At what time did the creation of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party take place. The ideology and program of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party

The largest and most influential of the non-proletarian parties was the party of socialist revolutionaries (Socialist-Revolutionaries), created in 1902. The history of the emergence of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party is connected with the populist movement. In 1881, after the defeat of the "Narodnaya Volya", part of the former Narodnaya Volya joined several underground groups. From 1891 to 1900 most of the underground left-populist circles and groups adopt the name "Socialist-Revolutionaries". The first organization to adopt this name was the Swiss emigrant group of Russian populists headed by H. Zhitlovsky.

The main role in the creation of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party and the development of its program was played by the Northern Union of Socialist Revolutionaries, the Southern Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, the Workers' Party of the Political Liberation of Russia and the Agrarian Socialist League.

The programs of these groups show the evolution of the views of future Social Revolutionaries. Initially, there is a reliance on the intelligentsia, an understanding of the leading role of the working class. Even those groups that relied on the peasantry then saw its stratification. And in relation to the peasantry, only one measure was expressed - an additional cutting of land to the peasant allotments.

Many Social Revolutionary groups in the 90s of the XIX century. negative attitude towards the practical application of individual terror. And the revision of these views largely occurred under the influence of Marxism.

But the departure from the populist worldview among the Socialist-Revolutionaries did not last long. As early as 1901, they decided to focus their main attention on the dissemination of socialist ideas among the peasants. The reason was the first major peasant unrest. The Social Revolutionaries came to the conclusion that they were early disillusioned with the peasantry as the most revolutionary class.

One of the first Social Revolutionaries, who already in the 90s began working among the peasants, was Viktor Mikhailovich Chernov, one of the future leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. His father, a native of a peasant family, in the recent past a serf, was educated through the efforts of his parents, became a county treasurer, rose to the rank of collegiate adviser and the Order of St. Vladimir, which gave him the right to personal nobility. The father had a certain influence on the views of his son, repeatedly expressing the idea that sooner or later all the land should move from the landowners to the peasants.

Under the influence of his older brother, Viktor, even in his gymnasium years, became interested in the political struggle and passed the path to the revolution, typical for an intellectual, through populist circles. In 1892 he entered the law faculty of Moscow University. It was at this time that Chernov showed interest in Marxism, which he considered necessary to know better than his supporters. In 1893, he joined the secret organization "Party of People's Law", in 1894 he was arrested and expelled to live in the city of Tambov. During the arrest, sitting in the Peter and Paul Fortress, he began to study philosophy, political economy, sociology and history. Tambov group V.M. Chernova was one of the first to resume the orientation of the Narodniks towards the peasantry, launching extensive propaganda work.

In the autumn of 1901, the largest populist organizations in Russia decided to unite into a party. In December 1901, it finally took shape and received the name "party of socialist revolutionaries." Its official organs were "Revolutionary Russia" (from number 3) and "Bulletin of the Russian Revolution" (from number 2).

The Socialist-Revolutionary Party considered itself the spokesman for the interests of all working and exploited strata of the people. However, the Socialist-Revolutionaries, like the old Narodnaya Volya, were still in the foreground during the revolution, the interests and aspirations of tens of millions of peasants. Gradually, the main functional role of the Socialist-Revolutionaries in the system of political parties in Russia emerged more and more clearly - the expression of the interests of the entire working peasantry as a whole, primarily the poor and middle peasants. In addition, the Socialist-Revolutionaries worked among soldiers and sailors, students and students, and among the democratic intelligentsia. All these layers, together with the peasantry and the proletariat, were united by the Socialist-Revolutionaries in the concept of "working people."

The social base of the Social Revolutionaries was quite wide. Workers made up 43%, peasants (together with soldiers) - 45%, intellectuals (including students) - 12%. During the period of the first revolution, the Social Revolutionaries numbered over 60-65 thousand people in their ranks, not counting the numerous stratum of sympathizers of the party.

Local organizations operated in more than 500 cities and towns in 76 provinces and regions of the country. The vast majority of organizations and party members were in European Russia. Large Socialist-Revolutionary organizations were in the Volga region, the middle and southern Black Earth provinces. During the years of the first revolution, more than one and a half thousand peasant SR brotherhoods arose, many student organizations, student groups and unions. The Socialist-Revolutionary Party also included 7 national organizations: Estonian, Yakut, Buryat, Chuvash, Greek, Ossetian, Mohammedan Volga group. In addition, in the national regions of the country there were several parties and organizations of the Socialist-Revolutionary type: the Polish Socialist Party, the Armenian Revolutionary Union "Dashnaktsutyun", the Belarusian Socialist Community, the Party of Socialist-Federalists of Georgia, the Ukrainian Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Socialist Jewish labor party, etc.

Leading figures of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party in 1905-1907. were its main theorist V.M. Chernov, head of the Combat Organization E.F. Azef (later unmasked as a provocateur), his assistant B.V. Savinkov, members of the populist movement of the last century M.A. Natanson, E.K. Breshko-Breshkovskaya, I.A. Rubanovich, the future outstanding chemist A.N. Bach. And also younger in age G.A. Gershuni, N.D. Avksentiev, V.M. Zenzinov, A.A. Argunov, S.N. Sletov, sons of a merchant - millionaire brothers A.R. and M.R. Gots, I.I. Fundaminsky (Bunakov) and others.

The Social Revolutionaries were not a single trend. Their left wing, which spun off in 1906 into the independent "Union of Socialist-Revolutionary Maximalists", spoke out for the "socialization" not only of the land, but of all plants and factories. The right wing, the tone in which was set by the former liberal populists grouped around the journal Russkoe bogatstvo (A.V. Peshekhonov, V.A. Myakotin, N.F. Annensky and others), was limited to the demand "moderate remuneration" and the replacement of autocracy with a constitutional monarchy. In 1906, the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries created a legal "People's Socialist Labor Party" (populists), which immediately became the spokesman for the more prosperous peasantry. However, at the beginning of 1907 it had only about 1.5 - 2 thousand members.

The Socialist-Revolutionary program was developed on the basis of various and very different projects by the beginning of 1905 and was adopted after heavy disputes at the party congress in January 1906. The Socialist-Revolutionary doctrine combined elements of old populist views, fashionable bourgeois-liberal theories , anarchist and Marxist. During the preparation of the program, an attempt was made to deliberately compromise. Chernov said that "each step of a real movement is more important than a dozen programs, and party unity on the basis of an imperfect, mosaic program is better than a split in the name of a great program symmetry."

From the adopted program of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, it is clear that the Socialist-Revolutionary Party saw its main goal in the overthrow of the autocracy and the transition from democracy to socialism. In the program, the Socialist-Revolutionaries give an assessment of the prerequisites for socialism. They believed that capitalism in its development creates the conditions for building socialism through the socialization of small-scale production into large-scale "from above", as well as "from below" - through the development of non-capitalist forms of economy: cooperation, community, labor farming.

In the introductory part of the program, the Socialist-Revolutionaries discuss various combinations of the positive and negative sides of capitalism. They referred to the “destructive aspects” of the “anarchy of production”, which reaches its extreme manifestations in crises, disasters and insecurity of the working masses. They saw the positive side in the fact that capitalism prepares "certain material elements" for the future socialist system and contributes to the unification of the industrial armies of hired workers into a cohesive social force.

The program states that "the entire burden of the struggle against tsarism falls on the proletariat, the working peasantry and the revolutionary-socialist intelligentsia." Together, according to the Socialist-Revolutionaries, they constitute the "working working class", which, organized in a social revolutionary party, should, if necessary, establish its own temporary revolutionary dictatorship.

But in contrast to Marxism, the Socialist-Revolutionaries made the division of society into classes dependent not on the attitude to tools and means of production, but on the attitude to labor and the distribution of income. Therefore, they considered the differences between workers and peasants to be unprincipled, and their similarities to be enormous, since their existence is based on labor and ruthless exploitation, to which they are equally subjected. Chernov, for example, refused to recognize the peasantry as a petty-bourgeois class, because its characteristic features are not the appropriation of the labor of others, but their own labor.

He called the peasantry "the working class of the countryside". But he shared 2 categories of peasants: the working peasantry, living on the exploitation of its own labor force, here he also included the agricultural proletariat - farm laborers, as well as the rural bourgeoisie, living on the exploitation of someone else's labor force. Chernov argued that “the independent working farmer, as such, is very susceptible to socialist propaganda; no less susceptible than the agricultural laborer, the proletarian.

But although the workers and the laboring peasantry constitute a single working class and are equally inclined towards socialism, they must arrive at it by different paths. Chernov believed that the city was moving towards socialism through the development of capitalism, while the countryside - through non-capitalist evolution.

The Socialist-Revolutionaries are convinced that small peasant labor farming is capable of defeating large-scale farming because it is advancing towards the development of collectivism through the commune and cooperation. But this possibility can develop only after the abolition of landownership, the transfer of land to the public property, the abolition of private ownership of land and its egalitarian redistributive distribution.

Behind the revolutionary appeals of the Socialist-Revolutionaries were deep peasant democratism, the indestructible craving of the peasant for land “equalization”, the elimination of landlord landownership and for “freedom” in its broadest sense, including the active participation of the peasantry in government. At the same time, the Socialist-Revolutionaries, like the Narodniks in their time, continued to believe in the innate collectivism of the peasants, linking their socialist aspirations with it.

In the agrarian part of the program of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, it is written that “in matters of reorganization of land relations, P.S.R. relies on communal and labor views, traditions and forms of life of the Russian peasantry, on the conviction that only labor gives the land to nobody and the right to use it. Chernov, in general, believed that for a socialist, “There is nothing more dangerous than planting private property, accustoming a peasant, who still believes that the land is “no one’s”, “free” (or “God’s”), to the idea of ​​​​the right to trade, to make young ladies with land . It is precisely here that the danger of planting and strengthening that “proprietary fanaticism” lies, which is then capable of causing a lot of trouble for the socialists.

The Social Revolutionaries proclaimed that they would stand for the socialization of the land. With the help of the socialization of the land, they hoped to save the peasant from infection with the psychology of private ownership, which would become a brake on the road to socialism in the future.

The socialization of land presupposes the right to use the land, to cultivate it by one's own labor without the help of hired workers. The amount of land should be no less than what is needed for a comfortable existence and no more than what the family is able to cultivate without resorting to hired labor. Land was redistributed by taking away from those who had an excess of it in favor of those who had a shortage of land, up to an equalizing labor norm.

There is no private ownership of land. All lands come under the control of the central and local bodies of people's self-government (and not in state ownership). The bowels of the earth remain with the state.

Mainly with their revolutionary agrarian program, the Socialist-Revolutionaries attracted peasants to themselves. The Social Revolutionaries did not identify the "socialization" (socialization) of the land with socialism as such. But they were convinced that on its basis, with the help of the most diverse types and forms of cooperation, in the future a new, collective agriculture would be created in a purely evolutionary way. Speaking at the I Congress of the Socialist-Revolutionaries (December 1905 - January 1906), V.M. Chernov stated that the socialization of the land is only the foundation for organic work in the spirit of the socialization of peasant labor.

The attractive force of the Socialist-Revolutionary program for the peasants was that it adequately reflected their organic rejection of landownership, on the one hand, and the craving for the preservation of the community and the equal distribution of land, on the other.

So, egalitarian land use established two basic norms: the norm of provision (consumer) and marginal (labor). Consumption - the minimum rate meant the provision for the use of one family of such an amount of land, as a result of which the most pressing needs of this family could be covered by the methods usual for the area.

But the question arises, what needs should be taken as a basis? After all, based on them, you need to determine the site. And the needs were different not only within the entire Russian state, but also within individual provinces, counties, and depended on a number of specific circumstances.

Labor - the Socialist-Revolutionaries considered the maximum norm to be the amount of land that a peasant family can cultivate without hiring labor. But this labor norm did not fit well with egalitarian land tenure. The point here is the difference in the labor force of the peasant farms. If we assume that for a family consisting of two adult workers, the labor norm will be "A" hectares of land, then if there are four adult workers, the norm of peasant land will not be "A + A", as required by the idea of ​​equalization, but "A + A + a "hectares, where "a" is some additional piece of land necessary for the application of the newly appeared labor force, formed by a cooperation of 4 people. Thus, the simple scheme of the Socialist-Revolutionaries still contradicted reality.

The general democratic demands and the path to socialism in the city in the Socialist-Revolutionary program practically did not differ from the path predetermined by the European Social Democratic Parties. The program of the Socialist-Revolutionaries included demands typical of a revolutionary democracy for a republic, political freedoms, national equality, and universal suffrage.

A significant place was given to the national question. It was covered more voluminously and wider than other parties did. Such provisions were fixed as complete freedom of conscience, speech, press, assembly and unions; freedom of movement, choice of occupation and freedom to strike; universal and equal suffrage for every citizen at least 20 years of age, without distinction of sex, religion and nationality, subject to a direct system of elections and closed voting. In addition, a democratic republic was supposed to be established on these principles with broad autonomy for regions and communities, both urban and rural; recognition of the unconditional right of nations to self-determination; the introduction of the native language into all local, public and state institutions. Establishment of compulsory, equal for all general secular education at public expense; the complete separation of church and state and the declaration of religion as a private matter for everyone.

These demands were practically identical to the demands of the Social Democrats known at that time. But there were two significant additions to the Socialist-Revolutionary program. They advocated the greatest possible use of federal relations between individual nationalities, and in "areas with a mixed population, the right of each nationality to a share in the budget proportional to its size, intended for cultural and educational purposes, and the disposal of these funds on the basis of self-government"

In addition to the political area, the program of the Socialist-Revolutionaries defines measures in the field of legal, national economic, in matters of communal, municipal and zemstvo economy. Here we are talking about the election, turnover at any time and the jurisdiction of all officials, including deputies and judges, about the free of charge of legal proceedings. On the introduction of a progressive income and inheritance tax, exemption from small income tax. On the protection of the spiritual and physical forces of the working class in the city and countryside.

On the reduction of working hours, state insurance, prohibition of overtime work, work of minors under 16 years of age, restriction of work of minors, prohibition of child and female labor in certain industries and in certain periods, uninterrupted weekly rest. The Socialist-Revolutionary Party advocated the development of all kinds of public services and enterprises (free medical care, extensive credit for the development of the labor economy, communization of water supply, lighting, ways and means of communication), etc. It was written in the program that the Socialist-Revolutionary Party would defend these measures, support them, or wrest them out with their revolutionary struggle.

A specific feature of the tactics of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, inherited from the Narodnaya Volya, was individual terror directed against representatives of the highest tsarist administration (the assassination of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, the attempt on the Moscow Governor General F.V. Dubasov, P.A. Stolypin and etc.) In total in 1905-1907. Socialist-Revolutionaries carried out 220 terrorist attacks. During the revolution, 242 people became victims of their terror (of which 162 people were killed). During the revolution, by such acts, the Social Revolutionaries tried to beat the constitution and civil liberties out of the tsarist government. Terror for the Socialist-Revolutionaries was the main means of struggle against the autocracy.

In general, the revolutionary terror did not have in 1905-1907. great influence on the course of events, although its significance as a factor in the disorganization of power and the activation of the masses should not be denied.

However, the Social Revolutionaries were not cutthroats, hung with bombs and revolvers. Mostly they were people who painfully comprehended the criteria of good and evil, their right to dispose of other people's lives. Of course, there are many victims on the conscience of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. But this apparent determination was not simply given to them. Savinkov, a writer, socialist-revolutionary theorist, terrorist, politician, writes in his Memoirs that Kalyaev, who killed Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich in February 1905, “loved the revolution as deeply and tenderly as only those who love it gives his life for it, seeing in terror "not only the best form of political struggle, but also a moral, perhaps religious sacrifice."

There were also “knights without fear and reproach” among the Socialist-Revolutionaries, who did not experience any special doubts. The terrorist Karpovich told Savinkov: “They hang us - we must hang them. With clean hands, in gloves, you can not do terror. Let thousands and tens of thousands die - it is necessary to achieve victory. Peasants are burning estates - let them burn ... Now is not the time to be sentimental - in war, as in war. And here after Savinkov writes: “But he himself did not expropriate and did not burn the estates. And I don’t know how many people I have met in my life who, behind external harshness, would keep such a tender and loving heart as Karpovich.

These painful, almost always insoluble contradictions of deeds, characters, destinies, ideas permeate the history of the Socialist-Revolutionary movement. The Social Revolutionaries firmly believed that by eliminating those governors, grand dukes, gendarmerie officers who would be recognized as the most criminal and dangerous enemies of freedom, they would be able to establish the kingdom of justice in the country. But, subjectively fighting for a certain bright future and fearlessly sacrificing themselves, the Social Revolutionaries actually cleared the way for immoral adventurers, devoid of any doubts and hesitations.

Not all terrorist acts ended successfully; many militants were arrested and executed. The Socialist-Revolutionary terror led to unnecessary casualties among the revolutionaries, diverting their strength and material resources from work among the masses. In addition, the revolutionaries actually carried out lynching, although they justified their actions by the interests of the people and the revolution. One violence inevitably gave rise to another, and spilled blood was usually washed away with new blood, creating some kind of vicious circle.

Most of the minor assassination attempts remained unknown, but one murder by a 20-year-old girl Maria Spiridonova of the Tambov “subduer” of the peasants Luzhenovsky, thanks to the newspaper Rus, thundered all over the world. The murder of Luzhenovsky revealed to the world the whole horror of Russian reality: the cruelty of the authorities (Spiridonova was not only beaten so that the doctor could not testify for a week whether her eye was intact, but also raped) and brought to readiness sacrifice their lives alienating youth from the government.

Thanks to the protests of the world community, Spiridonova was not executed. The execution was replaced by hard labor. The regime at Akatui hard labor in 1906 was mild, and there Spiridonova, Proshyan, Bitsenko - the future leaders of the Left SR leaders - walked through the taiga, indulged in their wildest dreams of socialism. Akatui convicts were idealists of the highest standard, faithful comrades, unmercenaries, as alien to the everyday side of life as it is possible only in Russia. For example, when in December 1917 Proshyan, who was appointed People's Commissar of Posts and Telegraphs, came to receive a narco-mat - in a blouse and tattered boots - the doorman did not let him go further than the front.

But the fact is that the entire parliamentary, Duma experience of the country's development passed them by. By 1917, they came with 10 years of hard labor or exile, perhaps more maximalists than they were in their youth.

The Socialist-Revolutionaries also resorted to such a very dubious means of revolutionary struggle as expropriation. This was an extreme means of replenishing the party fund, but the “exes” were fraught with the threat of the degeneration of the activities of the revolutionaries into political banditry, especially since they were often accompanied by the murders of innocent people.

During the First Revolution, the organizations of the Social Revolutionaries began to grow rapidly. On October 17, 1905, an amnesty was declared by the manifesto, and revolutionary emigrants began to return. The year 1905 was the apogee of neo-populist revolutionary democracy. During this period, the party calls on the peasants to openly seize the lands of the bourgeoisie, but not by individual peasants, but by entire villages or societies.

The Social Revolutionaries had different views on the role of the party in that period. The right neo-populists believed that it was necessary to liquidate the illegal party, that it could move to a legal position, since political freedoms had already been won.

V. Chernov believed that this was premature. That the most pressing problem facing the party is the envelopment of party influence among the masses. He believed that a pariah who had just emerged from the underground would not be isolated from the people if he used the emerging mass organizations. Therefore, the Social Revolutionaries were oriented towards work in trade unions, councils, the All-Russian Peasant Union, the All-Russian Railway Union and the Union of Postal and Telegraph Employees.

During the years of the revolution, the Social Revolutionaries launched a wide propaganda and agitation activity. At various times during this period, more than 100 Socialist-Revolutionary newspapers were published, proclamations, flyers, brochures, etc. were printed and distributed in millions of copies.

When the election campaign for the First State Duma began, the first congress of the party decided to boycott the elections. However, some Socialist-Revolutionaries took part in the elections, although many of the Socialist-Revolutionary organizations issued leaflets calling for a boycott of the Duma and the preparation of an armed uprising. But the Central Committee of the party in its Bulletin (March 1906) proposed not to force events, but to use the situation of political freedoms won to expand agitation and organized work among the masses. The Party Council (the highest body between party congresses, which included members of the Central Committee and the Central Organ and one representative each from regional organizations) adopted a special resolution on the Duma. Considering that the Duma was incapable of justifying the aspirations of the people, the Soviet at the same time noted the opposition of its majority, the presence of workers and peasants in it. Hence the conclusion was drawn about the inevitability of the Duma's struggle with the government and the need to use this struggle to develop the revolutionary consciousness and mood of the masses. The Social Revolutionaries actively influenced the peasant faction in the First Duma.

The defeat of the armed uprisings in 1905-1906, the spread among the people of hopes for the Duma and the development of constitutional illusions in this regard, the reduction of the revolutionary pressure of the masses - all this steadily led to a change in mood among the Socialist-Revolutionaries. In particular, this was manifested in the exaggeration of the significance of the Duma for the development of the revolutionary process and unity. The Socialist-Revolutionaries began to regard the Duma as an instrument in the struggle to convene the Constituent Assembly. There were fluctuations in tactics in relation to the Cadets Party. From a complete rejection of the Cadets and exposing them as traitors to the revolution, the Socialist-Revolutionaries came to the recognition that the Cadets are not enemies of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, and agreements with them are possible. This was especially evident during the period of the election campaign for the Second Duma and in the Duma itself. Then the Socialist-Revolutionaries, meeting the needs of the People's Socialists and Trudoviks in the name of creating a Narodnik bloc, adopted many of the tactics of the Cadets.

It is impossible to unequivocally evaluate the activities of the Socialist-Revolutionaries during the retreat of the revolution. The Socialist-Revolutionary Party did not stop working, propagated its programmatic demands and slogans, which were of a revolutionary-democratic nature. The defeat of the revolution dramatically changed the situation in which the Socialist-Revolutionary Party operated. But the Socialist-Revolutionaries did not consider the coming reaction to be the end of the revolution. Chernov wrote about the inevitability of a new revolutionary explosion, and all the events of 1905-1907. regarded only as a prologue to the revolution.

III Party Council (July 1907) defined immediate goals: gathering forces both in the party and among the masses, and as the next task - strengthening political terror. At the same time, the participation of the Socialist-Revolutionaries in the Third Duma was rejected. V. Chernov urged the Socialist-Revolutionaries to go to trade unions, cooperatives, clubs, educational societies and fight against "a disdainful attitude towards all this" culturalism ". Not removed from the agenda and preparations for an armed uprising.

But the party had no strength, it fell apart. The intelligentsia left the party, organizations in Russia perished under the blows of the police. Printing houses, warehouses with weapons and books were liquidated.

Stolypin's agrarian reform dealt a severe blow to the party, aimed at destroying the community - the ideological basis of the Socialist-Revolutionary "socialization".

The crisis that erupted in connection with the exposure of Yevno Azef, who for many years was an agent of the Okhrana and at the same time the head of the Combat Organization, a member of the Central Committee of the party, completed the process of disintegration of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party.

In May 1909, the 5th Council of the Party accepted the resignation of the Central Committee. A new composition of the Central Committee was elected. But soon it ceased to exist. The party began to be led by a group of figures called the "Foreign Delegation", and the "Banner of Labor" began to gradually lose its position as a central organ.

World War I caused another split in the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. The overwhelming majority of Socialist-Revolutionaries abroad zealously defended the positions of social chauvinism. Another part, led by V.M. Chernov and M.A. Natanson took an internationalist position.

In the pamphlet War and the Third Force, Chernov wrote that the duty of the left trend in socialism is to oppose "any idealization of war and any elimination - in view of war - of the basic internal work of socialism." The international working-class movement must be the "third force" that is called upon to intervene in the struggle of the imperialist forces. All the efforts of the left socialists must be directed towards its creation and elaboration of a general socialist peace program.

V.M. Chernov called on the socialist parties to move "to a revolutionary offensive against the foundations of bourgeois domination and bourgeois property." Under these conditions, he defined the tactics of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party as "the transformation of the military crisis experienced by the civilized world into a revolutionary crisis." Chernov wrote that it was possible that it was Russia that would be the country that would give impetus to the reorganization of the world on socialist principles.

The February Revolution of 1917 was a major turning point in the history of Russia. The autocracy has fallen. By the summer of 1917, the Socialist-Revolutionaries had become the largest political party, numbering over 400,000 people in their ranks. Having a majority in the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks on February 28, 1917, rejected the opportunity to form a Provisional Government from the Soviet, and on March 1 decided to entrust the formation of the government to the Provisional Committee of the State Duma.

In April 1917, Chernov, together with a group of Socialist-Revolutionaries, arrived in Petrograd. At the III Congress of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (May-June 1917), he was again elected to the Central Committee. After the April crisis of the Provisional Government, on May 4, 1917, the Petrograd Soviet adopted a resolution on the formation of a coalition Provisional Government, which now included 6 ministers - socialists, including V.M. Chernov as Minister of Agriculture. He also became a member of the Main Land Committee, which was entrusted with the task of preparing land reform.

The Socialist-Revolutionary Party now has the opportunity to carry out its program directly. But she chose the apex version of agrarian reform. The resolution of the Third Congress of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party proposed, right up to the Constituent Assembly, to carry out only preparatory measures for the future socialization of the land. Prior to the Constituent Assembly, all lands were to be transferred to the jurisdiction of local land committees, which were given the right to decide all issues related to the lease. A law was issued prohibiting land transactions before the Constituent Assembly.

This law caused a storm of indignation among the landowners, who were deprived of the right to sell their lands on the eve of land reform. An instruction was issued by the Land Committee, which established supervision over the exploitation of arable and hay lands, accounting for uncultivated land. Chernov believed that some changes in land relations were necessary before the Constituent Assembly. But not a single law or instruction seriously meeting the needs of the peasantry was issued.

After the July political crisis, the agrarian policy of the Ministry of Agriculture shifted to the right. But the leadership of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party feared that the peasant movement would finally get out of control, and they tried to put pressure on the Cadets to adopt temporary agrarian legislation. In order to implement this legislation, it was necessary to break with the policy of conciliation. However, the same Chernov, who was the first to realize that it was impossible to work in the same government with the Cadets, did not dare to break with them.

He chose the tactic of maneuvering, trying to convince the bourgeoisie and landowners to make concessions. At the same time, he urged the peasants not to seize the landlords' lands, not to leave the position of "legality". In August, Chernov resigned, which coincided with an attempted rebellion by General L.G. Kornilov. In connection with the Kornilov rebellion, the leadership of the Socialist-Revolutionaries at first sided with the formation of a "uniform socialist government", i.e. government, consisting of representatives of the socialist parties, but soon again began to seek a compromise with the bourgeoisie.

The new government, in which most of the portfolios belonged to socialist ministers, turned to repressions against workers, soldiers, began to participate in punitive measures against the countryside, which led to peasant uprisings.

So, being in power after the fall of the autocracy, the Social Revolutionaries could not fulfill their main program requirements.

It must be said that already in the spring - summer of 1917, the left wing, numbering 42 people, declared itself in the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, which in November 1917 was constituted into the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party. The left wing of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party showed fundamental differences on programmatic issues with the rest of the party.

For example, on the issue of land, they insisted on transferring the land to the peasants without a ransom. They were against the coalition with the Cadets, opposed the war, stood in relation to it on internationalist positions.

After the July crisis, the Left Socialist-Revolutionary faction issued a declaration in which it sharply dissociated itself from the policy of its Central Committee. The left became active in Riga, Reveli, Novgorod, Taganrog, Saratov, Minsk, Pskov, Odessa, Moscow, Tver and Kostroma provinces. Since the spring they have occupied strong positions in Voronezh, Kharkov, Kazan, Kronstadt.

The Socialist-Revolutionaries also reacted differently to the October Revolution. The Second Congress of Soviets was attended by representatives of all the main socialist parties in Russia. The left wing of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party supported the Bolsheviks. The right SRs believed that an armed coup had taken place, which did not rely on the will of the majority of the people. And that will only lead to civil war. At the Second Congress of Soviets, they insisted on the formation of a government based on all layers of democracy, including the Provisional Government. But the idea of ​​negotiations with the Provisional Government was rejected by the majority of the delegates. And the Right SRs are throwing the congress. Together with the Right Mensheviks, they set the goal of gathering public forces in order to put up stubborn resistance to the attempts of the Bolsheviks to seize power. They do not leave hope for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly.

On the evening of October 25, 1917, during the Second Congress of Soviets, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries organized a faction. They remained at the congress and insisted on the formation of a government based, if not on all, then at least on the majority of revolutionary democracy. The Bolsheviks offered them to enter the first Soviet government, but the left rejected this offer, because. this would finally break off their ties with the party members who left the congress. And this would exclude the possibility of their mediation between the Bolsheviks and the departed part of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. In addition, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries believed that 2-3 ministerial portfolios were too few to reveal their own face, not to get lost, not to turn out to be "petitioners in the Bolshevik front."

Undoubtedly, the refusal to enter the Council of People's Commissars was not final. The Bolsheviks, realizing this, clearly outlined the platform for a possible agreement. With every passing hour, the leadership of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries grew more and more aware that isolation from the Bolsheviks was disastrous. M. Spiridonova was especially active in this direction, and her voice was listened to with extraordinary attention: she was the recognized leader, soul, conscience of the left wing of the party.

For cooperation with the Bolsheviks, the IV Congress of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party confirmed the resolutions previously adopted by the Central Committee on the exclusion of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries from their ranks. In November 1917, the leftists formed their own party, the Party of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries.

In December 1917, the Left SRs shared power in the government with the Bolsheviks. Steinberg became People's Commissar of Justice, Proshyan - People's Commissar for Posts and Telegraphs, Trutovsky - People's Commissar for Local Self-Government, Karelin - People's Commissar for Property of the Russian Republic, Kolegaev - People's Commissar for Agriculture, Diamonds and Algasov - People's Commissars without portfolios.

The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries were also represented in the government of Soviet Ukraine, they held responsible positions in the Red Army, in the Navy, in the Cheka, and in local Soviets. On an equal footing, the Bolsheviks shared with the Left SRs the leadership of the departments of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.

What did the program demands of the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party include? In the political field: the dictatorship of the working people, the Soviet Republic, the free federation of Soviet republics, the fullness of local executive power, direct, equal, secret voting, the right to recall deputies, the election of labor organizations, the obligation to report to voters. Ensuring freedom of conscience, speech, press, meetings and unions. The right to existence, to work, to land, to upbringing and education.

In matters of the work program: workers' control over production, which is understood not as the return of factories and plants to workers, railways to railway workers, etc., but as organized centralized control over production on a national scale, as a transitional stage to nationalization and socialization enterprises.

For the peasantry: the demand for the socialization of the land. The Socialist-Revolutionary Party set itself the task of winning the peasants over to its side. It was the concession of the Bolsheviks to the peasants in the Decree on Land (the Decree on Land is a Socialist-Revolutionary project) that largely contributed to the establishment of cooperation between the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks. The Left SRs explained that the socialization of land is a transitional form of land use. Socialization did not imply first driving the landowners from their homes, and then proceeding to a general leveling allotment, starting with farm laborers and proletarians. On the contrary, the tasks of socialization were to take away from those who have a surplus in favor of those who have a shortage of land to an equalizing labor norm, and to give everyone the opportunity to work on the land.

In the opinion of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, the peasant communities, legitimately fearing the fragmentation of the land into small plots, should intensify the forms of joint cultivation and establish quite consistent, from the point of view of socialism, norms for the distribution of the products of labor among the consumers, regardless of the ability to work of one or another member of the working community.

In their opinion, since socialization is based on the principle of creation, hence the desire to conduct collective forms of economy, as more productive than individual ones. By raising productivity, establishing new social relations in the countryside, and putting into practice the principle of collective law, the socialization of the land leads directly to socialist forms of economy.

At the same time, the Left Social Revolutionaries believed that the unification of the peasants with the workers was the key to further successful struggle for a better future for the oppressed classes, for socialism.

So, the Right SRs characterized the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks as a crime against the Motherland and the revolution. Chernov considered the socialist revolution in Russia impossible, since the country was economically disordered and economically undeveloped. What happened on October 25, he called an anarcho-bolshevik uprising. All hope was placed on the transfer of power to the Constituent Assembly, although the importance of the activities of the Soviets was emphasized.

In principle, the Social Revolutionaries did not object to the slogans “Power to the Soviets!”, “Land to the peasants!”, “Peace to the peoples!”. They only stipulated their legal implementation by the decision of the popularly elected Constituent Assembly. Unable to return the lost power peacefully through the idea of ​​creating a homogeneous socialist government, they made a second attempt - through the Constituent Assembly.

As a result of the first free elections, 715 deputies were elected to the Constituent Assembly, of which 370 were Socialist-Revolutionaries, i.e. 51.8%. January 5, 1918 Constituent Assembly chaired by V.M. Chernov adopted a law on land, an appeal to the allied powers for peace, and proclaimed the Russian Democratic Federative Republic. But all this was secondary and did not matter. The Bolsheviks were the first to put these decrees into effect.

The Bolsheviks dispersed the Constituent Assembly. And the Socialist-Revolutionaries determined that the liquidation of the Bolshevik government is the next and urgent task of all democracy. The Socialist-Revolutionary Party could not come to terms with the policy pursued by the Bolsheviks. At the beginning of 1918, Chernov wrote that the policy of the RCP(b) “is trying to jump through decrees through the natural organic processes of the growth of the proletariat in political, cultural and social terms, representing some kind of peculiar, original, truly Russian“ decree socialism ” or "socialist decreeism".

According to the Central Committee of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, “in such a situation, socialism turns into a caricature, reduced to a system of equalizing everyone to a lower and even ever-lowering level ... of all culture and the smuggling revival of the most primitive forms of economic life,” therefore, “Bolshevik communism is nothing about has nothing to do with socialism and therefore can only compromise itself.”

They criticized the economic policy of the Bolsheviks, their proposed measures to overcome the industrial crisis and their agrarian program. The Socialist-Revolutionaries believed that the gains of the February Revolution were partly stolen, partly mutilated by the Bolshevik authorities, that “this coup” caused a fierce civil war throughout the country, “without Brest and the October Revolution, Russia would already have tasted the blessings of the world,” and so Russia is still engulfed in the unbreakable fiery ring of fratricidal war; the stake of the Bolsheviks on the world revolution only means that they "have lost faith in their own strength" and are waiting for "salvation only from outside."

The intransigence of the Socialist-Revolutionaries towards the Bolsheviks was also determined by the fact that "the Bolsheviks, having rejected the basic principles of socialism - freedom and democracy - and replacing them with the dictatorship and arbitrariness of an insignificant minority over the majority, thereby deleted themselves from the ranks of socialism."

In June 1918, the Right SRs led the overthrow of Soviet power in Samara, then in Simbirsk and Kazan. They acted with the help of Czechoslovak legionnaires and the people's army, created within the framework of the Samara Committee of members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch).

As Cher-nov later recalled, they explained their armed uprising in the Volga region by the illegal dispersal of the Constituent Assembly. They saw at the beginning of the civil war the struggle of two democracies - the Soviet one and the one that recognized the power of the Constituent Assembly. They justified their speech by the fact that the food policy of the Soviet government aroused the indignation of the peasants, and they, as a peasant party, had to lead the struggle for their rights.

However, there was no unity among the leaders of the Right SRs. The most right-wing of them insisted on the rejection of the Brest peace, on the resumption of Russia's participation in the world war, and only after that the transfer of power to the Constituent Assembly. Others, more left-wing, called for the resumption of the work of the Constituent Assembly, were against the civil war and advocated cooperation with the Bolsheviks, because. “Bolshevism turned out to be not a fleeting flurry, but a long-term phenomenon, and the influx of masses towards it at the expense of central democracy undoubtedly continues in the outlying regions of Russia.”

After the defeat of the Samara Komuch by the Red Army, the Right SRs in September 1918 took an active part in the Ufa State Conference, which elected the Directory, which undertook to transfer power to the Constituent Assembly on January 1, 1919, if it meets.

However, on November 18, Kolchak's coup took place. The members of the Central Committee of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party living in Ufa, having learned about Kolchak's coming to power, adopted an appeal to fight the dictator. But soon many of them were arrested by Kolchak. Then the remaining at large members of the Samara Committee of the Constituent Assembly, headed by its chairman V.K. Volsky declared their intention to stop the armed struggle with the Soviet government and enter into negotiations with it. But they set as their condition for cooperation the creation of an all-Russian government from representatives of all socialist parties and the convening of a new Constituent Assembly.

At Lenin's suggestion, the Ufa Revolutionary Committee entered into negotiations with them without any conditions. An agreement was reached, and this part of the Socialist-Revolutionaries created their own group "People".

In response, the Central Committee of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party declared that the actions taken by Volsky and others were their own business. The Central Committee of the Socialist-Revolutionaries still believes that “the creation of a united revolutionary front against any dictatorship is conceived by the Socialist-Revolutionary organizations only on the basis of the fulfillment of the basic requirements of democracy: the convocation of the Constituent Assembly and the restoration of all freedoms (speech, press, assembly, agitation, etc.). ) won by the February Revolution, and subject to the termination of the civil war within the democracy.

Over the following years, the Socialist-Revolutionaries did not play any active role in the political and state life of the country. At the IX Council of their party (June 1919), they decided "to stop the armed struggle against the Bolshevik government and replace it with the usual political struggle."

But 2 years later, in July-August 1921, the X Council of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party secretly met in Samara, at which it was stated that “the question of the revolutionary overthrow of the dictatorship of the Communist Party with all the force of iron necessity is put on the order of the day becomes a question of the existence of Russian labor democracy”.

By that time, the Socialist-Revolutionaries had 2 leading centers: the "Foreign Delegation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party" and the "Central Bureau of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party in Russia." The first were waiting for a long emigration, the publication of magazines, the writing of memoirs. The second - a political trial in July - August 1922.

At the end of February 1922, Moscow announced the forthcoming trial of the Right SRs on charges of actions committed during the civil war. The accusation against the leaders of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party was based on the testimony of two former members of the Combat Organization - Lydia Konoplyova and her husband G. Semenov (Vasiliev). By that time they were not in the ranks of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, and according to rumors they belonged to the RCP (b). They presented their testimony in a pamphlet published in Berlin in February 1922, which, in the opinion of the Socialist-Revolutionary leaders, was cynical, falsified and provocative. This pamphlet claimed the involvement of leading party functionaries in attempts to assassinate V.I. Lenin, L.D. Trotsky, G.E. Zinoviev and other Bolshevik leaders at the beginning of the revolution.

The leaders of the revolutionary movement with an impeccable past, who spent many years in pre-revolutionary prisons and hard labor, were involved in the process of 1922. The announcement of the trial was preceded by a long stay (since 1920) of the leaders of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party in prison without presenting an appropriate specific charge. The notice of the trial was perceived by everyone (without distinction of political affiliation) as a warning of the imminent execution of the old revolutionaries and as a harbinger of a new stage in the liquidation of the socialist movement in Russia. (In the spring of 1922 there were widespread arrests among the Mensheviks of Russia).

At the head of the public struggle against the forthcoming massacre of the Socialist-Revolutionaries were the leaders of the Menshevik Party, who were in exile in Berlin. Under pressure from public opinion in socialist Europe, N. Bukharin and K. Radek gave a written assurance that the death sentence would not be pronounced at the forthcoming trial and would not even be requested by the prosecutors.

However, Lenin found this agreement infringing on the sovereignty of Soviet Russia, and People's Commissar of Justice D.I. Kursky publicly stated that this agreement did not in the least bind the Moscow court. The trial, which opened in early June, lasted 50 days. Prominent representatives of the Western socialist movement, who, by agreement, came to Moscow to defend the defendants, were subjected to organized harassment and were forced to leave the trial on June 22. Following them, the Russian lawyers also left the courtroom. The accused were left without formal legal protection. It became clear that the death sentence for the leaders of the socialist revolutionaries was inevitable.

“The trial of the socialists-revolutionaries took on the cynical nature of public preparations for the murder of people who sincerely served the cause of the liberation of the Russian people,” wrote M. Gorky to A. Francis.

The verdict in the case of the Social Revolutionaries, passed on August 7, provided for the death penalty in relation to 12 members of the Central Committee of the party. However, by decision of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of August 9, the execution of the death sentence was suspended for an indefinite period and made dependent on the resumption or non-resumption of the hostile activities of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party against the Soviet regime.

However, the decision to suspend the death sentences was not immediately communicated to the convicts, and for a long time they did not know when their sentence would be carried out.

Later, on January 14, 1924, the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee again considered the issue of the death penalty and replaced the shooting with a five-year prison sentence and exile.

In March 1923, the Social Revolutionaries decided to dissolve their party in Soviet Russia. In November 1923, a congress of the Socialist-Revolutionaries who were in exile took place. A foreign organization of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party was organized. But the Socialist-Revolutionary emigration also split into small groups. Chernov's group was in the position of some kind of "party center", claiming special powers to speak on behalf of the party abroad, allegedly received by them from the Central Committee.

But his group soon broke up, because. none of its members recognized a single leadership and did not want to obey Chernov. In 1927, Chernov was forced to sign a protocol, according to which he did not have emergency powers, giving him the right to speak on behalf of the party. As the leader of an influential political party, V.M. Chernov ceased to exist from the moment of emigration and in connection with the complete collapse of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party both in Russia and abroad.

During the period 1920-1931. V.M. Chernov settled in Prague, where he published the journal Revolutionary Russia. All his journalism and published works were of a pronounced anti-Soviet character.

As for the Left Social Revolutionaries, it must be said that, realizing the need for cooperation with the Bolsheviks, they did not accept their tactics and did not give up hope of obtaining the support of the majority not only in the Socialist Revolutionary Party, but also in the country's governing bodies.

At the 1st Congress of the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party on November 21, 1917, M. Spiridonova said about the Bolsheviks: “No matter how alien their rude steps are to us, we are in close contact with them, because behind them comes the mass, brought out of a state of stagnation.”

She believed that the influence of the Bolsheviks on the masses was temporary, since the Bolsheviks “have no enthusiasm, no religious enthusiasm, everything breathes with hatred and anger. These feelings are good during a fierce struggle and barricades. But in the second stage of the struggle, when organic work is needed, when a new life must be created on the basis of love and altruism, then the Bolsheviks will go bankrupt. We, keeping the precepts of our fighters, must always remember the second stage of the struggle.

The alliance of the Bolsheviks with the Left SRs was short-lived. The fact is that one of the most important questions facing the revolution was the way out of the imperialist war. It must be said that at the beginning the majority of the Central Committee of the PLSR supported the conclusion of an agreement with Germany. But when in February 1918 the German delegation put forward new, much more difficult peace conditions, the Socialist-Revolutionaries spoke out against the conclusion of the treaty. And after its ratification by the IV All-Russian Congress of Soviets, the Left Social Revolutionaries withdrew from the Council of People's Commissars.

However, M. Spiridonova continued to support the position of Lenin and his supporters. “The peace was signed not by us and not by the Bolsheviks,” she said in a polemic with Komkov at the II Congress of the PLSR, “it was signed by need, hunger, the unwillingness of the whole people - exhausted, tired - to fight. And who among us will say that the party of left socialists-revolutionaries, if it represented only one government, would have acted differently than the party of the Bolsheviks did? Spiridonova sharply rejected the calls of some congress delegates to provoke a break in the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and unleash a "revolutionary war" against German imperialism.

But already in June 1918, she abruptly changed her position, including in relation to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, since she closely connected it with the subsequent policy of the Bolshevik Party towards the peasants. At this time, a decree on food dictatorship was adopted, according to which all food policy was centralized and a struggle was declared against all "bread-holders" in the countryside. The Socialist-Revolutionaries did not object to the fight against the kulaks, but they feared that the blow would fall on the small and middle peasantry. The decree obligated every owner of grain to hand it over, declared all those who had surpluses and did not take them out to bulk points as enemies of the people.

The opposition of the rural poor to the “working peasantry” seemed to the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries senseless and even blasphemous. They referred to the committees of the poor only as "committees of idlers." Spiridonova accused the Bolsheviks of curtailing the socialization of the land, replacing it with nationalization, of a food dictatorship, of organizing food detachments forcibly requisitioning bread from the peasants, of planting committees of the poor.

At the Fifth Congress of Soviets (July 4-10, 1918), Spiridonova warned: “We will fight on the ground, and the committees of the rural poor will not have a place for themselves ... if the Bolsheviks do not stop planting kombeds, then the left socialist revolutionaries will take the same revolvers, the same bombs that they used in the fight against tsarist officials.

Kamkov echoed her: "We will throw out not only your detachments, but also your committees by the collar." According to Kamkov, workers went to these detachments to rob the village.

This was confirmed by the letters of the peasants, which they sent to the Central Committee of the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party and personally to Spiridonova: “As the Bolshevik detachment approached, they put on all the shirts and even women’s sweaters on themselves in order to prevent pain on the body, but the Red Army soldiers got so good at it that two shirts were down at once - fell into the body of a peasant - a worker. Then they soaked it in a bathhouse or just in a pond, some of them did not lie down on their backs for several weeks. They took everything clean from us, from the women all the clothes and canvases, from the men - jackets, watches and shoes, but there’s nothing to say about bread ...

Our mother, tell me who to go to now, in our village everyone is poor and hungry, we sowed poorly - there weren’t enough seeds, we had three kulaks, we robbed them a long time ago, we don’t have a “bourgeoisie”, we have I put on ¾ - ½ per capita, there was no purchased land, and a contribution and a fine were imposed on us, we beat our Bolshevik commissar, he offended us painfully. We were beaten up a lot, we can't tell you. Those who had a party card from the communists were not flogged.”

The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries believed that such a situation in the countryside had developed because the Bolsheviks followed the lead of Germany, gave her all the granaries of the country, and doomed the rest of Russia to starvation.

On June 24, 1918, the Central Committee of the PLSR decided to break the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk by organizing terrorist acts against the most prominent representatives of German imperialism. On July 6, 1918, the German ambassador to Russia, Count Mirbach, was killed by the Left Social Revolutionaries. For a long time there was a point of view that it was an anti-Soviet, anti-Bolshevik rebellion. But the documents show otherwise. The Central Committee of the PLSR explained that the murder was carried out in order to stop the conquest of labor Russia by German capital. This, by the way, was confirmed by Ya.M. Sverdlov, speaking at a meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on July 15, 1918

After the events of July 6-7, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party went underground, in accordance with the decision of its Central Committee. But since a limited circle of people knew about the rebellion and its preparation, many Socialist-Revolutionary organizations condemned the rebellion.

In August - September 1918, two independent parties were formed from among the Left SRs who condemned the rebellion: the revolutionary communists and the populists - the communists. Many publications of the Socialist-Revolutionaries were closed, cases of leaving the Party became more frequent, contradictions between the “tops” and “bottoms” of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries grew. The ultra-leftists created the terrorist organization All-Russian Headquarters of Revolutionary Partisans. However, the civil war again and again raised the question of the unacceptability of the struggle - especially armed, terrorist - against the Bolsheviks. It is characteristic that it was precisely in the summer of 1919, at the most dramatic moment, when Soviet power was hanging by a thread, that the Central Committee of the PLSR decided by a majority vote to support the ruling party.

In October 1919, a circular letter was circulated among the Left SR organizations, calling on various trends in the party to unite on the basis of refusing to confront the RCP (b). And in April - May 1920, in connection with the Polish offensive, it was recognized as necessary to actively participate in the life of the Soviets. A specially adopted resolution contained a call to fight the counter-revolution, support the Red Army, participate in social construction and overcoming devastation.

But this was not the generally accepted view. Disagreements led to the fact that in the spring of 1920 the Central Committee actually ceased to exist as a single body. The party was slowly fading away. Government repression played a significant role in this. Some of the leaders of the PLSR were imprisoned or exiled, some emigrated, some retired from political activity. Many at different times joined the RCP (b). By the end of 1922, the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party had virtually ceased to exist.

As for M. Spiridonova, she was repeatedly arrested after she retired from political activity: in 1923 for trying to escape abroad, in 1930 - during the persecution of former socialists. The last time was in 1937, when the "final blow" was dealt to the former socialists. She was charged with preparing an assassination attempt on members of the government of Bashkiria and K.E. Voroshilov, who was about to come to Ufa.

By that time, she was serving a previous term, worked as an economist in the credit - planning department of the Bashkir office of the State Bank. She no longer posed any political threat. Sick, almost blind woman. Only her name was dangerous, thoroughly forgotten in the country, but often mentioned by me in socialist circles abroad.

January 7, 1938 M.A. Spiridonova was sentenced to 25 years in prison. She served her term in the Oryol prison. But shortly before German tanks broke into Orel, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR changed its verdict, appointing her the highest penalty. On September 11, 1941, the sentence was carried out. Together with Spiridonova, Kh.G. was shot. Rakovsky, D.D. Pletnev, F.I. Goloshchekin and other Soviet and party workers, whom the administration of the Oryol prison and the NKVD did not find it possible, unlike criminals, to evacuate deep into the country.

Thus, both Right and Left SRs lived out their lives in prisons and exile. Almost everyone who did not die earlier died during the Stalinist terror.

Party of Socialist Revolutionaries(abbreviation C R- pronounced es er, socialist-revolutionaries, AKP, party s.-r .; after 1917 - right SRs) - a revolutionary political party of the Russian Empire, later the Russian Republic, RSFSR. Member of the Second International.

The Party of Socialist Revolutionaries was created on the basis of previously existing populist organizations and occupied one of the leading places in the system of Russian political parties. It was the largest and most influential non-Marxist socialist party. Its fate was more dramatic than the fate of other parties. The year 1917 was a triumph and tragedy for the Socialist-Revolutionaries. In a short time after the February Revolution, the party turned into the largest political force, reached the million mark in its membership, acquired a dominant position in local self-government bodies and most public organizations, won the elections to the Constituent Assembly. Its representatives held a number of key positions in the government. Attractive to the population were her ideas of democratic socialism and a peaceful transition to it. However, despite all this, the Socialist-Revolutionaries could not hold on to power.

Encyclopedic YouTube

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  The historical and philosophical worldview of the party was substantiated by the works of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Peter Lavrov, Nikolai Mikhailovsky.

  The draft program of the party was published in May 1906 in the newspaper Revolutionary Russia. The project, with minor changes, was approved as the program of the party at its first congress in early January 1906. This program remained the main document of the party throughout its existence. The main author of the program was the chief theoretician of the party, Viktor Chernov.

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

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

  The socialization of land meant, firstly, the abolition of private ownership of land, at the same time not its transformation into state property, not its nationalization, but its transformation into a public property without the right to buy and sell. Secondly, the transfer of all land to the control of central and local organs of people's self-government, from democratically organized rural and urban communities to regional and central institutions. Thirdly, the use of land was to be egalitarian labor, that is, to provide a consumer norm on the basis of the application of one's own labor, either individually or in partnership.

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

  Editions (for 1913): "Revolutionary Russia" (in 1902-1905 illegally), "People's Messenger", "Thought", "Conscious Russia", "Covenants".

  Party history

  Pre-revolutionary period

  The Socialist-Revolutionary Party began with the Saratov circle, which arose in and was in connection with the Flying Leaf group of Narodnaya Volya. When the Narodnaya Volya group was dispersed, the Saratov circle became isolated and began to act independently. In he developed the program. It was printed on a hectograph under the title “Our tasks. Basic Provisions of the Program of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. This pamphlet was published by the Union of Russian Socialist-Revolutionaries Abroad together with Grigorovich's article "Socialist-Revolutionaries and Social-Democrats". In the Saratov circle he moved to Moscow, was engaged in the issuance of proclamations, the distribution of foreign literature. The circle acquired a new name - the Northern Union of Socialist-Revolutionaries. It was led by Andrey Argunov.

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

  In April 1902, the Combat Organization (BO) of the Socialist-Revolutionaries declared itself a terrorist act against the Minister of the Interior Dmitry Sipyagin. The BO was the most conspiratorial part of the party, its charter was written by Mikhail Gotz. Over the entire history of the existence of the BO (1901-1908), over 80 people worked in it. The organization was in the party in an autonomous position, the Central Committee only gave it the task of committing the next terrorist act and indicated the desired date for its execution. The BO had its own cash desk, turnouts, addresses, apartments, the Central Committee had no right to interfere in its internal affairs. The leaders of the BO Gershuni (1901-1903) and Azef (1903-1908) (who is a secret police agent) were the organizers of the Social Revolutionary Party and the most influential members of its Central Committee.

  The period of the first Russian revolution 1905-1907

  The peasantry enjoyed special attention of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Peasant brotherhoods and unions were formed in the villages (the Volga region, the Central Chernozem Region). They managed to organize a number of local peasant protests, but their attempts to organize all-Russian peasant protests in the summer of 1905 and after the dissolution of the First State Duma failed. It was not possible to establish hegemony in the All-Russian Peasant Union and over the representatives of the peasantry in the State Duma. But there was no full confidence in the peasants: they were absent from the Central Committee, the agrarian terror was condemned, the solution of the agrarian question was “from above”.

  During the revolution, the composition of the party changed significantly. The overwhelming majority of its members were now workers and peasants. But the policy of the party was determined by the intelligentsia leadership. The number of Social Revolutionaries during the years of the revolution exceeded 60 thousand people. Party organizations existed in 48 provinces and 254 districts. There were about 2000 rural organizations and groups.

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

  During the years of the revolution of 1905-1907, the peak of the terrorist activities of the Social Revolutionaries fell. During this period, 233 terrorist attacks were carried out (among others, 2 ministers, 33 governors, in particular, the uncle of the king, and 7 generals were killed), from 1902 to 1911 - 216 assassination attempts.

  After the February Revolution

  The Socialist-Revolutionary Party actively participated in the political life of the country after the February Revolution of 1917, blocked with the Mensheviks-defencists and was the largest party of this period. By the summer of 1917, there were about 1 million people in the party, united in 436 organizations in 62 provinces, in the fleets and on the fronts of the active army.

  At the beginning of 1919, the Moscow Bureau of the AKP, and then a conference of Socialist-Revolutionary organizations operating on the territory of Soviet Russia, spoke out against any agreements both with the Bolsheviks and with "bourgeois reaction". At the same time, it was recognized that the danger from the right was greater, and therefore it was decided to abandon the armed struggle against the Soviet government. However, a group of Socialist-Revolutionaries led by the former head of Komuch Vladimir Volsky, the so-called "Ufa Delegation", which entered into negotiations with the Bolsheviks on closer cooperation, was condemned.

  To use the potential of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party in the fight against the White movement, on February 26, the Soviet government legalized the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. Members of the Central Committee began to gather in Moscow, and the publication of the central party newspaper Delo Naroda was resumed there. But the Socialist-Revolutionaries did not stop sharply criticizing the Bolshevik regime, and the persecution of the party was resumed: the publication of Dyelo Naroda was banned, and a number of active members of the party were arrested. Nevertheless, the plenum of the Central Committee of the AKP, held in April 1919, based on the fact that the party did not have the strength to wage an armed struggle on two fronts at once, urged not to resume it against the Bolsheviks yet. The plenum condemned the participation of party representatives in the Ufa State Conference, the Directory, in the regional governments of Siberia, the Urals and the Crimea, as well as in the Iasi conference of Russian anti-Bolshevik forces (November 1918), spoke out against foreign intervention, declaring that it would be only an expression "self-serving imperialist interests" the governments of the intervention countries. At the same time, it was emphasized that no agreements should be made with the Bolsheviks. The IX Council of the Party, held in Moscow or near Moscow in June 1919, confirmed the decision on the Party's renunciation of the armed struggle against the Soviet regime while continuing the political struggle against it. It was ordered to direct their efforts to mobilize, organize and put on alert the forces of democracy, so that if the Bolsheviks did not voluntarily abandon their policy, eliminate them by force in the name of "democracy, freedom and socialism".

  At the same time, the leaders of the right wing of the party, who were then already abroad, reacted with hostility to the decisions of the IX Council and continued to believe that only an armed struggle against the Bolsheviks could be successful, that in this struggle a coalition was acceptable even with non-democratic forces that could be democratized with the help of tactics "enveloping". They also allowed foreign intervention to help "Anti-Bolshevik Front".

  At the same time, the Ufa delegation called for the recognition of Soviet power and uniting under its leadership to fight the counter-revolution. This group began to publish its own weekly "People", and therefore is also known under the name of the group "People". The Central Committee of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, calling the actions of the "People" group disorganizing, decided to dissolve it, but the "People" group did not obey this decision, at the end of October 1919 left the party and adopted the name " Minority   Party   Socialist Revolutionaries".

  In Ukraine, there was the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, which separated from the AKP in April 1917, and organizations of the AKP headed by the All-Ukrainian Regional Committee. According to the instructions of the leadership of the AKP, the Ukrainian Social Revolutionaries were supposed to fight the Denikin regime, but these instructions were not always followed. So, for calls to support Denikin, the Kiev mayor Ryabtsev was expelled from the party, and for solidarity with him, the local city SR party organization was dissolved. In the territory. controlled by the Denikin regime, the SRs worked in such coalition organizations as the South-Eastern Committee of the Constituent Assembly members and the Zemstvo-City Association. The newspaper "Native Land", published in Yekaterinodar by one of the leaders of the Zemstvo-City Association Grigory Schreider, promoted tactics "enveloping" Denikin, until it was closed by the latter, and the publisher himself was not arrested. At the same time, the Social Revolutionaries, who dominated the Committee for the Liberation of the Black Sea, which led the "green" peasant movement, directed their forces primarily to the fight against Denikin and recognized the need for a united socialist front.

  In 1920, the Central Committee of the AKP called on the party to continue to wage an ideological and political struggle against the Bolsheviks, but at the same time to direct its main attention to the war with Poland and the fight against Wrangel. Party members and party organizations who found themselves in the territories occupied by the troops of Poland and Wrangel were to lead with them "revolutionary struggle by all means and methods" including terror. The Riga peace treaty, which ended the Soviet-Polish war, was estimated by the Socialist-Revolutionaries as "treacherous betrayal" Russian national interests.

  The activities of the Siberian Social Revolutionaries intensified under the influence of the victories of the Red Army over the troops of Kolchak. In organizing the anti-Kolchak forces, the Socialist-Revolutionaries used the Zemstvos. The Zemsky Congress, held in Irkutsk in October 1919, which was dominated by the Social Revolutionaries, decided to overthrow the Kolchak government. In November 1919, in Irkutsk, the All-Siberian Conference of Zemstvos and cities created the Political Center for preparing an uprising against the Kolchak regime, which was headed by F. F. Fedorovich, a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. When the Red Army approached Irkutsk, the Political Center carried out an armed uprising in late December 1919 - early January 1920 and seized power in the city, however, power in Irkutsk soon passed to the Bolsheviks. The Socialist-Revolutionaries were part of the coalition government created by the Bolsheviks in Vladivostok at the end of January 1920 - the Primorsky Oblast Zemsky Administration and the same government of the united Far Eastern Republic, formed in July 1921.

  By the beginning of 1921, the Central Committee of the AKP had actually ceased its activities. As early as June 1920, the Social Revolutionaries formed the Central Organizational Bureau, which, along with members of the Central Committee, included some prominent members of the party. In August 1921, in connection with numerous arrests, the leadership in the party finally passed to the Central Bureau. By that time, some of the members of the Central Committee, elected at the IV Congress, died (I. I. Teterkin, M. L. Kogan-Bernshtein), voluntarily left the Central Committee (K. S. Bureva, N. I. Rakitnikov, M. I. . Sumgin), went abroad (V. M. Chernov, V. M. Zenzinov, N. S. Rusanov, V. V. Sukhomlin). The members of the Central Committee of the AKP who remained in Russia were almost without exception in prisons.

  The 10th Party Council, held in Samara in August 1921, defined as the immediate task the accumulation and organization of the forces of labor democracy, the members of the party were urged to refrain from extremist actions against the Soviet government and to restrain the masses from scattered and spontaneous actions that scatter the forces of democracy. V. M. Chernov, who was at the time

  It is known that in the period following the overthrow of the monarchy, the most influential political force in Russia was the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (SR), which numbered about a million of its followers. However, despite the fact that its representatives occupied a number of prominent positions in the government of the country, and the program was supported by the majority of citizens, the Social Revolutionaries did not manage to keep power in their hands. The revolutionary year of 1917 was the period of their triumph and the beginning of tragedy.

  The birth of a new party

  In January 1902, the underground newspaper Revolutionary Russia, published abroad, informed its readers about the appearance on the political horizon of a new party, whose members call themselves social revolutionaries. It is unlikely that this event received at that moment a significant resonance in society, since at that time, structures similar to it often appeared and disappeared. Nevertheless, the creation of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party was a significant milestone in national history.

  Despite the publication of 1902, its creation occurred much earlier than announced in the newspaper. Eight years earlier, an illegal revolutionary circle had formed in Saratov, which had close ties with the local branch of the Narodnaya Volya party, which was living out its last days by that time. When it was finally liquidated by the Okhrana, the members of the circle began to act independently and two years later developed their own program.

  Initially, it was distributed in the form of leaflets printed on a hectograph - a very primitive printing device, which, nevertheless, made it possible to make the required number of prints. In the form of a brochure, this document saw the light only in 1900, published in the printing house of one of the foreign branches of the party that had appeared by that time.

  Merging together the two branches of the party

  In 1897, members of the Saratov circle, led by Andrei Argunov, moved to Moscow and in a new place began to call their organization the Northern Union of Socialist Revolutionaries. They had to introduce this geographical specification into the name, since similar organizations, whose members also called themselves socialist revolutionaries, had appeared by that time in Odessa, Kharkov, Poltava and a number of other cities. They, in turn, became known as the Southern Union. In 1904, these two branches of an essentially single organization merged, as a result of which the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, well known to everyone, was formed. It was headed by the permanent leader Viktor Chernov (his photo is presented in the article).

  

  The tasks that the Socialist-Revolutionaries set themselves

  The program of the Social Revolutionary Party had a number of points that distinguished it from most of the then existing political organizations. Among them were:

  1. The formation of the Russian state on a federal basis, in which it will consist of independent territories (subjects of the federation) that have the right to self-determination.
  2. Universal suffrage, extending to citizens who have reached the age of 20, regardless of gender, nationality and religious affiliation;
  3. Guaranteed respect for fundamental civil liberties such as freedom of conscience, speech, press, association, unions, etc.
  4. Free public education.
  5. Reducing the working day to 8 hours.
  6. The reform of the armed forces, in which they cease to be a permanent state structure.
  7. Separation of church and state.

  In addition, the program included a few more points, repeating, in essence, the requirements of other political organizations that aspired to power, as well as the Socialist-Revolutionaries. The highest organ of party power of the social revolutionaries was the Congresses, and between them all the current issues were decided by the Soviets. The main slogan of the party was the call "Land and freedom!"

  Features of the agrarian policy of the Socialist-Revolutionaries

  Of all the political parties that existed at that time, the Socialist-Revolutionaries stood out for their attitude towards solving the agrarian question and towards the peasantry as a whole. This class, the most numerous in pre-revolutionary Russia, was, in the opinion of all social democrats, including the Bolsheviks, so backward and devoid of political activity that it could only be regarded as an ally and help to the proletariat, which was assigned the role of "locomotive of the revolution."

  The Social Revolutionaries took a different view. In their opinion, the revolutionary process in Russia should begin precisely in the countryside and only then spread to the cities and industrialized regions. Therefore, in the transformation of society, the peasants were given almost the leading role.

  

  As for the land policy, here the Socialist-Revolutionaries proposed their own path, different from others. According to their party program, all agricultural land was not subject to nationalization, as the Bolsheviks called for, and not to distribution to individual owners, as the Mensheviks proposed, but to be socialized and transferred to the disposal of local self-government bodies. This way they called the socialization of the land.

  At the same time, its private possession, as well as the purchase and sale, were legally prohibited. The final product was subject to distribution, in accordance with established consumer norms, which were directly dependent on the amount of labor invested.

  Socialist-Revolutionaries during the First Russian Revolution

  It is known that the party of socialist revolutionaries (Socialist-Revolutionaries) was very skeptical about the First Russian Revolution. In the opinion of its leaders, it was not bourgeois, since this class was not able to lead the new society that was being created. The reasons for this lie in the reforms of Alexander II, who opened a wide path for the development of capitalism. They did not consider it socialist either, but came up with a new term - "social revolution".

  In general, the theorists of the social revolutionary party believed that the transition to socialism should be carried out in a peaceful, reformist way, without any social upheavals. Nevertheless, a significant number of Socialist-Revolutionaries took an active part in the battles of the First Russian Revolution. For example, their role in the uprising on the battleship Potemkin is well known.

  

  Fighting organization of the Socialist-Revolutionaries

  A curious paradox lies in the fact that with all its calls for a peaceful and non-violent path of transformation, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party was remembered primarily for its terrorist activities that began immediately after its creation.

  Already in 1902, its combat organization was created, which then numbered 78 people. Its first leader was Grigory Gershuni, then at different stages this post was occupied by Evno Azef and Boris Savinkov. It is recognized that of all the known terrorist formations of the early 20th century, this organization was the most effective. The victims of the committed acts were not only high-ranking officials of the tsarist government and representatives of law enforcement agencies, but also political opponents from among other parties.

  The bloody path of the militant organization of the Social Revolutionaries was started in April 1902 by the assassination of the Minister of the Interior D. Sipyagin and the attempt on the life of the Chief Prosecutor of the Holy Synod K. Pobedonostsev. This was followed by a series of new terrorist attacks, the most famous of which is the murder of the tsarist minister V. Plehve, carried out in 1904 by Yegor Sazonov, and the uncle of Nicholas II, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, committed in 1905 by Ivan Kalyaev.

  The peak of the terrorist activity of the Social Revolutionaries falls on 1905-1907. According to reports, the leader of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party V. Chernov and the leadership of the combat group are responsible for committing 223 terrorist attacks during this period alone, as a result of which 7 generals, 33 governors, 2 ministers and the Moscow governor-general were killed. This bloody statistics was continued in subsequent years.

  

  Events of 1917

  After the February Revolution, as a political party, the Social Revolutionaries became the most influential public organization in Russia. Their representatives occupied key positions in many newly formed government structures, and the total composition reached a million people. However, despite the rapid rise and popularity of the main provisions of their program among the population of Russia, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party soon lost political leadership, and the Bolsheviks seized power in the country.

  Immediately after the October coup, the leader of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party V. Chernov, together with members of the Central Committee, addressed an appeal to all political organizations in Russia, in which he described the actions of Lenin's supporters as madness and a crime. At the same time, at an intra-party meeting, a coordinating committee was created to organize the fight against the usurpers of power. It was headed by the prominent Socialist-Revolutionary Abram Gots.

  However, not all members of the party reacted unequivocally to what was happening, and representatives of its left wing expressed support for the Bolsheviks. From that time on, the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Party tried to put its policy into practice on many issues. This caused a split and a general weakening of the organization.

  Between two fires

  During the years of the Civil War, the Social Revolutionaries tried to fight both the Reds and the Whites, alternately entering into an alliance with one or the other. The leader of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, who at the beginning of the war declared that the Bolsheviks were the lesser of two evils, very soon began to point out the need for joint action with the White Guards and interventionists.

  Of course, none of the representatives of the main opposing sides took the alliance with the Social Revolutionaries seriously, realizing that as soon as circumstances change, yesterday's allies could defect to the camp of opponents. And there were many such examples during the war.

  

  Defeat of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party

  In 1919, wanting to make the most of the potential that the Socialist-Revolutionary Party had in itself, Lenin's government decided to legalize it in the territories under its control. However, this did not bring the expected result. The Socialist-Revolutionaries did not stop their attacks on the Bolshevik leadership and the methods of struggle resorted to by the party they led. Even the danger posed by their common enemy could not reconcile the Bolsheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries.

  As a result, the temporary truce was soon replaced by a new strip of arrests, as a result of which, by the beginning of 1921, the Central Committee of the Social Revolutionary Party had practically ceased to exist. Some of its members had been killed by that time (M. L. Kogan-Bernshtein, I. I. Teterkin, and others), many emigrated to Europe (V. V. Samokhin, N. S. Rusanov, and party leader V. M. Chernov), and the bulk were in prisons. From that time on, the Socialist-Revolutionaries, as a party, ceased to be a real political force.

  Years of emigration

  The further history of the Social Revolutionaries is inextricably linked with the Russian emigration, whose ranks were intensively replenished in the first post-revolutionary years. Once abroad after the defeat of the party, which began as early as 1918, the Social Revolutionaries were met there by their fellow party members, who settled in Europe and created a foreign department there long before the revolution.

  After the party was banned in Russia, all its surviving and free members were forced to emigrate. They settled mainly in Paris, Berlin, Stockholm and Prague. The general leadership of the activities of foreign cells was carried out by the former head of the party, Viktor Chernov, who left Russia in 1920.

  Newspapers published by the Socialist-Revolutionaries

  Which party, once in exile, did not have its own printed organ? The Social Revolutionaries were no exception. They issued a number of periodicals, such as the newspapers "Revolutionary Russia", "Modern Notes", "For the People!" and some others. In the 1920s, they managed to be smuggled across the border illegally, and therefore the material published in them was oriented towards the Russian reader. But as a result of the efforts made by the Soviet secret services, the delivery channels were soon blocked, and all newspaper circulations began to be distributed among the emigrants.

  

  Many researchers note that in the articles published in the Socialist-Revolutionary newspapers, not only the rhetoric, but also the general ideological orientation changed from year to year. If at first the party leaders stood mainly in their previous positions, exaggerating the same topic of creating a classless society in Russia, then at the end of the 30s, they openly declared the need to return to capitalism.

  Afterword

  On this, the Socialist-Revolutionaries (party) practically completed their activities. The year 1917 went down in history as the most successful period of their activity, which soon gave way to unsuccessful attempts to find their place in the new historical realities. Unable to withstand the struggle with a stronger political opponent in the face of the RSDLP (b), headed by Lenin, they were forced to leave the historical stage forever.

  However, in the Soviet Union, for many years, people who had nothing to do with it were accused of belonging to the Socialist-Revolutionary Party and propagating its ideology. In an atmosphere of total terror that gripped the country, the very word "SR" was used as a designation of the enemy and was hung as a label on obvious, and more often imaginary oppositionists for their illegal condemnation.

  Oddly enough, there have always been political parties in Russia. Of course, not in the modern interpretation, which defines a political party as a “special public organization”, the guiding goal of which is to seize political power in the country.

  Nevertheless, it is known for certain that, for example, in the same ancient Novgorod, various “Konchak” parties of Ivankovich, Mikulchich, Miroshkinich, Mikhalkovich, Tverdislavich and other rich boyar clans have long existed and constantly fought for the key position of the Novgorod mayor. A similar situation was observed in medieval Tver, where during the years of acute confrontation with Moscow there was a constant struggle between the two branches of the Tver princely house - the "Prolitov" party of the Mikulin princes, headed by Mikhail Alexandrovich and the "pro-Moscow" party of the Kashira princes, headed by Vasily Mikhailovich, and etc.

  Although, of course, in the modern sense, political parties in Russia arose rather late. As you know, the first of these were two rather radical party structures of a socialist persuasion - the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) and the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (PSR), created only at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. For obvious reasons, these political parties could only be illegal and worked under the strictest secrecy, under constant pressure from the tsarist secret police, which in those years was headed by such aces of the imperial political investigation as gendarmerie colonels Vladimir Piramidov, Yakov Sazonov and Leonid Kremenetsky.

  

  Only after the infamous Tsarist Manifesto of October 17, 1905, which for the first time granted political freedoms to the subjects of the Russian crown, did the rapid process of the formation of legal political parties begin, the number of which by the time of the collapse of the Russian Empire exceeded one hundred and fifty. True, the vast majority of these political structures were in the nature of "sofa parties" formed solely to satisfy the ambitious and career interests of various political clowns who absolutely did not play any role in the country's political process. Despite this, almost immediately after the wholesale process of the emergence of these parties, the first attempt was made to classify them.

  

  Thus, the leader of the Russian Bolsheviks Vladimir Ulyanov(Lenin) in a number of his works, such as "An attempt to classify Russian political parties" (1906), "Political parties in Russia" (1912) and others, relying on his own thesis that "the struggle of parties is a concentrated expression of the struggle classes", proposed the following classification of Russian political parties of that period:

  1) landlord-monarchist (Black Hundreds),

  2) bourgeois (Octobrists, Cadets),

  3) petty-bourgeois (Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks)

  and 4) proletarian (Bolsheviks).

  In defiance of Lenin's classification of parties, the well-known leader of the Cadets Pavel Milyukov in his pamphlet Political Parties in the Country and the Duma (1909), on the contrary, he stated that political parties are by no means created on the basis of class interests, but exclusively on the basis of general ideas. Based on this basic thesis, he proposed his own classification of Russian political parties:

  2) bourgeois-conservative (Octobrists),

  and 4) socialist (Socialist-Revolutionaries, Social-Democrats).

  Later, another active participant in the political battles of that time, the leader of the Menshevik Party Julius Zederbaum(Martov) in his famous work “Political Parties in Russia” (1917) stated that it is necessary to classify Russian political parties according to their relation to the existing government, therefore he made such a classification of them:

  1) reactionary-conservative (Black Hundreds),

  2) moderately conservative (Octobrists),

  3) liberal-democratic (cadets)

  and 4) revolutionary (Socialist-Revolutionaries, Social Democrats).

  In modern political science, there are two main approaches to this issue. Depending on the political goals, means and methods of achieving their goals, some authors ( Vladimir Fedorov) divide the Russian political parties of that period into:

  1) conservative-protective (Black Hundreds, clerics),

  2) liberal opposition (Octobrists, Cadets, Progressives)

  and 3) revolutionary-democratic (Socialist-Revolutionaries, Popular Socialists, Social Democrats).

  And their opponents Valentin Shelokhaev) - on the:

  1) monarchist (Black Hundreds),

  2) liberal (cadets),

  3) conservative (Octobrists),

  4) left (Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries)

  and 5) anarchist (anarcho-syndicalists, headless).

  Dear reader, you have probably already noticed that among all the political parties that existed in the Russian Empire, all politicians, historians and political scientists focused their attention on only a few large party structures that concentratedly expressed the entire spectrum of political, social and class interests of the subjects of the Russian crown . Therefore, it is these political parties that will be at the center of our short story. Moreover, we will begin our story with the most "left" revolutionary parties - the Social Democrats and the Socialist Revolutionaries.

  Abram Gots

  Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (AKP), or Socialist-Revolutionaries,- the largest peasant party of the populist persuasion - arose in 1901. But as early as the late 1890s, the rebirth of revolutionary populist organizations began, which were crushed by the tsarist government in the early 1880s.

  The main provisions of the populist doctrine remained virtually unchanged. However, its new theorists, above all Viktor Chernov, Nikolai Avksentiev and Abram Gots, not recognizing the very progressiveness of capitalism, nevertheless recognized its victory in the country. Although, being absolutely convinced that Russian capitalism is a completely artificial phenomenon, forcibly implanted by the Russian police state, they still devoutly believed in the theory of "peasant socialism" and considered the landed peasant community to be a ready-made cell of socialist society.

  Alexey Peshekhonov

  At the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, several large neo-populist organizations arose in Russia and abroad, including the Berne Union of Russian Socialist Revolutionaries (1894), the Moscow Northern Union of Socialist-Revolutionaries (1897), and the Agrarian Socialist League (1898). ) and the "Southern Party of Socialist Revolutionaries" (1900), whose representatives in the fall of 1901 agreed to create a single Central Committee, which included Viktor Chernov, Mikhail Gots, Grigory Gershuni and other neo-populists.

  In the first years of their existence, before the founding congress, which took place only in the winter of 1905-1906, the Socialist-Revolutionaries did not have a generally accepted program and charter, therefore their views and main program guidelines were reflected in two printed organs - the Revolutionary Russia newspaper and the journal Vestnik Rossiyskoy revolution."

  

  From the populists, the Social Revolutionaries adopted not only the basic ideological principles and attitudes, but also the tactics of combating the existing autocratic regime - terror. In the autumn of 1901, Grigory Gershuni, Evno Azef and Boris Savinkov created within the party a strictly conspiratorial and independent from the Central Committee "Combat Organization of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party" (BO AKP), which, according to updated data from historians ( Roman Gorodnitsky), during its heyday in 1901-1906, when it included more than 70 militants, committed more than 2,000 terrorist attacks that shook the whole country.

  In particular, it was then that the Minister of Public Education Nikolai Bogolepov (1901), the Ministers of Internal Affairs Dmitry Sipyagin (1902) and Vyacheslav Pleve (1904), the Ufa Governor-General Nikolai Bogdanovich (1903), the Moscow Governor-General Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich (1905), Minister of War Viktor Sakharov (1905), Moscow Mayor Pavel Shuvalov (1905), Member of the State Council Alexei Ignatiev (1906), Tver Governor Pavel Sleptsov (1906), Penza Governor Sergei Khvostov (1906), Simbirsk Governor Konstantin Starynkevich (1906), Governor of Samara Ivan Blok (1906), Governor of Akmola Nikolai Litvinov (1906), Commander of the Black Sea Fleet Vice Admiral Grigory Chukhnin (1906), Chief Military Prosecutor Lieutenant General Vladimir Pavlov (1906) and many other top dignitaries of the empire , generals, police chiefs and officers. And in August 1906, the Social Revolutionary fighters made an attempt on the life of the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Pyotr Stolypin, who survived only thanks to the immediate reaction of his adjutant, Major General Alexander Zamyatin, who, in fact, covered the prime minister with his chest, not letting the terrorists into his office.

  In total, according to a modern American researcher Anna Geifman, author of the first special monograph "Revolutionary terror in Russia in 1894-1917" (1997), more than 17,000 people became victims of the “Combat Organization of the AKP” in 1901-1911, that is, before its actual dissolution, including 3 ministers, 33 governors and vice-governors, 16 mayors, police chiefs and prosecutors, 7 generals and admirals, 15 colonels, etc.

  The legal registration of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party took place only in the winter of 1905-1906, when its founding congress took place, at which its charter, program were adopted and the governing bodies were elected - the Central Committee and the Party Council. Moreover, a number of modern historians ( Nikolay Erofeev) believes that the question of the time of the emergence of the Central Committee and its personal composition is still one of the unresolved mysteries of history.

  Nikolai Annensky

  Most likely, in different periods of its existence, the members of the Central Committee were the main ideologist of the party Viktor Chernov, "grandmother of the Russian revolution" Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya, militant leaders Grigory Gershuni, Yevno Azef and Boris Savinkov, as well as Nikolai Avksentiev, G.M. Gotz, Osip Minor, Nikolai Rakitnikov, Mark Natanson and a number of other people.

  The total number of the party, according to various estimates, ranged from 60 to 120 thousand members. The central printed organs of the party were the newspaper "Revolutionary Russia" and the magazine "Bulletin of the Russian Revolution". The main program settings of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party looked like this:

  1) the liquidation of the monarchy and the establishment of a republican form of government through the convocation of the Constituent Assembly;

  2) the granting of autonomy to all the national outskirts of the Russian Empire and the legislative consolidation of the right of nations to self-determination;

  3) legislative consolidation of basic civil and political rights and freedoms and the introduction of universal suffrage;

  4) the solution of the agrarian issue by confiscation of all landowners', appanage and monastic lands without compensation and their transfer to the full ownership of peasant and urban communities without the right to buy and sell and the distribution of land according to the equalizing labor principle (land socialization program).

  In 1906, a split occurred in the ranks of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. Two rather influential groups emerged from it, which then created their own party structures:

  1) Labor People's Socialist Party (People's Socialists, or Enes), whose leaders were Alexei Peshekhonov, Nikolai Annensky, Venedikt Myakotin and Vasily Semevsky, and 2) the "Union of Socialist-Revolutionary Maximalists", headed by Mikhail Sokolov.

  The first group of schismatics denied the tactics of terror and the program of socialization of the land, while the second, on the contrary, advocated the intensification of terror and proposed to extend the principles of socialization not only to peasant communities, but also to industrial enterprises.

  Viktor Chernov

  In February 1907, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party took part in the elections to the Second State Duma and managed to get 37 seats. However, after its dissolution and a change in the electoral law, the Social Revolutionaries began to boycott the parliamentary elections, preferring exclusively illegal methods of fighting the autocratic regime.

  In 1908, there was a serious scandal that thoroughly tarnished the reputation of the Socialist-Revolutionaries: it became known that the head of its “Combat Organization”, Yevno Azef, had been a paid agent of the tsarist secret police since 1892. His successor as head of the organization, Boris Savinkov, tried to revive its former power, but nothing good came of this idea, and in 1911 the party ceased to exist.

  

  By the way, this year many modern historians ( Oleg Budnitsky, Mikhail Leonov) also date the end of the era of revolutionary terror in Russia, which began at the turn of the 1870s–1880s. Although their opponents Anna Geifman, Sergey Lantsov) believe that the end date of this tragic "epoch" was 1918, marked by the murder of the royal family and the attempt on V.I. Lenin.

  With the outbreak of the First World War, the party again split into SR-centrists, headed by Viktor Chernov and Socialist-Revolutionaries-Internationalists (Left Socialist-Revolutionaries), led by Maria Spiridonova who supported the well-known Leninist slogan "the defeat of the Russian government in the war and the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war."

  Evgeniy SPITSYN

  Socialist revolutionary parties - Socialist Revolutionary Parties (Socialist-Revolutionaries), RSDLP (Bolsheviks), RSDLP (Mensheviks)

  Ways to solve the main issues of the revolution		Bolsheviks	Mensheviks
  1. Political system	Democratic Republic	The power of the workers and peasants, passing into the dictatorship of the proletariat	Democratic Republic
  	Maximum democratic rights and freedoms	Democracy is only for the working classes	Unconditional nature of all democratic rights and freedoms
  3. The peasant question	Elimination of landownership, its transfer to the ownership of communities and the division between peasants according to a labor or equalization norm	Nationalization of all land and its division among the peasants according to the labor or equalization norm	Municipalization of land, that is, its transfer to local authorities with subsequent lease by peasants
  4. Work question	Manufacturing communes throughout the country with broad popular self-government	The working class is the hegemon of the revolution and the creator of the new socialist society, the protection of its interests is the highest goal of the party	Protecting the interests of the working class from the arbitrariness of the capitalists, providing it with all political rights and social guarantees
  5. National question	Federation of Free Republics	The right of nations to self-determination, the federal principle of state structure	Right to cultural and national autonomy

  Liberal Democratic Parties - Union of October 17 (Octobrists) and Party of Constitutional Democrats (Kadets)

  A way to solve the main problems of Russia	Octobrists
  1. Political system	Constitutional monarchy modeled on Germany	Parliamentary monarchy modeled on England
  2. Political rights and freedoms	Maximum political rights and freedoms while maintaining a strong state order and the unity of the country	Maximum democratic rights and freedoms up to the proclamation of a republic
  3. Agrarian question	The solution of the peasant question in line with the Stolypin agrarian reform	Demand for the alienation of part of the landed estates for a ransom acceptable to the peasants
  4. Work question	Non-intervention of the state in the relationship between entrepreneurs and wage workers, the right of the latter to strike, with the exception of strategically important enterprises	Creation of conciliation chambers with the participation of the state to settle conflicts between workers and entrepreneurs, the right of workers to strike and strike
  5. National question	Preservation of a unitary Russian state with little autonomy for Poland and Finland	The program of cultural and national autonomy, which provides complete freedom of cultural development for all peoples while maintaining the territorial integrity of the country