The Agrarian Policy of the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party
From its Origins through the Revolution of 1905–1907

In this study the author traces the development of SR agrarian policy in the party's formative years.

Maureen Perrie (Author)

9780521081153, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 18 September 2008

236 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.4 cm, 0.31 kg

The Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) party gained an overall majority in the election to the Russian Constituent Assembly, which was dissolved by the Bolsheviks in January 1918. The SRs derived the bulk of their electoral support from the peasantry, and the gulf between the predominantly urban Bolshevik party and the rural masses was to create immense problems for the Soviet government in the 1920s, culminating in the horrors of forced collectivization. The SRs offered an alternative vision of the Russian peasant's path to socialism. They were closer to the peasantry than any other revolutionary party, and more aware of the problems involved in implementing a socialist transformation of Russian agriculture. In this study the author traces the development of SR agrarian policy in the party's formative years, from the period of disillusionment which followed the failure of the Populist 'movement to the people' of the 1870s, through the revolutionary years 1905–7, to the subsequent reaction under Stolypin.

Part I. From Populism to the SR party (1881–1901): 1. The Populist legacy
2. The first peasant Brotherhood
3. The Agrarian-Socialist League
4. Rural propaganda in Saratov guberniya
5. The party and the League
Part II. The campaign for the peasantry (1902–1904)
6. The peasant movement of 1902
7. The SR Peasant Union
8. The problem of cadres
9. Agrarian terrorism
Part III. The revolution of 1905
10. The party, the peasantry and the revolution
11. The nature of the peasant movement
Part IV. The aftermath of revolution (1906–1908): 12. The party approves its programme
13. Splits in the party
14. The SR agrarian programme in the first two Dumas
15. The commune, socialisation and the Stolypin reforms
16. Party activity in the countryside
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: General & world history [HBG]