The Terrorist Strategies of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party in Russia, 1900–14

Abstract

As successor to the populist social movement of the 1870s, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (SRP) represented the most important non-Marxist trend within the Russian revolutionary movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. It differed from the Social Democrats not only in its subjectivist social theory, which held the initiative of the ‘creative individual’ (P. L. Lavrov, N. K. Mikhailovsky) to be the driving force of the historical process, but also in its aim at a decentralised, agrarian-socialist society, and it maintained that the autocratic regime it was fighting could only be removed by popular insurrection under the leadership of the peasantry. Its particular nature manifested itself even more clearly in the forms of action it favoured, inherited from Narodnaya Volya and closely linked to the latter’s subjectivist-voluntarist principles. Just as the call for ‘socialisation of the land’ was the distinguishing feature of the SRP’s programme, the so-called ‘individual terror’ was to become the characteristic of SR strategy. The following comments are confined to an attempt to throw some light on the peculiarities of their political tactics as well as on some aspects that are of interest beyond the merely Russian context.1They will deal with (1) the theoretical justification of ‘individual terror’ and the form it took; (2) its political effectiveness; and (3) its organisation.