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Revolutionary Russia
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The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 19211939
Alexander Trapeznik
a a

University of Otago Version of record first published: 14 Dec 2011.

To cite this article: Alexander Trapeznik (2011): The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 19211939, Revolutionary Russia, 24:2, 223-224 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09546545.2011.618302

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Revolutionary Russia, Vol. 24, No. 2, December 2011, pp. 223 224

BOOK REVIEW
Elizabeth White, The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1921 1939, London: Routledge, 2011. Pp. IX 1 180; notes; bibliography; index. 80.00 (hardback). ISBN 9-780-415435-840 From the early 1900s to 1917, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that Lenin and the Bolshevik Party would emerge as the major figures in the Russian revolutionary movement, let alone as the rulers of Russia. Viktor Chernovs Socialist Revolutionary (SR) party, Iulii Martov and Leon Trotsky could equally have been heirs apparent to the throne. Indeed, there were occasions when it appeared that the SRs would succeed in dominating the Russian revolutionary movement, and for much of 1917 they exercised far more influence over the working class and in the country at large than did the Bolsheviks or Mensheviks. In fact, it can be argued that SR policies and blunders in 1917 contributed as much to the Bolshevik triumph as did the actions of the Leninists themselves. In the end, they were powerless to prevent the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. The SR party once again was chiefly concerned with, and distracted by, factional infighting and the elections to the Constituent Assembly. The Assembly duly convened in Petrograd on 5 January 1918. It met for only one day during which it elected Chernov as Chairman. Civil wars broke out in the course of 1918. Many leading SRs made their way to Samara on the Volga where, together with a few Mensheviks, they attempted to set up a new Provisional Government made up of members of the dispersed Constituent Assembly. The end of the SR party came in 1922, when its remaining leaders in Russia were tried for treason and condemned to death. Or so one thought. Elizabeth Whites book attempts to retrieve the SR party from the dustbin of history and examine its leaders in political exile in Czechoslovakia in the 1920s and 1930s, where they continued to agitate for a socialist future as they saw it and provided perceptive critiques of the events unfolding in Soviet Russia. Whites book complements and supplements existing major scholarship on the SR party, which has focused primarily on the history of the party and its splits, and its terrorist and agrarian policies in the turbulent period between 1905 and 1917. It also con tributes to the burgeoning study of the Russian emigre community. Her work, which is based on a comprehensive examination of party archival material, contains some very perceptive insights and useful commentary. It dismisses the populist myth, which has haunted the party since its inception of peasant socialism. The book is based on her PhD thesis and focuses on Russian emigre political thought and action among the SRs and their reaction to Bolshevik Russias attempts to build socialism. White argues that the first wave of emigration after the October Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent civil war made an important contribution to the history of twentieth-century Russian political thought as well as adding to our understanding of Stalins Revolution from Above. Furthermore, these individual heirs to the populist intellectual tradition of Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Cherenyshevskii were not preoccupied with

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ISSN 0954-6545 print/ISSN 1743-7873 online/11/020223-2 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09546545.2011.618302

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REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA

feelings of frustration, recriminations or guilt. Instead, they were fully integrated into the social and intellectual life of Czechoslovakia. She also argues that the Prague SRs were closely allied with the European socialist movements and made a positive contribution to socialist ideas. The focus of the study is on their contribution to the intellectual tradition in the post-October environment rather than the internecine and long-standing factionalism within the party. Furthermore, a study of emigre groups such as the Prague SRs widens our understanding of the events in the Soviet Union within the confines of Russian narodnichestvo and European socialism. As White points out, these individuals from the centre left of the party settled in Czechoslovakia with the support of President Masaryk. They remained committed to the ideals of socialism and the traditional populist belief in the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. They were staunchly opposed to the fledgling Soviet regime and were critical of the SR partys actions and policies in the heady days of 1917. It is also important to note that prior to, and indeed after 1917, the SR party was always an amalgam of many groups and tendencies with divergent viewpoints and political ideals; for example, the partys leader and chief theoretician, Viktor Chernov, and a small group split from the Prague SRs in 1928; the other major group which opposed them were the Paris SRs. Whites book is organised into eight succinct chapters. The first covers the early history of the populist movement, the SR partys political programme and the reasons for its demise in 1917. Chapter 2 deals with the historical, political and intellectual environment in which the Prague SRs operated. Chapter 3 examines their analysis of the NEP period with a special emphasis on the peasants response to the Bolsheviks fiscal retreat and the Soviet governments handling of the situation, and posits the SRs alternative view for Russias economic development. Chapter 4 presents the Prague SRs analysis of the Soviet government and its social support base, which White argues reveals their failure to adequately understand power relations in the Soviet Union. Chapter 5 presents a utopian view from the SR viewpoint of a postSoviet Russia after the fall of Bolshevism. Chapter 6 complements the earlier chapter on the NEP period by examining the SRs analysis of the failure of NEP and the subsequent advent of the Stalin period. Chapter 7 provides the SRs response to forced collectivisation of agriculture and how this policy related to their own agrarian programme. The final chapter presents an overview of the Prague SRs during the 1930s and their assessment of the rise of fascism and the looming war threat. In the end, despite their endeavours and intellectual analysis of the Russian revolution, all was in vain: the Bolsheviks maintained their power in Russia. White is to be commended for her efforts in producing a book that makes an important contribution to the study of emigre politics, and highlights the significant contribution that the Prague SRs made to the intellectual and political history of inter-war Europe and the Soviet Union. Alexander Trapeznik University of Otago alextrapeznik@otago.ac.nz # 2011, Alexander Trapeznik

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