People of the Revolution and the USSR

GlossarySocialist Revolutionary Party (PSR/SR)

Semyon Leontyevich Maslov

Семён Леонтьевич Маслов

A Socialist-Revolutionary agrarian thinker who championed peasant cooperation

“We talk too much; at moments like these, action is necessary.”

Semyon Leontyevich Maslov was a Socialist-Revolutionary agrarian economist and organiser of the peasant cooperative movement. He supported land reform but opposed unsanctioned seizures of estates, seeking to join legal reform with rural self-government. As minister of agriculture in October 1917, he lived through the Provisional Government’s final hours and arrest in the Winter Palace, while continuing to defend the Constituent Assembly and cooperative politics. His later defence of cooperative autonomy conflicted with the direction of Soviet policy, and he was executed in 1938 and rehabilitated in 1988.

Career timeline
  • 1897–1903Exiled to Kazan, then graduated from Kazan University’s law faculty
  • 1902–1913Statistician in the Kazan zemstvo, peasant-press editor and Socialist-Revolutionary publicist
  • 1913–1917Worked in Moscow agricultural cooperation and helped organise the Central Flax-Growers’ Association
  • 1917.04–10Deputy chair of the Main Land Committee and member of the All-Russian Council of Peasant Deputies’ executive committee
  • 1917.10.03–25Minister of Agriculture in the Provisional Government
  • 1917.10–1918Arrested in the Winter Palace, then joined the underground Provisional Government and Constituent Assembly
  • 1921–1929Chair of Selsko-Soyuz, professor and vice-rector of the All-Russian Cooperative Institute
  • 1930–1938Exiled and rearrested before being executed in 1938

Maxim Maximilianovich Filonenko

Максимилиан Максимилианович Филоненко

The Socialist Revolutionary official who pressed the revolutionary government toward coercive order

Filonenko later testified that "General Kornilov, under the sway of his staff and the circulating rumours, feared some unforeseen action against himself."

Maxim Filonenko was a lawyer and Socialist Revolutionary who, as government commissar at Supreme Headquarters in 1917, worked with Kornilov and Savinkov to restore the death penalty and tighten military discipline. He sided with Kerensky during the Kornilov crisis, then joined anti-Bolshevik underground activity before emigrating to work as a lawyer and professor of law.

Career timeline
  • 1906–1913Studied shipbuilding at the Saint Petersburg Polytechnic Institute
  • 1914Entered the First World War as a sub-lieutenant in the Life Guards Grenadier Regiment
  • 1917.06Provisional Government commissar with the 8th Army
  • 1917.07–08Government commissar under Supreme Commander Kornilov
  • 1917.08Tried to mediate between Kornilov and Kerensky, then supported Kerensky
  • 1917–1918Participated in anti-Bolshevik underground activity in Petrograd
  • 1918–1919Member of the Arkhangelsk city duma under the Northern Region provisional government
  • 1933–1940Professor of Roman law at the University of Brussels