. V. Vishnyak, V. M. Zenzinov, E. E. Lazarev, O. S. Minor and others.

The centers of Socialist Revolutionary emigration were Paris, Berlin and Prague. in 1923 the first congress of foreign organizations of the AKP took place, in 1928 the second. Since 1920, the party's periodicals began to be published abroad. A huge role in establishing this business was played by V. M. Chernov, who left Russia in September 1920. First in Reval (now Tallinn, Estonia), and then in Berlin, Chernov organized the publication of the magazine “Revolutionary Russia” (the name repeated the title of the central body of the party in 1901-1905). The first issue of “Revolutionary Russia” was published in December 1920. The magazine was published in Yuryev (now Tartu), Berlin, and Prague. In addition to “Revolutionary Russia,” the Socialist Revolutionaries published several other publications in exile. In 1921, three issues of the magazine “For the People!” were published in Revel. (officially it was not considered a party one and was called the “worker-peasant-Red Army magazine”), political and cultural magazines “The Will of Russia” (Prague, 1922-1932), “Modern Notes” (Paris, 1920-1940) and others, including including in foreign languages. In the first half of the 1920s, most of these publications were focused on Russia, where most of the circulation was illegally delivered. From the mid-1920s, the ties of the Foreign Delegation of the AKP with Russia weakened, and the Socialist Revolutionary press began to spread mainly among the emigrants.

Literature

• Pavlenkov F. Encyclopedic Dictionary. St. Petersburg, 1913 (5th ed.).
• Eltsin B. M.(ed.) Political Dictionary. M.; L.: Krasnaya Nov, 1924 (2nd ed.).
• Supplement to the Encyclopedic Dictionary // In a reprint of the 5th edition of the “Encyclopedic Dictionary” by F. Pavlenkov, New York, 1956.
• Radkey O.H. The Sickle under the Hammer: The Russian Socialist Revolu-tionaries in the Early Months of Soviet Rule. N.Y.; L.: Columbia University Press, 1963. 525 p.
• Gusev K.V. Socialist Revolutionary Party: from petty-bourgeois revolutionism to counter-revolution: Historical essay / K. V. Gusev. M.: Mysl, 1975. - 383 p.
• Gusev K.V. Knights of Terror. M.: Luch, 1992.
• Party of Socialist Revolutionaries after the October Revolution of 1917: Documents from the archives of P.S.-R. / Collected and provided with notes and an outline of the history of the party in the post-revolutionary period by Marc Jansen. Amsterdam: Stichting beheer IISG, 1989. 772 pp.
• Leonov M. I. Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1905-1907. / M. I. Leonov. M.: ROSSPEN, 1997. - 512 p.
• Morozov K. N. Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1907-1914. / K. N. Morozov. M.: ROSSPEN, 1998. - 624 p.
• Morozov K. N. The trial of the socialist revolutionaries and the prison confrontation (1922-1926): ethics and tactics of confrontation / K. N. Morozov. M.: ROSSPEN, 2005. 736 p.
• Suslov A. Yu. Socialist revolutionaries in Soviet Russia: sources and historiography / A. Yu. Suslov. Kazan: Kazan Publishing House. state technol. University, 2007.

see also

External links

• Priceman L. G. Terrorists and revolutionaries, security guards and provocateurs - M.: ROSSPEN, 2001. - 432 p.
• Morozov K. N. Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1907-1914. - M.: ROSSPEN, 1998. - 624 p.
• Insarov Socialist-Revolutionary Maximalists in the struggle for a new world

Links and notes

Development of opposition ideas in Tsarist Russia XIX - early XX centuries
1810s-1826	“Constitution” by N. M. Muravyov | “Russian Truth” by P. I. Pestel
1826-1850s	"Contemporary" | "What to do?"
1880s-1905	Socialist Revolutionary Party | Russian Social Democratic Labor Party
1905-1917