L’impossibile sconfitta dei socialisti-rivoluzionari russi

Russian Socialist-Revolutionaries’ Impossible Defeat

Representing the average peasantry, the Russian Socialist-Revolutionaries (PS-R) were the largest political force in 1917 Russia. Revolution brought them to power, but as a result of their deep internal dissensions, they soon lost it, which they took for an inconceivable phenomenon, a real impossible defeat. Socialist-Revolutionaries went on denying this reality even in the 1920s, when they saw the Nep as a Soviet acknowledgement of the defeat of the whole Leninist political project, and the turning point which paved the way for the re-emergence of peasant traditions in a society free of the great capitalist production. The Soviet politics of komnarodničestvo (the «communist populism» of 1925-26) seemed to con rm that the socialist-revolutionary defeat had only been apparent, and at the end of the decade only Stalinist violence put an end to the intellectual experience of the PS-R.

Keywords: Russian History; 1917; Revolution; Russian Socialist- Revolutionaries; Russian peasant traditions; Communist populism.