Political and Economic Terror in the Tactics of the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party before 1914

Abstract

The Russian Socialist-Revolutionaries (SRs)1 are best known as a terrorist party whose Combat Organisation (Boevaya Organizatsiya) accomplished a series of spectacular assassinations in the early years of the twentieth century. Their victims were carefully chosen as particularly repressive figures from the Tsarist bureaucracy; they included the Ministers of Internal Affairs, D. S. Sipyagin and V. K. Plehve; and the Tsar’s uncle, the governor-general of Moscow, Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich. These assassinations, undertaken against the background of a developing revolutionary situation in Russia, gained the party much sympathy and support not only in Russia, but also in Western Europe. The right of the SRs to employ terrorist tactics against the Russian autocracy was recognised by many European socialists, and in 1903, in a cause célèbre of its day, the leaders of the Second International, to which the SR party belonged, launched a successful campaign to prevent the extradition from Italy to Russia of M. R. Gots, the chief émigré organiser of the SR Combat Organisation.2KeywordsMass MovementCentral CommitteeParty LeadershipSocialist RevolutionParty CommitteeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.