The Russian Revolution полностью

The social program of the SRs centered on the “socialization” of land, which called for the abolition of private property in land and the transfer of its management to local organs of self-government: these were to ensure that any citizen able and willing to cultivate the land received an adequate allotment. The SRs adopted the peasant slogan of “Black Repartition”—that is, the expropriation and distribution to the communes of all privately held land. This program, which reflected the desires of the rural population of Orthodox Russia, gained the SRs the support of nearly the entire peasantry. The much more modest demands on behalf of the peasants in the SD program, and the general contempt in which the SDs held the muzhik kept that party from gaining any following in the countryside.

Although their main base of support lay in the village, the SRs did not ignore industrial workers: in their program, they described the proletariat as an essential element in the revolution and allowed for a transitional period of “proletarian revolutionary dictatorship.”⁴⁵ Unlike the SDs, the SRs did not treat the peasants and industrial workers as distinct and hostile classes. Their theoreticians, of whom Victor Chernov was the most prominent, defined classes not by the relationship to the means of production but by the source of income. By this standard, societies had only two classes: the exploited or “toilers” and the exploiters—those who earned their livelihood and those who lived off the labor of others. In the latter category they placed landlords, capitalists, officials, and clergy; in the former, peasants, workers, and themselves, the intelligentsia. A self-employed peasant was to them a “toiler” and a natural ally of the industrial worker. They were vague, however, on what to do about industrial enterprises in a post-revolutionary society and had difficulty attracting workers.

The SR Party, extremist as it was, had a still more extreme wing known as Maximalists. This minority wanted to supplement political terror with “economic terror,” by which they meant assassinations of landlords and factory owners. In practice, their strategy reduced itself to indiscriminate bombings, as illustrated by the attack on Prime Minister Stolypin’s villa in 1911 in which dozens of bystanders lost their lives. To finance their operations, the Maximalists carried out bank holdups, euphemistically called “expropriations,” which brought them hundreds of thousands of rubles. (In these operations, as we shall see, they sometimes collaborated with the Bolsheviks.) The movement had a maniacal quality, as is evident from the ideas of the Maximalist I. Pavlov. In a pamphlet published legally in Moscow in 1907, The Purification of Mankind (Ochistka chelovechestva), Pavlov argued that “exploiters” were not only a social class but a “degenerate race,” which inherited and developed beyond anything known in the animal world the vilest characteristics of the gorilla and the orangutan. Since they bequeathed these vicious traits to their own offspring, all representatives of that “race,” including women and children, had to be exterminated.⁴⁶ The SR Party formally disowned the Maximalists and the Union of Socialists-Revolutionaries Maximalists, formed in October 1906, but in practice it managed to accommodate itself to their outrages.

The SRs were loosely organized in good measure because the police, for whom prevention of terrorist acts had the highest priority, kept on infiltrating and decimating SR ranks. (According to G. A. Gershuni, the founder of the SR terrorist apparatus, for the denunciation of a member of the SR Combat Organization, the Okhrana paid a reward of 1,000 rubles, for an SR intellectual, 100, and for an SR worker, 25, but for a Social-Democrat, at most 3.⁴⁷) The party’s cells were filled with students: in Moscow they were said to constitute at least 75 percent of SR activists.⁴⁸ In the countryside, the most loyal supporters of the SRs were schoolteachers. Propaganda and agitation among the peasantry, consisting mainly of a scattering of pamphlets and leaflets, seems to have had little direct success in stimulating anti-governmental disorders, since at least until 1905 the peasants remained loyal to the notion that the land they craved would be provided by the Tsar.