Conclusion

Summary

This study has traced the development of SR agrarian policy from the end of the nineteenth century to the eve of the First World War. In the early stages of the formation of the party, those SRs who retained the Populist faith in peasant revolution had to combat the legacy of disillusionment left by the failure of the ‘movement to the people’. It was not until 1902 that the balance between the narodovol'tsy and the Agrarian Socialists shifted in favour of the latter. The peasant movement of 1902 conclusively demonstrated the revolutionary potential of the countryside, and the formation of the SR Peasant Union marked the acceptance by the party leadership of the need for an extensive propaganda campaign in the villages. To a considerable extent, the SRs had been taken by surprise by the disturbances in the South, and their policy in the years 1902–4 represented an attempt to harness the spontaneity of the peasantry to the cause of revolutionary socialism. In this, they were hampered by police repressions as well as by shortages of finance and personnel, so that the advent of war in 1904 found the mass of the peasantry still untouched by SR influence. The revolutionary years 1905–7 enabled the party to extend its contacts in the countryside, but only a minority of the peasants elected SR deputies to the Second Duma. 1907 represented the climax of SR development before the war; the Stolypin reaction again forced the party underground, and isolated it from the peasantry.