We shall deal with the Social-Democratic Party at length elsewhere. Here it will be sufficient to point out certain features of that party that were to have political consequences in the early years of the century. Unlike the SRs, who divided society into “exploiters” and “exploited,” the SDs defined classes in relation to the means of production, and regarded the industrial working class (“proletariat”) as the only truly revolutionary class. The peasants, with the possible exception of those without access to communal land, they considered “petty bourgeois” and, as such, reactionary. On the other hand, to the SDs the “bourgeoisie” was a temporary ally in the common struggle against the autocracy, and capitalism was both inevitable and progressive. The SDs disparaged terror on the grounds that it diverted attention from the main immediate task of the socialists, that of organizing workers, although they benefited considerably from it.
The social background of the leaders as well as the rank and file of the two socialist parties showed no significant differences.49 Their leadership was drawn from the gentry and the middle class—that is, from the same social milieu as that of the liberal party. The SRs had in their top ranks a surprising number of sons of millionaires, among them V. M. Zenzinov, Abraham Gots, and I. I. Fundaminskii.50 For all their dedication to the peasantry, the SRs admitted no peasants into their directing organs, and the SDs, the self-proclaimed party of the working class, allowed very few manual workers into their top ranks.51 In times of unrest (1905–6 and 1917), both parties relied heavily on rural immigrants to the cities, uprooted peasants who had acquired only the most superficial qualities of city dwellers. Psychologically and economically insecure, some of these peasants flocked to the socialists, while others joined the “Black Hundred” gangs that terrorized students and Jews. According to the Social-Democrat P. P. Maslov:
Essentially the activity of local SR groups differed little from that of the SDs. The organizations of both parties usually consisted of small groups of
Russian liberals belonged only partly to the ranks of the intelligentsia. They did not share the basic philosophical premise of the radicals—that is, the belief in the perfectibility of man and society. Their stated objectives were not different from those of Western liberals. In their strategy and tactics, however, the Russian liberals drew very close to the radicals: as Paul Miliukov, their leader, liked to boast, their political program “was the most leftist of all those advanced by analogous groups in Western Europe.”53 Ivan Petrunkevich, another leading Kadet, thought that Russian “liberals, radicals, and revolutionaries” were distinguished not by political objectives but by temperament.54
This left-wing tendency was dictated by two considerations. The liberals, appealing to the mass electorate, had to compete with radical parties, which also stood to the left of their Western European counterparts, making the most extreme and Utopian promises to the electorate. It was a challenge they had to meet. To steal the thunder from the socialists, the liberals adopted a radical social program, which included a demand for the expropriation of large landed estates (with compensation at “fair” rather than market prices), as well as Church and state properties, for distribution to the peasants.* Their platform also called for a comprehensive program of social welfare. They would turn a deaf ear to counsels of moderation, afraid of “compromising” themselves in the eyes of the masses and losing out to the socialists.
Even more compelling were tactical reasons. To wrest from the autocracy first a constitution and a legislative parliament and then parliamentary democracy, the liberals required leverage. This they found in the threat of revolution. In 1905–7 and then again in 1915–17, they urged the monarchy to make political concessions to them as a way of avoiding a much worse fate. The party maintained discreet silence in regard to SR terror, which its liberal principles should have caused it to condemn outright.
The political practice of the Kadets thus displayed a troublesome ambivalence—dread of revolution and exploitation of the revolution—and proved a gross miscalculation: playing with the revolutionary threat contributed not a little to promoting the very thing the liberals most wished to avoid. But this they would realize only after the event, when it was too late.
