ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the split which happened between Chernov and the other Prague SRs in the late 1920s. The split is usually ascribed to émigré factionalism or to the heterogeneous nature of the Party. While other issues and personalities played a role, the deepest cause of the split was very serious: Chernov’s bold conceptualisation of the geopolitical space of the USSR as a series of independent nation-states. This proposal proved to be so explosive and unacceptable that Chernov became persona non gratis for many SRs and adherence to his Socialist League of the New East was considered incompatible with Party membership.1 The Armenian SR V. Minokhoryan wrote in 1928 that the main reason for the split in the Foreign Delegation had been ‘theoretical differences over the future structure of Russia, principally in relation to the national East’.2 Postnikov claimed that the split began when Chernov introduced Gurevich’s nationalities policy into Revolyutsionnaya Rossiya.3 The Czechoslovak government also disliked Chernov’s League, despite having itself been a prime beneficiary of the Wilsonian/Leninist thesis of the right to national self-determination. The position the Socialist League adopted on Ukrainian independence was one of
the primary reasons that other SRs rejected it. The question of Ukrainian national identity is intimately bound up with the question of Russian national identity.4 The Socialist League was largely a project between Russian and Ukrainian SRs and it claimed that the Bolshevik regime was a Great Russian colonial oppressor of the other Soviet Republics.The idea that Ukraine had a colonial relationship to Russia was utterly unacceptable to the majority of SRs, as was the idea that Ukrainian separatism was a radical and progressive movement. The Prague SRs equally vehemently rejected the idea of Russia as a nation-state. Their views support the argument that most Russian intellectuals believed that the historical spaces of the empire were the only spaces in which Russians could exist and that the existence of this empire impeded and confused the formation of nationhood.5
