This week’s episode is brought to you by Bombas. How often do you think about your socks? If you’re like I used to be, not much. But I recently discovered socks that changed the way I’ll think about socks forever. They’re called Bombas and they really are great. They’re made from super soft, natural cotton, and every pair comes with arch support, a seamless toe, and a cushioned foot bed that’s comfy, but not too thick.
There’s also a ton of colors and patterns and lengths and styles to choose from, and I’m personally particularly pleased with these kids’ socks that have grippers on the bottom, which are perfect for running around small Paris apartments with hardwood floors. And as a bonus, for every pair of Bombas you buy, they will donate one pair to charity.
So buy your Bombas at bombas.com/revolutions today, and you will get 20% off your first purchase. That’s bombas.com/revolutions for 20% off.
~dramatic music swells~
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.
Episode 10.30: The SRs
We spent the last two episodes tracing the unification of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party under the banner of Marxist orthodoxy, and then we left them as they entered their post-unification de-unification phase as they split it into the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. This week, we are going to trace a similar line of unification for the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, AKA the SRs.
The SRs were that narodist alternative to the Social Democrats inside the still very fluid revolutionary underground, where different parties representing different ideologies were competing for the hearts and minds of potential young radicals. So the SRs grew up right alongside, and in rivalry with, the Social Democrats that we’ve been talking about the last few weeks, though their post-unification de-unification phase was not as immediate or as abrupt as it was for the Social Democrats,
So, to reorient yourself, it may be helpful to go back and listen to episodes 10.21 and the back half of episode 10.27, because that’s what I’m building off of here today.
But where we basically left off with the SRs is that around 1900, there were a couple of stable narodist organizations floating around in Russia and in the émigré communities of Europe. There was the Northern Union, who most explicitly carry the legacy of People’s Will, believing that an elite vanguard of terrorists must launch a violent political revolution that will free the people of Russia, but that we cannot count on the people of Russia to rise up themselves because they are hopelessly ignorant and backwards.
Then there were the southern groups, who extended across a span from Ukraine to the Volga River. The southern groups now believed that a combination of better rural education, the famine of 1891, and the impact of the Witte System had left the Russian peasantry very receptive to radicalization. They could, in fact, be counted on to rise up, that they had revolutionary potential right now here today.
Now like their northern comrades, the southern group also preached political revolution as being the first necessary step to economic socialization, but they were far more suspicious of the efficacy of terrorism, which they felt was a strategy that had long since been discredited. The original People’s Will had successfully killed the tsar, and the result had been smothering reaction, not liberating revolution. To which their northern comrades could easily reply well, you’re arguing we try going to the people again, which has never worked and will never work.
But though these differences of opinion existed, they all did come out of the same narodist tradition. All of them sought the overthrow of the tsar, and believed that the revolutionary future of Russia was all about agrarian socialism. After all, even with the undeniable impact of the Witte System and the advance of modern industrial progress, Russia was still overwhelmingly rural, and the Russian population still engaged in agricultural activity. But perhaps most importantly, they shared common rivals: they were not liberals, or unionists, or legal Marxists, and they were not, perish the thought, Social Democrats. So the various socialist revolutionary leaders inside Russia agreed that despite their own differences, it would be better to come into alliance with one another than to not. This was both to advance what common agenda they did have, and form a united front to prevent potential recruits from being taken in by the Social Democrats on the one hand, or settling for weak tea liberal reformism as among the other.
So over the winter of 1901-1902, the leaders of the Northern Union and the southern groups came together and formed this new thing they called the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries.
Now joining the new SR party as its third principal pillar was that Worker’s Party for the Political Liberation of Russia that we talked about back in episode 10.21. This was the group founded by Grigory Gershuni and old Breshkovskaya, the babushka of revolution, who did their work among the Jewish laborers. Their focus on the Jewish communities put them in competition with both the Marxist Jewish Labor Bund, and the protos-Zionists, who were pitching a vision of United Jewish nationalism. I mean if you were a Jewish worker in the Russian Empire at this point, there were lots of groups competing for your attention and loyalties. But Gershuni was noted by friends and enemies alike as an incredibly charismatic proselytizer and organizer, while Breshkovskaya’s undeniable revolutionary credentials and her own fiery charisma made them very successful among those they preached to. Now the program of the Workers’ Party was similar to the Northern Union: staging a quick and violent political revolution should be the main work of the party. And wherever Gershuni and Breshkovskaya planted seeds, we will find later hotbeds of SR maximalism.
So with this new nucleus of an SR party having formed inside Russia, they then pursued unification with the larger narodist community in exile; Both old veterans of the 1870s, and younger émigrés who had departed Russia in the 1890s And this was, again, both about improving their ability to actually stage the revolution they all wanted, and to form a united firewall that would stop the expansion of the Social Democrats, who seemed to be insisting among other things that Russia must undergo a period of bourgeois capitalist rule, which seemed crazy and not a little bit counterproductive to the project of revolution.
So the SR leadership inside Russia deputized Gershuni in late 1901 to leave Russia and meet with potential émigré allies to pitch them on the idea of forming one single party to unite them all. But while this was a successful trip, it was not a wholly successful trip. Gershuni did meet enthusiastic supporters of the idea, of including Victor Chernov, who we talked about at the end of episode 10.27, and who is emerging — right now, basically — as the main theoretical architect of SR ideology. Chernov had now settled in as an émigré and was excited by the existence of this new united party inside Russia, so Chernov and his collaborators abroad agreed to help facilitate and edit the publication of a newspaper called Revolutionary Russia, which had been founded by Andre Argunov, one of the main Northern Union leaders, and which would now serve as the single national paper of the SR Party, putting it in direct competition with the orthodox Marxist newspaper Iskra.
But Gershuni found other immigrant groups more circumspect. As you will recall from the end of episode 10.27, most of the old veteran narodist groups had gotten together literally at the grave side of Pyotr Lavrov, and agreed to form a united League of Socialist Revolutionaries. But these older veterans were not as thrilled by the announcement of this new SR Party inside Russia, and they were not thrilled for three detectable reasons: first, they were old. They had seen this all before. They were skeptical that the united party could actually survive under constant police repression inside Russia. Plenty of the league’s members had fled into exile specifically because the police had so effectively crushed People’s Will back in the 1880s, so they were not prepared to commit to what may be just another disappointing flash in the pan.
Second — and we’ll talk more about this in a second — they had theoretical reservations about some of the ideas this new party seemed interested in pursuing. Chernov and the southern groups were clearly looking to revive something like the Going to the People movement, which if they were skeptical about the chances of an SR Party surviving in Russia, they thought going to the people was downright impossible. That was a strategy that had been tried, and was amongst the most embarrassing failures of the whole Russian revolutionary tradition.
But third, you cannot deny the power of personality and ego sensitivity. The old guard émigrés believed they had earned the right to not simply join, participate, or affiliate with the new party, but to lead that new party. Merely joining as the émigré wing of something was not what they had dreamed of for themselves.
But while the league remained aloof, Gershuni did return to Russia bearing the good news that Chernov and some other exiles, whose names I won’t trouble you with, were now on board, and the party inside Russia now had connections to émigré groups abroad. Which meant access to support and financing and resources from across Europe.
But as a new SR central committee came together to try to advance their common interests, they had to grapple with two big differences of opinion about what to do and how to do it. Now one of these issues I have already brought up plenty of times, because it’s an issue that’s just not going to go away: what to do about the peasants? Are we doing this for them, or with them and by them, who do we even mean? When we say “the people” or “the peasants,” are we talking about one undifferentiated mass, or are there in fact important class distinctions inside “the people” that we need to take into account?
But the other big issue was a matter of tactics, specifically the question of terrorism. Do we do terrorism or not? And if we do do it, who do we target, when do we target them, how do we target them, and why do we target them? Opinion inside the SR leadership ranged from terrorism is a counterproductive distraction, to terrorism is our primary purpose. So, they’re going to have to work that out.
First we will turn to the peasants, and for that we will turn to Victor Chernov, who was one of the ones arguing that times had changed, and there was a great deal of revolutionary potential inside the Russian peasantry. Now he was not alone in this opinion of course. Old Breshkovskaya reported after her return to Russia from 20 years in exile that she found the peasants of the 1890s far more advanced than where she had left them in the 1870s. They were better educated, more literate, and best of all, openly dissatisfied with the realities of life in their post-emancipation villages, especially due to the fact that they still had to pay those hated redemption payments. But the population had also been growing rapidly over the past 30 years while the amount of available land had stayed pretty much the same, so many peasants were forced into becoming landless wage laborers, and they found their wages depressed by the glut of available labor.
Now if you will also recall, I briefly mentioned in episode 10.26 that Sergei Witte was hoping to deal with this problem of over-population by enticing people to hop on the Trans-Siberian Railway and resettle in the far east. Chernov and the SRs hoped to deal with the problem by having the people rise up seize all the land that was still being held by the parasitic nobility, and redistributing that land equitably.
But that brings us to this question of what we mean by “the people” and “the peasants.”
Now, back in the 1870s, and the days of People’s Will, it was taken for granted that “the people” whose will they were doing was just one thing. But more sophisticated analysis in the intervening years had revealed that this was not actually the case: the arrival of Marxism in Russia really helped shed a light on this, though I should note for the record that Pyotr Tkachev, doyen of elite vanguard party revolution, had already pointed out to everyone that there was a big difference between rich peasants and poor peasants. But, the realities of post-emancipation landownership and the arrival of Marxist theory combined to make the class distinction out in the rural areas more obvious.
Now the prevailing theory of the Russian Social Democrats — that is, Plekhanov and Lenin and Iskra — was that the peasants were of two types: those who owned land, and those who did not. The former were classified as bourgeois and the latter they classified as a rural proletariat. In this telling, both types of peasants would be united in the first democratic revolution aimed at tearing down the last vestiges of medieval privilege. Rich peasants and poor peasants alike had an interest in throwing off the shackles of the old aristocracy. This would then usher in a period of agrarian capitalism that would see the richer bourgeois peasants expand their private holdings and improve the profitability of their growing commercial estates. And this would at the same time transform the majority of the rural population into landless wage laborers. These landless wage laborers would then either migrate to the factories and swell the ranks of the urban industrial proletariat, or stay behind, and swell the ranks of a new agricultural rural proletariat. Those who stayed behind would then join in the second socialist revolution by attacking the rural bourgeoisie, the rich peasants. They would see as the means of production, which is to say the land and the tools and the farm equipment, and socialize the agricultural sector of the economy. Chernov however disputed this analysis, and instead differentiated three types of peasants: there were the landless wage workers, yes, and the rich peasants who owned a lot of land and hired those landless wage workers and exploited their labor for profit, yes, but at the moment the vast majority of Russians were neither of those things. Most of them were families who worked a small plot of land for themselves. Now sure, thanks to post emancipation economic reforms, they technically owned the property, which according to the orthodox Marxist interpretation meant they owned the means of production and were thus bourgeois, but Chernov said the important thing is that they work these plots for themselves. In Chernov’s view, which was about to become one of the defining points of SR ideology, the key issue was not whether or not you own the land, but whether or not your income was principally drawn from the exploitation of labor, which was not true in the case of this middle rank of small hold independent farmers. Now the Social Democrats said that anybody who owns their own plot of land would be ranked among the reactionary petty bourgeoisie when the revolution came, and Chernov said, no, they are just as downtrodden and exhausted and exploited as the landless agricultural proletariat. They’re living under the tyranny of bankers in the oppressive competition of their wealthy neighbors, and when the revolution comes, they would join the revolution, not the reaction.
But both the SRs and Social Democrats agreed that the richer peasants were a big concern. And though the definition of the word at this point is still vague and unrefined, we call these richer peasants the kulaks. Now eventually the word kulak will come to have a specific administrative definition that had bloody consequences when Stalin implemented de-kulakization in the first Five Year Plan, but for now we can define them as peasant families who had successfully navigated the economics of the post-emancipation world. They had gathered up a little investment capital, speculated in land, successfully expanded commercial operations. They often worked in conjunction with the experts employed by the zemstvos to improve agricultural production. The kulaks employed modern farming techniques, brought in veterinarians to care for their animals, they consulted soil and crop experts, all of which made them rich and successful. Or at least richer and more successful than their neighbors, who were now employed as hired wage workers on kulak lands.
But we shouldn’t go too far yet in talking up kulak wealth and prosperity. They had not grown to the same scale as the old noble estates, whose far greater holdings the kulak families eyed with a mix of envy, resentment, and ambition. And this obvious mix of envy, resentment, and ambition led SRs and Social Democrats alike to assume that the kulaks would be on board with any revolution aimed at overthrowing the feudal lords, because that would open up land to be privately acquired and further developed.
The concern for Chernov though, was that if the kulaks were allowed to take the lead in such a revolution, that they would then turn around and short circuit the socialist revolution. Thus, when he received reports that these more prosperous kulak families were among the most eager audiences for revolutionary literature, he was as vexed at the implications as he was pleased by the fact that he had an audience. The kulaks could not be allowed to bear the standard of socialist revolution because it would never be in good faith.
So who then could they trust to lead the revolution in the rural areas? Now since the villagers were as hostile as ever to urban intellectuals showing up one day preaching revolution, this is when the SRs really landed on the possibility of recruiting inside that rural intelligentsia, and specifically targeting the village teachers, who ever after became a kind of quasi-mythic ideal SR revolutionary. These teachers were educated, connected to the people, and as members of the intelligentsia, were off to one side from the direct class conflict that would be coming with the revolution. So the village teachers were the perfect mediator between the urban intelligentsia who led the SRs, and the rural peasants who they hoped would fill the rank and file of an SR army. It would take time to build these connections and mediate the differences between them, but it could be done. And it should be done.
Now as these theories were being developed, there was this whole other wing of the SRs that believed it was all just a pointless retread of Going to the People, it was doomed to failure. But then proponents of peasant agitation received a startling gift that proved indeed what they had previously only been speculating about in theory.
The harvests of 1901 had been very poor, and in the spring of 1902, famine conditions prevailed across Ukraine and Southern Russia. Now it wasn’t as bad as the Great Famine from ten years earlier, but it still led to angry hostility aimed at local lords, who were assumed to be hoarding food and grain. So in the spring of 1902, peasant mobs spontaneously started ransacking noble estates. Now there was almost no physical violence, these weren’t lynch mobs, but they did seize all food, supplies, grain, and equipment that they could lay their hands on. And then they would burn the manor house down, reasoning that if the hated local lord had no home to live in, that they wouldn’t come back. So all through the spring of 1902, as many as 50,000 peasants total attacked and torched about a hundred different estates. Now this wasn’t 50,000 people in one mass army, mind you, but the combined number of participants in lots of separate local uprisings that stretched from Ukraine to the Volga.
Now the 1902 peasant uprisings ended the way most other peasant uprisings end: the regime scrambled the army and the angry peasants were brutally suppressed. And then the harvest of 1902 was much better than the harvest of 1901, which eliminated the immediate problem of hunger. But still, you could not have asked for better proof that the peasants were, in fact, very pissed off, and it was eminently possible to turn them into a full-blown revolutionary army.
The 1902 the uprisings had three immediate effects on SR theory, practice, and organization. First, they created an official peasant union that would serve as the organizational backbone for what they envisioned to be one day a vast network of revolutionary groups inside every village in Russia ready to lead their friends family and neighbors into revolution when the time came; second, they incorporated a new rural teachers union which had formed independently, and whose task it would be to recruit and train local teachers to be the principal missionaries of revolutionary gospel; and then finally, it was one of the things that finally convinced that émigré League of Socialist Revolutionaries to finally join the SRs, because they said, hey maybe times have changed. And though they maintained the league as a separate entity that was merely federated with the SRs, for all intents and purposes they were part of the SRs. And they now helped form a link of money, resources, publications, and personnel that stretched from Paris all the way to the Ural Mountains.
But now we need to turn to the other big debate inside SR circles that was going on alongside all of this, which was over the tactical question of terrorism.
Terrorism and narodism had always been closely linked, and plenty of SRs believed that it needed to be a central part of their program, that an SR without a bomb was no SR at all. And though there was a lot of sympathy for terrorist activity, many SR leaders did not want the political project caught up with the dirty business of assassinations and bombings, and they didn’t want this for three very good reasons: first, it might turn off potential allies in more moderate circles; second, terrorist activity was bound to invite heavy police pressure that would threaten anyone directly connected to the terrorists; and third, actually participating in murderous conspiracy would weigh too heavily on the consciences of many of the political leaders.
Now some SRs really didn’t want to restart the terrorist campaigns of the past. But a majority of them seemed happy enough to give it their approval, if the three concerns I just mentioned were addressed. Which they were. They concluded that the best approach would be to create a wholly separate compartmentalized and autonomous terrorist group, which would stay at arms length from the political party so as not to create traceable links between the two operations. And thus was born the SR Combat Organization.
The principal leaders of the Combat Organization were Grigory Gershuni, now transitioning from organizing Jewish workers to organizing potential assassins, this other guy named Boris Savinkov, and a third guy who… I will more fully introduce here in a second. The Combat Organization was not interested in ideology, or theory, or what Russia would look like after the revolution. They were there to wage war on the tsarist regime right now, directly, today. Their goal was to keep up a relentless campaign of political assassination that would help destabilize that regime, and if nothing else, keep everyone inside the government in a constant state of stress and panic. Now unlike the old People’s Will, the Combat Organization did not believe that just knocking off a few government ministers would necessarily trigger a revolution all on its own. Instead, they saw themselves acting as the people’s executioners, delivering karmic justice for the evil those ministers had done. And this was not unlike Pancho Villa’s avenging angel routine that we talked all about during the Mexican Revolution.
So in small conspiratorial cells, they planned and carried out assassinations, some of which were successful, many of which were not. And as this campaign of terror unfolded between 1902 and 1905, the Combat Organization became ever more autonomous. Now they were supposed to at least run potential plans by the SR central committee to at least give them a heads up, but after a while the leadership of the Combat Organization stopped doing even that. They were just off on their own, killing people when and where they wanted. Their coming out party was April the second, 1902, when an agent successfully walked up and put two bullets into the minister of the interior. There was then a subsequent plot to execute attendees of the minister’s funeral, the most important of which being old Pobedonostsev, one of the architects of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, but it turned out the combat organization was not composed entirely of hardened killers, because the assassin lost his nerve and couldn’t fire the shot. And indeed a deeper look at how the combat organization actually functioned reveals some charismatic leaders convincing some impressionable and potentially unstable youths to carry out assassinations on behalf of a revolution they didn’t quite fully understand. And indeed, one of the jobs of those charismatic leaders was to ensure that potential assassins didn’t get cold feet at the last minute.
So that brings us to one of the most infamous members of the Combat Organization, that third guy, who I am now more fully introducing right now this second: Yevno Azef. But Azef is not just infamous because he played a leading role in planning and carrying out so many political murders over the next five years, and if you already know who Azef is, please don’t spoil it for the other listeners. So Azef was now in his mid forties. He was born the poor son of a Jewish family in Belarus, and while he was working as a salesman and aspiring journalist in the early 1890s, he got caught up with the radical underground. At one point, the police were onto him, and to avoid arrest he embezzled some money from his employer and fled to Germany in 1892. Once he got there, he linked up with some other socialist exiles, and appeared to continue his revolutionary activity but he struggled to make a living. And then he hit upon a brilliant idea, a way to ensure himself a steady stream of cash, and here now is what makes Azef not just famous, but infamous: he contacted the Okhrana, and offered to become an informant. All he asked for in return was money. And thus began his career not so much as a double agent, but as a straight up police spy working deep inside the revolutionary underground.
Azef then returned to Russia partially bankrolled by Okhrana, and linked up with Andre Argunov, and helped organize the Northern Union. Far from being suspected as a spy, Azef was considered one of the most dependable members of the party, and Argunov, for example, did not know that one of the reasons Azef had been able to successfully set up a printing operation was because the police let him do it. Then, when Azef went abroad again in 1901, and Argunov and many of his closest associates were arrested, right after Azef crossed the border, it never occurred to them that it was Azef who had sold them out.
Now so far, this is all pretty standard police spy stuff. But where it gets interesting is that one of the reasons Azef was never suspected of being a spy was because of his vocal advocacy of direct terrorist action. And when the combat organization was formed, Azef joined as Gershuni’s principal deputy, and he conceived, proposed, and organized some of the most spectacular assassination plots of the whole terrorist campaign. I mean it’s not like the Okhrana would be employing someone they knew to be literally murdering government officials. Except, that’s exactly what they were doing. Azef was too valuable an asset to worry about the individual lives of a few interchangeable ministers. They let these assassinations happen.
In the spring of 1903, Gershuni was arrested thanks to a tip from a different informant, and Azef became the leader of the Combat Organization. And even then nothing changed. So when I said that the Okhrana was more… creative than their secret police predecessors, this is what I’m talking about. They were allowing one of their assets to conduct an assassination campaign, which is certainly a creative way to combat revolutionary terrorism.
Now for his part, Azef seems to have been in it simply for the money. He was an amoral scoundrel, interested mostly in amassing a personal fortune while killing government ministers for the fun and sport of it, all the while selling his comrades to the police whenever it seemed convenient or profitable. But nobody would know anything about this for years to come. Azef would not be exposed until well after the Revolution of 1905 had come and gone.
So where we will leave the SRs today is with the unified party in place and growing. They would double their membership between 1902 and 1904, and though it remained frustratingly slow going, that was okay, because they had time to build up their strength. In the meantime, those who were looking for immediate action could join the combat organization and go throw bombs at people.
But everyone’s calculations were going to change in 1904, because the tsarist regime they were trying to take down was suddenly hit with a massive de-stabilizing blow that was not inflicted by the SRs, or the Social Democrats, or any other domestic revolutionary group, but instead by the Japanese Navy. And next week, we will return to the far east, where the tsar’s imperialist ambitions in Asia were leading not to the expansion of the Russian Empire, but nearly to its ruin.