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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.21: The Socialist Revolutionaries

Last time, we talked through the liberal, or at least liberalish, tradition of 19th century Russia. However thin the thread, when Tsar Nicholas the Second ascended the throne in 1894, there was a group inside the intelligentsia who hoped the arrival of a young, new monarch would bring liberal political reform: the constitution, representative government, freedom of speech and the press and assembly, something resembling the rule of law, economic modernization, social improvements. And they were as grossed out as any radical by the chauvinistic, authoritarian, and backwards triptych of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. It embarrassed them abroad, and humiliated them at home.

But those liberals were always going to want to stop well short of the places more radical leaders wanted to take Russia in the 1890s, whether these new groups of Marxist Social Democrats, or the groups we’re going to talk about today: the neo-Narodist Socialist Revolutionaries, or as everyone calls them, the SRs.

To begin this discussion, we need to back up to the late 1870s. In 1879, the terrorism question divided the once unified Land and Liberty party into two factions: the small minority who followed Plekhanov into the splinter group Black Repartition, which then wound up breaking with Narodist ideology entirely when they formed the explicitly Marxist Emancipation of Labor Group in 1884. But the majority of Land and Liberty had done what? That’s right, they embraced the terrorist campaign, redubbed themselves People’s Will, and went off to kill the tsar, finally succeeding in 1881. But what happened to them after that? Well, as I mentioned, somewhat obliquely in episodes 10.16 and 10.17, the People’s Will organization was almost immediately smashed and scattered by the vengeful fist of the Okhrana, the tsar’s new secret police service. The members of People’s Will were hunted, arrested, tried by military tribunals, and then either hanged or exiled. Those who slipped this roundup were forced into exile, taking off for Switzerland or France or Britain. A few stayed behind and dug in even harder on terrorist campaigning, but their old networks were so disrupted, and the repressive hand of the new Tsar Alexander the Third was so heavy, that it was nearly impossible to meet, publish, or plan. So their great prize for successfully killing the tsar… was the destruction of their party.

Not only were the 1880s a low point for radical Narodism in terms of literal personnel and party organization, but it also seemed like their ideas and theories were dead too. Because what was the main organizing principle behind People’s Will in those critical years, leading up to the assassination of Tsar Alexander the Second? Well, first, while they fought for the peasants and wanted to base future Russian socialism in the rural villages, the peasantry was at present too hopelessly smothered by the repressive imperial government to rise up en masse. It would only be after the political war against the tsarist state was won that the peasants could be freed and rural socialism could flourish.

Now, one of the main arguments in favor of an assassination campaign carried out by an elite cadre of revolutionary terrorists was that it would deal a fatal, physical, and psychic blow to the forces of political despotism. On the physical level, this was very much a kill the head and the body dies kind of thing. But on the psychic level, on an almost cosmic level, assassinating the tsar would prove that the tsar was just a man after all, not some divine demigod, and the superstitious peasants would then be roused from their fearful and superstitious stupor.

So, on both a practical and a spiritual level, killing the tsar was supposed to simultaneously cause the imperial apparatus to fall apart, and trigger the people to rise up. And then, People’s Will did it. They killed the tsar. And what happened? Pretty much the opposite. The repressive imperial police state only spread wider and drove deeper. And as for the peasants, they did nothing. They were seemingly as inert and apathetic as ever. Certainly there was no mass insurrection accompanying the death of Tsar Alexander the Second. Kind of disproving, and discrediting, all the strategic tactical and ideological assumptions that People’s Will had been operating under.

That leads to what might seem like a pretty straight historical story for the evolution of Russian radicalism at the end of the 19th century. The nihilism of the 1860s had led to the mass mobilization Going to the People of 1874, which failed, giving way to the elite terrorism of People’s Will, which was exposed as fatally flawed in 1881, paving the way for the exciting new brand of Russian Marxism to pick up the fallen torch in the 1890s. And this is what happened? Well, yes and no. Everything I just said definitely led a new generation of radicals to be drawn to the Marxist ideas being disseminated by the Emancipation of Labor Group, because Marxist analysis was going to make a lot of sense against the backdrop of the rapid industrialization of the Witte system.

But Narodism did not die in the 1880s. It simply went into hibernation. And when it emerged from its slumber in the 1890s, it still found a lot of enthusiastic adherents, not for the least reason that even with the rapid industrialization of the Witte system, the empire was still overwhelmingly rural, agrarian, and peasant.

The revival of the fortunes of Narodism can be traced to two coinciding events in the early 1890s. The first was the famine of 1891-1892 that we talked about in Episode 10.18. Bad harvests led to frightening scarcity and then outright famine, which resulted in the deaths of upwards of 500,000 people. The government was simply unprepared and unequipped to deal with the crisis. And while People’s Will theory had been, if we kill the tsar, maybe the people will lose faith in the tsar, there was now a new revelation: if the tsar lets the people die, then maybe the people will lose faith in the tsar.

The experience of mass starvation caused by bad luck but exacerbated by incompetent, indifferent, or outright malevolence by the tsarist imperial apparatus, it was a real blow to the regime’s perceived legitimacy. Old Narodist veterans of the 1870s working among the peasants in the 1890s remarked how much more open and receptive they were to radical critiques of the government. So Going to the People had failed in 1874, but suddenly, it was maybe an idea whose time had come by 1894.

And speaking of those Narodist veterans, they are the other coinciding event of the early 1890s. Many of those who had been tried and convicted of various crimes back in the 1870s, like those convicted in the famous Trial of the 193, were now completing their sentences of Siberian exile and returning home by the early 1890s. Then in his benevolent generosity, when Tsar Nicholas the Second ascended the throne, he marked the occasion by granting wide reaching amnesties and pardons that invited former political prisoners to rejoin society. Now, sure, many of those who returned were like, okay, that’s all in the past, Siberia sucked, I have paid for my youthful follies, and I would like to just go home now, please. But plenty of those returning had changed not one jot. And they had spent their years either in prison or in exile simply biding their time. And because they had gone into isolation, holding old Narodist ideas, they came out of that isolation, holding those same old ideas. They missed the memo that their ideas had been discredited, that Narodism and the rural peasants were old news, the future belonged to the Marxists and the urban proletariat. Now they were not insensible to the fact that conditions in the 1890s were not what they had been in the 1870s, and that past experience and new ideas would mean some of the program would need to be adapted or revised, but still. They had no intention of being merely a stepping stone on the road to Marxist proletarian revolution.

Okay. So what we are up to specifically in this week’s episode, is setting up the formation of the coming Socialist Revolutionary Party in January of 1902. So what we’re going to spend the rest of today talking about are the four distinct groups who would start coming together independently of each other in the mid 1890s, who would go on to form the core of that Socialist Revolutionary Party.

These groups formed organically and separately, often starting with one or two people deciding one day to get a little group together, maybe to educate the workers or the peasants, maybe to offer reading material and discussion space for students, maybe to try to link with like-minded members of the intelligentsia. These groups were self-starting and self-funded. They were often a mix of old veterans and young upstarts. They were never very big — seven people here, a dozen people there, fifty at most — but what they all had in common is that they were working in the old Narodist tradition. Well, that, and they were all destined to feed into the SRs.

So the first group we’ll talk about is called the Union of Socialist Revolutionaries, but they will be better known to history by the shorthand name, the Northern Union. And just as a general warning as we go forward not just for today, but for the rest of the series, all these people are going to be calling themselves a Socialist Revolutionary Union, and the Workers Union of Revolutionary socialists, and the Socialist Revolutionary Party, as opposed to the Revolutionary Socialist Party, as opposed to the Party for Revolutionary Socialism, as opposed to the Revolutionary Party of Socialists. Don’t worry too much about the names just now, just try to follow along with the ideas and the people who are participating in the movement.

So anyway, what becomes known as the Northern Union formed in 1896 in the southwestern city of Saratov, but moved its headquarters to Moscow the following year. And just to remind you of the scale here, the Northern Union at its peak is only going to have about 30 full fledged members. The organizing force behind the Northern Union was Andrei Argunov, who will be on the Central Committee of the SRs come the Revolution of 1905. Born in 1866, he was too young to have been a part of the original run of People’s Will terrorism, but in his early twenties, Argunov hooked up with the few 1880s holdouts in Tomsk, and then spent the early 1890s circulating among student groups, which led to the more formal organization of the Northern Union a few years later. When it was formed, the Northern Union represented the most unreconstructed ideological continuity with the now defunct People’s Will. Argunov would write a declaration of principles for the group in 1898 called Our Tasks, which set out their political goals and tactical approach for the revolution. Both friends and rivals alike noted that it was cribbed almost entirely from similar People’s Will declarations in the 1870s. The argument was that though the peasants, the people, would be the principle beneficiaries of the revolution, they were not yet ready to carry out the revolution themselves. They would not be able to overcome their poverty, ignorance, and apathy until the tsarist apparatus had been brought down. And the best way to attack and topple that apparatus was through violent terrorist assassination campaigns. Before there can be a social or economic revolution, there must first be a political revolution, carried out by diehard radicals inside the intelligentsia.

So this, I mean, all of this, I just said five minutes ago when I was talking about what People’s Will believed. And other groups, among them, neo-Narodists and anarchists and Marxist social democrats, would read Our Tasks and find it full of tried and failed Narodist dogmatism.

While the Northern Union was getting going, there was another developmental pattern centered especially in Ukraine, that is collectively referred to as the southern groups. Unlike Argunov and the Northern Union, the southern groups really leaned into the neo part of neo-Narodism, and they adapted their program to a.) account for the failures of the 1870s, b.) acknowledge the reality of Witte system Russia in the 1890s, and c.) grapple directly with the Marxist analysis now going mainstream inside radical circles. On the matter of terrorism, they either tried to avoid directly taking a stand, or coming down firmly in opposition. Terrorism and assassination might be viscerally exciting, but it had not, and would not, get the job done.

The southern groups were also recalculating the immediate revolutionary potential of the peasants. While the old recycled People’s Will dogma that the Northern Union was spouting said they can’t be activated until the tsar has been toppled, the southern group suspected that things had changed, the times have changed, and that activating the peasants was not only possible but necessary to carry out a socialist revolution in Russia. And they also agreed that a sure path to appealing to the workers and the peasants was to focus on addressing their immediate concerns and grievances, and then helping them alleviate those immediate concerns and grievances.

But just as the southern groups criticized the Northern Union for reheating spoiled potatoes, the Northern Union criticized the southern groups for splitting off from Narodism entirely, this isn’t neo-Narodism, this is something else entirely. For example, one of the big features of Narodism was a desire to either head off or leapfrog over industrial capitalism. And the southern groups tended to accept the Marx’s position that capitalism was coming, and that the urban proletariat might very well serve as the advanced guard of the next revolution. On top of this heresy, they added another: that willingness to talk about and improve living and working conditions was a break with the core beliefs of both Narodism and Bakuninist anarchism. Those guys wanted to reject capitalism root and branch, and not sap the revolution of its vitality by marginally improving the workers lives in exchange for tacitly accepting this new capitalist system. Putting padding on the chains does not break the chains.

But the southern groups were not closet Marxists. In fact, they had more faith in the rural peasantry than the Northern Union did. They still believed that the future of Russia was agrarian socialism, and that the failure of the Going to the People should not be taken as permanent proof that a revolutionary army would never come marching out of the rural countryside. When they looked around in the mid 1890s, they noted that conditions had changed. And there were two new classes who provided an excellent opportunity to more efficiently and productively focus recruitment, propaganda, and education efforts on the peasants. First, there was the so-called rural intelligentsia, and second, there was that large subset of the growing industrial working class who regularly returned home to their native villages. Neither of those classes had really existed back in the 1870s, but now they did, and now they could be used.

As to the first class, this rural intelligentsia, the zemstvo wound up being the factory that produced them. Remember, the zemstvo were focused on creating schools and hospitals and health services and improving local infrastructure. So this drew out to more rural areas educated professionals, who used to be found only in the bigger cities: teachers, lawyers, engineers, doctors, and so forth. And then, especially thanks to the educational improvements of the 1870s and 1880s, you saw a new generation growing up much better educated than their parents. Now obviously, many people in this rural intelligentsia group are going to wind up mostly in political sympathy with the liberal zemstvo constitutionalists that we talked about last week, but there were plenty with more radical ambitions, especially among the teachers. They would start their own little reading discussion and educational circles. Partly this was to alleviate boredom, but partly it was out of real zeal. And you would see things like little lending libraries get organized that allowed the increasingly literate local population to access new and interesting ideas. And one of the great lessons learned of the failed Going to the People was that the people had not known or trusted the people who went to the people. But the rural intelligentsia was engaged with far more permanent cohabitation, and they were identified as the perfect bridge between the elite revolutionary leadership still based in the capital cities and the mass of peasants they hoped one day to organize and lead.

The other group that this elite revolutionary leadership realized had potential was that semi-seasonal labor force that moved back and forth between industrial labor sites, like factories and mines and railroad projects, and their home villages. If you were a socialist revolutionary organizer, you could maneuver your way into one of these mass concentrations of industrial workers that we talked about at the end of episode, 10.18, on the Witte system, and find a very receptive audience, an audience whose minds had been opened by the general terribleness of their working conditions. Then you could explain to them your theory of what socialist revolution would look like and they would carry that message back to their friends and families in the home villages, ideas that were now being delivered not by strangers who just showed up one day and started saying, hey, you know what? Down with the tsar. They heard it from their cousin, or their sister, or their best friend. And with a little luck, when those workers then returned to their factories, the people left behind might find a radical member of the rural intelligentsia lurking around ready to talk more about all of these interesting new ideas and further foster revolutionary consciousness.

So this was a pretty exciting realization, and it made the southern groups more convinced that right now, today, they should think of the peasants as a force that could be mobilized. Now, as I’ve said, these groups are not very big, and they would still have to be based in the cities focused mostly on the urban workers, but they could create a social web that would spread ideas. And when the time was right, a revolutionary army could come marching out of the rural countryside. Now this wasn’t going to happen overnight, but the path was clear, and the heart of what is going to become socialist revolutionary ideology, started beating.

The third pillar of the future SRs grew out of a worker education circle in Minsk that was dubbed the Workers’ Party for the Political Emancipation of Russia. Founded in 1895, the Workers’ Party for the Political Emancipation of Russia was unique in that it was specifically focused on the jewish community, a community that held its own unique position inside the Russian Empire. Navigating as they did between the antisemitic assumptions of the tsarist authorities, that the jews did not really fit into a system of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, and the antisemitic assumptions of many revolutionary Marxists, and populists and anarchists, that the Jews were greedy parasites, adversaries, not allies in the coming revolution. But that said, this jewish centered workers’ party operated a lot like the Northern Union did in the tradition of terroristic Narodism and anarchism. They believed that first and foremost, the revolutionary task was to overthrow the tsar. What better way to fight the encroaching tyranny of capitalism than overthrowing the state, which backed up those capitalists with the force of the police and the army and an array of anti-labor laws? So the Workers’ Party for the Political Emancipation of Russia and the Northern Union were largely in agreement about both the task and the methods of revolution.

One of the key organizers of the Workers’ Party was an old veteran of the 1870s, who was among those leaders now returning from a long period of political exile. They had in fact spent the last 20 years bouncing around between prisons, penal labor camps, and supervised exile. I am speaking of Yekaterina Breshkovskaya, a revolutionary stalwart on her way to earning the nickname Babushka, the Grandmother.

Born in 1844 into a well-to-do land and serf owning family. Breshkovskaya was 17 years old when the Emancipation Decree was issued in 1861. She enthusiastically helped her father navigate the logistics of freeing the family serfs, and took it upon herself to organize education and literacy programs. Two years later, she followed a normal social path by marrying a landowning magistrate, but that was a very short-lived experiment with normalcy. She left her husband two years later and moved to Kiev with her sister and a friend named Maria Kolenkina. Upon arrival, the three of them set up house and got super into Bakuninist anarchism, meeting at this point a young 20 year old named Pavel Axelrod. Now her sister appears to have died young, but in 1874 Breshkovskaya and Maria Kolenkina of course went to the people. They were however soon tipped off that they might be arrested and Kolenkina went home, but Breshkovskaya simply bounced to other villages. Eventually though, she was arrested. While trying to pass a checkpoint dressed as a peasant, she failed to act the part and show the instinctive deference expected from a peasant woman. She blew her own cover, and was arrested.

So now she’s in jail, and then she wound up as one of the 193 in the famous Trial of the 193. When it was her turn to stand accused, she gave a defiant speech declaring that she did not recognize the court’s authority over her and that yes, she was a socialist and that yes, she was a revolutionary and she was damn proud of it. The court of course, recognized its own authority over her, and unlike most other arrested women who were acquitted and set free, Breshkovskaya was given five years penal labor in Siberia. And I have seen it claimed that she was the first woman in Russia sentenced to prison labor for political crimes.

And now I must break this story, so that we can tie ourselves back to some big drama from previous episodes, because after the sentencing Breshkovskaya’s old friend, Maria Kolenkina resolved on a plan to murder the prosecutor in revenge. And Maria got together with one of her new friends to plot a double assassination, and that new friend was… Vera Zasulich. So yes, when I talked about Zasulich’s comrade in the murder conspiracy, that was Maria Kolenkina. This is a very small world we’re talking about here. Anyway, while Zasulich was able to get her shot off, Kolenkina was not, and instead she was arrested and sentenced herself to 10 years in Siberia.

But getting back to Breshkovskaya: after a couple of years, her sentence was reduced from penal labor to mere exile, and she immediately attempted to flee the country. But the attempt failed, and so she got four more years hard labor. After completing that sentence, she was back to living in mere exile again, when an American journalist came through in 1885 and Breshkovskaya gave an interview where she said that maybe she would die in exile, maybe her children would die in exile, maybe her grandchildren would die in exile, but someday it would all be worth it. This interview made her a minor celebrity among unionists and radicals and progressive liberals in the English speaking world, though as it turned out, neither she nor her children nor her grandchildren died in exile. In 1896, she was released as part of a general amnesty that accompanied the formal coronation of Nicholas the Second. Now well past 50 years old, she returned home so full of thankfulness at the amnesty that she… went right back to organizing for a socialist revolution, this time in Minsk.

Her partner in crime during this period was future inner circle SR leader Grigory Gershuni. Gershuni was 25 years younger than Breshkovskaya, but they formed a working revolutionary partnership with Breshkovskaya as the dynamic, charismatic, passionate living witness to the indomitable spirit of revolutionary will, then once the audience was fired up, Gershuni would follow in her wake and handle the practical logistics of organizing and establishing groups and communication between them. Their partnership made the Workers’ Party for the Political Emancipation of Russia one of the most dedicated and well organized inside Russia, and though even at its peak there were never more than 60 full-time members, they would be one of the backbones of the coming SR coalition.

The fourth and final group we need to talk about today are those not in Russia at all. Because if you had been in People’s Will when the reactionary hammer came down in 1881, and you managed to escape arrest and execution or exile, you invariably wound up fleeing abroad, and settling in Russian émigré enclaves, usually in Switzerland or Paris or London. As so often happens with communities of exiled radicals, as we’ve seen going all the way back to the post 1848 émigré waters that Marx and Engels and Bakunin swam in, these exile groups continued to publish pamphlets and newspapers that focused as much on prosecuting beefs and rivalries amongst themselves as the larger project of socialist revolution. Everyone was pushing their own idiosyncratic vision for the revolutionary future even as that revolutionary future seemed further away than ever.

The most important of these groups came together in Paris, where one of the old deans of Russian populism, Pyotr Lavrov, had moved after his time in Switzerland. Lavrov, remember, had been an influential Narodist theorist going all the way back before the Going to the People, and he was as old an old timer as they came. In the mid 1890s, he was enjoying something of a personal renaissance after the failure of People’s Will style quick terrorism made Lavrov’s pitch for slow and steady education seem much wiser in retrospect. So in the early 1890s, Lavrov and a few other old exiled luminaries form their own group of veterans. Now that conditions in Russia seem to be improving, they hoped to form a kind of Narodist senior leadership in exile, who could observe and direct their younger comrades who were making good headway back home.

But though voices were listened to and their service was respected, they suffered from the same delusion that many émigré groups abroad suffer in all times in places: namely, that while they considered themselves to be the leaders of the movement, the people on the ground back home didn’t know them, and certainly weren’t going to take orders from them. The leaders in Russia saw themselves as the leaders, and they saw the émigrés serving merely as ambassadors and fundraisers, not as like, the central committee of the revolution. This disconnect is shown clearly in that one of the principle preoccupations of those leaders inside Russia was how to get their own printing presses and newspapers going, because the literature being smuggled in from abroad was so thoroughly out of touch and disconnected from realities in Russia, it was just all around unhelpful.

So the émigrés are going to form the fourth group, the fourth pillar of what becomes the SRs. And by the late 1890s, our future socialist revolutionaries are coming back to life like budding little shoots after a long winter. But as they came back to life, they would find themselves in direct competition with a new species of revolutionary that they had not had to contend with back in the 1870s, and that was Marxist Social Democrats.

And next week will be a very important episode in the Revolutions podcast, because we will be introducing two of the most important members of the energetic, younger generation of Russian Marxists. So join me next week when I finally introduce you to Lenin and Krupskaya.