The Socialist Revolutionary party, which had been the largest and most popular party in Russia in 1917, did not after the October Revolution just disappear into the "dustbin of history", as Trotsky hoped, but – led by its leadership in exile in the 1920s and 1930s – continued to observe and comment on developments in Russia. In emigration, the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) party often put forward policy proposals on a wide range of topics: policies which, based on a shrewd understanding of the real situation in Russia, offered realistic alternatives to the policies being pursued by the Marxist Bolshevik regime. This book fills a gap in examining one of the most significant Russian political parties, and is based on extensive original analysis of SR party materials, shows how it operated; how it formulated and disseminated its ideas; what these ideas were, and how the party's ideas developed in response to changing circumstances in Russia and Europe more widely. Far from being the agrarian Slavophile romantics as they are often portrayed, this book shows the SRs were energetic European modernisers who contributed vigorously to the leading debates of their day; it also shows how the SR vision of a populist, socialist regime failed to materialise as state control, dictatorship and the collectivisation of agriculture took hold.

The Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) party gained an overall majority in the election to the Russian Constituent Assembly, which was dissolved by the Bolsheviks in January 1918. The SRs derived the bulk of their electoral support from the peasantry, and the gulf between the predominantly urban Bolshevik party and the rural masses was to create immense problems for the Soviet government in the 1920s, culminating in the horrors of forced collectivization. The SRs offered an alternative vision of the Russian peasant's path to socialism. They were closer to the peasantry than any other revolutionary party, and more aware of the problems involved in implementing a socialist transformation of Russian agriculture. In this study the author traces the development of SR agrarian policy in the party's formative years, from the period of disillusionment which followed the failure of the Populist 'movement to the people' of the 1870s, through the revolutionary years 1905-7, to the subsequent reaction under Stolypin.

" The Socialist Revolutionary Party played an important role in the history of the Russian revolutionary movement. The author seeks to explain why this party--which continued the tradition of the 1870s--did not ultimately prevail in an agrarian country like the Tsarist empire. Using a wealth of printed sources and, for the first time, drawing upon materials from the archive of the Central Committee of the PSR, this study provides a detailed analysis of the theoretical foundations of the party as well as its organisational structure and political practice during the first Russian Revolution. Manfred Hildermeier ist Professor am Seminar für Mittlere und Neuere Geschichte der Universität Göttingen. "

Fyodor Sergeyevich Olferieff (1885&–1971) led a remarkable life in the shadows of history. This book presents his memoirs for the first time, translated and annotated by his granddaughter Tanya A. Cameron. Born into a noble family, Olferieff was a Russian career military officer who observed firsthand key events of the early twentieth century, including the 1905&–7 revolution, the Great War, the collapse of the imperial state, and the civil wars in Ukraine and Crimea. Olferieff wrestles with moral and political questions, wondering whether his own advantages could be justified—and whether, if born a peasant, he might have thrown himself into the revolution. As Gary Hamburg writes in an illuminating companion essay, Olferieff wrote "to understand himself and to record his broken life for posterity" as a privileged observer of a bloody, historically pivotal era.

Anna Geifman examines the explosion of terrorist activity that took place in the Russian empire from the years just prior to the turn of the century through 1917, a period when over 17,000 people were killed or wounded by revolutionary extremists. On the basis of new research, she argues that a multitude of assassination attempts, bombings, ideologically motivated robberies, and incidents of armed assault, kidnapping, extortion, and blackmail for party purposes played a primary role in the revolution of 1905 and early twentieth-century Russian political history in general.