| This work examines the failures of the Socialist Revolutionary party (SRs) to ascend into power during the Russian Revolution of 1905. Although the SRs claimed political hegemony and revolutionary preeminence during the movement, citing historical, social and tactical advantages, such assertions were disingenuous and illusory. Through a combination of secondary Western accounts, along with a politically diverse assortment of writings and reminiscences from Russian sources, this assessment paints a vivid picture of the internal and external factors that contributed to the downfall of the SRs in 1905. The party might have been able to overcome any one of them separately, but to have so many serious flaws all at once: internal disunity; a basic failure to understand its constituents; and intense police infiltration, was just too much to overcome and the party simply unraveled from the inside out. Instead of striding out of the conflagration of 1905 as the socio-political vanguard party on their way to a socialist victory, the SRs stumbled their way to revolutionary defeat by year's end and faced political ruin by the beginning of 1906. For the next twelve years the SRs limped along as a decimated and hollowed-out shell, meeting its ultimate liquidation at the hands of the Bolsheviks in 1917. |
