Socialist Revolutionary Party
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Socialist Revolutionary Party, or Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries (the SRs or Esers; Template:Lang-ru or Template:Lang-ru) was a major political party in late Imperial Russia and early Soviet Russia.
The SRs were socialists and supporters of democracy. They won a mass following in the years preceding the Russian Revolutions of 1917 by endorsing the overthrow of the Tsar and the redistribution of land to the peasantry. In the elections following the 1905 Revolution, the SRs obtained the majority of the few seats allotted to the peasantry. Following the 1907 coup, the SRs boycotted all subsequent Dumas until the fall of the Tsar in the February Revolution of March 1917. Controversially, the party leadership endorsed the Russian Provisional Government of 1917 and participated in multiple coalitions with liberal and social democratic parties. Increasingly, a faction of SR members formed rejecting the Provisional Government's authority and began to operate within the soviets with the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The divisions between the SR factions supporting the Provisional Government or the Petrograd Soviet could not be reconciledTemplate:By whom? and the party split over the course of the summer of 1917 into the Right and Left SRs.
By October 1917 the provisional government had failed to quell social unrest and the soviets were recognized throughout the country as the legitimate authority. The Bolsheviks then moved to seize exclusive control of the country by conducting the October 1917 coup eliminating the other parties from the soviets and destroying the democratic structure within the soviets. The Left SRs reluctantly formed a coalition government with the Bolsheviks from November 1917 to July 1918, while the Right SRs denounced what they saw as a completely unjustified and illegal coup, boycotting the Congress of Soviets. The SRs obtained a majority in the national election (Template:OldStyleDate) to the Russian Constituent Assembly but the Bolsheviks now controlling the soviets already had control of the country. Most of the seats went to the Right SR faction. Citing outdated voter-rolls which did not acknowledge the party split and the Assembly's conflicts with the Congress of Soviets, the Bolsheviks would dissolve the Constituent Assembly in January 1918.
