Union of Socialists-Revolutionaries-Maximalists
사회혁명당 최대주의자 연합
A radical populist party of the Russian Empire that split from the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1906. It demanded the immediate socialisation of the land, factories and all other means of production, that is, the full implementation of the 'maximum programme', and a 'Toilers' Republic', and it endorsed 'economic terror' against factory owners and landowners and expropriations as well as political terror.
In depth
The Maximalists were agrarian terrorists, the 'Moscow Opposition' and other radical dissidents within the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and they split from it officially at its Second Congress at Imatra in 1906; their first founding conference met at Åbo (Turku) in Finland in October 1906. They rejected the 'two-stage' revolution associated with Chernov, arguing that it was unrealistic to think the liberated toiling masses would content themselves with a bourgeois republic and gradual reform. They were not opposed to the state as such and envisaged a popular revolutionary dictatorship, rejecting the comparison with anarchists; they also rejected parliamentary democracy and boycotted the State Duma elections.
In practice much of the party's energy went into fundraising by criminal means and violence against officials, capitalists and landowners. In March 1906 it seized 875,000 roubles from the Moscow Mutual Credit Society; in August it attempted to assassinate Stolypin, killing or wounding more than a hundred people; and in October it attacked a customs cash carriage in Fonarny Lane in St Petersburg and took 400,000 roubles. It was responsible for about fifty terrorist acts in 1906–1907. Prominent Maximalists included the principal leader M. I. Sokolov, regarded by his followers as a 'born dictator', the theorist E. Iu. Lozinsky ('Ustinov') and Vladimir Mazurin.
Decimated by arrests after the failed revolution of 1905–1907, the party had ceased to function by 1911, but it revived after the February Revolution of 1917 and took part in the October armed uprising, the congresses of soviets and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. In April 1918 its Third All-Russian Conference approved a draft of the foundations of a constitution of the Toilers' Republic. The Union split in 1919, and in 1920 some Maximalists joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) while others united with former Left SRs.