The liberals formed their own Constitutional-Democratic Party (also known as the Party of National Freedom) in October 1905.
All these parties were led by intelligenty, and although the socialists referred to the liberals as “bourgeois” and the Bolsheviks labeled their socialist opponents “petty bourgeois,” there was no discernible difference in the social background of the leaders of the three principal opposition parties. They competed for much the same constituency, and even though the liberals wanted to avoid the revolution which the socialists promoted, in their strategy and tactics they were not averse to employing revolutionary methods and benefiting from terrorism.
Russian liberalism was dominated by intellectuals with a pronounced left-wing orientation: its complexion was radical-liberal. The Constitutional-Democrats, or Kadets as they were popularly known, espoused the traditional liberal values: democratic franchise, parliamentary rule, liberty and equality of all citizens, respect for law. But operating in a country in which the overwhelming majority of the population had little understanding of these imported ideas and the socialists were busy inciting revolution, they felt it necessary to adopt a more radical stance.
The Socialist-Revolutionary Party was the elder of the two leading socialist parties, since it could trace its origins to the People’s Will. Its platform had three main planks: anti-capitalism, terrorism, and socialization of land. Following the Socialists-Revolutionaries of the 1870s and 1880s, the SRs espoused the theory of “separate path.” They could not entirely ignore the spectacular growth in Russia after 1890 of capitalism in its industrial and financial forms, but they argued that this was an artificial and transient phenomenon, that by its very success undermined itself, laying waste the rural economy, its principal market. They allowed the “bourgeoisie” some role in the revolutionary process; on the whole, however, they considered it loyal to the autocracy. Russia would be liberated by armed action of the masses in the cities and villages.
Since they did not believe that the Russian bourgeoisie would lead or even join in the political struggle, the task devolved on the intelligentsia. This mission it could fulfill best by acts of political terrorism which had the same objective as that formulated by the People’s Will—that is, undermining the prestige of the government in the eyes of the population and encouraging it to rebellion. Terror occupied the central plank in the SR program. To the SRs it was not only a political tactic but a spiritual act, a quasi-religious ritual, in which the terrorist took life but paid for it with his own. SR literature contains curiously barbaric paeans to the “holy cause,” the “creative ecstasy,” and the “highest peak of human spirit,” which found expression, it was said, in the spilling of blood.43 Terrorist operations were directed by the conspiratorial SR Combat Organization (Boevaia Organizatsiia), which “sentenced” government officials to “execution.” But local SR cells and individual members also engaged in assassinations on their own initiative. The first act of political terror directed by the SRs was the murder in 1902 of the Minister of the Interior, D. S. Sipiagin. Subsequently, until crushed in 1908–9, the SR Combat Organization perpetrated hundreds of political murders.
Its daring terrorist undertakings, which often ended with the death of the terrorist, won the SRs much admiration in oppositional circles, including those formally opposed to terrorism. The Social-Democrats, who rejected this tactic, suffered serious defections to their rivals, reputed to be “real” revolutionaries.44
The social program of the SRs centered on the “socialization” of land, which called for the abolition of private property in land and the transfer of its management to local organs of self-government: these were to ensure that any citizen able and willing to cultivate the land received an adequate allotment. The SRs adopted the peasant slogan of “Black Repartition”—that is, the expropriation and distribution to the communes of all privately held land. This program, which reflected the desires of the rural population of Orthodox Russia, gained the SRs the support of nearly the entire peasantry. The much more modest demands on behalf of the peasants in the SD program, and the general contempt in which the SDs held the muzhik kept that party from gaining any following in the countryside.
Although their main base of support lay in the village, the SRs did not ignore industrial workers: in their program, they described the proletariat as an essential element in the revolution and allowed for a transitional period of “proletarian revolutionary dictatorship.”45 Unlike the SDs, the SRs did not treat the peasants and industrial workers as distinct and hostile classes. Their theoreticians, of whom Victor Chernov was the most prominent, defined classes not by the relationship to the means of production but by the source of income. By this standard, societies had only two classes: the exploited or “toilers” and the exploiters—those who earned their livelihood and those who lived off the labor of others. In the latter category they placed landlords, capitalists, officials, and clergy; in the former, peasants, workers, and themselves, the intelligentsia. A self-employed peasant was to them a “toiler” and a natural ally of the industrial worker. They were vague, however, on what to do about industrial enterprises in a post-revolutionary society and had difficulty attracting workers.
The SR Party, extremist as it was, had a still more extreme wing known as Maximalists. This minority wanted to supplement political terror with “economic terror,” by which they meant assassinations of landlords and factory owners. In practice, their strategy reduced itself to indiscriminate bombings, as illustrated by the attack on Prime Minister Stolypin’s villa in 1911 in which dozens of bystanders lost their lives. To finance their operations, the Maximalists carried out bank holdups, euphemistically called “expropriations,” which brought them hundreds of thousands of rubles. (In these operations, as we shall see, they sometimes collaborated with the Bolsheviks.) The movement had a maniacal quality, as is evident from the ideas of the Maximalist I. Pavlov. In a pamphlet published legally in Moscow in 1907, The Purification of Mankind (Ochistka chelovechestva), Pavlov argued that “exploiters” were not only a social class but a “degenerate race,” which inherited and developed beyond anything known in the animal world the vilest characteristics of the gorilla and the orangutan. Since they bequeathed these vicious traits to their own offspring, all representatives of that “race,” including women and children, had to be exterminated.46 The SR Party formally disowned the Maximalists and the Union of Socialists-Revolutionaries Maximalists, formed in October 1906, but in practice it managed to accommodate itself to their outrages.
The SRs were loosely organized in good measure because the police, for whom prevention of terrorist acts had the highest priority, kept on infiltrating and decimating SR ranks. (According to G. A. Gershuni, the founder of the SR terrorist apparatus, for the denunciation of a member of the SR Combat Organization, the Okhrana paid a reward of 1,000 rubles, for an SR intellectual, 100, and for an SR worker, 25, but for a Social-Democrat, at most 3.47) The party’s cells were filled with students: in Moscow they were said to constitute at least 75 percent of SR activists.48 In the countryside, the most loyal supporters of the SRs were schoolteachers. Propaganda and agitation among the peasantry, consisting mainly of a scattering of pamphlets and leaflets, seems to have had little direct success in stimulating anti-governmental disorders, since at least until 1905 the peasants remained loyal to the notion that the land they craved would be provided by the Tsar.