Facing Russia

"The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1921-1939" by Elizabeth White is, despite the general title, a book specifically about the Prague branch of the Right SRs during the period mentioned.

The SRs were one of the largest political parties in Russia before the October revolution, representing the "populist" or "Narodnik" revolutionary tradition, which called for socialism based on the peasantry. Alexander Kerensky, the de facto leader of the Provisional Government, was an SR. Victor Chernov, the speaker of the Constituent Assembly, was also an SR. The Bolsheviks overthrew Kerensky in 1917 and dissolved the Constituent Assembly in 1918...

Under the impact of the October Revolution, the SR Party split in two. The Left SRs supported the Bolsheviks and were briefly part of a Bolshevik-dominated coalition government. They broke with the Bolsheviks during the Civil War. The Right SRs, by contrast, fought the Bolsheviks from the start. Both Kerensky and Chernov were Right SRs. After the Bolshevik victory in the Civil War, Kerensky went to France, while Chernov set up shop in Czechoslovakia. 

The Right SRs were split into several different factions, with the group in Paris being "on the right" within the Party. Their "socialism" was probably nominal. The Paris SRs cooperated with the "bourgeois" Kadet Party and moved closer to religion, seeing Orthodoxy as a genuine expression of Russian national identity. The Prague SRs, by contrast, upheld the socialist-Narodnik line, and represented the SR Party in the Socialist International. They were thus the left wing of the Right SRs! 

Strictly speaking, the Prague SR was a fusion of two factions, the group around Chernov being the most leftist. Chernov had opposed Russian entry into World War I and even participated in the famous radical socialist anti-war conferences in Zimmerwald and Kienthal. The other group consisted of "defensists" who had supported the Russian war effort but broken with the pro-Allied line when the Western powers intervened in Russia during the Civil War to aid the White Guards. (As democratic socialists, the Right SRs had conflicts with both the Bolsheviks and the monarchist Whites.)

Czechoslovakia supported the Right SRs and other Russian emigre groups during the 1920's. The collaboration began during the Russian Civil War, when the Right SRs worked with the Czechoslovak Legions in Siberia. When the Legions finally left Russia, some Right SRs accompanied them. The liberal or moderately socialist Czechoslovak leadership seems to have promoted the Right SR group in Prague above all other Russian factions. The Prague SRs were funded by the Czechoslovak government. Both president Masaryk and future president Benes were personally involved in supporting the Prague SR group. 

Interestingly, most Prague SRs were not impressed by the New Economic Policy or NEP launched by Lenin after the Russian Civil War, despite its supposed "pro-peasant" orientation. They regarded the NEP as a mere tactic, and even criticized it "from the left" for being too capitalist! SR magazines printed articles about peasant resistance in the Soviet Union during the NEP, resistance directed against tax collectors. The lack of democracy and attempts by the Soviet regime to control the cooperative movement were sharply criticized. Most Prague SRs didn't like Bukharin, who had rallied the Bolshevik "masses" against the SRs during the anti-SR trial of 1922. The Prague SRs correctly predicted that the Bolsheviks would abandon NEP, despite the defeat of the United Opposition. However, they didn't expect Stalin's "left" turn to be succesful, instead predicting a collapse of the entire Soviet system. 

Chernov and his sub-faction had a somewhat different line. Chernov was more positive towards Bukharin. Above all, Chernov called for the right of non-Russian territories to leave the Soviet Union. To promote cooperation with non-Russian SRs (above all Ukrainians), he formed the Socialist League of the New East. This provoked a de facto split between the Chernovites and the ex-defensist group. The latter defended the territorial integrity of Russia and opposed non-Russian self-determination with nationalist and chauvinist arguments. 

The split between the two factions making up the Prague SR paralyzed its activities. Chernov's position on Ukrainan self-determination was extremely unpopular in Czechoslovakia, which controlled a territory with an ethnic Ukrainan population, Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia. By 1932, the Czechoslovak government had stopped funding both sub-groups of the Prague SR. In 1935, Czechoslovakia recognized the Soviet Union and signed a friendship treaty with it. The Soviets demanded that Benes must curtail Russian emigre activities in Prague. 

The Prague SRs took a "defensist" stance towards the Soviet Union during World War II. Despite this, the SRs who had remained in Prague during the war were arrested by the Soviets and sent to prison camps in the Soviet Union. 

Chernov spent some time in Palestine, fascinated by the "agrarian socialism" of the kibbutzim and moshavim. He was also involved in failed attempts to establish  agricultural communes in Canada and Mexico. Eventually, he settled in the United States. 

Chernov's anti-chauvinist position seems to have been his only redeeming trait. Otherwise, he comes across as an abstract elite intellectual. His analysis of the October Revolution was that Lenin had turned to the Lumpenproletariat. In reality, the "dark masses" of unskilled workers were the majority of the Russian working class. Many of them had only recently left life as impoverished peasants. Note the irony: a "socialist" leader of a "peasant party" repudiating both workers and peasants! 

With that, I close this review.