The Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries was an internationally publicized political trial in Soviet Russia, which brought twelve prominent members of the anti-Bolshevik Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (PSR) before the bar. The trial, which took place in Moscow from 8 June to 7 August 1922, was ordered by the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party.
The Bolshevik Central Committee had confirmed the verdict for the SR defendants to be executed but only on the condition they refused to abandon armed struggles in relation to "conspiratorial, terrorist, and espionage activities". Owing in great measure to international pressure, the death sentences rendered in the trial were subsequently commuted, although none of the defendants would ultimately survive the Great Terror under Stalin during the late 1930s.
History Background: The PSR in the Russian Civil War
Following the overthrow of Tsarism in the February Revolution of 1917, the pro-democratic Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (PSR) entered as partners in the Provisional Government headed by Alexander Kerensky. This government remained supportive of the Allied effort in World War I — a position regarded as anathema by radical political organizations, which sought an immediate end to hostilities and institution of a new redistributive government.
On , the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (bolsheviks), supported by a militant faction of the PSR, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries (Left SRs), launched a coup d'état, seizing government power. This put the majority of the PSR, retrospectively known as the "Right Socialist Revolutionaries," in direct political conflict with V. I. Lenin and the new Soviet regime, going so far as to attempt to form a counter-government and backing a new uprising in the first days after the revolution, without success.
The Bolshevik government, together with their Left SR allies and a small number of Menshevik-Internationalists, rapidly consolidated power. The PSR placed its hopes upon elections to the Constituent Assembly, a national parliament initially supported by all anti-tsarist parties. In these elections, held in the first days of Bolshevik power, the PSR polled a total of more than 16 million votes — a total which, when combined with the votes cast for similar pro-agrarian parties, amounted to more than half of the 42 million votes cast. The rival Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (bolsheviks), by way of contrast, received a total of just 10 million votes.
Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders had no intention of surrendering power to this new body, however, and the Constituent Assembly was dispersed by force on 5 January 1918, having met only one day. No immediate armed response from the PSR followed, though the organization had previously, like its Narodnik forefathers, engaged in terrorism against the tsarist regime.
In the spring of 1918, the idea of armed struggle against the Bolshevik regime began to spread in party ranks, with a May 1918 conference in Moscow passing a resolution in support of the strategy. The Revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion that same month gave the PSR an opportunity to launch its plan of action and on 8 June a shadow government called the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch) was launched in the city of Samara, with the declared goal of winning control of the nation in the name of the dispersed Constituent Assembly. With the aid of the Czechoslovak Legion, the Komuch declared war on the Soviet government as well as on Germany, and the Russian Civil War was begun in earnest. The newspapers of the PSR were immediately suppressed.
The Left SRs broke with the Bolsheviks while other regional governments sprang up in opposition to the Soviet regime, contributing to a worsening military situation for the Bolsheviks. Then on 30 August 1918, PSR member Fanny Kaplan fired three shots at Lenin, gravely wounding him, while elsewhere an assassin met with greater success, killing head of the Petrograd Cheka Moisei Uritsky. The Bolsheviks responded with a "Red Terror," taking hostages and engaging in summary executions of their enemies. The bloody civil war, marked by atrocities on both sides, would continue unabated through 1920.
The Cheka (Soviet political police) had begun an active campaign to hunt down members of the governing Central Committee of the PSR late in 1919. Top leader Viktor Chernov went into hiding and stayed ahead of the authorities but was finally forced into emigration in 1920, where he would serve as the PSR's official foreign representative.> Other ranking party figures were not so fortunate, with Dmitrii Donskoi, Sergei Morozov, and Evgeniia Ratner arrested in 1919, and Abram Gots, Evgenii Timofeev, Dmitrii Rakov, and others arrested in early 1920. By the middle of 1921, all members of the Central Committee who had not emigrated were in Cheka custody, with the secret police continuing to arrest all known party members who could be located. A new five member Central Bureau was named to guide the shattered party, but it too was decimated by arrests.
Facing the threat of Monarchist military dictatorship on the one hand and the Bolsheviks on the other, the PSR attenuated its campaign against the Bolsheviks in the second half of 1920, with party leaders passing a resolution on 1 October 1920, which ruled out further armed resistance to the Bolsheviks in the near future. The shattered party was deemed to have insufficient forces to have a credible chance at overthrowing the Bolshevik regime and sought not to play into the hands of those seeking a right wing restoration and therefore ceased to fight, going so far as to denounce the Tambov Rebellion of 1921 as a "semi-banditry movement."
The PSR, crushed to the point of near total disruption, played virtually no role in the requisitions-related peasant revolts of 1920 and 1921, contentions of the secret police notwithstanding.Scott B. Smith, Captives of Revolution: The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik Dictatorship, 1918-1923. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011; p. 227.
Preparations for the trial
In 1921, in an effort to restore the shattered economy, Lenin and the Soviet government embarked on a program of economic liberalization known as the New Economic Policy (NEP). This critical change meant abandonment of the old force-based system of commodity acquisition and the ration-based system of product distribution, in favor of a restoration of stable currency and the use of markets — a change which involved the delegation of greater power to the producing peasantry. With the political position of the Bolshevik regime commensurately weakened, the Soviet government intensified its effort to suppress and eliminate all political opposition within the country.
On 28 December 1921, the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (bolsheviks) [RKP(b)] secretly voted to organize a public trial of the Central Committee of the PSR, with a three-member commission consisting of party leaders Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin and Cheka head Felix Dzerzhinsky appointed to determine the timing of the public announcement of this controversial decision. There would be an interval of two months before this official announcement was made.
Lenin himself defined the Communist Party's objective in the trial of their opponents with a Feb. 20, 1922 letter to People's Commissar of Justice Dmitrii Kurskii, sent one week before public announcement of the trial. Lenin called for:
"intensification of the repression of the political enemies of the Soviet regime and the agents of the bourgeoisie (in particular the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries); the use of such repression by Revolutionary Tribunals and People's Courts in the quickest and, for the revolution, most effective manner; the compulsory organization of a number of model trials (which will stand model as regards the explanation of their significance to the masses of the people by the court and in the press) in Moscow, Petrograd, Kharkov, and other major centers;... — all this must be taken in hand systematically, resolutely, and with determination.V. I. Lenin, Letter to D. I. Kursky in Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971, Vol. 36, pp. 560-565.
This internal document was rewritten by lawyer Iakov Brandenburgskii for public dissemination and published in Pravda on 23 March, emphasizing that the trials be structured and publicized in such a way that the workers and peasants of the country should not only hear about them but understand their underlying political message. In short, historian Marc Jansen has observed, "the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries was intended not to bring the truth to light but to arouse public opinion against the Socialist Revolutionaries."
During the night of 24/25 February 1922, the members of the Central Committee of the PSR were moved from their cells in Butyrka prison to the so-called "Inner Prison" located at secret police headquarters on Lubyanka Square in Moscow, where they were confined in strict isolation.
Certain that a repressive trial with preordained grim results was in the offing, the official representatives of the PSR abroad, organized as a body called the Foreign Delegation of the PSR, began an international publicity campaign in support of their imprisoned comrades. On 7 March members of the PSR gathered in Berlin to form an international committee against the trial, leading to an official appeal of the Foreign Delegation of the PSR to all socialist parties in the world two days later. This came at a time when the Communist International (Comintern) was closely pursuing sensitive united front negotiations with the two international federations of non-communist socialist parties — the remnant of the Second International and their more radical counterparts in the short-lived so-called Vienna International. The Soviet regime was thus in a position in which it was particularly sensitive to radical criticism.
The 9 March appeal of the Foreign Delegation of the PSR was met with a wave of support from the various political organizations of the non-communist left. The Second International was virtually universal in its condemnation of a show trial as an opaque attempt to stifle socialist dissent in Russia, which the parties and leaders of the Vienna International distance themselves from the armed struggle of the PSR against the Soviet government, while seeking a fair trial and the opportunity for unfettered international investigation of the question of PSR participation in counterrevolutionary crimes.
In an effort to explore the possibility of unity of action, the three Internationals met at the Conference of the Three Internationals, held in Berlin from 2–5 April 1922. The forthcoming trial of the PSR leadership was inserted as a substantial issue in these negotiations, with representatives of the Second International, a delegation headed by Émile Vandervelde and Ramsay MacDonald, demanding the guarantee of the defendants to a competent independent defense and the right of the Internationals to directly supervise the trial. On behalf of the Bolsheviks, chief negotiator Karl Radek refused the demand for external supervisory authority, but agreed in principle with the suggestion that Vandervelde serve as a counsel for the defense and further guaranteed that representatives of the Second and Vienna Internationals should have the right to attend the trial, study documents of the case, and take stenographic report of the proceedings.