question of the war, however, the party was paralyzed on both of the remaining key issues, for it was not prepared to advocate an indiscriminate and disordered land seizure or to accept the full disintegration of the state along national lines. Yet both developments were taking place, whatever its wishes, while the party leadership temporized and Lenin stood by prepared to exploit the conse

quences.

The Bolshevik Revolution initiated a series of events which led rapidly to the division and destruction of the SR Party. The Bolshevik coup found the party's Center once again incapable of a united initiative. The Right-Center leadership continued to favor a government and a policy little different from those which Lenin had shattered, while Chernov's Left-Center group, though opposed to Bolshevism, was intent upon forming an alternative regime far more radical than the Provisional Government. The stalemate in the party's Center had been, of course, an all-too-familiar element in the inglorious history of the SRs since February.

The new element was the greatly increased strength and independence of the Left wing of the party and its decision first to break with the party organization and then to collaborate with Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

T

he break of the Left SRs with the rest of the party occurred at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets (October 25-26). The Left SRs had already rejected the Provisional Government, agreeing with the Bolsheviks that it must be replaced by a revolutionary socialist government. However, they had felt that it was preferable to wait for the Constituent Assembly to create such a government, counting on the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, meanwhile, to defend their cause. They had also rejected Lenin's idea of a power seizure in October as premature and dangerous, a plan likely to fail and thereby to encourage a Right-wing counterrevolution.

When the Bolsheviks nonetheless succeeded in overthrowing the Provisional Government, the Left SRs were quick to join them. Feeling that the revolution was now in Bolshevik hands, the Leftists favored collaboration as a means of moderating Bolshevik policy. The rejection of this course by the rest of the party initiated a break which became final when the Leftists refused to join the rest of the party delegation in a walkout from the Congress in protest against the Bolshevik coup. Subsequently read out of the party by the Rightist leadership, the Left SRS moved toward closer collaboration with the Bolsheviks. By an agreement reached on November 15, the Left SR-controlled peasants' soviets were merged at the top administrative level with the Bolshevik-dominated workers' soviets. Three days later a Left SR, and former head of the Peasants' Soviet of Kazan province, A. L. Kalegaev, became Commissar for Agriculture.

The collaboration was short-lived. Though the Left SRS held two ministerial portfolios (Justice in addition to Agriculture), Lenin held the reins of power. Strains in the alliance appeared at an early stage. After failing to win Lenin over to the principle of a broader socialist government-an approach which Lenin branded "conciliationism"-

9 The background of Left SR attitudes is well described in the work of a prominent Left SR and later member of the Soviet Government, I. Z. Steinberg. See especially his Ot fevralia do oktiabr 1917 g., Berlin and Milan, no date, pp. 123-27.

the Left SRS pressed vigorously for a genuine soviet power. They demanded the full, democratic responsibility of the Council of Peoples' Commissars to the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, a principle violated systematically by the Bolsheviks who, once in power, favored the party apparatus over the soviets as the "transmission belt" of political authority. The strains multiplied as the Bolsheviks launched their policy of grain requisitions and class warfare in the villages, ignoring Left SR protests. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was the fatal spark applied to the accumulated tinder of Bolshevik-SR conflicts. Though they, too, sought peace, the Left SRS regarded the treaty terms with horror, broke with the Bolsheviks, and soon resorted to a variety of terrorist activities against their former allies.

Thus the SR Party was fatally divided in the second crucial stage of the Revolution. Sharing the organizational weaknesses of the parent party, the Left SRS demonstrated a new weakness—an almost total lack of ideological leadership. They were a pathetic match for the Bolsheviks, either in alliance or in opposition. They had sought salvation in collaboration with the Bolsheviks, hoping to broaden the structure and temper the policies of the Soviet government. They failed in the first objective, and had only ephemeral success in the second. Lenin was prepared to steal the SR land policy in October for tactical reasons, but he insisted upon a monopoly of political power for the Bolsheviks. For the other half of the SR Party the months following the Bolshevik Revolution were equally frustrating. An initial attempt at armed rebellion having failed, the remainder of the time was spent in preparations for the Constituent Assembly in the misguided belief that it could peacefully replace the Soviet government as the locus of power.

SR Theories and Bolshevik Policies

The military victory of Bolshevism in the Civil War sealed the doom of the SRS as an organized party. Within a few months the remnants of the party were destroyed by Bolshevik command. Simultaneously, however, the Bolsheviks retreated from the aggressive class warfare and socialization measures of War Communism, so bitterly opposed by their erstwhile SR allies, and in effect accepted, as in 1917, an essentially SR agrarian policy. Bukharin later described this time as "the collapse of our illusions," referring to the abandonment of all hopes

of an early and direct advance to socialism.10 The desperate economic condition of the country, along with widespread peasant insurrections and urban labor unrest, suggested the wisdom of a retreat. In agriculture this retreat raised the question whether the Bolsheviks would be compelled to take the slow road to socialism through a long period of individual peasant farming, as the SRS had counseled. In most ways the system of small peasant landholdings in Russia after the Revolution was the fulfillment of the Populist ideal, and according to the theories of the prewar Populist economists it ought to have provided a solution to the agrarian problem -as a brief examination of their main theories will demonstrate.

The neo-Populist economists had achieved a place of prominence in Russian debates on agrarian economic questions in the years between the turn of the century and World War I. The main body of their theory had been developed by the outbreak of the war and was subsequently elaborated in a number of works by Prof. A. N. Chelintsev, and by a group of Moscow agricultural economists which included N. P. Makarov, A. V. Chaianov, and others." These men formulated what they called the labor or labor-consumption theory of the peasant economy. They insisted on the uniqueness of the peasant farm, basing their view on two factors: 1) the primacy of consumption as the aim of peasant farming; and 2) dependence upon the labor of the family as the means of meeting consumption needs. On these two features the neo-Populists erected their theory of the peasant farm. The farm was described as a consuming economic organization, using the labor of its members for working the land. The labor of the peasant was not evaluated in the same way as the payment of hired labor would be calculated by a capitalist employer, and did not therefore figure in the costs of production. Rather, since the chief aim of a peasant farm was the satisfaction of its members' consumption needs, revenue was determined not as net income but in terms of the quantity of output. The peasant farm was not

concerned with the level of prices for its products but solely with its own demands, and it increased the intensity of its farming operation in proportion to the increase in the number of its members. In broader terms, the intensification of labor on the peasant farm resulted from population growth, and its capacity for work depended not on market fluctuations or other "capitalist" factors but on the pressure of the population to find an outlet for its labor and to meet its consumption needs.

This theory could be applied to the problem of increasing population with optimistic results. Given a situation in which the population growth proceeded more rapidly than the growth of the cultivated area, and industry could not succeed in absorbing the surplus population, the necessity of feeding more mouths from the same land became the basis of agricultural evolution. Initially the pressure of population would lead to atomization of land usage, each succeeding generation having less land than the former. Because of the relatively primitive means of farming, income for the individual farmer must decline, and each succeeding expenditure of labor and capital must be less productive. However, this otherwise discouraging picture was transformed by what was described as the labor-consumer balance. Given insistent peasant consumer demands and a great labor reserve, as well as peasant indifference to the decline of productivity of labor, the peasant could simply raise the level of his "self-exploitation" and thus transform the situation, increasing gross output to meet his needs by intensification of labor usage on a given plot of land.

According to the neo-Populists, only peasant farming could achieve such a quick increase in the gross product of the land and feed a growing population. Moreover, only peasant farming could absorb the surplus of population not taken up by in dustry and thus protect the country from the horrors of famine and unemployment. Any kind of intensification was interpreted as a gain both for agriculture and for the general economy. The assumption was that the smaller the peasant economy the more intensive. One could therefore proceed to ever more intensive use of labor without regard for rent, profit, or any other factors of normal wage computation. Due to the relative equality of peasant demands and the uniformity of means, one could approach the ideal of equality of income and equality of landholding, and hence the Populist idea of equalized land usage.

Populist economics underwent considerable revision in the 1920's, especially in the works of B. D.

Brutskus.1 Brutskus continued to emphasize the special characteristics and advantages of peasant farming, economic and social, but he felt that the small, half-proletarian peasant farms must give way to larger farms capable of using the full labor resources of the farming family, employing modern technology, and producing a surplus of products for market. The commercialization of Russian agriculture had advanced so far, and would go so much farther in the future, that it was irrelevant to talk of a subsistence peasant farm. Large numbers of small-holders would do best to liquidate their landholdings in the villages. To prevent the sale of such lands was an error. If government credit were provided to enable other peasants to purchase such lands, and thus increase the size and labor productivity of their holdings, the result would be a vigorous and productive system of peasant proprietorships, not land speculation and largescale capitalist landholding. Prohibiting land sales and leases perpetuated unproductive farms and prevented the growth of the kind of farm that could produce the surpluses which the nation needed. Without free formation of price and rental payments there was no pressure upon the peasant to make efficient use of the land. The trend of Populist economic thought thus moved away from prewar positions and led to an increasingly critical view of government policy, a criticism elaborated by Menshevik and Liberal economists as well.

The new Populist agricultural economists were much concerned, as was the Soviet government, with the relationship of agricultural to industrial development. They believed that industrial growth depended upon the growth of production and labor productivity in agriculture, and that both could be obtained only by creating a stratum of larger and more modern peasant farms in the context of a vigorous cooperative movement. They rejected the prevailing Bolshevik agricultural policy as a sterile stalemate, holding that the old Populist utopia of equalized landholdings, as rationalized in Bolshevik theory, retarded the growth of industry and agriculture alike. Their impact upon the thinking of Soviet government leaders in matters of agrarian policy has yet to be systematically studied. Suffice it to observe that many of the concepts of Bukharin's writings, especially his famous Notes of an

12 Evidence of Brutskus' rethinking of the prewar Populist agricultural economics can be found in his Ekonomicheskii zakon selskovo khoziaistva, Kharkov, 1918. The full exposition of his views appeared, however, in Ekonomiki selskovo khoziaistva, Petrograd, 1924.

Economist, show a considerable influence of the new Populist economists.13 Bukharin was conversant with both their empirical and their theoretical studies, and they had clearly influenced his interpretation of agrarian questions, as they had also influenced some of his earlier recommendations on agricultural policy. However, his political demise, and the triumph of Stalin, marked a return to the doctrinaire, fortress-storming agricultural policies of War Communism.

fers by comparison to recent Soviet monographic publications.

Insights into the trends of Soviet historical opinion on the SRs can be found in literature dealing with agrarian questions or alternatively with special aspects of the Revolution. Both topics have been covered increasingly in recent years, but the former, because of its concern with the peasantary, is the most useful in examining changing views about the SRs.

Historiography:

A Distorted Mirror

Before making an assessment of the SR legacy, it may be of interest to review the development of Soviet studies on this vital topic. During the last few years there has been a veritable flood of documentary publications, monographs, and general histories dealing with the revolutionary era. Though little special attention has been paid to the SR's, the constant probing of the events of the Revolution occasionally brings them to the surface. It is possible, as Prof. I. I. Mints and his colleagues have demonstrated in a new multi-volume history of the USSR, to tell the story of the Revolution with scarcely a mention of the SRs.1 In this study the Bolsheviks' socialist rivals are relegated to a small section of less than three pages entitled "The Petty Bourgeois Parties in the Revolution." 15 The space allotted hardly allows for an examination of SR theory, and though the point is made that the party was large and that it had great influence, the significance of both facts is not evident in the remainder of the book. The question of why and to what extent the Mensheviks and the SRs joined forces is dismissed with the vague assertion that their collaboration was understandable since both parties had a "common social basis." The reasoning seems to be that petty bourgeois parties were bound to fail, so there is little point in elaboration. Such logic was familiar in earlier Soviet (and not only Soviet) historiography but is a disappointment in the new volume, which in this respect suf

he study of agrarian problems and parties

at the time of the Revolution was initiated with some vigor in the 1920's. In this era there was quite frank discussion of the conflicts that had divided the Bolsheviks and the SRs. Two of the best-known

of

works of the decade were N. Ya. Bukhovski's classic study on the All-Russian Soviet of Peasants' Deputies and Morokhovets' somewhat less distinguished, but very useful, study of the agrarian programs the major political parties in 1917.18 The 1920's also saw the publication of a mass of analytical literature and documents on the peasant movement in general. It was customary in these years to acknowledge the prominent role the SRS had played in the Revolution and in peasant organizations. Concerning the period after the Revolution, it was generally recognized that the Left SRs had been an important element in Narkomzem (People's Commissariat of Agriculture) during the first three years of its history. Indeed, B. Knipovich, in a 1920 review of the activity of Narkomzem, called the first months of its history (to March 1918) the "Left-SR Period," an identification that has recently earned him a rebuke from a Soviet historian.17

From the time that collectivization began in earnest to the end of the Zhdanov era there was a virtual drought in scholarship on the agrarian question. In general, the SRs were mentioned only in political histories in which the formulas of condemnation were tediously ritualized. (A particu

16 N. Ya. Bykhovaski, Vserossiiskii sovet krestianskikh deputatov, Moscow, 1929; E. A. Morokhovets, Agrarnye programmy rossiiskikh politicheskikh partii, Moscow-Leningrad, 1929.

17 B. Knipovich, Ocherk deiatelnosti narodnovo komissariata zemledeliia za tri goda (1918-1920), Moscow, 1920. Knipovich's critic was G. V. Sharapov, Razreshenie agrarnovo voprosa v Rossi posle pobedy oktiabrskoi revoliutsii (1917-1920 gg.), Moscow, 1961. Sharapov writes (p. 15): “Clearly the fact that the left SRs were at the helm of Narkomzem until March 1918 could only have a negative influence on the realization of Soviet agrarian policy. But that does not mean that the leadership and direction of policy emenated from the Left SRS."

larly vehement attack on them was contained in N. L. Rubinshtein's volume on the Constituent Assembly published in 1938.18) But nothing really new was produced either on the SRS directly or on the agrarian issues of the revolutionary period.19

The postwar years, and particularly the 1950's and 1960's, brought a remarkable upsurge in systematic research on the revolutionary era, offering a closer look at certain aspects of the Socialist Revolutionary movement. A review of Soviet bibliographic lists reveals about 27 major monographs and articles-most of them published in the last decade that deal with agrarian or peasant topics and that touch in some degree on the SRs. Perhaps the best way to review this literature is to examine a few major examples individually and then proceed to generalizations about the present state of Soviet historical scholarship on the SRs.

One of the main results of the intensified schol

of the main results of the intensified scholarly study of the Revolution has been a closer examination of the Left SRs and their collaboration with the Bolsheviks. This was not always so; until quite recently it was common to see the SRS treated as a single group. Yet the issue was obvious. Lenin had written extensively in defense of his agreement with the Left SRs, and some of them had even gone permanently into the Bolshevik camp.

R. M. Iliukhina, in an article appearing in Istoricheskie zapiski in 1963, stated:

The question of the agreement of the Bolsheviks with the Left SRS is part of one of the most important problems of the history of the Great October Socialist Revolution—the founding and strengthening of the union of the working class with the toiling peasantry.20

Iliukhina was sharply critical of one colleague (V. M. Gubareva) who had failed to make the distinction between Left and Right SRs, of another (Kh. A. Eritsian) who had clumsily called the Left SRS a kulak party, and of yet another who overlooked the varied class origins of the Left SRs and

the efforts of some to achieve "sincere collaboration with the Bolsheviks." 21

Iliukhina's own contribution is an interesting and carefully researched article tracing the history of the Left SR-Bolshevik collaboration with due stress on the division that resulted within the peasants' soviets and on the fusion of the peasants' soviets with those of the workers and soldiers. She acknowledges the enormous importance of this achievement to the consolidation of the Bolshevik Revolution, and pays generous credit to those Left SRs who were the most faithful collaborators, awarding special mention to those who subsequently joined the Bolshevik party.22 Needless to say, the story is told from a strictly Bolshevik viewpoint. The author condemns the "conciliationist" policy of the Left SRS-a term for their effort to serve as an intermediary between the Bolsheviks and other socialist parties and to build a socialist governing coalition. To have departed from Socialist Revolutionism altogether and embraced Bolshevism is laudable; to have been a "conciliationist" is contemptible. Iliukhina also details much of the "nefarious" activity of the Left SRS in Narkomzem, where they attempted to obstruct or modify Bolshevik agrarian policy.23 Appropriately, the paper concludes with a discussion of Leninist tactics, showing how the Left SR alliance had facilitated the stabilization of Bolshevik power.

This article probably represents the best that Soviet historiography can offer within the limits of the narrow political partisanship that still prevails. It shows a sober respect for logic (the Left SR-Bolshevik collaboration was important and therefore it must be studied) and a serious concern for accuracy of facts. Partisanship, of course, Iliukhina shares with all historians, but her partisanship is so rigid, so untempered by any skepticism at all about the rectitude of Bolshevik actions or doctrine, that it blinds her to the myriad questions about the SRS in 1917 that come so easily and stimulatingly from the pen of a scholar like Oliver Radkey (see footnote 1).

18 N. L. Rubinshtein, Bolsheviki i uchreditelnoe sobranie, Moscow, 1938.

19 There is, however, one significant exception to this generalization, the monograph by V. Parfenov entitled Razgrom levykh eserov (Moscow, 1940) which shows, at least, an appreciation of the strength of Left SR peasant support and states (p. 18) that the Left SRs "to a considerable degree reflected the mood and the aspirations of the toiling peasantry."

20 R. M. Iliukhina, "K voprosu o soglashenii bolshevikov s levymi eserami (oktiabr 1917-fevral 1918 g.)," Istoricheskie zapiski, 73, 1963, p. 3.

nother recent work of interest, by O. N. Moiseeva, offers a detailed study of the Soviets of Peasants' Deputies from March through October

21 Ibid., p. 4. 22 Ibid., p. 24. 23 Ibid., pp. 27-8.