Left Socialist-Revolutionaries

Formation

The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries (formally the Party of Left Socialist-Revolutionaries-Internationalists) grew out of the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party during 1917 and organized as an independent party in December 1917. The faction had formed after the February Revolution and opposed the continuation of the war in the Petrograd Soviet, where at the First Congress of Soviets it acted in close sympathy with the Bolsheviks. The Left SRs demanded condemnation of the war as imperialist and immediate withdrawal, an end to the SR party's cooperation with the Provisional Government, and immediate transfer of the land to the peasantry. Maria Spiridonova, Boris Kamkov, and Prosh Proshian were among the leaders, and the executive committee of the main railway union, the Vikzhel, had a Left SR majority.

October Revolution and coalition

The Left SRs joined the October armed insurrection and chaired the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee, voting for the decrees on peace and land at the Second Congress of Soviets. They initially refused to enter the Council of People's Commissars, demanding an all-socialist government, but in late 1917 they formed a coalition with the Bolsheviks, taking the commissariats of agriculture (Kolegayev), state property (Karelin), justice (Steinberg), post and telegraphs (Proshian), and local government (Trutovsky), while Algasov received a post without portfolio. They demanded the Justice Commissariat in order to keep terror within the law, and joined the government in order to moderate Bolshevik policy. The Bolsheviks, however, kept the decisive ministries controlling the armed forces, finance, and politics, so the distribution of power was very unfavorable to the Left SRs. Many Left SRs also took part in creating the Red Army and in the work of the Cheka.

Land socialization and agrarian policy

From late 1917 the Left SRs supervised the agrarian reform, controlling both the Agriculture Commissariat and the peasant section of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, chaired by Spiridonova. The Fundamental Law of Land Socialization of 1918 abolished private ownership of land, handed it to those who worked it, and favored cooperatives. The Left SRs played a crucial role in extending Soviet authority in the countryside through the volost soviets, where the Bolsheviks were weak.

The main dissent between the allies was over terror as an instrument of politics. Steinberg, as Justice Commissar, favored harsh measures against the opposition but always legally, whereas Lenin was willing to use state terror to consolidate the revolution. Steinberg tried to subordinate the Cheka to the revolutionary court but failed; since Lenin had given the Cheka the power to inform the commissars only after the fact, the body was in practice subordinate only to the Sovnarkom, where the Bolshevik majority could approve its actions. After the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly the Left SRs joined the Cheka to try to control it, and until the July crisis they blocked the execution of political prisoners.

Brest-Litovsk and July 1918

The decisive conflict arose over the peace negotiations with the Central Powers. At the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on 23 February 1918 the Left SRs voted against signing the treaty, and none of the party's ninety-three representatives there voted in favor. Treating the dictated peace as a betrayal of international revolution, the Left SRs backed Trotsky's proposal to abandon the war without signing, and on 19 March 1918 they resigned from the government in protest at ratification. The departure was not a complete break: both parties continued to collaborate in other councils and commissariats, and the party leadership was divided, with almost half of the central committee inclined to sign.

After the treaty the party's influence grew as support for the Bolsheviks fell: membership rose from about sixty thousand to one hundred thousand between April and June 1918. At the same time Bolshevik domestic policy, above all the campaign to divide the peasantry and requisition grain to supply the cities, the takeover of the soviets, and the restoration of the death penalty, made the Left SRs implacable opponents. At the Fifth Congress of Soviets the Left SRs demanded no confidence in the government, the annulment of Brest-Litovsk, and a declaration of war on Germany; when the Bolshevik majority rejected these demands, they walked out of the congress.

Assassination of Mirbach and suppression

On 6 July 1918, on the decision of the Left SR Central Committee, Yakov Blumkin and Nikolai Andreyev assassinated the German ambassador in Moscow, Count Wilhelm von Mirbach, in an attempt to provoke renewed war with Germany. The Left SRs occupied the Cheka headquarters and took its chairman Felix Dzerzhinsky hostage, seized the central telegraph and post office, and held twenty-seven Bolshevik officials as hostages; the Red Army commander on the Eastern Front, Muravyov, seized Simbirsk. Their intention was not to seize power but to force a confrontation with Germany and destroy the results of Brest-Litovsk, although the rebels' declarations and telegrams claimed they had taken power. The government treated the events as an uprising against Soviet power, and pro-Bolshevik units backed by the Latvian Riflemen suppressed it on 7 July with artillery and machine guns.

Repression followed immediately. The Fifth Congress declared the Left SR action an attempt to seize power, approved the government's actions, and expelled from the soviets those Left SRs who did not condemn their central committee. The roughly 450 Left SR delegates at the congress were arrested; thirteen of them, including Spiridonova, were transferred to the Kremlin, and those who had opposed the uprising were released after their weapons were seized. The party press was shut down and its officials removed. The government announced that two hundred people had been shot, which the German embassy welcomed; in fact, twelve Chekists from Popov's detachment were executed along with Aleksandrovich, and the party organisation was found to have had little involvement in the assassination.

Decline, repression and legacy

July 1918 signaled the end of the coalition and, for many historians, the final formation of the one-party Bolshevik dictatorship, since after that month the representation of other parties in the soviets became insignificant. The party split: in September 1918 the Party of Narodnik Communists and the Party of Revolutionary Communism broke away and later joined the Bolsheviks. Some Left SRs joined the underground and took part in armed actions against the leadership, and a number, such as Alexander Antonov, fought in the Civil War with the green rebels against both the Bolsheviks and the Whites. Spiridonova, Kamkov and Donat Cherepanov led the underground "activist" current, while Steinberg's "legalist" current advocated only public criticism and peaceful struggle and in 1922–23 joined the Association of Left Narodism. The survivors of that stage, whether in prison or internal exile, fell victim to the Great Purge in the late 1930s.

The Left SRs occupied an ambiguous position: an ally of the Bolsheviks that was destroyed by them, a party of the peasantry that rejected the dictatorship of the proletariat and after its Fourth Congress moved toward positions close to anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism, advocating self-government of labor collectives and a federation of cooperatives. The character of the July events remains disputed: Alexander Rabinowitch, reviewing published and unpublished evidence, concluded that the Moscow Left SRs' actions were consistent with reshaping Sovnarkom policy rather than seizing power; Spiridonova claimed the assassination was the personal initiative of a few leaders, that no uprising was intended, and that further actions were self-defense. Others, including Lenin, treated the episode as an attempt to overthrow Soviet power.