SOCIALIST-REVOLUTIONARIES ABOUT THE ESSENCE AND CHARACTER OF THE BOLSHEVIST REGIME IN THE YEARS OF CIVIL WAR
The author analyzes how Socialist-Revolutionaries estimated the character of the Bolshevik regime. He considers this in the context of the opposition between Socialist-Revolutionaries (PSR) and Bolsheviks as representatives of two branches of the Russian socialism - Narodnichestvo and Marxism. This opposition had a long history and roots. It must be taken into account that their doctrines had different nature and were derived from different concepts. At the same time it is a fundamental issue that Bolsheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries argued in the frames of one socialist paradigm, but PSR offered another model of socialist society and other ways and means of its construction and they estimated the Bolshevik regime from this point of view. The evaluations of the Bolshevik regime differed among the PSR members according to the group attachment of this or that PSR member. Centrists and Left-Centrists argued that adventurous and ill-considered actions of Bolsheviks pursuing among others selfish interests would lead to the discredit of the conception of socialism in the eyes of the masses and impede the movement to it in future. “The Right-Wing PSR members” including the group of Avksent’ev and Fondaminsky saw the near future of Russia in recovery of destroyed economy mainly on the capitalist basis and by “the formation of a healthy productive bourgeoisie” but necessarily with simultaneous development of democracy, self-government, cooperation, trade-unions and with PSR cooperation with other democratic parties for common or coordinated actions. V.M. Chernov characterized the Soviet regime as a form of state capitalism. All those Socialist-Revolutionaries stated from the very beginning: the impossibility of building socialism in the country with unready economic, social, cultural and psychological prerequisites; the regime relies not on the mass initiative but on the coercion and intimidation; the development of state terror to enormous quantitative and qualitative degrees which had no analogues in the previous history and destroyed the society structure; the degeneration of the Bolshevik party itself (E.M. Ratner pointed out this fact, which happened in 1922, at the PSR Trial, speaking about moral experimentation of Bolsheviks) - all this was confirmed during the next decades