'We're for the Muzhiks' Party!' Peasant Support for the Socialist Revolutionary Party During 1917

References

• 1917 . Narod , 28 November : 4
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• Vladimirov , V. 1906 . Mariya Spiridonova Moscow Even the Constitutional Democratic Party referred to Spiridonova sympathetically; see article in Rech', 18, 25 March 1906, p. 2. See also
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• Rabinowitch , Alexander . 1997 . “ `Spiridonova' ” . In Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution 1914-1921 , Edited by: Cherniaev , E. Acton, V.Iu. and Rosenberg , W.G. 182 Bloomington : Indiana University Press . Note, however, that such reductions of sentence would seem to have been very common, based on the numbers of individuals who had their death penalty commuted, usually to life katorga in the first instance. See Politicheskaya katorga i ssylka; biograficheskii spravochnik chlenov Obshchestva Politkatorzhan i Ssyl'no-porelentsev (Moscow, 1934)
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• Good , J.E. and Jones , D.R. 1991 . BABUSHKA: `The Life of the Russian Revolutionary E.K. Breshko-Breshkovskaia , i – ii . Massachusetts : Oriental Research Partners . `in the eyes of many in Russia and abroad, she was the revolution personified'
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• Delo Naroda, no. 97, 11 July 1917, p. 2; Delo Naroda, no. 101, 15 July 1917, p. 1. Delo Naroda was the daily newspaper published by the PSR Central Committee. Incidentally, this `great day of celebration' was not mentioned in Narod, which was generally speaking very loyal to Central Committee policy. This would indicate that `PSR Day' did not catch on.
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• Breshkovskaia , E.K. 1931 . Hidden Springs of the Revolution , 344 – 345 . Stanford : Stanford University Press .
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• Figes . “ `The Russian Revolution of 1917 and its Language in the Villages' ” . 340
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• 1917 . Narod , 28 November : 4
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• 1917 . Sotsialist Revolyutsioner , 11 September : 4
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• 1917 . Narod , 9 July : 4
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• Figes, `The Russian Revolution of 1917 and its Language in the Villages', p. 328.
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• 1917 . Sotsialist Revolyutsioner , 11 September : 4
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• 1917 . Narod , 7 May : 3
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• 1917 . Narod , 5 July : 4
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• Narod, no. 24, 9 June, p. 4.
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• Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls, p. 57.
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• 1917 . Sotsialist Revolyutsioner , 4 September : 4
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• 1917 . Golos Truda , 12 November An editorial exhorted the population to vote for the PSR Elders' list, no. 9, and not to vote for the Bolshevik lists, numbers 9 and 11. No. 11 was in fact the joint list of the Kazan'PSR group and the Soviet of Peasants' Deputies
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• Their newspaper, Za Zemlyu i Volyu, opposed coalition government (no. 1, 29 September 1917, p. 1) and was imbued with left-internationalist sentiment. The paper was later published under the banner of the Executive Committee of the Kazan' Soviet of Peasants' Deputies and the Kazan' town committee of left SR-Internationalists. The date for this transformation is not known exactly, as the set of newspapers has a large gap--it is definitely after 23 October 1917 and before 7 March (new style) 1918.
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• Ibid.
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• Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls, pp. 107-111. Radkey details three provinces where there was a breach between the Soviet and the PSR prior to the Constituent Assembly elections: in Bessarabia, in the Amur region, and in the Ural'sk district, in northwestern Turkestan. Though Radkey noted that information on all these three provinces was very limited, in Bessarabia the PSR won 33.6% of the vote, against the Peasant Soviet's 27.2%. The situation in Amur was very complex, with an even four-way split of the PSR vote.
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• Figes, `The Russian Revolution of 1917 and Its Language in the Villages', pp. 324-325.
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• 1917 . Golos Truda , 22 June : 4 Golos Truda was the newspaper published by Kazan PSR organisation, and came out twice a week
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• 1917 . Sotsialist Revolyutsioner , 14 August : 2 – 3 . from a report of the second Penza guberniya PSR conference
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• Narod, no. 34, 2 July 1917, p. 4.
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• Figes, `The Peasantry', p. 458.
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• Sotsialist Revolyutsioner, no. 6, 4 September, p. 4.
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• Figes, `The Peasantry', p. 550, claimed this. Radkey, Russia goes to the Polls, pp. 65-71, looked at a sample of village electoral returns and concluded that although some degree of communal voting existed, there was evidence for real division of opinion.
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• Narod, no. 112, 28 November 1917, p. 4.
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• Sotsialist Revolyutsioner, no. 16, 14 December 1917. Sotsialist Revolyutsioner was the organ of the Penza PSR guberniya committee. Only 16 issues were published, between July and December 1917.
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• Radkey, The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism, p. 80. Radkey reported this based on a personal interview with Zenzinov.
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• Cart , E.H. 1983 . The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-23, Volume One , 79 Harmondsworth : Penguin Books . A.E. Spiridovich, Revolyutsionnoe dvizhenie v Rossii; Partiya Sotsiolistov-Revolyutsionerov i ei predshestvenniki (Petrograd, 1916), p. 495. Note that the Bolsheviks were also crushed as a result of police surveillance by 1916;
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• `Voina i Predfevrale', Katorga i Ssylka, LXXV, II, 1931, pp. 32-33.
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• Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial'noi i Politicheskoi Istorii (henceforth RGASPI), f.274, op. 1, d. 26, pp. 84-113. This material is part of a memoir written by Zinovii Magergut in April 1917, which detailed the activities of the Sormovo PSR organisation between April 1916 and April 1917 (Sormovo was an industrial suburb of Nizhny Novgorod).
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• Radkey, Russia goes to the Polls, pp. 61 and 63.
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• 1917 . Partiinye izvestiya , 28 September : 18ff There are no reliable figures available for party membership at any time, but based on known membership figures of regional groups, around one million members can be suggested for 1917. See; no. 2, 5 October 1917, pp. 49-50; no. 3, 19 October 1917, pp. 35ff; no. 5, 20 January 1918, pp. 56, 59-60;
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• Radkey , O. 1958 . The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism , 236 New York and London : Columbia University Press .
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• Lenin , V.I. 1977 . Polnoe sobranie sochinenii , vol. 37 , 312 Moscow : Izd. Pofit. Lit. . Even Lenin himself admitted the domination of the moderate socialists in the countryside: `the backwardness of the dark (temnyi) poor peasantry caused them to be led by kulaks, the wealthy, capitalists and petty bourgeois intelligentsia. This was the era of domination of the petty bourgeois Mensheviks and Socialist Revolurionaries'.
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• Gill , G.J. 1978 . `Tbe Peasantry in the Revolutions of 1917' . Soviet Studies , 30 ( 1 ) : 63 – 86 . I am referring here primarily to the mass of agrarian direct action which took place during 1917, manifested in seizure of land, wood, grain and inventories, and the destruction of landowners' property. This was in direct contravention of Provisional Government policy on this matter, supported by the PSR Central Committee, which left a decision of the land question to the Constituent Assembly, and which condemned seizures and violence. See
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• Kolonitskii , Boris . 1999 . Interpreting the Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 , New Haven : Yale University Press . O. Figes, `The Russian Revolution of 1917 and its Language in the Villages', Russian Review, 5 6. July 1997, pp. 324-325. Figes's more recent work, produced in collaboration with), includes a chapter on language of the revolution in the villages (chapter 5, pp. 127-152) which reproduces the 1997 article verbatim
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• Engel , B. 1994 . Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work and Family in Russia 1861-1914 , Cambridge : Cambridge University Press . discusses the effects of female migratory labour on village life, especially chapters 3 and 4
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• Figes , O. 1997 . “ `The Peasantry' ” . In Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution 1914-1921 , Edited by: Acton , E. , Cherniaev , V.Iu. and Rosenberg , W.G. 544 Bloomington : Indiana University Press . Figes commented that `It is only when we know about the regions separately that we can reach any meaningful conclusions about the peasantry us a whole'.
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• Radkey , O. 1989 . Russia goes to the Polls; The Election to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, 1917 , 66 New York : Cornell University Press . Figes, `The Russian Revolution in 1917 and its Language in the Villages', p. 337;
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• 1917 . Narod , 28 November : 4 Narod was published by the Nizhegorodskaya guberniya PSR organisation, in Nizhny Novgorod
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• Marya Spiridonova, `O zadachakh revolyutsii, Nash Put', no. 1. Narh Put was the newspaper representing the left faction of the PSR. This article may well have been considered a significant turning point in the crystallisalion of the riff within the party--it was published in the Kazan' newspaper Za Zemlyu i Volvu, no. 5, 11 October 1917.
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• Radkey, The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism; chapter 6, `The Third Party Congress', discusses the rifts within the Central Committee of the party in detail; see particularly pp. 187-233.
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• 1917 . Golos Truda , 1 June : 4 A rather unfortunate postscript to Grasis' political career was that he was arrested on 2 July 1917 for `spreading disorder and setting one part of the population against another, and aiming to discredit the power of the Provisional Government'. Golos Truda, no. 19, 10 July 1917, p. 4
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• Narod, no. 18, p. 3, as reported at the second Nizhegorodskaya guberniya PSR conference, 21 May 1917, and continued in Narod, no. 19, p. 3.
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• An example of means tested payments being established is in Narod, no. 34, 2 July 1917, p. 4, at a meeting of Knyagininsky-Novostarinsky volost, Nizbegorodskaya guberniya.
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• Quoted by Radkey, The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism, p. 185, and footnoted by him as originating from the manuscript of a chapter Chernov wrote with the title `Partiya S-R'.
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• Steinberg , I. 1971 . Spiridonova--Revolutionary Terrorist , Edited by: David , G. and Mosbacher , E. 41 New York : Books for Libraries Press .
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• 1917 . Delo Derevni , 26 August : 4 This newspaper was published by the Tambov guberniya PSR committee and the Executive Committee of the guberniya Soviet of Peasants' Deputies
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• 1917 . Delo Derevni , 22 September : 1
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• 1917 . Chernozem (Narodnaya gazeta) , 8 August : 1 – 2 . This paper declared itself to be the guberniya PSR organ, but on 23 July lost its PSR tag and described itself instead as `a publication of Penza guberniya zemstvo'
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• 1917 . Narod , 17 September : 4
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• Breshkovskaia, Hidden Springs of the Russian Revolution, p. 340.
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• 1917 . Golos Truda , 21 August : 4
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• 1917 . Za Zemlyu i Volvu , 23 October
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• In Tambov, Delo Derevni. no. 14, 22 September 1917. In Penza, three newspapers are used to compile the final list: Chernozem, no. 14, 8 August, Chernozem, no. 65, 15 October and Sotsialist Revolyutsioner, no. 13, 26 October 1917.
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• Breshkovskaia, Hidden Springs of the Russian Revolution, p. 268.
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• 1917 . Sotsialist Revolyutsioner . 26 October : 3
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• 1917 . Golos Truda , 20 November
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