ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the Prague SR analysis of the Bolshevik regime, the social forces which made up the Soviet Union and the relationship between the two. It goes on to examine how the Prague SRs believed the Soviet regime might end and the tactics they devised for this eventuality. They believed that the peasantry’s role would be decisive. They suggested that SRs in Russia work in institutions which dealt with the peasantry, both to strengthen their own organisation and to encourage the peasants to build up resistance. Again, the strengths that they perceived in the commune and the cooperative lay at the heart of their approach. While the previous chapter showed that they produced useful critiques of economic developments, this chapter argues that they were bad tacticians. The places the SRs identified as sites of resistance to the regime turned out to be vulnerable when the conflict of collectivisation began. These institutions were smashed apart, dismantled or bypassed entirely. The peasantry did not erect barriers to state power and the Bolshevik Party was able to transform the economic, social and cultural life of the peasantry through violence. SR hopes that society could build barriers to state power through independent institutions such as the cooperatives were to be disappointed. Perhaps their weakness, particularly Chernov’s, lay in their failure to understand how power operated in the Soviet Union and that they did not understand the nature of the Soviet state. The SRs underestimated the Bolsheviks yet again as they had in 1917. However, the material they gathered and the analyses they produced enrich our understanding of the period and add to the more recent historiographical picture of NEP as tension-filled, rather than a ‘golden age’.
