1917.24 In it the author indirectly scores past scholarship on the SRs:

One of the most important and as yet inadequately examined problems in the literature [on the peasant soviets] is the question of the petty bourgeois parties and the degree of their influence on the peasantry before and after the victory of the October Revolution. 25

More than Iliukhina, Moiseeva shows interest and insight into the relations between the Right and Left wings of the SR party though none of the Soviet scholars seems to have perceived the more complex divisions within the party delineated by Professor Radkey 26). She describes very effectively the growing isolation of the Right SR and Menshevik leaders from peasant opinion in the late summer and fall of 1917 and presents clearly the origins and development of the Left SR movement.27 As with Iliukhina, the favor and interest shown the Left SRS is in direct proportion to their collaboration with the Bolsheviks, and the interest in the other elements of the movement is minimal.

In short, while Moiseeva frequently displays admirable critical sense in the course of her interesting monograph, she also has her blind spots. Her repetition in the conclusion of the familiar formula, "the broad masses of toiling peasantry came forth in support of the new worker-peasant government and its decrees," is simply not sustained by the evidence she offers. Broad peasant support there clearly was, but the author fails to prove her facile assumption that the deep divisions within the SR party and among the peasants were a mechanical function of the attitudes of different classes of the peasantry. Moreover, enthusiastic acceptance of specific policies of the Bolshevik government, and endorsement of the structure of that government itself, were not necessarily linked, either among the political leaders or among the elements of the population capable of understanding the October Revolution. As the author asserts, the Revolution "widened the gap between the Right SR leaders and their peasant followers. ,"28 but this, from all evidence, was simply part of a continuing process of division over the issues of war and land.

Moiseeva is quite frank, however, in stating that at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets the

Left SRs were led by their Bolshevik mentors into moving away from their efforts to promote a government of all socialist parties and toward making a further break with their own party. This led in turn to the consolidation of peasants' with workers' and soldiers' soviets and to the creation of a united All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets. She further notes that "the unification of the Soviets was accompanied everywhere by the banishment of the Right SRs and Mensheviks and the strengthening in the Soviets of the influence and authority of

Maria Aleksandrovna Spiridonova joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party as a young girl and was chosen to carry out the assassination of Luzhenovski, a tyrannical vice-governor in Tambov Province. She was jailed until 1917, when she assumed the leadership of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, steering them into coalition with Lenin. When the coalition dissolved in March 1918, the SRs continued their semi-legal opposition to the Bolsheviks, but their ranks were gradually decimated by arrests. Spiridonova died in prison at an unknown date.

-The Hoover Institution, Stanford University

the Bolshevik party.' ." 29 This was exactly Lenin's intention. Unwittingly, the Left SRS had collaborated with Lenin in the division and extinction of the SR party. Moiseeva admires Lenin's tactical skill and has no sympathy for his Left SR victims. As the Soviet government embarked upon agrarian policies of which they disapproved, and negotiated a peace which most of them regarded as a national humiliation, the Left SRS spent their last energies in a futile revolt, the roots of which Moiseeva interprets in the familiar class analysis:

With the development of the class struggle in the village, with the strengthening of the struggle of the poor against the kulaks, with the deepening of the socialist revolution both in the city and in the village, the petty bourgeois vacillation of the Left SRS intensified. Events came to a head in the summer of 1918 when the Left SRS rose in armed revolt against the Soviet power. The result of this was that the Left SRs lost the trust of the peasants. The leadership of the peasants came to belong to one party-the Bolshevik party, the sole representative of the interests of the peasant masses.30

The conclusion is all too familiar-but in the pages that precede it there is evidence of some growth of understanding of the Left SR role in 1917.

T

he most extensive treatment of the Left SRs to appear in recent years is contained in a monograph by K. V. Gusev.31 Based in part on new archival research, this work gives particularly good background on the separation of the Left SRs from the main body of the SR Party, although it is weak on the immediate issues of the break. It also offers more thorough coverage than any other recent study on the course of the Left SR-Bolshevik collaboration, and on the main points of conflict between these uneasy allies. It is, of course a biased account; as with Iliukhina and Moiseeva, the underlying assumption is that the Bolsheviks alone consistently pursued the interests of the "toiling peasantry" and that only when Bolshevik and Left SR policy coincided did the Left SRS have a real class basis among the peasants.

Gusev's concluding remarks on the political demise of the Left SRs assert that such was the inevitable fate "of those forces which come forth against socialism and democracy." 32 Yet he em

phasizes two very important points about the history of the Bolshevik-Left SR alliance: its importance as a tactical model for Bolshevik alliances in the borderlands (Turkestan and the Ukraine) during the Civil War; and the fact that it encouraged a large influx of Left SRS into the Bolshevik Party. Unfortunately, he has nothing to say about the eventual influence of the Left SRS upon the Bolsheviks.

One of the impressive deficiencies of the Soviet treatment of the SRS is the brevity or absence of discussion of SR agrarian theory and program. Occasionally, however, a cogent word appears-as in the important new work by Academician P. N. Pershin on the history of the Russian agrarian revolution.33 Pershin has published important studies of Russian agriculture over a period of half a century, and the present work marks the pinnacle of his scholarly career. While only a few pages in length, the section of the first volume entitled "Critique of the Agrarian Programs of the Kadets and SRS" is probably the best exposition of the SR land program available in recent Soviet literature, though it is presented strictly from a Leninist critical viewpoint and it pays no attention to the leading SR agrarian theorists.34

Among works that must be judged wholly superficial is a 1961 study by G. V. Sharapov that attempts a critical survey of both domestic and foreign literature on the agrarian question in Russia.35 The rich tradition of SR agrarian scholarshipMaslov, Oganovski, Chaianov and others-is reduced to a single paragraph of the study. For Sharapov the important point is the "anti-Marxist character of these views," and he considers it an adequate repudiation of Maslov and his ilk simply to quote Lenin's unedifying outburst when he discovered that Maslov's Krestianskoe khoziaistvo had escaped the vigilant eye of the Soviet censor: "Only a fool or an evil saboteur could pass this book." Sharapov's survey of foreign literature is of comparable quality. He is plainly bothered by David Mitrany's Marx against the Peasant, and takes this "Harvard University professor" to task, though really missing the point of the one issue on which he specifically challenges Mitrany.37 In general one

99 36

Organizationally, too, the SRS played a role, for it was they who "made the Soviet system the accepted form of organization for peasants as well as for workers. " 39 And there is, finally, the very extensive, and as yet little explored, impact of SR agrarian theory during the 1920's. The year 1928, and the fall of Bukharin, signaled the end of the influence of SR agrarian thought, just as the year 1921 had signaled the end of the SR Party. Both demises were milestone events, marking an important stage in the development of the Soviet system and also the repudiation of a broader heritage of Russian socialist thought. The repudiation was not for reasons of irrelevance or inadequacy, but for reasons of conflict with older Bolshevik agrarian dogmas. For a time it had seemed that SR academicians might penetrate the fortress and temper these dogmas in a way that SR politicians had failed to do.

Professor Radkey has written that "the Bolshevism of the early years of the revolution is a much broader term than the Communism of later times." He writes further that "it was the SRs who made

[Bolshevism] broader and its triumph inevitable."*° Adapting this point to our own conclusion, it is clear that the SRs were uniquely qualified to provide both sensitivity and adaptability on agrarian questions, and when their influence was finally repudiated in 1928, it was a much narrower Communist political doctrine that resulted.

It is

t is tempting to speculate about alternative fates that might have overtaken the SRs. Had there been no Bolshevik Revolution, the Provisional Government might well have bumbled through to the Constituent Assembly and to the launching of a political democracy, an enterprise which would probably have been at least as turbulent as the history of political democracies in much of Central and Eastern Europe in the interwar years, but in which the SR movement would have been bound to play a prominent role-as did the peasant parties of Bulgaria, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Czecholovakia and Poland. In agriculture this would almost certainly have meant the stabilization of a system of peasant holdings rather than collectivization.

A second alternative, highly unlikely as long as Lenin remained at the helm, is that a coalition of socialists would have been created, probably of a left-socialist complexion, under Bolshevik leadership. In such a coalition the Left SRs, at least, would probably have had a prominent voice and would doubtless have tempered Bolshevik agrarian policy.

The third alternative-and the one that came the closest to realization-would have seen the gradual infiltration of neo-Populist economics into the thinking of Bolshevik leaders, as they dealt concretely with problems of peasant farming during the 1920's. In this case, there might have evolved an official approach to development economics based on individual farming rather than on collectivization, profoundly changing the course of Soviet history.

By Israel Getzler

M

enshevism had its origins in 1903-04 in the revolt of the large majority of the founders and leaders of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (RSDWP) against Lenin's bid for personal domination of the party and for a hypercentralist scheme of organization which threatened to confine the party to an élite conspiracy of professional revolutionaries. The so-called "softs" of the Second RSDWP Congress-Julius Martov, A.N. Potresov, P. B. Akselrod, E. M. Aleksandrova, V. N. Krokhmal,, Vera Zasulich, Lev Deich, Boris Koltsov, Lev Trotsky, and Rosa Galbershtadt of the Iskra group; and E. Ya. Levin, V. N. Rozanov, and E. S. Levina of the Yuzhnyi rabochii (Southern Worker) group-broke with Lenin in revulsion against the ruthless tactics he had adopted during and after the Congress in order to impose his leadership, and against the organizational concepts set forth in his What is to be Done? and A Letter to a Comrade. They also resented some of Lenin's "hards," an aggregation of close personal followers, tough and

Reader in History at La Trobe University (Melbourne, Australia), Mr. Getzler is the author of Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat (Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press, 1967), which is reviewed elsewhere in this issue.

unscrupulous Iskra "agents," and young rank-andfilers from the provincial party organizations.

The ensuing debate between Lenin and his critics was acrimoniously argued out in terms of the latter's concept of a broad, inclusive party of Parteigenossen versus Lenin's idea of a narrow, exclusive party of professional revolutionaries; of the ethics of Lenin's attempts to gain mastery of the party by means of a ruthless purge of its institutions; and, above all, of that "personality cult" which soon became a permanent feature of Leninism and permanent anathema to the Mensheviks, who preached and practiced collective leadership. Soon after the Second Congress, Fiodor Dan voiced the Mensheviks' objection to Lenin's claim to a special place in the party by asking rhetorically:

Can we tolerate a situation which ties the entire fate of the party, and consequently the fate of the Russian proletariat and of Russian liberty, to the fate of one person, however we may appreciate his mind, talents and energy? 1

1 N. Riazanov, Razbitye illiuzii. K voprosu o prichinakh krizisa v nashei partii, Geneva, 1904, pp. 16, 144. (For a detailed discussion of the intraparty controversy preceding, during, and following the Second Congress in 1903, see Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, New York, Dial Press, 1948.-Ed.)