Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Victor Mikhailovich Chernov, co-founder and leader of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party from its inception in 1901 until its demise at the hands of the Bolshevik/Communist-led Soviet government in the early 1920s, drew from both Marxism and populism to advocate the union of the “toiling” classes of workers and peasants against political and economic oppression. Architect of the party's maximum and minimum programs approved at the first SR congress in early 1906, his unique contribution to Russian socialism was his emphasis on “socialization of the land,” a concept that he took care to differentiate from “nationalization of the land” as proposed by European and American agrarian reformers and as implemented by the Bolshevik/Communist Party several decades later. For Chernov, socialization meant taking the land out of commodity circulation by doing away with private ownership. The land would then belong to all of the people. His idea was quite different to nationalization, however, which called for the transfer of all land ownership to the central power. The author of a land socialization platform that would ultimately be appropriated and corrupted by the victorious Bolshevik/Communist Party, Chernov was born the grandson of a serf in Samara province; his father, however, had advanced the family's social status through education and service in the provincial bureaucracy. ... log in or subscribe to read full text