Social Revolutionaries
The Party of Social Revolutionaries ( Russian Партия социалистов-революционеров ; short: Social Revolutionaries / SR) was a left-wing party in Russia that was formed in late 1901 / early 1902 through the unification of various groups of the Narodniki (Russian populists). Their leaders included u. a. Viktor Michailowitsch Tschernow as party leader, Nikolai Dmitrijewitsch Awksentjew , Abram Rafailowitsch Goz , Jekaterina Konstantinovna Brezhko-Brezhkovskaya , Boris Viktorovich Savinkov , Yevno Fischelewitsch Asef , Chaim Schitlowsky . The party's organ was the Delo Naroda newspaper .
Tsarist empire
After the revolution of 1905 , in which they did not play a major role, the Social Revolutionaries were represented in the 1st and 2nd State Duma in 1906/07 . In the years before and after the party was illegal. In terms of composition, the members came mainly from the intelligentsia , the small salaried employees, the industrial proletariat and only partly from the peasantry . Although they saw the revolutionary subject of a coming upheaval in the rural population, they had significant difficulties in gaining a foothold with their target group - the small farmers and the impoverished rural population. During this time the Social Revolutionaries first split: in 1906 the Trudoviki and the Social Revolutionary maximalists left the party. This year the number of members of the party reached 42,000 and was thus only slightly more than half the number of members of the Marxist -oriented Social Democratic Workers' Party of Russia (SDLP). The Eastern European historian Manfred Hildermeier considers the number of their unorganized followers to be significantly larger.
Even if the Social Revolutionaries recognized the importance of mass movements in principle, they preferred individual terror as the basic tactical tool in the struggle against the tsarist autocracy . To this end, in 1902 they formed the Social Revolutionary Fighting Organization under the leadership of Grigory Gerschuni and Yevno Asef, which carried out numerous attacks on Tsarist officials, including the interior ministers Sipjagin and von Plehwe and the Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich Romanov . In 1908 Asef was exposed as a police spy and the fighting organization was broken up.
The Social Revolutionaries' program primarily called for a “ socialization of the country”: land reform or wild expropriations were intended to convert the large estates into the common property of the small farmers. In addition, they advocated the establishment of a democratic republic based on federal principles, the introduction of universal suffrage , freedom of speech, press , conscience , assembly and corporation , the separation of church and state , general unpaid education and the abolition of the standing army . On the labor question, the Social Revolutionaries were supporters of the eight-hour day , social security at the expense of the state and factory owners, and the organization of trade unions . They denied the contradictions within the peasantry, rejected the leading role postulated by the SDAR of the working class in the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat .
February revolution and dual power
After the February Revolution of 1917 the party was re-admitted and activated its agitation. Many of their leaders, including Chernov, returned from exile. It owned organizations in 63 governorates, in the fleets and on the fronts of the fighting army. Together with the Mensheviks , she played the leading role in most of the Soviets from July to August 1917 . In March 1917, Alexander Kerensky , who had recently converted from the Trudoviki to the Social Revolutionaries, joined the bourgeois coalition government under Prince Lvov . The Social Revolutionary Party was thus in power. As such, they supported the unpopular war policy , for which Foreign Minister Pavel Milyukov of the bourgeois Cadet Party stood above all . His clumsy note to the Allies , in which he promised to continue the war until the victory over the Central Powers, triggered the so-called April Crisis and a reshuffle of the government. Chernov became Minister of Agriculture, Kerensky took over the Ministry of War. The party seemed to be at the height of its power: in mid-May 1917, a million people considered themselves Social Revolutionaries, making them the largest party in Russia. In the local elections in May and June 1917 they became the strongest party with an average of 16.6% of the seats; in Moscow they even won an absolute majority with 58% of the votes, while in Petrograd they only came third after Cadets and Bolsheviks . The Social Revolutionaries also formed the strongest factions at the Conference of the Peasants' Councils and the All-Russian Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, which met in Petrograd in May and June 1917.
These external successes only seemingly masked the internal problems of the party, which was extremely divided over the question of whether the war should continue. At a party congress at the end of May, a split was narrowly avoided by party leader Chernov formulating a resolution in favor of both an international peace conference to end the war and a continuation of the defensive war until victory. As a result, the left wing of the party around Maria Spiridonova began to work openly against the government with the Bolsheviks, who since Lenin's April theses had clearly advocated an immediate end to the war and the expropriation of the large landowners.
The two social revolutionary members of the government subsequently made themselves unpopular through their policies: Party leader Chernov did not succeed in initiating the land reform, which was the focus of the party program. Since it would go hand in hand with considerable social upheaval, he did not want it to begin until after the war was over. Kerensky, however, vigorously pursued its continuation with the Kerensky offensive . The nationalization of the goods of the imperial family and the so-called cabinet lands could not alleviate the disappointment of the rural population, who increasingly turned away from the government and turned to the left social revolutionaries .
In July 1917, the Bolsheviks tried to overthrow the increasingly unpopular government by means of a coup , but it was crushed. The Social Revolutionaries did not seize the chance to seize power for themselves through their strong position in the councils and to end the dual power and the cooperation with the bourgeois Cadets: A sailor is said to have shouted angrily at Chernov: "Take power, you son of a bitch, if they are given to you! ”Instead, the party opted for a legalistic course and a continuation of the coalition with the Cadets. The provisional government was reshaped again: Kerensky also took over the post of Prime Minister, Boris Viktorovich Savinkov became his deputy in the War Ministry, and with Nikolai Avksentjew as Minister of the Interior, a fourth Social Revolutionary came into the government. A few weeks later, Chernov resigned after he had made no progress with the land reform, during which his party friend Avksentjew from the Interior Ministry kept putting new obstacles in his way. The new Minister of Agriculture was Semyon Leontievich Maslow , who acted even more hesitantly than his predecessor.
The successful suppression of General Lawr Georgievich Kornilov's attempted coup in August 1917 did not strengthen the Social Revolutionaries. Savinkov, Deputy Minister of War, who had sympathized with Kornilov, was expelled from the party. Party leader Chernov, who had fought for so long for cooperation with the Cadets, now resisted a new edition of the coalition, which is why the government temporarily passed into the hands of a five-member board of directors, of which no social revolutionary apart from Kerensky belonged. The left wing of the party now increasingly distanced itself from the government policy of the rest of the party: It demanded an immediate end to the war and an immediate expropriation of the large landowners in favor of the small farmers and the landless. The land reform should no longer be postponed out of consideration for the liberal coalition partner.
At a democratic conference that met in September to prepare for the election of a constituent assembly , the strength of the party appeared once again: of the 1,200 delegates, it provided 532, 71 of whom supported the left wing of the party. This strength was not reflected in the cabinet that Kerensky had brought together in October: Here only two SRs were clearly outnumbered compared to three Cadets, four Mensheviks and seven ministers who did not belong to any party. The loss of importance of the party was evident in the elections for the Moscow district presidents, in which the Social Revolutionaries ended up in second place behind the Bolsheviks with only 14.4%.
October Revolution and Soviet rule
On October 24, 1917, the Bolsheviks began the October Revolution in Petrograd and overthrew the Provisional Government. Lenin announced this on the following day at the II All-Russian Congress of Soviets , at which the Social Revolutionaries were clearly in the minority with 193 of 649 delegates. Together with the Mensheviks, about half of the Social Revolutionaries left the room in protest, while the left-wing party members remained. You were expelled from the Social Revolutionary Party on October 27, 1917. The party was organizationally divided. In December 1917, the Left Social Revolutionaries joined the new government, the Council of People's Commissars, as coalition partners . Andrei Kolegayev became People's Commissar for Agriculture, Isaac Nachman Steinberg for Justice and Prosch Perchevich Proschjan took over the post and telegraph department. Participation in government remained an episode because the Left Social Revolutionaries left the coalition in March 1918 in protest against the peace of Brest-Litovsk , in which Trotsky had renounced large parts of the territory of the tsarist empire.
The Social Revolutionaries who remained in the party opposed the Bolshevik overthrow from the start. The elections to the Constituent Assembly in November 1917 made the Social Revolutionaries the strongest party. They achieved 54% of the vote and provided 380 of the 703 MPs, while the Bolsheviks had 24% and the Left Social Revolutionaries allied with them only 5.5%. The supporters of Lenin clearly missed the majority and therefore dissolved the Constituent Assembly by force of arms on the night of January 6, 1918. The Social Revolutionaries then organized strikes and protests, but these were suppressed by the Bolsheviks, and Nikolai Avksentjew was temporarily imprisoned. In June 1918, the party, together with the Mensheviks, was expelled from the elections to the Soviets and from the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, whereupon the party leadership moved to Samara in the Volga region, which had previously been conquered by the Czechoslovak legions , and formed the Komutsch government there. Now the Social Revolutionaries resorted to the means of terror for which they had been known in the tsarist times: from the underground they formed groups that were supposed to overthrow the Bolshevik regime through attacks and the organization of uprisings. On June 20, 1918, the Petrograd ZEK member W. Volodarsky was shot by a member of the revived combat organization. At the beginning of July, an uprising organized by Savinkov broke out in Yaroslavl , Murom and Rybinsk . At the same time, Left Social Revolutionaries , with whom the rest of the party agreed in their rejection of the Bolsheviks and the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, murdered the German ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach-Harff in Moscow , thereby giving the signal for an uprising by the Left Social Revolutionaries . In Izhevsk occurred between August to November anti-Bolshevik uprising, here involving moderate Socialist Revolutionaries. On August 30, 1918, the Social Revolutionary Leonid Kannegiesser shot and killed the head of the Petrograd Cheka Moissei Solomonowitsch Uritski . On the same day, Fanny Kaplan seriously injured Lenin with two shots. The Bolsheviks reacted to this on September 5 with the decree on the Red Terror : many social revolutionary opposition members were shot or sent to concentration camps.
With the dissolution of the Czechoslovak legions in October 1918, support for the Komutsch in Samara was lost. The Komutsch government fled from advancing red troops to Ufa , where a five-member board of directors, including General Boldyrew, who was intended as commander in chief, was formed as a government. It met in a railroad car as the "seat of government" in Omsk before it was dissolved just eight weeks later after Admiral Kolchak's coup . The Social Revolutionaries had not succeeded in “forming a“ third force ”between the red and white dictatorship and helping it to victory”. Some Social Revolutionaries then sought an alliance with the Reds, while others joined the whites or the peasant movement ("Greens") and supported the Tambov peasant uprising in 1920–1921, among other things . In 1923 the party no longer existed in the Soviet Union . Its leaders emigrated or were arrested, their former members were sent to the Gulag or were shot in the 1930s . Former Social Revolutionaries were one of the particularly intensely persecuted groups of victims in the mass operation to repression of former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements in 1937/1938, Joseph Stalin himself had warned about their intensified persecution.
exile
The Social Revolutionaries continued their work in exile. A foreign committee of the Central Committee was set up in Prague. The party was a member of the Socialist Workers' International from 1923 to 1940 . The majority of the party's party archive (21 running meters , plus 146 microfilms) has been looked after by the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis for decades .
Reasons for failure
Manfred Hildermeier sees the reasons for the failure as the division of the Social Revolutionaries and deficits in the internal structure of the party, but above all in the politics of the Social Revolutionaries. The party was unable to organize its mass attachment. The promised agrarian reforms had also been postponed further and further out of consideration for the bourgeois coalition partner, who was quite dispensable in terms of power politics. In doing so, the party "frivolously gambled away" its large credit with the village population.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Manfred Hildermeier, The Russian Revolution 1905-1921 , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1989, p. 63 f
- ↑ Manfred Hildermeier, The Russian Revolution 1905-1921 , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1989, pp. 166 and 174
- ↑ Manfred Hildermeier, The Russian Revolution 1905-1921 , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1989, p. 168 f.
- ↑ Manfred Hildermeier, The Russian Revolution 1905-1921 , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1989, p. 194 f. and 204
- ↑ Manfred Hildermeier, The Russian Revolution 1905-1921 , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1989, p. 178
- ↑ Manfred Hildermeier, The Russian Revolution 1905-1921 , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1989, p. 178
- ↑ Manfred Hildermeier, The Russian Revolution 1905-1921 , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1989, pp. 224–227
- ↑ Natalija Gerulajtis, Introduction to the Declaration of the Left Social Revolutionary Group in the VCIK on the occasion of the ratification of the peace treaty by the 4th Extraordinary Soviet Congress, March 15, 1918 on 100 (0) key documents on Russian and Soviet history , ( online , accessed on July 26 2011)
- ↑ Dimitrj Olegovic Curakov: The anti-Bolshevik workers' uprising in Izevsk. Problems of establishing civil power organs - August to November 1919. in: Arbeit - Movement - History , Issue II / 2018, pp. 139–160.
- ↑ Manfred Hildermeier, The Russian Revolution 1905-1921 , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1989, p. 266
- ^ Rolf Binner, Bernd Bonwetsch , Marc Junge, mass murder and imprisonment. The other story of the great terror (publications of the German Historical Institute Moscow, vol. 1), Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2009, pp. 293–294.
- ↑ Werner Kowalski , History of the Socialist Workers' International 1923-1940 , Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, Berlin 1985, p. 337
- ↑ Manfred Hildermeier, The Russian Revolution 1905-1921 , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1989, pp. 167 and 200
literature
- Manfred Hildermeier: The Social Revolutionary Party of Russia. Agrarian Socialism and Modernization in the Tsarist Empire (1900-1914) , Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne 1978, ISBN 3-412-01078-2 (also dissertation at the University of Tübingen 1976).
- Oliver Radkey: The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism: Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, February to October 1917 , Columbia University Press, New York, NY 1958, ISBN 0-231-02170-4 .
- Dimitrj Olegovic Curakov: The anti-Bolshevik workers' uprising in Izevsk. Problems of establishing civil power organs - August to November 1919. in: Arbeit - Movement - History , Issue II / 2018, pp. 139–160.
