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215 6 the end of the party of socialist Revolutionaries “ t he terrifying thing about the modern dictatorships,” George Orwell remarked in 1939, “is that they are something entirely unprecedented. Their end cannot be foreseen.”1 The extraordinary difficulty of imagining an end to the dictatorship indeed aptly sums up the predicament of the anti-Bolshevik parties as the Whites passed from the scene and the Soviet victory became increasingly difficult to deny over the course of 1920 and 1921. For liberals and socialists working in the main line of the intelligentsia tradition, dominated as it was by images of 1789, 1848, and 1871, the Russian Revolution had broken the mold of European revolutions. It had resulted neither in an advance toward representative and constitutional government, nor in the triumph of a bourgeois order under a Thermidorean or Bonapartist regime. The unexpected victory of a revolutionary dictatorship posed a profound challenge to the intelligentsia’s conventional historical schemes and cultural categories. If culture, as the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has suggested, is “precisely the organization of the current situation in terms of a past,” the nature and depth of this challenge may be readily appreciated.2 As Orwell understood , liberals and socialists working with nineteenth-century narratives of history, progress, and revolution found it difficult to make sense of Bolshevik power and to find pasts on which they could draw for guidance as to how the dictatorship might be overcome. smith_text_3.indd 215 2/21/11 2:40 PM 216 / the end of the paRtY of soCialist RevolutionaRies after the whites It took time for the radical novelty of the situation to sink in. Although the SR Central Committee argued in early 1920 that the fall of Kolchak and Denikin had opened a “new page” in the Russian Revolution, through 1920 it in fact hardly questioned its reading of revolutionary history. Reference to the PSR as a “third force” faded away, but the concept of the third force was never as strongly anchored in party thinking as its rhetorical prominence in 1919 would suggest. The leadership insisted that the party’s role in the defeat of Kolchak had vindicated the tactical line of the Ninth Party Council. Despite the defeat of the principal White armies, the Central Committee held fast to its long-standing view that the Bolshevik dictatorship would endlessly generate economic chaos, peasant discontent, and counterrevolutionary resistance: only genuine popular sovereignty and consolidation of the democratic achievements of 1917 could stabilize the revolution and avert catastrophe. Moreover, with the outbreak of the Soviet-Polish War in April 1920, counterrevolution materialized for SRs in a new guise. The Central Committee invoked the threat of Polish imperialism, backed by the Anglo-French bourgeoisie, to call on all Russians to unite behind the Red Army. The Central Committee’s declaration characteristically intertwined social and national arguments as it called for the defense of the country and the revolution, and it warned that the Bolsheviks would be tempted to strike a deal with the Poles to save the dictatorship . At the same time, Baron Wrangel formed the last of the Russian White regimes after Denikin resigned command of the Volunteer Army and departed for exile. Able to consolidate itself in Crimea and to venture beyond the peninsula only because the Red Army was occupied by the Polish War, the Wrangel government posed little threat to the Soviet state. For the SR leadership, however , it served both as a daily reminder of the Bolsheviks’ supposed inability to vanquish the counterrevolution and as a constraint on its own range of options.3 Identifying Wrangel and the Poles with the counterrevolution may have validated SRs’ understanding of the revolution, but it offered little help in finding a way beyond the Bolshevik dictatorship. In January 1920 the Central Committee decided to convene a Tenth Party Council that would formulate a new tactical line for the party after the defeat of Kolchak and Denikin, but it would take over a year and a half for the council in fact to meet. In the meantime, the Central Committee repeatedly reaffirmed its unwillingness to resume armed struggle against the Soviet state. It hoped instead that pressure from “socialist and democratic public opinion” would compel the Bolsheviks to abandon the dictatorship, recognize basic civil liberties, and acquiesce in the emergence of a genuinely democratic and autonomous revolutionary politics.4 This outlook smith_text_3.indd 216 2/21/11 2:40 PM [3.142.174.55] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 01:48...

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