The Socialist-Revolutionary Party (SRs) was formed in Russia in 1902 and made a loud statement with several shocking acts of terror against tsarist officials. They assassinated the Minister of Internal Affairs of Russia, Pleve, and Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich Romanov.
In this way, they attempted to force the tsarist government to grant the people a constitution and civil liberties. The assassination of 20-year-old M. Spiridonova, the Tambov pacifier of peasants, Luzhenovsky, received international attention. Thanks to the support of world public opinion, the death penalty for the terrorist was replaced with hard labor, to which "disorderly" anarchists and SRs were usually sent, while peaceful social democrats were dealt with through exile. At the Akatuy hard labor camp in 1906, future left-SR leaders — Spiridonova, Proshyan, Bitzenko — indulged in the boldest dreams of socialism, in which oppressed humanity sought salvation from early imperialism, while the Russian intelligentsia of the narodnik type sought a new moral system.
The left-SR leaders were fanatical idealists, loyal comrades, and selfless individuals, indifferent to the mundane aspects of life. When in December 1917 Proshyan, appointed as the People's Commissar for Posts and Telegraphs, came to work in tattered felt boots, the doorman did not let him past the entrance. These were people of extraordinary spiritual strength, but all the parliamentary and Duma experience of normal country development, after the "Manifesto of October 17, 1905," passed them by. By 1917, they came with ten years of hard labor experience and were even more maximalist than they had been in their youth.
Professional revolutionaries, militants of the early underground, who had accumulated energy for destruction and hatred for the old world in dungeons, they could not understand either the joy of the February Revolution's victory or the respectable liberalism of the "March SRs," who joined the party after the overthrow of tsarism. They believed that under the conditions of a bourgeois system, there was no other way to escape poverty, need, and disenfranchisement except through rebellion and revolution.
In the summer of 1917, when A. F. Kerensky became Prime Minister and the SRs entered the Provisional Government, a "left" faction formed within the party, which accused its party of degeneration, collaboration with the bourgeoisie, delaying land reform, and the criminal continuation of the imperialist war.
By its nature, the left-SR party was revolutionary-democratic. Their tactical slogans were almost identical to the Bolshevik ones: power to the Soviets, land to the peasants, peace to the peoples. Their programmatic goals were generally similar as well: socialism, planned organization of labor, etc. However, behind these promises, there was nothing serious. "Peace to the peoples" was a beautiful declaration that turned into a new bloody civil war. "Land to the peasants" essentially became a sanction for the plunder of estates rather than an important economic measure, as at that time the landlords held only one-tenth of all land holdings, while "Power to the Soviets" in practice turned into the dictatorship of the bureaucratic apparatus.
The left-SRs actively supported the Bolsheviks in all their initiatives — during the October Revolution, at the Congresses of Soviets, during the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, and in the period of the first political crisis, agreeing to form a coalition government with them. At times, it even seemed that they were more revolutionary than the Bolsheviks. At the III All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which approved the "Declaration of Rights of Workers and Exploited People" and the left-SR land law, Proshyan, in a bright moment, proposed to Lenin, who was skeptical about his proposal, to raise the question of merging the parties, as all the differences between their parties seemed to boil down to a few disagreements regarding the timing and methods of building socialism. The ensuing rupture was all the more deafening.
Despite all their support for Bolshevik policies, the left-SRs still infused the events with a somewhat different meaning than the Bolsheviks did. They were the ones who "turned revolutionary dialectics into simplistic sophisms about 'simple rules of law and morality.'"
The left-SRs realized that by seizing power together with the Bolsheviks, they were exceeding their authority, but they consoled themselves with the thought that all this was done for the good of the revolution and the people.
The Masses of Semirechye for a Peaceful Evolutionary Path of Development
