Oliver Henry Radkey’s two volumes on the Socialist Revolutionaries in 19 17 and
the beginning of 1918 can be considered classics of modern historiography,
noteworthy both for their keen judgment and for the importance of their subject
matter. Because of the prevailing pro-Bolshevik current of opinions in the Englishspeaking
world over the course of the past few decades, neither book has received
the acclaim it deserves. Indeed, very few Sovietologists have read them. This is a pity
since they deserve admiration if for no other reason than for their limpid, elegant
prose, so different from the mediocre English in vogue nowadays amongst so many
influential historians.
It is difficult to understand why the historians of the Revolution of 1917 and of
the rise of Soviet society have so thoroughly ignored the Populist parties. The rise
and consolidation of the Bolshevik regime can hardly be understood without a clear
grasp of the underlying reasons behind the defeat of the Socialist Revolutionaries
(i.e., the party of the Russian peasantry) and without a clear appreciation of the
actions of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries after October 1917. Radkey is still well
worth reading for the light he can shed on these two fundamental questions and for
the intelligent issues he raises though, sadly, his research goes no further than
January 1918. Certainly, Soviet historiography is of little or no help in solving the
historical problem pertaining to the rise and fall of organized Populism in 1917-1918
in that, up to the collapse of the USSR, the heavy hand of ideology stifled historical
studies of this difficult and thorny issue and Soviet researchers were unable to carry
out their research freely. Of course, quite serious and minutely detailed studies —
some based on archival sources — are available and are of great use, though their
analyses appear to be quite unconvincing and very much in line with the judgments
expressed at the time by Lenin and by Bolshevik propaganda.
It is truly astonishing to what extent Western historiography has ignored the
Populist left during 1917-1918. Not even the opening of the archives has served to
promote an interest in the study of the field or to flesh out the rather sparse
bibliography. It is as if the victorious Bolsheviks — together with the mountains of
documents Lenin’s party has left posterity — had cast a spell over historians who
have not yet come to grips with the fundamental importance of a political and social
movement which was of such monumental consequence to the founding of Soviet
society. What follows is an attempt to fill this void as I follow Radkey’s footsteps in
reconstructing the main events in the activities of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries
in 1918.
From the old PSR to the Left Socialist Revolutionaries
The fundamental point of departure must of necessity be the crisis the old and
glorious Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR) underwent in the autumn of 1917 and
the rise of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party (PLSR). How did the organized
Populists react to the Bolsheviks’ takeover of power? What was the position of the
Right and Left SRs during negotiations for the creation of an homogeneous socialist
government, which had been promoted by the All-Russian Executive Committee of
the Railwaymen’s Union (Vikzhel) immediately after the Bolshevik revolution? Let
us see if we can answer the latter question before embarking upon the more general
topic of the split in Russian Populism.
It is a well-known fact that the all-powerful Vikzhel forced the Bolsheviks to open
negotiations with their adversaries. Vikzhel sent a telegram on October 26, 1917,
threatening with a total breakdown in railway traffic. He condemned the “fratricidal
war” and wanted the creation of a “homogeneous socialist and revolutionary
government”, since the Kerenskii ministry had proved itself “incapable of
maintaining power” and the Council of People’s Commissars, which was the
expression of a single party, “will not encounter recognition and acceptance
throughout the land.” Vikzhel declared that it would maintain a scrupulously neutral
stance while the political conflict unfolded and solidly backed the founding of an
executive comprising “all the Socialist parties, from the Bolsheviks to the Popular
Socialists” as the only way out of the crisis.
Radkey’s description of the attitude taken by the Socialist Revolutionaries in the
weeks following the October uprising, though penned more than thirty years ago, is
still well worth reading. He gave a very cogent and wise analysis of where the
responsibility lay for the failure of negotiations carried out by Vikzhel. in his view,
the Bolsheviks were not the only ones who showed insincerity and ambiguity during
the course of negotiations; the SRs were equally guilty. The left-centrist wing of the
PSR and the Bolshevik minority could, arguably, have come to an agreement, but the
hard-liners in both camps were not willing to strike any kind of compromise. Abram
A. Gots, who was the organizational mastermind of the PSR, opted for armed
resistance against the Bolsheviks. Indeed, he organized the failed insurrection of the
cadet officers at Petrograd on October 29. Conversely, Viktor M. Chernov, the
famous and prestigious internationalist head of the party, was “more like a prize bird,
exhibited on occasion because of the brilliance of its left-centrist plumage and the
attraction this had for soldiers and peasants, but caged again as soon as it gave
indications of independent flight.”
After the October uprising, both the right and center-right wings of the PSR
continued to hold considerable sway in the party — the same voices which several
months previously had accepted governmental collaboration with the Kadets and the
pursuit of war. One typical exponent of this moderate school of thought was the
mayor of Moscow, Vadim V. Rudnev, who advocated opposing the Bolsheviks with
armed might and who was a dyed-in-the-wool patriot and strong supporter of an
alliance with the liberals. Even the social composition of the rank and file of the
party had changed, as could be seen during the events of Moscow, minutely
reconstructed by Radkey. There was only a tepid response in the former capital to the
call of the Socialist Revolutionary committee to mobilize the people against a
Bolshevik dictatorship, in that “the loss of its proletarian and military following had
reduced the party in Moscow to an organization of intellectuals and radical democratic
elements that were not minded to fight in the streets, aside from an
undetermined number of students who joined their classmates of other persuasions
in a volunteer movement said to have been initiated by Constitutional Democrats.”
In the autumn of 1917, the PSR was at deadlock. By this time, its supporters in
the cities comprised mainly intellectuals and white-collar workers, who could of
course be counted on to favor political and social reforms but who were also capable
of being blinded by patriotism and nationalism. Radkey was quite right in concluding
that “the war was the nemesis of the PSR as it was of the whole Russian Revolution.”
In truth, the Socialist Revolutionaries proved incapable of formulating a clear-cut and
consistent solution to the terrifying problem of the war and ended up — to a greater
extent even than the Mensheviks — destroying themselves by internal conflicts until
the final split came in November 1917, when the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party
(PLRS) was officially founded.
Another, no less fatal, blow was dealt by the split between the leadership and the
rank and file as a result of the war. The masses had become increasingly radicalized
and embittered during the wartime years, most particularly in the countryside and at
the front, whilst the democratic intelligentsia increasingly tended to side with the
liberal and nationalistic stance of the professional and clerical classes. There had
been a fragile union between intellectuals and the people which had flowered at the
end of the nineteenth century with the rise of the “third element” and which had
prospered during the final stages of the 1905 Revolution; this alliance foundered and
expired on the battlefields and trenches of the First World War, together with millions
of human lives. In no country on earth did national cohesion, imbued with the venom
of chauvinism which festered amongst the propertied and the subordinate classes,
survive intact unto the bitter end, as proved by the social and political upheavals of
the immediate post-war period. Nonetheless, in the country where the tsar ruled, and
where the gap between the high degree of culture achieved by the Westernized
middle classes and the backwardness of the plebeian masses was greatest, the long
drawn-out war had dug an insurmountable trench between the two Russias. Though
the clerical workers and the professionals a decade earlier had opposed the war with
Japan, in 1914 they fell subject to the lure of nationalism which was winning over
their Western European colleagues. Of course, this whole process of ideological
homogeneity had consequences. Only a small minority of the democratic
intelligentsia which was in close contact with the lower classes and was aware of their
needs and mind-set was able to withstand the temptation of giving in to nationalism
and found refuge in extremism and radicalism. Most of them felt that — however
brightly the flame of the old dream of reform might burn — the more immediate and
urgent task facing the homeland was German imperialism. The democratic
bourgeoisie was both pugnacious and revolutionary as long as the tsar held the reins
of power. Indeed, the democratic bourgeoisie played a not inconsiderable role in
bringing about the fall of the autocratic regime and in the establishment of freedom
in Russia. However, once tsarism fell, they were truly on the horns of a dilemma —
should peace negotiations with all the belligerents begin at once or should the
democratic Russian homeland be defended against the Austro-German invaders? The
democratic bourgeoisie opted for the latter choice, in that there was the added
advantage of couching the powerful feelings of patriotism in idealistic terms. Since
quite a few Socialist Revolutionary intellectuals remained true to their pacifist ideals,
the professional and clerical classes who by now comprised the heart and soul of the
party hurled accusations of treason at those who spoke in concrete terms of peace
negotiations.
Inside the PSR, the conflicts had reached fever pitch by the end of the summer
subsequent to the mass resumption of peasant uprisings. The truth is that in the
Socialist Revolutionary Party there were at least three distinct and quite dissimilar
political groupings coexisting side by side, all of them, however, originating from the
same Populist roots. The origins of the crisis of the Socialist Revolutionary
movement harkened back to the defeat of 1905 and to the land reform promoted by
Stolypin; it was with the outbreak of the war and during the course of the war itself
that the various political positions inside the Populist movement hardened to the
point that they became ultimately irreconcilable. It bears repeating that the main
reason for the split lay in the political and ideological metamorphosis of broad
swathes of the Russian democratic intelligentsia, whose sudden conversion to liberal
nationalism blinded them to the fact that the country was facing very real and very
urgent social problems. Thus, in 1917, thanks to the unusually persuasive and
convincing Populist message, the SRs managed to create a party with a very large
following and to perform the miracle of peacefully mobilizing the rural masses.
Then, however, instead of convening the Constituent Assembly and introducing land
reform, the leadership of the PSR made several mistakes. Firstly, the leadership
assumed that the peasantry, who had long lusted after the gentry’s lands, and the
soldiery, who were eager to abandon the trenches and share in the spoils of the
division of the large landed estates, could be kept down. The Populist left, both in the
capitals and in the hinterland, pled in vain for the leaders to acknowledge the true
feelings running rife amongst the masses and the fire smoldering amid the ashes of
what on the surface looked peaceful. The ties the Socialist Revolutionary
intelligentsia had had with the Russian plebs had been either lost or weakened to the
point that the intelligentsia no longer understood that paying lip service to the old and
glorious party program no longer sufficed to resolve the social conflicts and to
placate the masses. The plebeian hard core of the Socialist Revolutionary movement
did not disperse but rather passed intact into the new political movement which arose
out of the split in the PSR after the Bolshevik victory. Radkey was quite right when
he noted that the “plebeian character” and the youth of its leaders were the hallmarks
of the new Populist party. At the time of the split, the allegiance of most of the
intellectuals and the clerical workers remained with the old PSR, whilst almost all of
the sailors and a goodly number of workers and soldiers followed the Left Socialist
Revolutionaries.
The start of cooperation between the Left SRs and the Bolsheviks
Once Lenin had rejected out of hand any possibility of working together with the
Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries, he tried to establish a special
relationship with the extreme left wing of the Populists, which was in the process of
splitting from the PSR and setting up as an independent party. The truth was that
negotiations between the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs, which had begun immediately
after the Petrograd insurrection and had continued through to the end of November,
were anything but easy; though the PLSR actually agreed with Lenin and his program
as far as the crucial questions of land and peace were concerned, it continued to
disagree with the coup of October 25 and was extremely mistrustful of the way in
which the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) governed. The Left SRs,
moreover, by no means presented a united and coherent front. Among their ranks
there was a radical and hard-line wing which coexisted with a more moderate wing,
which was aware of the democratic rules of the game and which abhorred the
Bolsheviks’ methods.
It would be well to bear in mind precisely what distinguished the PLSR from the
Leninist Bolsheviks. First of all, the PLSR rejected terror as a means of speeding up
the coming of socialism and sponsored the protection of the rights of freedom. These
were the most hotly-contested topics between the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs during
the meetings of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets ( VTsIK).
On November 2, 1917, B.F. Malkin vehemently protested against the single-party
dictatorship, which had taken repressive measures which risked affecting not only
the property -owners but also the masses. Then, two days later, there was a debate
rife with tension on the freedom of the press after the Sovnarkom decree which closed
down the bourgeois newspapers. Prosh P. Prosh’ian was quite clear in his
condemnation of the crude theories of Lenin and Trotskii when he observed that “the
struggle for freedom of the press has always been closely bound up with the struggle
for socialism.” Malkin countered the attempts of the two top Bolshevik leaders to
come up with an ideological justification for the dictatorship in the following way:
“We firmly repudiate the notion that socialism can be introduced by armed force. […] The
revolution’s appeal lies in the fact that we are striving not just to fill our hungry bellies but
for a higher truth, the liberation of the individual. We shall win not by closing down
bourgeois newspapers but because our programme and tactics express the interests of the
broad toiling masses, because we can build up a solid coalition of soldiers, workers and
peasants. […]
Lenin has told us about slanders put out by the bourgeois press. […] We
revolutionaries and socialists reply to these lies by telling the truth. The lies of the bourgeois press do
not represent an authentic danger to the socialist movement. […]
We Socialist-Revolutionaries were once prisoners of tsarism but we were never its
slaves, and we don’t want to establish slavery for anyone now.”
Another cause of friction between Lenin’s party and the Left SRs was the
omnipotence of the executive, which was not subject to any control. Karelin
protested at the abuse of the term “bourgeois”:
“It is not only bourgeois governments which need to give account of themselves or to
maintain good order in their affairs, even in matters of detail. […] A proletarian
government must also submit to popular control. […]
Our demand for responsible government is being rejected on the simple grounds that
this was characteristic of earlier parliamentary regimes. The logical corollary would be to
abandon financial accountability as well, another ‘bourgeois’ prejudice. […]
These decrees and draft ordinances which are being cooked up like bliny are
extraordinarily illiterate, although as yet, thank heavens, literacy has not been declared a
bourgeois prejudice.”
The PLSR had no intention whatsoever of striking a compromise over the
division of powers between Sovnarkom and VTsIK during the negotiations which
had begun with the Bolsheviks for the formation of a two-party government. Once
the PLSR abandoned its original idea of a coalition of all the Socialist parties after
the breakdown of the negotiations promoted by Vikzhel, it decided to join the Council
of People’s Commissars. However, it did so only after it had achieved the
enlargement of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets (VTsIK) by
including representatives of the extraordinary peasants’ congress ( which was sitting
at that time in Petrograd) and after the adoption of a document which regulated the
relationship between the government and the “parliament.” In his address to the first
congress of the PLSR, Boris D. Kamkov defined as an “immense victory” for his
party the separation of the legislative branch (in the guise of the VTsIK) from the
executive (the Sovnarkom). Indeed, the rules adopted on November 17 governing
the relationship between the VTsIK and the Sovnarkom established that the Council
of People’s Commissars was to be “entirely responsible before the Central Executive
Committee” and that “all legislative acts, and any and all ordinances of major
political import” were to be submitted to, and ratified by, the Soviet “parliament.”
Only emergency measures in the struggle against the enemies of the Revolution
could be enacted immediately, and only if the government then answered to the
VTsIK. Lastly, the regulations obliged each member of the Sovnarkom to answer for
his or her actions once a week before the VTsIK, and obliged the government to
respond “immediately” to any requests put forward by the Central Executive
Committee. Once this admittedly rough and ready form of division of powers
between Sovnarkom and VTsIK had been achieved, the Left SRs entered the
government and accepted, for the time being, the Ministry of Agriculture (they were
later to hold other offices, as well).
Nonetheless, there were still enormous differences between the Left SRs and the
Bolsheviks, as shown by the speech delivered by Mania A. Spiridonova, on behalf
of the PLSR, welcoming the newly-elected peasant deputies to the headquarters of
the VTsIK. The Populist revolutionary spoke of the basic concepts underlying
international socialism and repeated that the Russian peasantry would finally be
emancipated only by means of an alliance with the Russian workers and with the
workers of the world. Her speech also contained religious overtones which were alien
to Bolshevik doctrine and which harkened back to the traditional ideals of Russian
Populism:
“We shall attain our ideals not just through hatred but also through feelings of pity for all
who suffer and love, for all who are oppressed. For our ideals we shall give everything,
our lives and even perhaps our honor. We must cast off the last traces of slavery in our
psychological outlook. We must eliminate hatred among ourselves and direct our enmity
solely against our enemies. We must develop mutual respect and tolerance towards our
comrades in the struggle that awaits us. We must become better, purer, more sincere, so
that no one should dare say that our insurrection is bringing forth hatred and evil. Upon
the ruins of the old society there is being born, hidden from our eyes, a new society of
justice and love.”
Furthermore, the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries disagreed on
what stance to take regarding the Constituent Assembly, which had been elected in
November 1917. At first, the PLSR seemed to lean in favor of recognizing the right
of the Constituent Assembly to convene and to announce to the country at large the
basic guidelines of its policy. Indeed, it was this very question which sparked off a
lively debate within the VTsIK. The Left Socialist Revolutionary Shteinberg
protested against the Sovnarkom decree adopted on November 28 whereby the
leaders of the Kadet Party were to be arrested on the accusation of being “enemies
of the people.” Shteinberg said that “there is no place in the class struggle for
arbitrary repressive measures” and added: “The decree suggests a willingness to
disrupt the Constituent Assembly, and we announce that we are categorically
opposed to such a step.” Trotskii answered disdainfully:
“Russia is completely split into two irreconcilable camps, that of the bourgeoisie and that
of the proletariat. Between them are the Left SRs, who have yet to find their feet and are
vacillating in a petty-bourgeois funk which leads them to obstruct the CPC’s class
struggle. […] You wax indignant at the naked terror which we are applying against our
class enemies, but let me tell you that in one month’s time at the most it will assume more
frightful (groznye) forms, modelled on the terror of the great French revolutionaries. Not
the fortress but the guillotine will await our enemies.”
In his speech, Mstislavskii alluded to Trotskii ‘s reference to the French
Revolution to show how the Bolsheviks, in their zeal to attribute a petit-bourgeois
outlook to the PLSR, themselves were overly eager to copy the political forms of a
revolution which had itself been bourgeois and petit-bourgeois. The kind of terror
Lenin and Trotskii were advocating ran the risk of perverting the social nature of the
Russian Revolution, turning it into civil war. Mstislavskii felt that the task before the
Left Socialist Revolutionaries was to stop the Bolsheviks from harming the cause of
the Revolution with their blind repressive measures, such as the persecution of the
Kadets and of the Constituent Assembly.
Why did the PLSR change its tack and ally itself with the Bolsheviks on the
question of the Constituent Assembly? Prosh’ian gave an explanation at the meeting
of the VTsIK on December 22, stating clearly that “we were not being hypocritical,
we were not lying, when we defended the assembly.” But “real life is more
intransigent than political dogma. Its logic is more merciless, and saner, than that of
any political program.” Since the Constituent Assembly was asking for full powers,
it clashed headlong with the Soviets, “the sole organs of revolutionary authority,” and
blocked the social revolution then well under way in the country.
The peasants and Soviet power
Between November 1917 and the first few months of 1918, the crucial battle for
the survival and consolidation of the new power took place in the countryside. In the
autumn of 1917, there was a spontaneous peasant jacquerie, which was, in essence,
the final stage of the Russian social revolution. It spread so far and so violently that
it quickly spun out of control, unchecked by any political force or party. Lenin, in a
brilliant move, quickly understood its importance and this was his political
masterpiece in 1917.
Most, if not all, informed observers would agree that the famous Land Decree
made a major contribution in effecting a turnabout in the peasant uprisings, gradually
banking the fires of the raging jacquerie and winning the peasantry over to the
Bolshevik regime. Yet that is not quite the full picture. In a very important study, the
Bolshevik historian, A.V. Shestakov, boldly maintained that the date of the October
uprising should not be considered “a milestone in the peasants’ struggle against the
pomeshchikr and that the jacquerie raged on until November and December.
Shestakov ‘s study, unfortunately unknown to Western scholars, is based upon solid
documentary evidence.
The truth is that the rise of a new popular government in Petrograd hardly made
any impact whatsoever on the behavior of the rural masses. As a rule, the peasants
were apprised of the Land Decree only some time after the event: the Bolshevik press
and even the position papers of the government were available and in circulation only
in the major urban centers, beyond the ken of the boundless Russian provinces. Even
when news of the agrarian policy of Lenin’s government reached the hinterland
(usually spread by soldiers returning home from the front, informing their fellow
countrymen about the proclamations of the new government), the Land Decree was
interpreted as a call to seize the lands and the goods of the gentry. It is important to
bear in mind the extremely primitive degree of political awareness of the very first
“Bolshevik” propagandists, whose actions served only to increase the chaos and
violence that already reigned in the countryside.
Though Lenin’s decree had, to all intents and purposes, no practical effect, it was
nonetheless quite a far-sighted and resourceful political act, aimed at paving the way
towards a global and radical restructuring of land ownership in Russia. For
restructuring of land ownership to occur, however, first the anarchical peasant masses
had to be won over politically. This was not a task for a political party like the
Bolshevik party which had no rural roots and which was remote from the cares and
thoughts of the country-dwellers. Only a political movement which had a long
Populist tradition could hope to put an end to the chaos and establish a new order in
the villages. It was clear to Lenin from the beginning that only the political platform
of the Socialist Revolutionaries was capable of satisfying the basic claims of the
Russian peasantry and thus he co-opted it, to the astonishment and rage of his
Bolshevik friends and of his enemies. Nonetheless, for a few weeks, his political
sectarianism stopped him from reaching an agreement with the Populist left which —
whilst agreeing with the main guidelines of the Land Decree — disagreed with the
methods used by the Bolsheviks in power. When he realized that the Populist
platform could never be implemented by his party, for both political and cultural
reasons, Lenin opened the Sovnarkom to the Left SRs and gave them the Agriculture
Commissariat. This governmental coalition with the PLSR was of great help to the
Bolshevik party at a very crucial moment, during the convening of the Constituent
Assembly. Even more important, in terms of safeguarding and strengthening the
Soviet regime, was the proselytism carried out amongst the peasantry by the Populist
left in the center and above all in the hinterlands. One could safely say that without
these new allies, the Bolsheviks would have quickly lost power.
The Second All-Russian Soviet Congress, which ratified the Bolshevik takeover
of power and elected a new executive committee was not at all representative of the
countryside. Indeed, the executive committee of the АН-Russian Soviet of Peasant
Deputies was firmly in the hands of the Socialist Revolutionaries and was openly and
proudly hostile to the Bolsheviks. There was a fierce battle in the capital for control
of the main organ of political representation of the rural masses between November
and December 1917. Radkey has given a detailed description of the “fight for the
peasantry,”
describing the complicated political events and the social composition of
the congresses which were hurriedly held one after the other in Petrograd during
those weeks. One conference of the representatives of the countryside, which
opened at Petrograd on November 10, declared itself an extraordinary peasant
congress and elected a Presidium of Left Socialist Revolutionaries. A few days later,
the assembly was split into two opposing camps: the extraordinary congress, which
was dominated by the Populist left and by the Bolsheviks, and the conference of the
supporters of the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Peasants’ Soviet. The
extraordinary congress was held more or less at the same time as the founding
congress of the PLSR, and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries decided to recognize
the Sovnarkom and to send their own representatives, thus legitimizing the Bolshevik
regime and drawing it out of its isolation. Radkey described these events thus:
The Extraordinary Congress (November 10/25) had provided Lenin’s regime with a fig
leaf to conceal its proletarian nakedness. The mere fact that an assembly of peasants had
joined its voice to that of the workers and soldiers helped to stabilize the regime, for in the
general confusion few bothered to examine the title of the congress or the validity of its members’ credentials”.
The final split between the “right” and the “left” occurred during the Second AURussian
Peasants’ Congress, held in Petrograd from November 26 to December 10,
- Both of the opposing executive committees elected by the congress tried to
strengthen their position by convening a new general congress. The pro-Bolshevik
Peasants’ Congress, held on January 13, 1918, decided to merge with the Third All-
Russian Soviet Congress, which was being held concurrently. At the same time, the
“right Peasants’ Congress was being held; it harkened back to the values of the
Constituent Assembly and, like the Constituent Assembly, was forcibly disbanded.
Thus, thanks to the conclusive contribution of the Left SRs, the Bolsheviks managed
to overcome the resistance of the old PSR and to consolidate the central organs of
Soviet power.
The above-described events, important though they are, are of no use whatsoever
in understanding the political turnabout which occurred in Russia between the end of
1917 and the beginning of 1918. The “fight for the peasantry” raged not only in
Petrograd, but throughout the boundless land; this struggle was to determine the fate
of Soviet power. Though the Bolsheviks had the active support of many workers and
soldiers in the capitals and in the main industrial centers, in the provinces the new
regime had either not even managed to become established or was hanging by a
thread. In the final analysis, everything depended upon the position that the Soviet
district congresses were to take. In a rural nation like Russia, the Soviet district
congresses were mainly made up of peasant delegates.
We have only the most rudimentary knowledge of the composition and activities
of the local peasant congresses, even though they did play a most important role in
the establishment of Soviet power in the hinterland. Very few historians have been
bold enough to attempt to gather information on the political struggles in the
countryside in the months following the October Revolution. Shestakov’s book,
once again, comes to the rescue; based on local sources, it describes the changing
political mood of the district peasant soviets during the last few months of 1917 in
the black-soil provinces. For example, on October 29, the Temnikov Soviet (province
of Tambov) had decided to back the Provisional Government and fight Bolshevism;
on January 23, 1918, it announced to the Sovnarkom that a new power with popular
backing was being organized in the district. Similar events, at different times, were
occurring throughout the land. The political conquest of the district and volost’
soviets allowed the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs to get rid of the volostnye zemstva
(i.e., the administrative bodies of the rural areas) and the other organs of local self-
government which had arisen after the February Revolution and which had up until
then refused to recognize the new government. Clearly, the split in the PSR and the
rise of the PLSR were responsible for the new mix of politics in the rural volosti. The
old PSR, which up until then had had the local administrations in hand, was now in
the minority and deprived of power. Chernov’s party first saw an abrupt drop in its
clout in the countryside at the end of the summer, and now it was losing political
control over the peasant organizations. On their own, the Bolsheviks would have had
neither the strength nor the capacity to disrupt the authority in the rural districts of
the party which had won the elections for the Constituent Assembly. Suffice it to say
that, at the beginning of 1918, 207 Bolshevik organizations (covering only 3-4% of
the rural volosti) were operational in the agricultural areas for a total of 4,122 peasant
militants.
From the first few months of 1918 onwards, the volost ‘ soviets became the most
important political and administrative organ in the rural areas and, thus, the backbone
of the new regime in the countryside. Their duties were manifold and essentially
concerned all aspects of daily life in the rural hamlets, from the division of land to
procuring supplies, from the running of schools and hospitals to helping the needy
(orphans, the elderly, invalids, etc.), from enforcing law and order to armed defense
of the territory. Though we do not know much about how these local soviets actually
worked (documentary sources are scattered and as yet unstudied), one thing is certain
— the Bolshevik regime was able to establish itself and take root thanks in large part
to the rise of the local soviets.
The land socialization
We have already seen how, though the Land Decree was of enormous political
value, it did not have any immediate practical effects. There were, however, a number
of other pieces of legislation which had an impact on the economic and social life of
the countryside, amongst which was the law adopted on December 13/26, 1917 on
the land committees, which established the ways in which these operational bodies
were to be elected and what their jurisdiction was to be, both locally and nationally.
The land committees had been created in April 1917 by the Provisional Government;
now they were to be vested with the power to carry out a land survey and to manage
all the confiscated lands. The actions of the volosť land committees were very
important; in January of 1918, an All-Russian congress of the volosť land
committees was held and it helped in drawing up the law on the socialization of the
land and elected a Main Land Council (glavnyi zemeVnyi sovet) which was
dominated by the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. The Left SRs were given the task
of supervising the enormous land reform then underway. The PLSR not only headed
the People’s Commissariat for Agriculture, it also asked for — and obtained — the
leadership of the peasant section of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee,
which (like the other departments of the VTsIK) acted as a parliamentary committee
with far-reaching operational tasks. During the period in which they collaborated
with the Bolsheviks, the Left SRs were adamant that the soviet “parliament’s”
independence be maintained with respect to the Sovnarkom and the individual
People’s Commissariats. They were not always successful in defending the privileges
of the VTsIK. If anything, the opposite. However, in the case of the peasant section,
they did manage it, thus becoming one of the main instruments the PLSR used in
shaping the new agrarian world to their liking. The VTsIK’s peasant section, headed
by Mania Spiridonova, not only sent agitators and political pamphlets to the
countryside, but it also received numerous peasant emissaries sent with petition (the
so-called khodoki).
The PLSR’s activities in those months were fruitful, in that they were in line with
the deepest aspirations of the rural world. It is well worth bearing in mind that the
main protagonists of the profound changes in the agrarian world were the peasants
themselves and that the parties in power (first and foremost, the Left SRs) were the
ones to make available the institutional tools for the reordering of land ownership
which the village dwellers desired. Equality of ownership of the land, achieved
within the first six months of 1918, was the culmination of centuries of longing by
the peasants and had from the start been the byword of the Populist movement. By
helping it to come about, the PLSR miraculously managed to combine its political
and idealistic traditions with the claims of the peasantry. Early in 1918, the Soviet
regime managed to overcome both the political parties and the opposing social
classes by establishing deep roots in the villages and by endorsing the main demand
of Russian Populism. Russian Populism — considered more as a faith than as a
rational belief — was certainly alive in the hearts and minds of millions of men and
women. In order to gain an understanding of the prevailing mood of the countryside,
it would suffice to read the spare yet moving minutes of the local peasant congresses
of the time. Choosing one of the many, the minutes of the congress held in Bezhetsk
(in the province of Tver’) in March, 1918, and a speech of one of the delegates, we
read that he was not a member of any political party, but was “merely a Populist
(narodnik) who loved the callous hands of his fellow laborers.” The Populist
delegate’s name was Voronin, and he demanded the equal redistribution of land,
harking back to the language of the muzhiks: “God created land and only laborers
may use it.”
The narodniki also advocated the revival of the obshchina (land commune), an
idea which the Russian Marxists abhorred. Though land communes had been
declared dead many times, the revival of the obshchina was finally achieved in 1917.
After the fall of tsarism and the abolition of the suffocating police state, the
obshchestvo or the mir (as the peasants called their village commune) became the
center of political and organizational life for the peasants. In the main, the most
important decisions (from the “sentences” and the “instructions” to the occupation of
the lands of the gentry) were taken collectively by the rural assemblies. We are
fairly unfamiliar with what happened to the obshchina during the months in which
the jacquerie raged; by the same token there are many other aspects of village life in
that turbulent time which remain obscure. One thing is certain, however: from the
beginning of 1918, rural communes were once more in the forefront of events and
however hostile the Bolshevik authorities might be to them, their power increased
during the years of civil war.
Once the operational terrain for reform was set via the land committees, the
Soviet government set down guidelines for reform by means of the fundamental law
of land socialization, which was ratified on January 27 (February 9), 1918. It was
published a few days later, to coincide with the anniversary of the emancipation of
the peasants in 1861. The text was clearly inspired by the land reform program of
the Socialist Revolutionaries, even though it was contrary to the holy doctrine of
Russian Marxism.
In truth, the Bolsheviks were anything but jubilant over the law advocated by
their partners in the government. Yet, once again, Lenin convinced them that the
“black repartition” (which is what the Russian muzhiks called equal distribution of
land), was inevitable and limited himself to making a few amendments to the draft
under discussion.
The law solemnly proclaimed that henceforth all forms of private ownership of
the land would be abolished without reimbursement and that its use would be granted
solely to those who actually worked the land. Thus, only farm laborers could
legitimately claim use of farmland. These were Populist principles permeating the
entire legislative text. It was further stated that the reforms, among other things, were
meant “to encourage the collective system of agriculture at the expense of individual
farming, the former being more economical and leading to a socialistic economy.”
Another article stated that precedence must be given to collective use of the land as
opposed to individual use. These were of course mere statements of principle, in that
the actual provisions of the law regulated in minute detail the equal redistribution of
the land. The agrarian sections of the local soviets were the bodies responsible for
overseeing the reform. After the January All-Russian Congress, the land committees
were disbanded and their members formed part of the new operational instruments
established by the socialization law. The agrarian sections were supposed to base the
assignment of land on one basic criterion, the consumption-labor norm
(potrebitel’no-trudovaia norma), which was a typically Populist concept, taking into
account both the working capacity of each peasant family and the number of mouths
to be fed. That is why the law listed the categories of individuals who were exempt
from work for reasons of age or gender (girls and boys up until the age of 12, women
after the age of 50 and men after the age of 60) and also established, in quantitative
terms, the working capacity of individuals, assessed on the basis of gender and age
cohort (out of a score of full working ability of men aged 18 to 60, women from 18
to 50 years of age were given a score of 0.8, down to adolescents of both sexes
between the ages of 12 and 16, who were attributed a score of half a unit).
The law endeavored to create both the legal and institutional premises for
allocating the land to the peasants in as egalitarian a way as possible. And in the
spring of 1918, throughout Russia, there was a colossal redistribution of the
ownership of land. Yet, however strange it might appear, Soviet historiography has
often been quite hesitant, almost embarrassed in dealing with an event of such huge
economic and social importance. Most particularly, there were very few historians
during the Stalinist period who dared tell the truth about the true nature of the 1918
land reform, contradicting the official version, whereby the kulaks (the rich peasants)
benefited the most from the breakup of the property of the gentry. This gross
distortion of the truth can only be explained by the Bolshevik doctrine that the
peasantry was divided into classes at odds with each other. Given the social and
economic levelling process which occurred in the countryside after the October
Revolution, it is difficult to understand the reason why the party persecuted the
kulaks — sometimes ferociously, sometimes less so — from the summer of 1918 up
until Stalin’s collectivization.
In 1949, in the depths of the period of obscurantism, Evgenii A. Lutskii wrote a
very brave article, which is useful to this day, revealing the levelling consequences
of the law on the socialization of the land. The law’s egalitarian ideals were clearly
evinced by the fact that most of the lots of farmland were allotted “by eaters” (po
edokam), i.e. according to the overall number of people comprising a peasant family.
This was the unquestioned and uncontested criterion adopted, especially in the blacksoil
provinces, where the communal traditions were most deeply rooted and where
the thirst for land was most acutely felt. As Shestakov wrote, “the decision to use the
land in an egalitarian manner and to distribute it by eaters underpinned any and all
resolutions governing redistribution.” Here, in fact, often even the lots of land
which the peasants had owned before the reform were included in the general
redistribution of the land according to the new laws. It would appear (though detailed
studies of individual farm areas of the immense tracts of land in Russia are lacking)
that the land elsewhere was redistributed in a less egalitarian way; in other areas, the
working capacity of each family was taken into account and the wealthier peasants
were able to keep their land. As Keep has suggested, a clear grasp of the ways in
which the reform was implemented would require an understanding of the nature of
agrarian relations and the peasant traditions of each region, instead of Soviet
historiography’s ritual explanation — the “pressure of the kulaks.” At any rate,
redistribution, with rare exceptions, was carried out in a peaceful and organized
fashion, though of course there were, inevitably, conflicts with the neighboring
volosti. One eyewitness, who spent a number of months a year in the central-Russian
countryside and therefore knew it well, spoke of the “miraculous transformation”
which occurred in April: “When left to themselves the peasants partitioned the land
[…] peacefully […] and without the aid of land surveyors, relying solely on the
experience gained from communal land ownership.” True enough, not everything
transpired so easily and so smoothly. Nonetheless, the contrast between the
apocalyptic jacquerie in the autumn of 1917 and the calm, industrious “black
repartition” in the spring of 1918 was striking.
The net result of the egalitarian reform is that though the Russian muzhiks were
granted to all intents and purposes the use of the land expropriated from the
pomeshchiki and from the Church, it did not enlarge by any appreciable extent the
farmland they cultivated. The reasons are quite clear: many have noted that, from the
second half of the nineteenth century onwards, the large aristocratic landholdings
progressively diminished while the peasant holdings increased. This does not in any
way detract from the extraordinary importance of the land redistribution of 1918.
Once the aristocracy had been driven out and their land expropriated, the muzhiks
had fully achieved what they and their ancestors had dreamed of — the age-old class
war between the pomeshchiki and the peasants had finally ended with the triumph of
the latter. Imagine the deep satisfaction of the villagers in the months following the
October Revolution. N01 only had they finally wrought their revenge against the
hated aristocrats, terrorizing them and pillaging their property, but also doing so
without the draconian reprisals which usually followed each jacquerie. Not only did
the agrarian terror in the autumn of 1917 go unpunished, it was also legitimized by
the new power, which had abolished private property for all time.
The peasants also felt that they were masters of their own fate and of their future
for another reason: they had finally partitioned the land on the basis of criteria which
had been freely chosen and deeply felt, without any great hindrance. No matter that
the overall surface area allotted to each village was still insufficient, given the
agricultural techniques of the day. The important thing was that now the muzhiks
could make use of (almost) all of the arable land and that the land could be partitioned
according to the age-old rules of the obshchina. Therefore, in every sense the
peasants were the true victors of the Russian Revolution.
The followers of Populism were also deeply satisfied at their alliance with the
Bolsheviks, since they had managed to achieve the land revolution generations of
Russian revolutionaries had dreamed of. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries had
prepared the groundwork and managed the great land reform; they were the heirs to
the political and idealistic heritage left by the narodniki and were expressing the
desires of the muzhiks. As Aleksei M. Ustinov said before the peasants’ congress of
the Saratov province, illustrating the principles underlying the socialization law:
“this is one of the few laws not scientifically drawn up, it is not an abstract invention
(ne vysasyvalsia iz palîsa), but rather it arose from life itself, from the toiling
peasants. Radishchev, the Decembrists and Chernyshevskii were the first to talk of
adopting such a law, though it took shape only during the first Revolution.” Ustinov
further observed, harking back to the main milestones of the land reform, starting
from the bills presented to the Duma down to the recent socialization law: “This law,
more than any other, corresponds to the fundamental relationship the working
peasant has with the land. Each word of the law is as if it comes from the mouths of
the peasants.”
Surprising though it may seem, the Bolshevik party’s main source of popularity
at the beginning of 1918 was the fact that, whether it wished to be or not, it was the
heir of Russian Populism. After the early difficulties, the regime’s political strength
lay in its alliance with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and its social strength in its
roots in the countryside. Though by this time Soviet power was well-established in
the cities, there was still a great deal of resistance from the middle classes, and the
workers were starting to be restless due to the worsening food supply. In the rural
areas, however, the establishment of the volosť soviets and above all the
implementation of the land socialization law served to broaden the new regime’s
appeal. It has already been mentioned that Lenin was the main advocate of the
Bolsheviks’ bold land policy after the October Revolution; but that is not all — Lenin
was also mainly responsible for the breakdown of the recent miraculous political and
social alliance.
Populism and internationalism
The Left Socialist Revolutionaries were always attentive to their relations with
the Bolsheviks, and this aspect, which we have only fleetingly analyzed, is quite
worthy of interest. Prosh Perchevich Prosh’ian, in the political report of the central
committee delivered before the second party congress (held in Moscow from April
17 to April 25, 19 1 8), described the various stages of the sometimes difficult relations
between the PLSR and the Bolsheviks after October 1917. Prosh’ian ‘s speech
described the prospect of the two political forces working together in hopeful terms,
though he did point out that originally there had been a “psychological abyss”
between them which was “gradually disappearing.” He showed how the PLSR’s
stance on the difficult question of repression had become similar to that of the
Bolsheviks (“we are convinced that the power of the people must often be wielded
with strength and determination, with recourse to political terror, arrests, gags on the
bourgeois press, etc.”) and how, once the initial difficulties had been overcome, the
two parties had cooperated on a wide range of political and social problems, from
relations with the Constituent Assembly to the question of the socialization of the
land. Then, after ratification of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, relations between the two
parties suddenly deteriorated, when the Left SRs protested by withdrawing their
representatives from the Sovnarkom. Though the two parties had acted in unison
during negotiations with Austria and Germany, when the Bolsheviks yielded to
German imperialism, an internationalist party such as the PLSR could not go along.
Thus, the difficult decision to withdraw from the Sovnarkom was taken; however, this
did not mean — as Prosh’ian was quick to point out — that they had definitively
broken with Lenin’s party.
Though Prosh’ian belonged to the pro-Bolshevik wing of the PLSR, his opinion
was largely shared by the party. However, that “psychological abyss” he had
mentioned between the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks had not
vanished even though the two parties had worked closely together in the government;
it still represented the greatest stumbling-block to an agreement between them. The
speeches of PLSR members had ethical and religious overtones, which was anything
but a sham; the party had deep roots in the idealism and the long tradition of sacrifice
and abnegation of the nineteenth-century Populist intelligentsia. Mariia
Aleksandrovna once again reminded delegates of their tradition at the first PLSR
congress, speaking of the party’s “glorious forerunners,” those “militants of the
186O’s,the 187O’s,the 1880’sandthe 1890’s.” Spiridonova not only harkened back
to the roots of her movement, she also honored the Socialist Revolutionary terrorists
who had fought against tsarism and had gone to the scaffolds with their heads high
shortly before 1905 and during the first Revolution.
Over the course of the next few months, the official organ of the PLSR, Znamia
truda repeatedly stressed the party’s Populist origins and its terrorist past. Two events
stand out in this connection. At the end of January 1918, on the fourteenth
anniversary of the death of Nikolai Konstantinovich Mikhailovskii, the newspaper
dedicated two full pages to “the populist who united the peasants and the workers
under the banner of the toiling people,” the uncompromising critic of capitalism and
the “bard of the liberation of human individuality,” who “began from the theory of
the person” to end up “with the theory of society based on labor, and a republic
founded upon labor and socialism.” One week later, the newspaper dedicated
another full page to the writings of Ivan P. Kaliaev, including some poems, his speech
before the court, his Letter to my comrades; Kaliaev was the Socialist Revolutionary
terrorist who on February 4, 1905, threw a deadly bomb at the Grand Duke Sergei
Aleksandrcvich. Kaliacv was then sentenced to death by me tsar’s court.
Though the PLRS did boast of Russian Socialism’s terrorist past, it also
condemned the crude and brutal methods of the Bolsheviks in power. As we have
seen, the coup in October 1917 had been condemned by the Socialist Revolutionary
Left, which had advocated a broad-based agreement amongst the popular parties; the
Socialist Revolutionary Left had been appalled at the idea of a fratricidal war within
“revolutionary democracy.” On November 22, Boris Davidovich Kamkov delivered
a long speech before the congress participants, outlining what the Left SRs had done
within the VTsIK, in the course of that speech, he gave a clear account of the proud
history of the conflicts between the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks
— who “were punch-drunk from a too-easy victory” — and the way in which the
Left SRs, who were “immune from the exaltation of victory, the exaltation of the easy
taking of the Winter Palace,” had managed to keep united “the fronts of Russian
democracy.” Since the PLSR had not managed to bridge the gap between the two
Socialist fronts, it was now in danger, “between the devil and the deep blue sea,” and
had decided to side with the Bolshevik government, but only after obtaining specific
guarantees from the Bolsheviks. The main guarantee obtained was that the executive
branch (the Sovnarkom) would be subordinate to the legislative branch (the VTsIK).
However, Kamkov certainly did not think that all their problems were resolved and
that all the differences were papered over; he was perfectly aware of the dangers
involved in the mind-set and actions of the Bolsheviks. Certainly, the Left Socialist
Revolutionaries’ concept of political struggle and of democracy was completely
different from that of the Bolsheviks:
Terror is inherently weak. Only very weak political organizations, without deep social
roots and without the strong backing of broad-based social support feel that they mast gag
their opponents, and have recourse to mass arrests and even mass executions. A strong
power, a power based on the working classes — particularly in Russia, where the
overwhelming majority is of the working class — does not need these methods, which could
only serve to weaken. That is why we are pursuing a policy of reinstating civil liberties,
to use a term which Trotskii would call bourgeois.”
By April of 1918, during the PLSR’s second congress, a great deal of water had
already flowed under the Neva’s bridges from the day in which Kamkov had
solemnly committed himself to defending political liberties. The Left Socialist
Revolutionaries had initially promised to give free rein to the Constituent Assembly,
only to subsequently decree its dissolution; they had furthermore consented, whether
wholeheartedly or unwillingly, to the Bolshevik government’s series of repressions.
A perusal of the PLSR’s official organ, the Znamia truda, over January and February
of 1918 shows no notable changes in tone in the comments on the political events of
the day from the comments made by the Bolshevik Pravda in that same time frame.
During that period, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries felt that the iron fist of the
Soviet regime was legitimate, or at least inevitable. Nonetheless, even then the SRs
continued to pursue their own quite specific political line in an attempt to maintain
at least the appearance of constitutional legality. As before, the Populist left was
consumed with the problem of the relationship between the VTsIK and the
Sovnarkom and was intent on ensuring that legislative power prevail.
A number of voices extremely critical of the governmental alliance with the
Bolsheviks were raised during the congress held in April of 1918. The harshest critic
of all was the former People’s Commissar for Justice, Shteinberg, who told his
comrades that he had never held “real power” and that they should return “to the
people” if they were to have any hope of implementing the party’s platform.
Shteinberg was a PLSR moderate and a liberal”; he denounced the Soviet regime’s
despotism and illegal acts as “coming not from the popular masses but rather from
men who have been appointed and who therefore become ‘professional power
wielders'”; he concluded that “we have a democratic bureaucracy which is worse
than the old bureaucracy — at least the old one was God-fearing and fearful of the
powers that be, whereas they consider themselves to be God, tsar and the supreme
authority.”
One aspect of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries which is worthy of note is that
they were enthusiastic and intransigent internationalists. At the first congress in
November of 1917, the venerable Mark Andreevich Natanson (born in 1850 and one
of the great heroes of Russian Populism), spoke of prevailing philosophies in
European Socialism both before and after 1914; he showed how what truly
distinguished reformists from revolutionaries was the fact that revolutionaries were
internationalists and diametrically opposed to the narrow, nationalistic vision of
reformists. Of course, Natanson placed the new Russian left-wing party in the
mainstream of the movement launched via Zimmerwald (1915) and Kienthal (1916)
pacifist conferences. As a matter of fact, during the course of 1917, while the Left
Social Revolutionaries were still militants within the old PSR, they had criticized the
cautious or even ambiguous position taken by the party leaders on the war. The PLSR
had called for immediate social revolution in the cities and in the countryside, while
waving the flag of proletarian internationalism and anxiously following the struggles
of workers in the West. This is something which Soviet historians have too often
forgotten; they have misrepresented the Left SRs as the political representatives of
certain segments of the Russian peasantry (i.e., the kulaks, according to the most
widespread interpretation, or the “middle peasants” according to some). Whereas the
truth is that the PLSR was, at one and the same time, both a party rooted in the
plebeian reality of the Russian countryside and a party sworn to achieving its goal of
world revolution — and this created a serious structural weakness.
Indeed, after the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, it was the internationalist dream which
ruined the relationship between the PLSR and the Bolsheviks. At first, the Left
Socialist Revolutionaries had hoped that the fact that Trotskii and the Russian
delegation to the peace negotiations tried to procrastinate meant that they were trying
to block a new Austro-German offensive and that, by the same token, the political
and social crisis in the West would be accelerated. The party’s newspaper was
“deeply pleased” that the Russian delegation had rejected the proposal of signing a
peace treaty with the imperial powers; it was convinced that the time was ripe for
“the peace negotiations which had begun with Kuhlmann and Hoffman to be
concluded by negotiating with the representatives of the revolutionary proletariat of
Germany and of Austro-Hungary.” Of course, we now know that the opposite
occurred: the German military offensive launched after the break of the negotiations
crushed the young Soviet republic, and the Western proletariat didn’t lift a finger in
defense of the Russian Revolution. Still, the PLSR did not lose heart. On February
24, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries held a conference in Petrograd and rejected the
peace conditions imposed by the “German imperialist plunderers” and called the
“workers, soldiers and peasants to armed resistance against the aggression of foreign
capital.” A few days later, the central committee launched a heated appeal to all
party organizations, calling upon them to organize “combat squads” (druzhiny) and
to keep in touch with the “committee of insurrection” in Petrograd. In this document,
stress is placed on the vital importance of the struggle against foreign imperialism:
“by strangling Soviet power, the German bourgeoisie hopes that it can survive the
revolution of its own working class and that the West can be spared from the
victorious offensive of Soviet ideas.”
It was inevitable that such an unyielding position taken with regard to peace with
Germany would lead to open conflict with the party which had signed the Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk. It is common knowledge that the Left Socialist Revolutionaries
protested against the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and withdrew their delegation from the
Council of People’s Commissars.
Indeed, it was this topic and, more generally, the prospect of cooperation with the
Bolsheviks which dominated the debate during the April 1918 congress. The archives
of the minutes show that the decision to stand down from the Sovnarkom was not an
easy one to take and that there was a broad spectrum of opinions with regard to such
a far-reaching decision. Natanson pled in favor of cooperation in government with
the Bolsheviks, and his speech was very well-received. Spiridonova felt that
withdrawing from “the power structure,” i.e., from the “Ministry of Agriculture” at
a moment in which the law on the socialization of the land was being implemented
was nothing less than a “most grievous crime.” In her self-criticism, Mania
Aleksandrovna went so far as to touch upon the problem of the party’s attitude to the
war and to the Bolsheviks. It was unfair to call the Bolsheviks the “traitors of the
social revolution” and to reproach them because they had signed the Treaty of Brest,
when “we, the internationalists, have done our very best to break down the old
discipline” without creating a “new, revolutionary” one. If truth be told, the Peace
Treaty had been signed by “a routed army, by hunger, by distress, by our confusion,
by the fact that we tried to build a Socialist order and in five months didn’t succeed,
by the fact that the entire population was tired of fighting.” Opposing Bolsheviks
meant playing into the hands of the bourgeoisie and the moderate Socialist parties;
on the other hand, the Bolsheviks were not in a position to fulfill the promises of the
Russian Revolution. That was the “tragic situation” in which the Left Socialist
Revolutionaries found themselves:
The great tragedy of our Russian Revolution derives from the fact that by the very nature
of their platform and due to their mind-set, Social Democrats are incapable of implementing
our national Russian Revolution as it should be. They don’t know how to make use of every
single opportunity afforded by daily life, how to use the psychology of peasants and workers,
how to tap into our national identity, our national peculiarities and our people; and this is at
least part of the reason why the Russian Revolution might fail.”
Mania Spiridonova’s clear-eyed and bitter analysis touched upon the very heart
of the problem of the relationship between social movements and political forces in
the Russian plebeian revolution. There is no doubt that — even taking into account
an understandable partisanship — Mania Spiridonova had hit the nail on the head
and had perfectly understood that Bolshevism was a movement which, however
alienated it may have been from genuine popular traditions, had become the main
protagonist in the entire revolutionary process. No other delegate had so clearly
articulated the internal contradictions of the Russian Revolution. All the delegates,
however, had an opinion on the very topical question of relations with the Bolsheviks
before and after Brest-Litovsk. The speeches delivered by the representatives of the
local committees are of particular interest and depict the mood of the party’s rank and
file in the provinces where the Soviet regime had become established.
The Olonets delegate stated that, in the Olonets provincial committee, there had
been “major differences of opinion” on the question of whether the Left Socialist
Revolutionaries should quit the government, and that the majority opinion supported
the official party line. At any rate, a clear-cut majority in the organs of local power
were against a break with the Bolsheviks. Baranov, the representative of the
province of Viatka, stated that the majority in his organization was against having the
Socialist Revolutionary commissars resign from the Sovnarkom. Andreev, the
delegate from the province of Smolensk, stated that the masses were behind the
Bolsheviks on the question of the Brest Peace Treaty; resigning from the government,
it was felt, had been an incomprehensible move and seriously damaged the PLSR.
Other speakers, as well, expressed grave doubts about whether or not to renounce
high government posts. The motion adopted by the congress obviously took into
account the prevailing mood of the party in that, though it approved the withdrawal
of the Socialist Revolutionary delegation from the Sovnarkom, it did not rule out
future participation by the PLSR in the central government “if the political situation
changed.” At any rate, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries were to remain in the
collegial organs of the commissariats and in the other institutions so as not to weaken
Soviet power at the center and in the hinterland.
Summing up in brief the state of play of the relationship between the Bolsheviks
and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries as evinced from the many speeches given by
local cadres of the PLSR, we could safely say that, though there was a great deal of
tension and even bitter differences of opinion, the two parties managed to continue
cooperating in a fruitful manner. Sometimes the Bolsheviks, though they were in the
majority, were so keen on maintaining an alliance with the Populist left that they gave
in and accepted joint representation in the soviets and in the other organs of local
power. The main bone of contention — what approach to take with regard to the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk — appeared insurmountable in both capitals, yet diminished
in importance the further one traveled from Petrograd and from Moscow. The
yearning for peace was so keenly felt by the masses — particularly the peasants —
that the local PLSR committees felt unable to attack the Bolsheviks because they had
signed the humiliating treaty with Germany. As a matter of fact, a perusal of the
proceedings of the local peasant congresses would suffice to realize the impact in the
countryside of the news that the war had ended. That is probably why Spiridova felt
she could pose the question in such brutal terms to the congress: “Can our party, the
party of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, dare violate the peace and assume the
leadership of waging war with German imperialism?” The question already
contained the answer: the PLSR must of necessity avoid taking any isolated action
against the peace treaty because it would be a risky, dangerous business.
The party debated matters of war and peace once again during the proceedings
of the third congress, from June 28 to July 1, 1918. A number of delegates who took
part in the proceedings observed that the PLSR was notably more united and in
agreement than before. Reading the minutes of the congress allows one to experience
first-hand the feeling of enthusiasm reigning amongst the delegates; they felt that the
Left Socialist Revolutionaries had gained in popularity m the eyes of the peasants
and the people. Prosh’ian felt that the heady rise of the party over the course of the
past months was due to “our clear-cut position with regard to the question of the
ratification of the peace treaty.” Many speakers at the congress stressed the
importance of combating German imperialism. Mariia Spiridonova herself — though
she had been most cautious and moderate at the previous congress — now spoke
clearly of how the political situation had changed and how the first signs of collapse
of the German army required a new strategy. Since the irreversible crisis of German
imperialism had begun, the truce must be ended. “There had of course been many
reasons why a peace treaty could be considered justified and why breathing space
was necessary; now, the international situation does not by any means justify a truce
of this type.” It followed that the policy of the Bolshevik government was wrongheaded
and criminal, and that the Bolsheviks were dupes of the German ambassador,
Mirbach, and even more enslaved to the charms of diplomacy than the Kerenskii
government had been. In Spiridonova ‘s final appeal to her comrades, she did not rule
out the fact that even bitter conflict with the Bolsheviks could ensue, including the
use of German bayonets against the PLSR. What, therefore, would be the best tactic?
It would be necessary to disregard the conditions imposed by the Peace Treaty
without, however, a reopening of hostilities and a call to arms. “The only response is
that we would be subject to repression and the German imperialists would carry out
punitive expeditions. This would be our saving grace — punitive expeditions in
Ukraine gave rise to a movement and engendered an insurrection.” There was
nothing to fear from an invasion of Russia by German troops, not even if they
conquered Moscow and Petrograd.
Spiridonova ‘s naive hope that the masses would rise in response to a German
invasion of Russia was fomented by the example of Ukraine, where there had been
a number of peasant uprisings against the German-backed puppet government. One
of the main topics debated during the congress was the Ukrainian revolt; the Left
Socialist Revolutionaries learned from the revolt that it was possible to resist German
imperialism and that the countryside was still seething. However, not all the delegates
felt that resistance to German militarism was imminent. Even during the third
congress, a number of delegates voiced the opinion that the attitude of the workers
to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk could not be taken for granted. Though the delegate
from the provinces of Arkhangel ‘sk and Vologda did admit that the humiliating treaty
was “disastrous for the people and for the Revolution,” he also added that he didn’t
think the masses would reject it nor would they rise against it. Murav’ev, from the
province of Voronezh, stated that, however much the workers might disapprove of
the unjust peace, they would not heed the PLSR’s call, with the exception of the
provinces of the southern frontier, which had been frequently occupied by German
troops. Roslavets, a delegate from the district of Elets (in the province of Orel) was
even more vocal in her criticism of the prevailing attitude in the party: she said that
“if Kamkov and not Lenin were the head of government, we wouldn’t be here today,
we’d all be in Turukhan” (i.e. in Siberia). As far as Mania Spiridonova’s prediction
that the truce with Germany would be soon broken, Roslavets stated that this would
happen only “if all the peasants and all the workers were ready to mobilize
voluntarily. But they are not.”
Even relations with the Bolshevik party were worse than they had been in the
spring of 1918, as a number of delegates pointed out. Impatience with the
Communists was expressed time and again in the speeches of delegates, culminating
in the unanimous adoption of a motion proposed by Mania Spiridonova condemning
capital punishment. Still, not all the bridges between the PLSR and Bolshevism had
been burnt. Many could still remember episodes of close cooperation between the
local Socialist Revolutionary committees and the Bolsheviks, particularly the leftwing
Bolsheviks who were against the Peace Treaty with Germany. One of the
leaders of the party, Vladimir A. Algasov, called upon the party to avoid any clashes
with the Bolsheviks, because they had “taken the initiative and had had the great
honor of liberating Russia from the bourgeoisie”; anyway, many of them were against
the Treaty of Brest. If anything, it was incumbent upon the Left Socialist
Revolutionaries to imitate the Bolsheviks, so that they, too, could “take the initiative
and have the honor of liberating Russia from the imperialistic bourgeoisie.”6
Markar’iants, a representative of the Saratov organization, reopened the question of
the PLSR’s resignation from the government, stating that it had been a serious
mistake and stressing the need to have a solid working relationship with the
Bolsheviks.
As a matter of fact, even Mania Spiridonova stated that “the main, characteristic
feature of our activity is not the struggle against Bolshevism and the Bolsheviks: the
main, characteristic feature of our activity must be the struggle against capitalism,
against German imperialism, against the conciliators (soglashateliami), and against
the Bolsheviks’ harmful policy when it begins to be a conciliatory one
(soglashatel ‘skoi).n It is important to bear in mind that the Bolsheviks were “the party
at whose side we fought after the October Revolution, the party which shoulders the
burden of the leadership of the government”; a party which had of course committed
a number of errors, which “was no longer what it had once been,” but which still
harbored “deadly hatred towards the bourgeoisie.”
What clearly emerged from the debate during the party congress was that an
overwhelming majority of delegates, still reeling from the recent successes of the
party, thought that the time had come to wash away the shame of the Treaty of Brest-
Litovsk. The speakers who took the floor did not clarify exactly in which way the
party should protest against the iniquitous treaty, though on June 24, 1918, the PLSR
central committee had felt that it would be both “possible and opportune to organize
a series of terrorist acts against the most eminent representatives of German
imperialism.” The party leadership, encouraged by the anti-German sentiment
running rife in the congress, decided that action was necessary. On July 6, two
Socialist Revolutionary militants, Iakov G. Bliumkin and Nikolai A. Andreev,
assassinated the German ambassador, Wilhelm von Mirbach, in Moscow, while the
party newspaper (Znamia truda) proclaimed in screaming headlines: “Down with the
noose of Brest which is strangling the Russian revolution!” The attack was easy and
successful; there were a number of aspects to the attack which have led a few
historians to suspect that it might have been a provocation caused by (or facilitated
- by) the Bolsheviks in order to eliminate a dangerous rival, the PLSR. The Russian
scholar, Iurii G. Fel’shtinskii, who emigrated to the United States in the late 1970’s,
is one such historian. There is, however, no good reason to suspect that the
Bolshevik political police (the notorious Cheka) were involved in the planning and
execution of the attack on Mirbach. All contemporary documents point to the fact
that the Socialist Revolutionaries were intent on breaking the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
and resuming the struggle against German imperialism. At any rate, the unpublished
minutes of the fourth (and last) PLSK congress, which was held in Moscow from
October 2 to October 7, 1918, do unequivocally prove that the Bolsheviks were not
involved in Mirbach’s assassination. That fateful decision — with all its dreadful
consequences for Mania Spiridonova’s party — had been decided upon unanimously
by the leadership of the Socialist Revolutionary party. Karelin had spoken on behalf
of the central committee in his address to the congress that, since the previous
congress had voted in favor of violating the Brest Peace Treaty, the PLSR’s decisionmaking
organ had consequently decided to arrange the attack on the German
ambassador. Karelin supplied details regarding the meeting of the central committee
which had voted to carry out the terrorist act, revealing that only one comrade had
voted against the assassination and that even the pro-Bolshevik wing of the PLSR
had consented. As if wanting to justify such a disastrous choice, Karelin confessed
that no one in the party before July 6 had even imagined that the Bolsheviks would
have turned out to be such pawns of German imperialism: “Our assessment of them
was based upon our memories of the October Revolution and, mindful of the part
they played then in the Revolution, we certainly didn’t expect them to behave so
differently; it was our fault that we ignored to what extent they would end up
defending German imperialism.”
In plotting the assassination of ambassador Mirbach, the PLSR was hoping to
force the Bolshevik government’s hand and to shake it out of its deep lethargy and
infuse it with new revolutionary fervor. Thus, contrary to what Soviet historiography
has often maintained, the aim was not to fight Lenin’s party, since the Left Socialist
Revolutionaries hoped to be fellow travelers of the Bolsheviks for a long time to
come. By this time, the PLSR was so blinded by internationalist fervor that it started
tilting at windmills, fighting battles which had been lost before they began, whilst
losing sight of more urgent tasks before them in the political and social struggle.
Peasant protests against the Bolsheviks’ land policy were exploding throughout the
country; Lenin’s party had lost the support of the urban masses and was in a blind
alley, and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries managed to fritter away in only a few
weeks the great popular support they had amassed in the previous months by
embarking upon pointless quests and conjuring up specters which had no relation to
the urban and rural masses. That is the reason behind the party’s resounding failure
and why it quickly and irremediably foundered at the moment of its greatest glory.
The collapse of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries
Once the German authorities had been pacified and once war with Germany had
been avoided, the Bolshevik government managed to deal with the aftermath of the
revolt of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries without too many difficulties. The
leadership of the PLSR was imprisoned, the local committees were persecuted by the
Bolshevik peripheral organizations and the entire party was to all intents and
purposes forced into hiding. In only a few months, the still fragile organizational
framework of the party of the Populist left was reduced to rubble due to a double blow
— by the Bolshevik repression and by internal breakdown.
A perusal of the reports delivered by the local committees before the October
congress — which was the very last congress the Left Socialist Revolutionaries ever
managed to organize — gives a very clear indication of the PLSR’s untenable
situation. Generally speaking, the speeches delivered at the congress were sad and
disconsolate in tone and quite the opposite of the joyful and celebratory atmosphere
which reigned during the PLSR’s third congress only three months before. Almost
all of the representatives of the local organizations described a party in a state of acute
crisis, weakened by persecutions and torn apart by internal splits. The delegate from
Vologda said that in his province “the party organization split into a thousand pieces
after July 6” and asked for clarification, asked why Mirbach was assassinated and
asked what line should be followed in the present difficult moment. Balakhin
complained that in the area of Novgorod, “all the organizations have been completely
destroyed.” The representative of the province of Tvez’ described a somewhat less
bleak situation: “After July 6, here as elsewhere, our party has been persecuted by
the Communists; nonetheless, the Tver’ organization has not given up yet on all the
work which has yet to be accomplished.” Matters were much worse in Vladimir, as
Loktev reported: “The events of July have had enormously cruel consequences for
the Vladimir committee. Some have been imprisoned, others removed from office.
Only those who worked in the provincial soviet are still at their jobs: at any rate, the
Communists have stated that they would put up with them for the moment, and then
later would get rid of them.”
The PLSR was only less than a year old and did not have a solid organizational
structure, as the Bolsheviks did. Unlike the Bolsheviks, who were quite capable of
keeping alive a rudimentary apparatus even during very difficult periods or even after
a serious defeat, the PLSR was capable of achieving broad-based support and of
growing enormously in a very short span of time; it was not, however, capable of
translating the growth achieved by working with the people into a solid
organizational basis. As a matter of fact, Mania Spiridonova and her comrades were
well aware of the party’s organizational limitations, which they felt were due to the
lack of “intellectual forces.” Many of the leaders mentioned time and again that the
Socialist Revolutionary militants had a very low level of schooling, and this was
considered to be a considerable obstacle to future growth of the party. Indeed, as has
been noted, during the November 1917 split, almost all of the intellectuals and white
collar workers sided with Chernov’s party, whereas the new PLSR comprised mainly
soldiers and workers, most of whom had only elementary schooling or were semiliterate.
Not only was the Populist left quite plebeian in make-up, it was notable as
well for the fact that its leaders and militants were very young (Natanson was a
notable exception, in that he was a famous representative of the revolutionary
generation of the second half of the nineteenth century). Even Bolshevism in 1918
was a political movement comprising young, unruly plebeians but, unlike in the
PLSR, there was a more numerous and capable leadership which had a long tradition
of political plotting and had great organizational capabilities. Furthermore, the
Bolshevik leaders were more politically homogeneous; even though there might have
been internal political dissent concerning a number of questions, they were
nonetheless prepared to close ranks with regard to adversaries and enemies. Lenin’s
party responded to the increased isolation after the power takeover by presenting a
united front; conversely, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries’ response to the brief
period of governance was the creation of profound rifts and conflicts, so that they
ended up more divided than they had been when they split from the PSR. As we shall
soon see, even with regard to the crucial question of the peasants, the left Populists
began to be irresolute and divided, thus losing touch with the rank and file, with its
broad-based, secure support.
When the Left Socialist Revolutionaries carried out their crazy terroristic attack
on Mirbach, they were at the height of popularity and had a majority in a number of
district and rural soviets. Indeed, all the data available seem to point to the
extraordinary rise in popularity of the PLSR between the spring and the summer of
1918 in the countryside and, to a lesser extent, in the cities. The Bolsheviks had
always had their strongholds in the cities and so they managed to gain the majority
at the fifth All-Russian Congress of the Soviets, which opened on July 4 at the
Bol’shoi Theater in Moscow. At the time, however, the PLSR felt that the tallying of
the votes was suspect; one historian has recently expressed serious doubts about the
legitimacy of the Bolshevik victory.
When the Left Socialist Revolutionaries decided that their battle-cry would be
the question of the Brest Peace Treaty and relations with imperialist Germany, they
paved the way for the Bolsheviks to defeat them politically and to exclude them from
the soviets. Certainly, the factory workers and the peasants had other things to worry
about! Throughout Russia that July there was an enormous purge of the local soviets
(provincial, district and rural soviets), and by the end of the purge, the Left SRs had
been expelled from all the organs of power. Where the left Populists had the majority,
the Bolsheviks used sheer force in disbanding the Socialist Revolutionary soviets,
electing new and more trustworthy councils. Of course, matters were much simpler
when the PLSR deputies were in the minority — in that case they were simply
dismissed. Furthermore, at times the Bolsheviks forced their adversaries to deliver a
formal declaration (sometimes in writing) condemning the botched Moscow
uprising. Thanks to such declarations of fealty to the Bolshevik government, some
of the Socialist Revolutionary deputies managed to remain in power in the local
soviets. However, the Bolsheviks were certainly unsparing of the party and its
leaders. Mariia Spiridonova and the other leaders of the PLSR were imprisoned.
The reports of the delegates to the fourth congress in October 1918, which have
already been mentioned, give an idea of what happened to the local organizations.
Notwithstanding the persecutions, the Left SRs tried to continue their campaign
of dissent against the deterioration of the Soviet regime, which they felt was guilty
of betraying the Russian and the international revolution. By early autumn, however,
the PLSR was on its last legs. The final battle between the Bolshevik government and
its adversaries had been fought in the summer of 1918. During those momentous
days, the Populist left not only pursued its quixotic battle against phantom enemies,
but it also refrained from allying itself with the moderate Socialist parties (the
Mensheviks and the PSR), which were trying to throw off the Bolshevik yoke. Mariia
Spiridonova ‘s party ended up being politically and socially isolated and quickly
disappeared without a trace. Many militants and leaders of the party formally joined
Bolshevism, a movement they had felt close to since October 1917.
The Bolsheviks proved quite adept at taming the opposition made up of the leftwing
SRs, wielding both carrot and stick. The PLSR’s unstoppable decline, the
upshot of paralyzing internal conflicts subsequent to the events of July 6, 1918,
precipitated once the Bolsheviks chose a flexible response, which was intended to
repress any insurrections and to checkmate the Socialist Revolutionary leaders, but
which also tried to win over, wherever possible, the more pliant members of the rival
party.
All things considered, even the way the Bolsheviks treated the leaders of the party
was more lenient than the way they treated other adversaries of the regime. The fact
is that the Bolsheviks simply could not forget how immensely useful the PLSR had
been during the very delicate stage of establishing and consolidating Soviet power.
Lenin himself clearly stated this in Prosh’ian ‘s obituary, which was published in
Pravda on December 20, 1918. It is true that Prosh’ian, who died young, belonged
to the pro-Bolshevik wing of the PLSR and that therefore Lenin found it easier to
praise him and his sincere dedication to the Socialist cause, even if he did come from
a Populist background. However, it is also true that Prosh’ian, like his comrades, had
willingly taken part in the anti-Bolshevik revolt in July. At any rate, Lenin’s final
assessment was quite clear-cut: “Still, up until July of 1918, Prosh’ian contributed
more to the consolidation of the Soviet regime than he did to its downfall after July 1918”.
The Left SRs and the question of the peasantry
The defeat of the PLSR was not only due to the rash decision to join battle over
an issue — the war with imperial Germany — of which the masses knew nothing and
cared less about. The truth was that Mariia Spiridonova’s party was easily bested by
the Bolsheviks because at a very crucial moment it completely lost sight of its
traditions and ideals, thereby losing the active support of the very class which had up
until that moment backed and sustained it. The underlying reasons for the collapse
of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, which was to have such profound repercussions
on Soviet society, can be found both in the senseless attack on Mirbach and in the
weakened bond with the peasants. When the peasants rose against the Bolshevik
government’s agrarian policy, both the leaders and the militants of the PLSR seemed
hesitant and uncertain. For that reason, Mariia Spiridonova and her comrades wasted
a great historic opportunity, just as the year before Chernov’s party reneged on its
solemn promise to resolve the land reform question and had been soundly defeated.
In the summer of 1918, the requisitioning of farm products and the creation of the
committees of village poor (kombedy) set off a furious reaction, almost as violent as
the class war against the pomeshchiki which had raged in the autumn of 1917. What
was the reaction of the Left SRs to the Bolsheviks’ food supply policy? How did they
react to the introduction of the kombedy in the villages, which upset the traditional
equilibrium in the countryside? Before answering these questions, a few more points
must be made with regard to the PLSR’s peasant policy.
It has been repeated over and over again that the Left Socialist Revolutionaries
were both the expression of and the guardians of the interests of the Russian
peasantry, and to a great extent this is true; nonetheless, this is not the whole picture.
Further study is required, but not to establish whether the PLSR represented the
“middle peasants” or the kulaks; Soviet historians have studied this aspect for years,
though it is a completely false and superficial controversy — as false as Lenin’s and
the Bolsheviks’ classification of the rural world. No, the true problem is that Maria
Spiridonova’s party was the spiritual heir of the old PSR, carrying on and renewing
the Socialist committment of Russian revolutionary Populism.
The slogan put forward by the Russian revolutionary Socialists, the “socialization
of the land,” was both original and contradictory, in that it was considered a minimal
party claim, to be implemented within the context of the bourgeois economic system,
and at the same time an initial step towards the introduction of socialism. The heirs
of the narodniki, who at the beginning of the century had renewed the Populist
tradition while adapting it to the changed political and social reality, considered
themselves Socialists — and indeed they were; their appreciation of the importance
of the growing factory proletariat testifies to that. However, given their political
background, they could hardly ignore the aspirations of millions of peasants for
whom the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries had fought. The obshchina
seemed to justify their faith that the agrarian movement could act as a powerful
catalyst in the Socialist transformation of Russia. The socialization of the land
seemed to reconcile the peasantry’s pressing desire to share out the pomeshchikVs
lands with the overarching plan to collectivize society. The October Revolution and
the land decree abruptly overturned the entire scenario. Their adversaries, the
Bolsheviks, had made a solemn proclamation, promising to implement the central
plank of the Socialist Revolutionary platform. The PSR was taken by surprise and
reacted by casting aspersions upon Lenin’s oversimplification of the problem in
passing decree after decree in the hopes that this would solve the highly complex land
reform problem. The secessionists in the PLSR, on the other hand, took Lenin’s new
agrarian policy quite seriously and participated in the Bolshevik government with the
firm intention of implementing the socialization which had traditionally been the
main goal of revolutionary Populism.
The Left SRs embarked upon such an ambitious undertaking in the firm
conviction that the political bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie and the rise to power of a
workers’
party would be followed by agrarian transformations the nature and extent
of which would be much greater than contemplated in the minimal program.
Furthermore, the PLSR felt that the bourgeois and capitalist elements which arose
from Stolypin’s land reform served only to complicate the play of economic forces
in the countryside and to force events in a specific direction. In brief, the law on the
socialization of the land, which had been discussed in January of 1918, was imbued
with socialist overtones. When Il’ia Andreevich Maiorov, the official rapporteur on
the agrarian question, addressed the party’s second congress (from April 17 to April
25, 1918), he reported that the party felt that the measures were of such scope and
economic import that the party felt compelled to organize courses on the socialization
of the land throughout the countryside for the edification of the peasantry. The party
congress adopted a motion reiterating that “the socialization of the land is not to be
considered a measure unto itself, but rather a means by which the ultimate goal of
socialism is to be achieved,” stressing the fact that the collective tilling of the land
would bring both material and moral advantages.
Clearly, though, the party platform of the Left SRs was different from that of the
Bolsheviks. After they had seized power, the Bolsheviks to an increasing degree
tended towards a centralized management of the economy by the state; the Left
Socialist Revolutionaries, on the other hand, whilst disapproving of anarchic
syndicalism, were much more in favor of an economy based on cooperativism and
initiatives coming from below. The difference between the two parties was most
evident in each party’s approach to the introduction of land reform by means of the
law on socialization. Mania Spiridonova addressed the PLSR’s second congress and
spoke on behalf of the peasant section of the VTslK, which she headed, mentioning
the “interminable disputes with the Bolsheviks over how to get this point or that point
of our program across, while they introduced amendment after amendment aimed at
voiding the socialization of the land of its meaning and its spirit.” For example, the
insistence on basing the right to the land upon both “labor” and “Soviet power” was
basically trying to achieve nationalization “through the back door,” whereas “for us,
it is labor which confers the right to the land.”
Spiridonova ‘s report on the activities of the peasant section, part of which has
been quoted above, is interesting not only because of the information it gives on the
ongoing differences in ideals between the two Socialist parties, but also because it
shows how the PLSR changed its stance towards the rural world. This is an issue
of great importance and which requires close study, in that it can help explain the
PLSR’s defeat in the summer of 1918. A few months after the October Revolution,
the Left Socialist Revolutionaries shunned any idealized vision of Russia’s masses,
and in particular of the peasantry. Spiridonova quite unequivocally spoke of “the
people’s general disheartenment,” which was growing to alarming proportions in the
peasant section, where some members “were absolutely not up to the situation.” It
was not just a question of the very low level of education of the muzhiks, which was
so damaging and such a hindrance to the section as it tried to achieve its outsize goals;
at first, Mariia had been tireless — “the only intellectual” to work in the section,
where even the secretaries were “almost completely illiterate.” This lack of
“intellectual militants” (rabotnikov intelligentnykh) had not stopped the PLSR —
which was used to difficulties of this nature — from achieving the miracle of
establishing contacts, by means of the soviets, with the peasant masses. Rather, the
major difficulties arose from the fact that, in the section, someone had been caught
red-handed stealing, or was suspected of being a thief. Furthermore, many did not
work at all: “We had to throw a number of peasant comrades out of the section
because they weren’t doing anything at all: all they did was take the money, went to
all the spots and then just lounged about.” Spiridonova ‘s overall assessment of the
peasants was bitter — they were not to be particularly trusted, given the general
discontent in the countryside over the government’s food supply policy. Were a
peasant congress to be convened, “all would not be well for Soviet power.”
Therefore, the attempts at agitation in the countryside had had among its aims that of
“dividing the peasantry into two camps — those who stood for the old and those who
were fighting for the new.” To this end, more Bolsheviks had been sent to the
countryside than Left SRs, since the former were “more ideologically sure” (bolee
ideiny) than the latter.
Spiridonova ‘s analysis was in many respects similar to the Bolshevik analysis,
but quite surprising, with the hindsight of our knowledge of the deep divisions
between the Russian Populists and the Marxists. It is true that ever since Stolypin’s
land reform, the Socialist Revolutionaries had abandoned their old, dearly-held
image of a compact and homogeneous world of the peasantry, because they had
recognized the early signs of economic divisions in the villages. Nonetheless, the
Bolshevik idea of countryside being split into antagonistic classes was still quite alien
to them. This concept began to gain a foothold amongst the left-wing Populists after
October 1917, whilst coexisting with the traditional faith in the revolutionary role
and Socialist aspirations of the peasants. This is the most important novelty to be
perceived in the doctrine of the newly-founded PLSR; together with the very strong
internationalist committment, this new approach to the question of the peasants
brought the Left Socialist Revolutionaries closer to Lenin’s party. A few months after
me takeover of power by the bolsheviks, the PLSR stated that it appreciated
Leninism’s resolute leadership during the October Revolution and its ability to
distinguish all the diverse social strata in Russian villages. When Mariia Spiridonova
addressed her party’s third congress (from June 28 to July 1, 1918), she praised
Lenin’s concept of “the struggle against the small landowners (khoziaichikiy which
in her opinion merely confirmed the fact that the “president of the Sovnarkom was a
Indeed, it was easier to prevail against the big capitalists than to conquer
“those counterrevolutionaries, the petit bourgeois kulaks, who are scattered
throughout Russia.” Even throughout Western Europe, the small peasants had always
posed a serious threat to the revolution. In Russia, “we are facing the kulaks, who are
our greatest economic and political enemies; they must be crushed, they must be
disarmed, they must be eliminated.” With regard to the food supply question,
Karelin as well established a clear-cut line of demarcation, dividing the rural world
“into toiling peasants and kulak peasants, into small toiling peasants and parasitic
kulaks.” Roslavets went even further, calling upon the party to “retire the
expression ‘laboring peasants,’ which is old-fashioned and obsolete.” “There were
laboring peasants, when the distinction between the kulaks and poor peasants didn’t
exist. The Elets organization favors the use of the term ‘poor peasants’ over the
traditional one.”
It would be over-hasty to conclude from the above that the Left Socialist
Revolutionaries had cut their Populist ties on the very fundamental issue of how to
deal with the peasants. First of all, thoroughly Bolshevik opinions, such as those
expressed by the Elets delegate, were in the minority within the PLSR. Secondly, the
Left SRs had openly and completely split with the Bolsheviks over the question of the
food supply. In her address to the third party congress mentioned above, Spiridonova
condemned Lenin’s agrarian policy, which aimed at ensuring the total victory of the
small class of poor peasants and landless farm laborers, because this policy would
“keep the peasants away from Soviet power. If we falter in our farm policy, if we do
not understand the psychology of the peasants, they will not be grateful for the
revolution and will rise against us — and this would be due to Lenin’s policy.”
Early in the summer of 1918, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, fired with
enthusiasm by the example of the Ukraine, believed once again in the revolutionary
and progressive role of the peasants. This is the line Mariia Spiridonova espoused
before the third party congress, when she said that “today, if Soviet Russia is to be
saved, it will be saved solely by the peasants, who are working to build their new
Soviet Russia and their new Soviet countryside.” In the wake of the party’s great
successes at the time, the leadership of the Populist left did not discern the
contradictions inherent in their analysis of the rural world (which in many respects
was similar to the Bolshevik analysis) and the PLSR’s stated objections to the
Bolsheviks’ agrarian and food supply policies. The central committee published a
plea in the Znamia truda on June 9, 1918, forbidding all party militants from
participating in the actions of the requisitioning squads who operated outside the
guidelines laid down by the local soviets, since the requisitions were “forcing the
countryside into an artificial solidarity (iskusstvenno splachivaiut vsiu derevniu) in
the struggle against the cities, making the country’s situation worse and, in the Final
analysis, weakening Soviet power.” The PLSR leadership perceived the Bolshevik
agrarian policy as a serious threat not only to the food supply of the cities but to the
very survival of the Soviet regime. Therefore, stress was laid more on the certainty
that the requisitions carried out by the armed Bolshevik divisions would have a
negative impact than on trying to refute the political and social premises (the struggle
against the kulaks) upon which Lenin’s government had based its food supply policy.
The atmosphere was quite different during the district peasant congresses, where the
speakers all shouted for the requisitions to cease immediately, and the general tenor
of the reports of the representatives of the PLSR local committees at the third
congress was quite different as well, in that there was great insistence upon the
pressing need to defend the peasants from the incursions of the food squads. A
perusal of the local documents gives the clear impression that, as had been the case
for the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, the agrarian question as well was one which the rank
and file understood better than did the party leaders in Moscow; the rank and file
militants had grasped what the masses felt and needed and their attitude was much
less doctrinaire than that of the members of the Central Committee. It would be an
oversimplification to explain away the complex splits within the party as merely
divisions between the center and the periphery and between the main party organs
and the local organizations. Nonetheless, one could safely say that the local PLSR
committees often had difficulties in following the instructions which came from the
leadership and applying them to local realities. At any rate, there is no doubt that,
wherever the Left SRs firmly opposed the requisitions, they were enthusiastically
backed by the village inhabitants and easily managed to best the Bolsheviks. What
follows is the report of a delegate from Voronezh (a province in the black-soil region).
The delegate took the floor during the third national PLSR congress, stating that “the
food supply question has been the greatest bone of contention between the
Bolsheviks and us.” He added that:
“Now the peasantry is against the Bolsheviks because of their recent food supply policy;
yet they are still favorable to Soviet power. Though the peasants of Voronezh province are
not better supplied with food than the peasants of any other province, they nonetheless feel
closer to the Revolution now thanks to the implementation of the law on the socialization
of the land. The peasants of the province of Voronezh have quite enough land, for which
they have the Revolution to thank and for which they are duly grateful. That is why they
are in favor of Soviet power; still, they do not trust the Bolsheviks.”
Prospects for the Left Socialist Revolutionaries looked good. If only the local
organizations had been patient enough in working with the masses and had made
certain that they were distinct from the Right Socialist Revolutionaries and from the
Bolsheviks and had “explained to the masses how disastrous the peace of Brest was
for the Revolution and above all if they had explained the Bolshevik’s agrarian
policy,” then the PLSR would have politically conquered the countryside in two or
three months. Indeed, though there were thousands of organizational difficulties,
the PLSR local committees did try to penetrate down to the local village level
throughout the vast country.
Why did a party which was so strongly rooted in the countryside as was the PLSR
during the summer of 1918 fall prey so quickly to the Bolsheviks, who were so
unpopular with the peasants? One reason has already been adduced: the murder of
Mirbach and the PLSR’s quixotic quest for internationalism. The more bitter the
warfare between the peasants and the Bolsheviks became, the more the Left Socialist
Revolutionaries wasted their strength on unpopular battles destined to fail. However,
there is another, not insignificant reason: the erratic and contradictory response of the
Populist left to the introduction of the kombedy (the committees ot village poor).
Indeed, wherever the Socialist Revolutionary committees managed to organize and
lead the peasant protests against the Bolsheviks, they were able to overcome without
major damage even the July crisis. During the October 1918 congress, Murav’ev,
who represented the Voronezh committee, as he had during the third congress,
reported that in his province the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs were at loggerheads
because of the requisitions and that the events of July had not taken the party by
surprise; the peasants there were fed up with the violence and injustice of the food
supply squads and were fully behind the party which was fighting for them.
The example of Voronezh proves that, even after the political and organizational
upsets due to the July events, the PLSR still managed to keep the Bolsheviks in line
whenever they offered their unswerving support to the peasants. However, as can be
seen by the tenor of the debates during the fourth congress, by the end of the summer
the party no longer had a united platform with regard to the fundamental question of
the kombedy. Some were clearly against the committees which had recently been
founded in the countryside, while others were less hostile or even in favor of them.
When the question was put to the vote, many delegates (30) felt that participation in
the kombedy, under certain conditions, could not be ruled out and many others (24)
saw no obstacles at all to Socialist Revolutionary militants joining the committees of
village poor. Only 12 delegates were categorical in their rejection of any type of
cooperation with the kombedy. As one could imagine, such great indecision over
an issue of such crucial importance only served to cast an already split and
disorganized party into even greater confusion and to hasten its end. One speaker
spoke in simple terms of what many from the rank and file were feeling: “We of the
province of Chernigov have protested against these committees: How, then, can we
go back home from our party’s congress and start spreading propaganda in favor of
them?”
The issue of the kombedy was the decisive test which the Left Socialist
Revolutionaries had to face in the summer and in the autumn of 1918. This was the
issue — i.e., whether or not the party could meet the challenge of the Bolsheviks in
the countryside — which would determine the survival or final collapse of organized
Populism in Russia.
The Left Socialist Revolutionaries and the kombedy
The committees of village poor were set up, according to the letter of the decree
dated June 11, 1918, as auxiliary instruments of the local food supply organs; soon,
they were invested with wide-ranging powers and a great deal of discretionary power
over the management of the political and economic life of the villages. The law’s first
two paragraphs had been drafted in intentionally vague terms; they laid down the
procedure for the establishment and the election of the kombedy in the villages and
in the volosti. The Bolshevik leaders had planned for the kombedy to be used as a tool
in upsetting social relations in the countryside, sparking off a veritable class war
between the rich peasants and the quasi-proletarian elements. Bolshevik ideology
was based upon the conviction that the village classes were antagonists; this was a
misperception of what life was really like in the Russian countryside where, after all,
the great division of the spring of 1918 had produced a greater degree of levelling
than had existed before and had seen the rebirth of the village commune (obshchina).
This is not to say that there were no rivalries or tension or conflicts amongst the
peasantry, but rather that what conflicts there were could not be comprehended or
explained away by means of the rigid categories established by Lenin and by Russian
Marxists. From the very beginning, the implementation of the kombedy decree had
been met with the open hostility of both the village inhabitants and the rural soviets,
which were led by the Left SRs. Thus, the attempt to set up the committees of village
poor immediately sparked off a fierce battle between the Bolsheviks and the Populist
left over the question of who would have hegemony over the village and volosť
soviets. At first, the PLSR did not hesitate in opposing the Bolshevik forays into their
own political and social strongholds.
As a rule, the Bolsheviks were forced to adopt all kinds of subterfuges and use
violence in order to set up the committees of village poor. Wherever a communist
cell already existed, it disbanded and then reelected the village soviet ruled by
peasants — who were called kulaks by the Bolsheviks — who opposed the
government’s agrarian policy. Even in these rare cases, however, force was necessary
in order to overcome the fierce resistance of the “kulaks.”
Generally speaking, the Bolsheviks could not count on their own militants or on
villagers sympathetic to their cause; thus, the Bolsheviks were forced to send an
envoy or an instructor (usually a worker who was also a party member); the envoy
or instructor would then try to upset the political and social equilibrium in the
countryside, with the help of the armed forces. What often transpired was that the
first kombedy were mainly composed of people who were outsiders. This is what is
rpeovoera”l ed by Bolshevik sources. Indeed, the very fact that the “committees of village
usually drafted the minutes of their founding deed and of each meeting clearly
shows that the Bolsheviks were behind the creation and the activities of the kombedy.
From their inception, the kombedy were anything but spontaneous; clearly, they were
managed and controlled by the local committees of Lenin’s party. At first, the
Bolsheviks were certain of the doctrine that there was a great deal of class antagonism
boiling in the villages and that the kulaks would soon be easily isolated and then
defeated; after all, the kulaks had starved the proletariat and the Bolsheviks were
confident that they had the support of the poorest classes of the peasantry. However,
many unexpected difficulties arose, the Bolsheviks neither wavered nor faltered —
as far as they were concerned, the problem could only be solved by a more rigid
organization and by a more fierce struggle against the all-powerful kulaks. The
following is taken from an article published on August 18, 1918 in a Bolshevik
newspaper in the province of Vitebsk:
uAt present in our district (Polotsk), we are suffering from an acute shortage of
propagandists. […] Throughout the district, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries are
conducting a propaganda campaign against the Bolsheviks. Under these conditions,
wherever committees of the village poor have been set up, they cannot fulfill their tasks.
[…] A continuous struggle between the poor peasants and the kulaks is raging throughout
the district. The former shall undoubtedly emerge the victors if help is sent in time —
propagandists and armed men.”
Bolshevik propaganda usually blamed the kulaks and the Left Socialist
Revolutionaries for the failure of the kombedy. The Leninist militants turned a blind
eye to reality and convinced themselves that only the “excessive power” (řasil ‘e. я
term much in vogue at the time) of the kulaks, who were supported or at the very least
tolerated by the Populist left, stood in the way of the victory of the Socialist
revolution in the countryside.
Until August, the Populist left had been fairly united in its desire to defeat the
Sovnarkonťs food supply measures and to block the rise of the kombedy. (Though
Bolshevik documents often triumphantly brandished incredible figures concerning
the kombedy, they actually existed only on paper or else were of little or no
influence). Why did the Left SRs change their stance vis-à-vis the decree of June 11?
Why did the delegates to the PLSR’s fourth congress seem to be so uncertain with
regard to an issue of such great importance? The answer lies in Karelin’s address to
the October congress of his party:
“I would merely like to remind you of a document of major importance — the appeal of
Lenin and of Tsiuriupa (sic). Allow me to read it out to you. (He reads the document. ) This
document, and most particularly its conclusion, which I have just read out to you, contains
not one word with which we disagree.”
The document so lavishly praised by Karelin (and by other congress participants)
was the telegram sent to all provincial soviets on August 18, 1918 and signed by
Lenin and by Tsiurupa, People’s Commissar for Food Supply. The telegram
stated that Soviet power had never intended to conduct a battle against the
“middle peasants” and that the many reported incidents of violations of the rights of
the middle peasants were due to a misinterpretation of the spirit and of the letter of the
kombedy decree. “The committees of the village poor must be the revolutionary organs
of all the peasants against the former pomeshchiki, the kulaks, the merchants and the popes,
not the organs of the farm proletariat standing alone against the rest of the rural population.”
The provincial soviets and the provincial food supply committees were supposed to take this
into account and to ensure that their activities were in line with the political guidelines established
by the central government.
The telegram sent by Lenin and by Tsiurupa remained a dead letter in the
countryside, but it did have the effect of disarming the Left Socialist Revolutionaries.
If the kombedy were not trying to create a split amongst the peasants, but rather were
endeavoring to isolate and defeat a handful of exploiters, then it was perfectly
pointless to oppose the rise of organs which represented the overwhelming majority
of the rural population. As a PLSR delegate to the fourth congress put it:
“The committees which had been set up earlier and which only the poorest Bolsheviks were
allowed to join were absolutely unacceptable. But ever since Lenin’s decree made it quite
clear that the committees of the village poor can include the middle strata of the laboring
peasant population, from that moment on we, the party of revolutionary socialism, can
harbor no further objections to these committees.”
Of course, not everybody in the party went along with this sudden about-face
with regard to the kombedy and Lenin’s policy. That autumn, as can be gleaned from
Bolshevik sources, a few local committees were still against the food squads and
opposed the committees of the village poor; indeed, the committees had not really
changed all that much after August 1918. However, once the party — which was
already in a state of crisis after having failed in July — adopted that ambiguous
motion during its October congress, it also lost its last stronghold in the villages and
began its rapid and inglorious decline.
The president of the assembly launched a heartfelt plea for unity during the
closing speech of the fourth PLSR congress, but in vain. Unity was the party’s last
hope for survival. The president’s hope that the next congress would be held under
happier circumstances, “against a backdrop of world revolution, when the world will
be lit by the fire of the world revolution and our party will occupy the most important
spot in that fire,” was merely pathetic wishful thinking and a smokescreen to avoid
facing much more pressing matters and to avoid gazing into the coffin in which the
PLSR, which had forgotten its Populist origins, was soon to be laid to rest.
University of Pisa, 1996.
* I became acquainted with the important book on the Left SRs by Lutz Hefner
(Die Partei der linken Sozialrevolutionâre in der russischen Revolution von 191 7-18
(Cologne: Bohlau, 1994)) only after my article was ready for print and therefore I was
unable to take it into account. It is my intention to write a detailed review of this book
at the first opportunity.