The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism: Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries February to October 1917

539 Pages·1958·13.15 MB·English

by  Oliver H. Radkey

THE
AGRARIAN FOES
OF
BOLSHEVISM
STUDIES OF THE RUSSIAN INSTITUTE
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

The
Agrarian
Foes
of
Bolshevism
PROMISE AND DEFAULT
OF THE
RUSSIAN SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES
FEBRUARY TO OCTOBER
By Oliver H. Radkey
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW YORK 1958
THE system of transliteration from the Russian employed in
this book is based on that of the Library of Congress with
certain modifications. Familiar names of German or Jewish
origin are given in the German form (Rosenblum, Richter),
whereas less familiar ones or names the original form of which
is doubtful, are transliterated from the Russian (Gendelman,
Shreider); in a few instances names are simply given in the
form most familiar to the author. The soft and medial hard
signs and the two dots over stressed e, pronounced yo in
Russian, have been confined to Russian text or titles and do
not appear in the case of proper names in the English text
or in the citation of authors, the only exceptions being
names of some significance that are frequently mispronounced
(Slerov, Pugachev).
Dates are given in the Old Style.
COPYRIGHT @ 1958 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW YORK
PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN, CANADA, INDIA, AND PAKISTAN
BY THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON, TORONTO, BOMBAY, AND KARACHI
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 57-12340
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
THE RUSSIAN INSTITUTE
OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
THE Russian Institute was established by Columbia University in
1946 to serve two major objectives: the training of a limited number
of well-qualified Americans for scholarly and professional careers
in the field of Russian studies, and the development of research in
the social sciences and the humanities as they relate to Russia and the
Soviet Union. The research program of the Russian Institute is con
ducted through the efforts of its faculty members, of scholars invited
to participate as Senior Fellows in its program, and of candidates for
the Certificate of the Institute and for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy. Some of the results of the research program are pre
sented in the Studies of the Russian Institute of Columbia University.
The faculty of the Institute, without necessarily agreeing with the
conclusions reached in the Studies, believe that their publication
advances the difficult task of promoting systematic research on
Russia and the Soviet Union and public understanding of the prob
lems involved.
The faculty of the Russian Institute are grateful to the Rockefeller
Foundation for the financial assistance which it has given to the
program of research and publication.
STUDIES OF THE RUSSIAN INSTITUTE
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
SOVIET NATIONAL INCOME
AND PRODUCT IN I937 Abram Bergson
THROUGH THE GLASS OF SOVIET LITERATURE:
VIEWS OF RUSSIAN SOCIETY edited by Ernest J. Simmons
THE PROLETARIAN EPISODE
IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE, I928-I932 EdwffYd f. Brown
MANAGEMENT OF THE INDUSTRIAL FIRM IN THE USSR:
A STUDY IN SOVIET ECONOMIC PLANNING David Granick
SOVIET POLICIES IN CHINA, I9I7-I924 Allen S. Whiting
UKRAINIAN NATIONALISM, I939-I945 John A. Armstrong
POLISH POSTWAR ECONOMY Thad Paul Alton
LITERARY POLITICS
IN THE SOVIET UKRAINE, I9I7-I934 George S. N. Luckyj
THE EMERGENCE OF RUSSIAN
PANSLAVISM, I856-I870 Michael Boro Petrovich
BOLSHEVISM IN TURKESTAN, I9I7-I927 Alexander G. Park
THE LAST YEARS OF THE GEORGIAN
MONARCHY, I658-I832 David Marshall Lang
LENIN ON TRADE UNIONS
AND REVOLUTION, I893-I917 Thomas Taylor Hammond
THE JAPANESE THRUST INTO SIBERIA, I9I8 James William Morley
SOVIET MARXISM: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS Herbert Marcuse
THE AGRARIAN FOES OF BOLSHEVISM: PROMISE
AND DEFAULT OF THE RUSSIAN SOCIALIST
REVOLUTIONARIES, MARCH TO OCTOBER, 1917 Oliver H. Radkey, Jr.
TO THE MEMORY OF
MY MOTHER AND FATHER
Sarah Hewlett and
Oliver H. Radkey

FOREWORD
FROM undergraduate days the author has been interested in the fate
of the large but little-known movement which spoke for the peas
antry in the Revolution of 1917. There was a certain mystification
about the subject: Why this collapse of a movement which defended
the peasant interest in one of the great peasant lands of the world?
Why this beheading of a class so imposing in numbers and why its
enforced servitude to a cause not its own? There was no answer to
the problem, only the raw material for an answer, and this scattered
in distant places and unavailable in Western tongues. All this simply
added to the interest. It was apparent, even to the immature mind,
that Western writers had nothing to offe r, and Russian writers
seemed hopelessly prejudiced, when they dealt with the subject at all.
The paradox of peasant loss in a peasant land, then so baffiing, is
now quite easy to understand, but first the blank in the record had
to be filled and the myth of mass rule exploded in the mind of the
author. For it must be said that the triumph of a minority in Russia
in 1917 was not in defiance of the nature of human society, but in
accordance with it. No lesson of history is more illuminating, or
appalling, than the ability of a small group hungry for power to sub
jugate and victimize the mass of their fellow beings-the rural mass
more easily than the urban. Always the peasantry has borne the brunt
of fiscal extortion and military sacrifice, from the crushing incidence
of church and state in ancient Egypt to the dictum of a Prussian
king that the rural toiler is the "beast of burden of human society."
The story of the feeble enterprise of the peasants' partisans in Russia
and of their failure is the subject of this book.
These partisans were called Populists. With the older Populism of
x FOREWORD
the nineteenth century this study is not concerned; others have dealt
with it at greater length than it deserves. It seems incredible that a
tiny band of adult children should have claimed so much attention
while the broad movement of neo-Populism in our own century has
been neglected. The only explanation is that under the influence of
the German school of Kulturgeschichte, slavishly followed elsewhere
by intellectuals who damn everything that is German, attention has
been riveted upon the high-flown abstractions of a few individuals,
and particularly upon the vastly overpublicized antithesis between
East and West, instead of upon the conflict of social groups, national
or class, Eastern or Western, out of which this vapor arises. Enough
has been said in this book about the ideology of neo-Populism (we
shall see how lightly it rested upon the Socialist Revolutionaries in
1917), but no time has been wasted on tracing its philosophical
origins. In the last analysis, it sprang from the emotions of those who
embraced it and from the mind of V. M. Chernov, who took from
the older Populism and from Marxian socialism, from Western re
visionism and Russian reality, from Comte, Avenarius, Mach, and
others, whatever he found suitable for his purpose, throwing the rest
away and adding much of his own, in a ceaseless endeavor to con
struct an ideology that would be pleasing to people who practiced
terrorism and loved the peasantry, yet wished to preserve it from the
inequalities of a regime of private property such as had grown out
of the French Revolution and might conceivably grow out of the
revolution which they were fomenting in Russia.
In accordance with the author's view that too much attention has
been paid to the ideology of movements and too little to their prac
tice, his treatment has centered on the events of 1917 and on an
analysis of why these events were so little in harmony with the stated
purposes of the neo-Populist movement. The emphasis throughout
has been on men and their actions, their foibles and failures, rather
than on the theories they threw up to justify their feelings or conceal
their actions. In short, the author has set himself the task of writing
a history of Social Revolutionism in 1917, sometimes in more detail
than the reader will relish, for the purpose of presenting a full record
of the movement whose failure forms the complement of Bolshevik