2 - The first peasant Brotherhood

Summary

It was in Tambov guberniya, where he spent a period of ‘administrative exile’ under police supervision from 1895 to 1899, that Viktor Chernov, the future leader of the Socialist-Revolutionary party, became involved in the organisation of the first ‘peasant brotherhood’ in Russia. On his arrival in Tambov, at the age of twenty-two, Chernov was already a veteran of the revolutionary movement. The grandson of a serf – his father had risen to gentry rank as the result of a successful career in the Tsarist civil service – Chernov's first association with revolutionary circles had been as a schoolboy in Saratov in the 1880s. In 1891, to escape police persecution, he left Saratov to complete his secondary education in Derpt. The following year he entered the Law Faculty of Moscow University, where he was soon elected to the students' ‘Union council’ and became a leading member of a group of ‘young narodovol'tsy’ In 1894 he was arrested and imprisoned for nine months as a result of his connection with the short-lived ‘Party of the people's rights’(Partlya narodnogo prava) founded by the old Populist, Mark Natanson. Following this period of imprisonment, he had to undergo the term of ‘administrative exile’ under police supervision in the provinces. This exile he spent in his native town of Kamyshin on the Volga, in Saratov for a brief time, and finally in Tambov.