Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

From its birth, the party advocated terrorism as a means of destabilizing tsarism, and its “Combat Organization” (Boevaia organizatsiia), led by Evno Azef and B. V. Savinkov, was behind the assassination of a number of public figures (including Minister of Education N. P. Bogolepov in 1901; Ministers of the Interior D. S. Sipiagin in 1902 and V. K. von Plehve in 1904; and Grand Duke Sergei, uncle of Nicholas II, in 1905). As a consequence of this—and also as a consequence of the fissiparous nature of social-democratic politics at the time—the PSR became by far the most popular socialist party in Russia before the First World War. Despite its hold over the revolutionary movement and its control of key unions, however, the party proved incapable of uniting the opposition during the 1905 Revolution, and from 1907, it went into a period of rapid decline, hastened by the demoralizing revelation in 1908 that Azef was a paid agent of the tsarist secret police (the Okhrana). Consequently, the right of the party—which had been the center until the defection of the Popular Socialists—began to argue for an abandonment of terror and the reorientation of the PSR toward a role as the (legal) representative of the interests of small property owners, as the land reforms of Prime Minister P. A. Stolypin appeared to be undermining the cohesion of the traditional peasant commune that the SRs had always envisaged to be the basic building block of a future socialist society. (The party’s right wing also advocated participation in the State Duma elections, from which the party, as an illegal terrorist organization, was banned, although some individual members were elected under the Trudovik banner.)

The rise of labor unrest from April 1912, in the wake of the “Lena goldfields massacre” of striking miners in eastern Siberia, helped the party revive, but the onset of war in 1914 brought new divisions, as center-leftist SR-Internationalists (including Rakitnikov and Chernov) opposed the war and attended the antiwar socialist conferences at Zimmerwald and Kienthal, while the right wing of the party (notably Savinkov and Avksent′ev, through the journal Prizyv, “The Call”) advocated “defensism,” supported the imperial government’s war efforts, and demanded a civil truce during the hostilities.

That division endured into 1917, beyond the collapse of tsarism during the February Revolution, and by the summer of that year the left of the party was operating as a quite separate organization, soon to formally split from the PSR as the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries (led by M. A. Spiridonova and B. D. Kamkov). Meanwhile, the right wing of the party (led by Avksent′ev and V. M. Zenzinov) offered succor to the Russian Provisional Government of A. F. Kerensky, even though the latter was not even reelected to the SR Central Committee in June 1917, as a consequence of members’ distaste for his policies. This rendered the center of the party, led by Chernov, isolated; even as minister of agriculture in the Provisional Government, Chernov was unable to push through measures on land reform that might have appealed to what remained of the party’s key constituency, the peasantry, while the PSR’s campaign to end the war through a peace “without annexations or indemnities” was shunned by the Allies (and in part by the Provisional Government). Nevertheless, the SRs formed the largest faction within VTsIK in 1917, dominated the All-Russian Peasants’ Soviet, could boast at least 1,000,000 members in almost 500 regional branches, sold an average of 300,000 copies of each edition of their main newspaper, Delo naroda (“The People’s Cause”), and with their allies in Ukraine (the Ukrainian Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries) and elsewhere, won 58 percent of the votes for the Constituent Assembly in the elections of November 1917.