The History of Liberalism in Russia

Chapter 13

155 chapter 13 The agrarian Program of the Left-Wing Parties Rural collectivism and socialist ideas—agrarian program of the Kadets (constitutional democratic Party) as Chicherin pointed out so clearly and forcefully, there was a close affinity between the old forms of peasant collectivism and the ideal of the socialist collective . Chicherin highlighted that, on the one hand, as we have already noted, the rural commune influenced the outlook of the peasants, so that they became especially susceptible to socialist ideas, while on the other hand many socialists viewed the commune with particular enthusiasm, because they perceived it as an embryonic cell from which a socialist society could develop. The Socialist Revolutionary Party, which saw itself above all as the defender of peasant interests and which enjoyed, at least for a time, considerable support among the peasants, wrote the following in its program: As far as agrarian policy . . . is concerned, the Socialist Revolutionary Party aims, in the interest of socialism and the struggle against bourgeois ideas and property, to harness those views, traditions, and way of life of the Russian peasants that are rooted in the rural commune, in particular the view by which land is the common property of all working people. To this end, the party will strive for the socialization of all privately owned land and bring it under social ownership. The right of disposal over this property will be left to the democratically organized communes and associations in their area, on condition that the principle of equitable use is respected.1 156 • the agrarian program of the left-wing parties Members and supporters of the Socialist Revolutionary Party developed and commented in numerous publications on these ideas in the party’s program. For example, the leader of the party, Chernov, wrote, “Implementing the socialization of land means, if I can put it like this, turning rural Russia into a single enormous commune.”2 The implementation of this program would have entailed the end of legal dualism not by extending civil society to include the peasants, which was the aim of the liberals, but rather by eliminating civil law and fully implementing rural collectivism. All rights to land ownership would have been changed into the “right to land,” understood as an entitlement under public law to be provided with land by the state, that is, would have taken the form that the antiliberals defended so adamantly against the liberals. It is astonishing that the tsar and his circle did not notice sooner, or worry about, the possibility that the socialist parties would embrace their reactionary agrarian program rooted in the traditions of serfdom and purge it of the half-hearted approval of private property that coexisted beside the collective ownership of the commune. The Left could thus win the sympathy of the peasantry through the determined pursuit of this coherently designed program.3 It was only with the 1905 revolution that the scales fell from their eyes. These elite circles finally grasped that there were only two outcomes: either to be swept aside by a socialist dictatorship or to eliminate the vestiges of serfdom with determination and transform tsarist Russia into a constitutional monarchy. The first modest steps in this direction were indeed already under way before the outbreak of the revolutionary upheavals of 1905. Besides government representatives and the socialist parties, the Union of Liberation, and the Party of Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) that emerged from it, saw themselves as the true representatives of efforts to achieve greater freedom and produced their own agrarian program.4 This program, just like the overall approach of the Kadets at the time, had all the hallmarks of a compromise , in which tactical considerations played a major part. As Maklakov’s memoirs show, the tactics of this party were linked to the demands of their program, whereas the program was largely determined by tactical considerations. On the one hand, judging from their agrarian program, the Kadets did not envisage campaigning against private property as such or making collective ownership the only desirable type of property in general. On the other hand, their program contained nothing to accelerate the decline of the rural commune or any demand to declare the farmstead the private property of the head of the household. Doubtless , there were many among the Kadets who shared the views expressed by the committees set up by Witte and who thus agreed with Witte’s agrarian program. This is apparent from articles that were published in a collected edition called Nuzhdy...