Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

That such apparent popularity could not be transformed into effective leadership or governance, however, was revealed when the Constituent Assembly, which was chaired by Chernov and included a majority of SR delegates (380 out of 720 delegates), was closed by the Bolsheviks with hardly a murmur of popular protest, while subsequent efforts by the party to organize in the assembly’s name (notably as Komuch) during the Democratic Counter-Revolution of 1918 were swamped by the Right. The election results, being based on unified party lists, also obscured how many votes were actually cast by voters who would have preferred to elect Left-SRs. (From December 1917, Left-SRs had entered Sovnarkom and supported the closure of the assembly.) At this point, the party’s Central Committee (elected at its 4th Congress in December 1917) consisted of Rakitnikov, D. F. Rakov, Chernov, Zenzinov, N. S. Rusanov, V. V. Lunkevich, М. А. Likhach, М. А. Vedeniapin, I. A. Prilezhaev, М. I. Sumgin, A. R. Gots, M. Ia. Gendel′man, F. F. Fedorovich, V. N. Rikhter, K. S. Burevoi, Е. М. Timofeev, L. Ia. Gershtein, D. D. Donskoi, V. A. Chaikin, and E. M. Ratner.

On 14 June 1918, the PSR was listed as a proscribed organization by Sovnarkom of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. From late 1918, the PSR divided again, among those who were willing to cooperate with the Soviet government in its fight against the Whites (chiefly the Narod group, led by V. K. Vol′skii, which was then precariously legalized), those (such as Chernov) who assumed an attitude of (at times hostile) neutrality to the Soviet government, those who sought to battle both the Bolsheviks and the Whites, and those (chiefly lapsed SRs) who collaborated with the White regimes in Siberia and South Russia. As the civil wars wound down, the Bolsheviks chose to dispose of the SRs, putting their leaders on trial for “counterrevolutionary activities” from 8 June 1922. Twelve of the SR leaders, including eight Central Committee members, were sentenced to death, although (for fear of inciting international outrage at a time when the Soviet government was seeking a tactical rapprochement with Western governments) this was later commuted to life imprisonment (and in fact they were subsequently deported). Doubts were cast at the time upon the legality of these sentences, as they were based on the Soviet legal code of 1922, which postdated the alleged “crimes.” Nevertheless, countless other, lesser SRs were also arrested and imprisoned or exiled during the 1920s, and few party members who were even remotely prominent would survive the Terror of the 1930s.

In emigration—chiefly in Prague, Paris, and Berlin—feuding within the PSR continued, notably between Chernov and Kerensky, and the party gradually dissolved. Émigré SRs were responsible, however, for the publication of a number of important journals and newspapers, among them Volia Rossii (“The Will of Russia,” Prague, 1922–1932) and Sovremennye zapiski (“Contemporary Notes,” Paris, 1920–1940), which dissected the party’s fate during the civil wars.

SOCIETY OF GALLIPOLIITSI.See GALLIPOLIITSI, SOCIETY OF.

SOKOL′NIKOV, GRIGORII IAKOVLEVICH (BRILIANT/BRILLIANTOV, GRISH IANKELEVICH (3 August 1888–21 May 1939). The Soviet politician and military commander G. Ia. Sokol′nikov was born into the family of a Jewish doctor at Romny (Romni), in Poltava guberniia. He studied in the Law Faculty of Moscow University but did not graduate, although he later received a doctorate in economics from the Sorbonne (1914). He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1905, siding with the Bolsheviks, and was an active participant in the revolutionary upheavals of 1905–1907 (including the Moscow uprising of 1905). He was arrested by the tsarist authorities in 1907, and in February 1909 was exiled to Siberia. He escaped and fled abroad in 1909, living in Switzerland and then France and working on party newspapers. He returned to Russia with V. I. Lenin, on the famous “sealed train,” in April 1917. Back in Russia, he assumed senior party posts, being elected to the Central Committee on 3 August 1917, and remained a member until 18 March 1919. (He would be repeatedly elected to the Central Committee from 2 April 1922 to 26 June 1930.)