ABSTRACT
This book examines the activities and the intellectual life of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs) in Czechoslovakia in the interwar period. It argues that the work of the political émigrés forms part of the history of twentieth-century Russian political and social thought as well as adding to an understanding of contemporaneous developments in the Soviet Union. It thus seeks to challenge the common idea that Russian émigré politics are of no interest to historians. Little research has been done on the political aspects of the first wave emigration, that which took place as a result of the 1917 Revolution and the Civil War. Western historians of the emigration have largely neglected the political aspects while Soviet historians presented it solely as political, but did so according to a pre-determined schema of its political bankruptcy.1 The SRs in particular have received barely any scholarly attention; their main socialist rivals, the Mensheviks, despite their smaller numbers, have fared better.2 A recent Russian collection of documents on the ‘first wave’ political emigration contains not a single SR document.3 During the perestroika period inside the Soviet Union during the late 1980s there was a renewed interest in neglected actors and alternatives to Stalinism, yet it was the Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin and his ideas which were resurrected. The provenance of some of his and his supporters’ ideas in SR categories of thought about Russian development was ignored. Later after the collapse of the Soviet regime, interest focused on the rediscovery of Eurasianist thinkers such as Nikolai Trubetskoi and Petr Savitskii and the so-called Vekhovyi group: religious philosophers such as Nikolai Berdayev and political thinkers on the centre-right such as Petr Struve.4 There has not yet been a serious study of SR activities in Prague. The most recent book on the Russian émigré community there, Russia Abroad: Prague and the Russian Diaspora, 1918-1938 by Catherine Andreyev and Ivan Savický is dismissive of the SRs and their politics (such as they are described), as is the earlier book on Russian Prague by Elena Chinyaeva.5 Both these works rely largely on sources from émigrés who were members of the professorial elite and who had been associated with the Kadet Party.
