7 - The SR Peasant Union

Summary

In June 1902, Revolyutsionnaya Rossiya devoted an entire issue to the peasant movement in the south. The appearance of this issue marked the triumph of Chernov and his ‘agrarian’ faction over the narodovol'tsy in the SR party. The events in Poltava and Khar'kov were seen as a justification of the views of the Agrarian-Socialist League, and from 1902 onwards the party as a whole adopted a consistently pro-peasant policy.

In his editorial, ‘The peasant movement’, Chernov put forward an important claim, which he was later to develop in a series of theoretical articles in Revolyutsionnaya Rossiya–that the contemporary peasant movement was semi-socialist in character. He attacked the view of the movement expressed in the Social-Democratic journal Iskra (‘The spark’). Iskra saw the peasant movement as an integral part of the bourgeois revolution – an attack on the remnants of feudalism in Tsarist society, which would clear the way for the development of capitalism in Russia. Chernov rejected the SD assumption that the forthcoming revolution would be bourgeois in character: bourgeois revolution ‘from below’ had, he claimed, been forestalled in Russia by bourgeois revolution ‘from above’. The ‘Great Reforms’ of Alexander II in the 1860s had represented ‘a metamorphosis of feudal autocracy into gentry–bourgeois bureaucratism’ and had already cleared the way for capitalist development, under the protection of the Tsarist government. The bourgeoisie, therefore, had no direct interest in the political overthrow of autocracy. The forthcoming revolution would be primarily political, but it would go beyond the framework of bourgeois democracy and introduce far-reaching social and economic reforms which would pave the way to socialism.