Scott B Smith,Captives of Revolution: The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik Dictatorship,1918–1923

Reviewed by: James D White, University of Glasgow, UK

Ostensibly this book is about the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), but, as the author explains, rather than to simply restore a neglected party to scholarly attention, his aim is to explicate the politics of the Russian civil war. As Smith shows, the two aspects are connected: the history of the SR party provides an insight into the dynamics of the civil war and its outcome in favour of the Bolsheviks. Following the French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, Smith sees politics as a struggle to impose an authoritative version of the social world. He believes that the version of the civil war that the Bolsheviks sought to promulgate was that it was a contest between Red and White, between the forces of the proletariat and those of the bourgeoisie, and that there was no third way. This despite the fact that the civil war was a very complex phenomenon, so that it would be more accurate to say that there was not one, but several simultaneous civil wars. The success of the Bolsheviks was their ability to defeat the democratic opposition to their dictatorship posed by the SRs and the Mensheviks and to secure for themselves a monopoly of revolutionary discourse.

What gives shape to Smith’s book is not so much the sociological theory that it adopts, but the fact that it assigns such a pivotal role to the Constituent Assembly and its dissolution in January 1918. This serves to emphasize the democratic credentials of the SRs in contrast to the authoritarian tendencies of their adversaries. Less attention is paid to the SRs’ opposition to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the sequence of events flowing from this, which is a narrative that previous historians of the SR party have tended to follow.

Much of Smith’s book is devoted to the activities of the SRs in Siberia, as the area in which the anti-Bolshevik movement was able to take root. Unlike in Russia proper, the Siberian peasants enjoyed a greater prosperity, and there were fewer industrial workers, a group more likely to support the Bolsheviks. In Siberia too the SRs had the support of the Czechoslovak Legion, and with the Legion’s protection they were able to establish a government bearing the title ‘Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly’ or ‘Komuch’. Komuch was intended to establish continuity with the Constituent Assembly that the Bolsheviks had dissolved. Considering itself to be part of ‘revolutionary democracy’ Komuch tried to implement a moderate socialist programme. It promulgated the land reform that had been adopted by the Constituent Assembly at its one and only session. But, because it considered the nationalization of industry premature, it denationalized those industries under its jurisdiction which had been nationalized by the Bolsheviks.

Smith follows step by step the processes by which Komuch was undermined by competition from the more right-wing Siberian government, and latterly by the coup d’état carried out by Admiral Kolchak. He shows too how even relatively liberal organizations, such as the cooperatives in Siberia, came to support Kolchak. Smith notes that support for Kolchak was also more likely to come from the Buriats and other ethnic minorities than the Russian peasants in Siberia.

The outbreak of the German revolution in November 1918 and the subsequent annulment of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk created a new situation for the SRs. They could no longer interpret their military campaign against the Bolsheviks as part of the wider war; now it had become part of a ‘normal civil war’, and they found themselves allied with the forces of reaction. Negotiations were opened with the Bolsheviks to form an alliance in fighting against the Kolchak regime. However, the SRs had missed their moment; they had wanted to negotiate from strength, as a valuable ally against Kolchak, but by the time they came to bargain with the Bolsheviks Kolchak’s forces had already disintegrated. The opportunity to become a moderating force on the Bolshevik dictatorship had passed.

For their part, the Bolsheviks were eager to demonstrate that the SRs were not part of the revolutionary democracy that they claimed to be, but were in fact renegades from socialism and properly belonged to the anti-socialist camp. The trial of the SRs in 1922 was the opportunity for the Bolshevik regime to drive this view home. Smith concludes his study by showing that the narrative of the Bolsheviks’ being the only possible socialist party lay behind the show trials of the 1930s and Soviet political culture in general.

Smith has written an extremely valuable and dispassionate analysis of the politics of the Russian Civil War centred on the dilemmas confronting the SR party. The limitation of the work is that it achieves its high degree of coherence by its selectivity, selectivity in terms of following the continuity from the Constituent Assembly rather than Brest-Litovsk, and selectivity in terms of geographical area: Siberia and the east rather than the western borderlands. It is essential reading for historians of the civil war period nevertheless.