The Rise and Fall of the Minority Party Socialist Revolutionaries

Abstract

One of the currents in the Russian petit bourgeois democratic movement was the Minority Party SRs (MPSR), a group of Right SRs who evolved from hostility toward the Soviet regime to neutrality, and then to a position of a certain degree of support for the government of workers and peasants in the period from 1918 to 1922. Some information about this organization, principally about the early phase of its activity, the period when it was known as The People [Narod], can be found in the works of K. V. Gusev, Kh. A. Eritsian, and L. M. Spirin.1 I. A. Chemerisskii and Iu. I. Shestak have written the first articles dedicated specifically to the MPSR.2 These studies examine the history of the formation, existence, and fall of the Minority Party SRs and draw conclusions about the significance of the negotiations between the Bolsheviks and the SRs for the fate of petit bourgeois democracy, about Minority SR views on questions of domestic and foreign policy, and about the role of the MPSR in the fall of the Right...