The Socialist-Revolutionary Party, formed in 1902, was, in word and deed, the most radical, with a penchant for anarchism and syndicalism and an abiding commitment to terrorism.42 The Social-Democrats founded their party at a clandestine congress in Minsk in 1898. The police, however, got wind. of the meeting and arrested the participants. The Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Rossiiskaia Sotsial-Demokraticheskaia Rabochaia Partiia, or RSDRP) came into existence five years later at its Second Congress, held in Belgium and England.
The liberals formed their own Constitutional-Democratic Party (also known as the Party of National Freedom) in October 1905.
All these parties were led by
Russian liberalism was dominated by intellectuals with a pronounced left-wing orientation: its complexion was radical-liberal. The Constitutional-Democrats, or Kadets as they were popularly known, espoused the traditional liberal values: democratic franchise, parliamentary rule, liberty and equality of all citizens, respect for law. But operating in a country in which the overwhelming majority of the population had little understanding of these imported ideas and the socialists were busy inciting revolution, they felt it necessary to adopt a more radical stance.
The Socialist-Revolutionary Party was the elder of the two leading socialist parties, since it could trace its origins to the People’s Will. Its platform had three main planks: anti-capitalism, terrorism, and socialization of land. Following the Socialists-Revolutionaries of the 1870s and 1880s, the SRs espoused the theory of “separate path.” They could not entirely ignore the spectacular growth in Russia after 1890 of capitalism in its industrial and financial forms, but they argued that this was an artificial and transient phenomenon, that by its very success undermined itself, laying waste the rural economy, its principal market. They allowed the “bourgeoisie” some role in the revolutionary process; on the whole, however, they considered it loyal to the autocracy. Russia would be liberated by armed action of the masses in the cities and villages.
Since they did not believe that the Russian bourgeoisie would lead or even join in the political struggle, the task devolved on the intelligentsia. This mission it could fulfill best by acts of political terrorism which had the same objective as that formulated by the People’s Will—that is, undermining the prestige of the government in the eyes of the population and encouraging it to rebellion. Terror occupied the central plank in the SR program. To the SRs it was not only a political tactic but a spiritual act, a quasi-religious ritual, in which the terrorist took life but paid for it with his own. SR literature contains curiously barbaric paeans to the “holy cause,” the “creative ecstasy,” and the “highest peak of human spirit,” which found expression, it was said, in the spilling of blood.43 Terrorist operations were directed by the conspiratorial SR Combat Organization (Boevaia Organizatsiia), which “sentenced” government officials to “execution.” But local SR cells and individual members also engaged in assassinations on their own initiative. The first act of political terror directed by the SRs was the murder in 1902 of the Minister of the Interior, D. S. Sipiagin. Subsequently, until crushed in 1908–9, the SR Combat Organization perpetrated hundreds of political murders.
Its daring terrorist undertakings, which often ended with the death of the terrorist, won the SRs much admiration in oppositional circles, including those formally opposed to terrorism. The Social-Democrats, who rejected this tactic, suffered serious defections to their rivals, reputed to be “real” revolutionaries.44
