In the 1890s, Chernov attempted to organise the peasants of the Samara province, for which he was imprisoned in the infamous St Peter and Paul Fortress. A Marxist theorist in his own right, he developed SR policy around Marx’s suggestion that the Russian village commune might contain the seeds of a specifically Russian socialism that could avoid the ugliness and alienation of industrial capitalism. In the SRs he forged a mass party advocating progressive taxation, land re-distribution and agrarian socialism. In all contested elections held between 1906 (the first Duma) and 1918 (the first and last All-Russia Constituent Assembly, of which he was President), the SRs received the majority of votes of Russian workers and peasants. From 1901 to 1918 they indisputably held the most legitimate mandate to speak for the Russian masses.
The SRs offered an attractive package of radical reforms to a wide base of peasant and worker supporters. Francis King’s history of the SRs during 1917 considered that in the light of today’s indigenous peoples’ movements the agrarian policies of the SRs “deserve more serious attention on the left”.1 From their earliest days, the SR’s believed “the coming revolution would be national in character, expressing the aspirations of workers, peasants and intellectuals”.2 Their call for immediate socialisation of the land without compensation and its redistribution to peasant small holders was immensely popular. The SRs based themselves on educational activity and support to the peasantry such as Sunday Schools for adult literacy and Committees for the Elimination of Illiteracy (these efforts were frowned upon by the Ministry of the Interior, who saw no benefit in a literate peasantry).3 This activity “played a considerable part in achieving the rapprochement between the peasantry and the intelligentsia which was a prerequisite for successful revolutionary work in the countryside”.4
The particular type of “intelligentsia” attracted to the SRs were not the highly educated lawyers and philosophers of the RSDLP. They tended to be village schoolteachers, medical assistants and nurses, and were often the sons and daughters of peasants themselves. This gave them a deeper insight in to the lives and concerns of the peasants than the urban-based Marxists. Because of this organic connection to their members the SRs supported the local consumer and producer cooperatives promoted by peasant radicals such as Sergei Semenov, who wished to escape the often-chaotic allocation of narrow strips of land by the Mir for a more rational system of land management.5 At the same time the SRs’ violent retaliatory actions against repressive police and Land Captains secured the emotional sympathies of peasants looking for swift class justice. Not surprisingly the SRs were subject to fierce attacks by the Social Democrats. Struggling to forge a united Marxist party, the last thing the Social Democrats needed was a populist socialist alternative that tapped into the gut instincts of the mass of worker-peasants.
The SRs practiced a populist rural socialism not dissimilar to that offered by the Mexican Zaptatista movement in response to the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the 1990s. The preconditions for Mexico entering NAFTA was the revoking of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution which forbad selling communal land–the Ejidos, half of all Mexican land–held and used by indigenous people. NAFTA forbad any obstacle to “free” investment in the US, Canada and Mexico, and thus granted an unrestricted right to large American corporations to buy privatised state assets. It turned legal tenants into illegal land-squatters and made their communities informal settlements. On the day NAFTA became law, 1st January, 1994, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), a collection of agrarian radicals and indigenous rights activists, took over land and vacant estates in the Chiapas region and announced they would march on Mexico City.
The EZLN emerged from self-defence brigades set up to protect peasants from the terrorism of Chiapas’ coffee barons and cattle ranchers. Their statement of intent proclaimed:
We are a product of 500 years of struggle: first against slavery, then during the War of Independence against Spain […] then to avoid being absorbed by North American imperialism, then to promulgate our constitution and expel the French empire from our soil […] Later the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz denied us the just application of the Reform laws, and the people rebelled and leaders like Villa and Zapata emerged, poor men just like us.
In reality they did not attempt to overthrow the government but settled on occupation of their land. When the government of President Salinas threatened to eject them, the central square of Mexico City was flooded with Zapatista supporters, and Chief Advisor of Chase Manhattan Bank’s Emerging Markets Group Riordan Rhett sent an instruction to President Salinas: “The government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate its effective control of the national territory and of security policy”.6
Commentators on right and left expected the Zapatistas to attempt to overthrow the government, but they refused to indulge what would have been a suicidal power play. Instead the Zapatista’s iconic spokesperson “Subcommandante Marcos”–whose identity to this day is in dispute, and may even have been what the Zapatistas called a “hologram”, a PR construct–declared at the National Democratic Convention in the Lacandon jungle in August 1994, that the Zapatistas rejected “the doubtful honour of being the vanguard of the multiple vanguards that plague us”. He explained that unlike Leninist elites who imposed political programmes on workers and peasants, “The moment has come to say to everyone that we neither want, nor are able, to occupy the place that some hope we will occupy, the place from which all opinions will come, all the answers, all the truth. We are not going to do that”.7
Following US orders the Mexican government attempted to crush the EZLN militarily–once in January 1994 and again in February 1995. Both times the government had to back off in the face of massive protests in Mexico City and around the world. In 1996, the government was forced to meet with EZLN leaders and negotiate the San Andrés Accords, which established local autonomy for indigenous peoples in Mexico, as well as new educational, social and cultural rights. They required changes to the law and the Mexican constitution, and committed the Mexican government to eliminating “the poverty, the marginalisation and insufficient political participation of millions of indigenous Mexicans”. The commitments have not been fully honoured, but the Zapatistas continue to fight for the rights of the indigenous rural population against the legalised predation of US corporations and agri-business.
The challenge to Tsarism offered by the SRs might have developed along similar lines had they not had to contend with a fiercely urban-centred social-democratic alternative. While the SRs were gaining support amongst the peasantry, the Social Democrats were using Iskra as “a weapon to build a centralised all-Russian organisation”.8 Central to this work was Iskra’s primary strategist and organiser, Vladimir Ulyanov, now beginning to use the alias by which he would become famous–V.I. Lenin. Only Plekhanov was regarded as more senior and his eminence derived solely from his philosophical and theoretical writing.
Personally, Plekhanov was vain, prickly and difficult, and he did not contribute to the administrative grind behind the production and distribution of Iskra. This was left to the younger generation of Lenin, Martov and Potresov. Plekhanov regarded Lenin as a forceful polemicist, although crude and simplistic. But as one of Lenin’s more critical biographers conceded, “Lenin wrote only to influence the actions of men. If his writing was often repetitious and oversimplified, he nevertheless hammered out what he wanted to say very effectively. And if his words did not always appeal to refined intellects, they carried wider appeal for the larger mass at which they were aimed”.9 Unlike Plekhanov, Lenin rarely adopted a revolutionary pose or militant attitude he did not genuinely believe. When Peter Struve moved across to liberalism in the early years of the 20th century, Lenin labeled him a renegade and a traitor in Iskra. He was criticised for this by a fellow Marxist who feared that Lenin’s words might inflame someone to assassinate Struve. “He deserves to die”, replied Lenin.