The Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) party gained an overall majority in the election to the Russian Constituent Assembly, which was dissolved by the Bolsheviks in January 1918. The SRs derived the bulk of their electoral support from the peasantry, and the gulf between the predominantly urban Bolshevik party and the rural masses was to create immense problems for the Soviet government in the 1920s, culminating in the horrors of forced collectivization. The SRs offered an alternative vision of the Russian peasant's path to socialism. They were closer to the peasantry than any other revolutionary party, and more aware of the problems involved in implementing a socialist transformation of Russian agriculture. In this study the author traces the development of SR agrarian policy in the party's formative years, from the period of disillusionment which followed the failure of the Populist 'movement to the people' of the 1870s, through the revolutionary years 1905-7, to the subsequent reaction under Stolypin.

" The Socialist Revolutionary Party played an important role in the history of the Russian revolutionary movement. The author seeks to explain why this party--which continued the tradition of the 1870s--did not ultimately prevail in an agrarian country like the Tsarist empire. Using a wealth of printed sources and, for the first time, drawing upon materials from the archive of the Central Committee of the PSR, this study provides a detailed analysis of the theoretical foundations of the party as well as its organisational structure and political practice during the first Russian Revolution. Manfred Hildermeier ist Professor am Seminar für Mittlere und Neuere Geschichte der Universität Göttingen. "

Fyodor Sergeyevich Olferieff (1885&–1971) led a remarkable life in the shadows of history. This book presents his memoirs for the first time, translated and annotated by his granddaughter Tanya A. Cameron. Born into a noble family, Olferieff was a Russian career military officer who observed firsthand key events of the early twentieth century, including the 1905&–7 revolution, the Great War, the collapse of the imperial state, and the civil wars in Ukraine and Crimea. Olferieff wrestles with moral and political questions, wondering whether his own advantages could be justified—and whether, if born a peasant, he might have thrown himself into the revolution. As Gary Hamburg writes in an illuminating companion essay, Olferieff wrote "to understand himself and to record his broken life for posterity" as a privileged observer of a bloody, historically pivotal era.

Anna Geifman examines the explosion of terrorist activity that took place in the Russian empire from the years just prior to the turn of the century through 1917, a period when over 17,000 people were killed or wounded by revolutionary extremists. On the basis of new research, she argues that a multitude of assassination attempts, bombings, ideologically motivated robberies, and incidents of armed assault, kidnapping, extortion, and blackmail for party purposes played a primary role in the revolution of 1905 and early twentieth-century Russian political history in general.

2005 marks the centenary of Russia’s ‘first revolution’ - an unplanned, spontaneous rejection of Tsarist rule that was a response to the ‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre of 9th January 1905. A wave of strikes, urban uprisings, peasant revolts, national revolutions and mutinies swept across the Russian Empire, and it proved a crucial turning point in the demise of the autocracy and the rise of a revolutionary socialism that would shape Russia, Europe and the international system for the rest of the twentieth century. The centenary of the Revolution has prompted scholars to review and reassess our understanding of what happened in 1905. Recent opportunities to access archives throughout the former Soviet Union are yielding new provincial perspectives, as well as fresh insights into the roles of national and religious minorities, and the parts played by individuals, social groups, political parties and institutions. This text brings together some of the best of this new research and reassessment, and includes thirteen chapters written by leading historians from around the world, together with an introduction from Abraham Ascher.

A reference surveying the major concerns, findings, and terms of social history. The coverage includes major categories within social history (family, demographic transition, multiculturalism, industrialization, nationalism); major aspects of life for which social history has provided a crucial per

What is the relationship between the political parties that embrace the democratic process and terrorist groups, which eschew the legal and procedural strictures of democracy?This acclaimed volume provides a detailed theoretical and empirical analysis of this controversial issue. Drawing on a vast array of data, the authors examine a large number of international case studies from Italy, Spain, Lebanon, Turkey, Iran, Israel, Palestine, Peru, Argentina, Japan and Northern Ireland. This comprehensive book is the definitive account of this extremely important subject.

This book examines the role of the Socialist Revolutionary party, which had been the largest and most popular party in Russia in 1917, and shows how, after the October revolution, rather than disappearing, led by its leadership in exile, it continued to observe and comment on developments in Russia.

Feliks Volkhovskii (1846-1914) was a significant figure in the Russian revolutionary movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He lived through pivotal changes ranging from the rise of ‘nihilism’ in the 1860s and the growth of populism in the 1870s, through to the creation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in the early 1900s. Imprisoned three times before he turned thirty, he spent ten years in Siberian exile before fleeing abroad to join the fight against tsarist autocracy from western Europe. Following Volkhovskii’s arrival in Britain in 1890, he played a central role in the campaign to win sympathy for the Russian revolutionary movement, editing newspapers and journals including Free Russia. He also helped to smuggle propaganda into Russia as well as becoming one of the most prominent figures in the émigré leadership of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Throughout his life, Volkhovskii was also a prolific writer of poetry and short stories, and was on good terms with many leading literary figures of the time including Ford Maddox Ford and Edward and Constance Garnett. Michael Hughes’s groundbreaking new biography provides a vivid history of this notable but hitherto neglected figure of both the political and literary worlds. Based on ten years of research in archives across the world and drawing on sources in multiple languages, this masterful biography explores how Volkhovskii’s life illuminates broader intellectual and historical questions about the Russian revolutionary movement. It is essential reading for anyone interested in late Imperial Russia and the Russian revolution.