Viktor Chernov

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(1873 - 1952), pseudonyms: 'Ia. Vechev', 'Gardenin', 'V. Lenuar'; leading theorist and activist of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.

Viktor Chernov was born into a noble family in Samara province. He studied at the Saratov gymnasium, but was transferred to the Derpt gymnasium in Estonia as a result of his revolutionary activity. In 1892 Chernov joined the law faculty at Moscow University, where he was active in the radical student movement. He was first arrested in April 1894 and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress for six months. Chernov was exiled to Kamyshin in 1895, but was transferred to Saratov and then to Tambov because of poor health. He married Anastasia Nikolaevna Sletova in 1898. In the same year, he organized the influential "Brotherhood for the Defense of People's Rights" in Tambov, a revolutionary peasants' organisation.

In 1899 Chernov left Russia, and for the next six years he worked for the revolutionary cause in exile. He joined the newly formed Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1901, and from 1903 he was a central committee member. His role in the party was predominantly as a political theorist and writer. He formulated the party's philosophy around a blending of Marxist and Populist ideas, propounding that Russia's communal system offered a "third way" to the development of socialism. He reluctantly supported the use of terror as a means of advancing the revolutionary cause.

Chernov returned to St. Petersburg in October 1905, and proposed that the party follow a moderate line, suspending terrorist activity and opposing further strike action. In July 1906 he again left Russia, this time for Finland. He continued his revolutionary work abroad, not returning to Russia until April 1917. Chernov joined the first coalition Provisional Government as Minister for Agriculture in May 1917, despite misgivings about socialist participation in the Provisional Government. His three months in government raised popular expectations about an imminent land settlement, but his tenure as minister was marked by impotency. The Provisional Government refused to sanction his radical proposals for reform of land use.

Chernov struggled to hold the fractured Socialist Revolutionary Party together, and stepped down from the Central Committee in September 1917. He was made president of the Constituent Assembly, and after the Constituent Assembly's dissolution, was a key figure in leftist anti-Bolshevik organizations, including the Komuch. He believed that the Socialist Revolutionary Party needed to form a "third front" in the civil war period, fighting for democracy against both the Bolsheviks and the Whites. He left Russia in 1920, and was a passionate contributor to the emigré anti-Bolshevik movement until his death in 1952 in New York. Chernov was a gifted intellectual and theorist who ultimately lacked the ruthless single-mindedness required of a revolutionary political leader.

Bibliography

Burbank, Jane. (1985). "Waiting for the People's Revolution: Martov and Chernov in Revolutionary Russia, 1917 - 1923." Cahiers du monde russe et sovietique 26(3 - 4):375 - 394.

Chernov, Victor Mikhailovich. (1936). The Great Russian Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Melancon, Michael. (1997). "Chernov." In Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914 - 1921, ed. Edward Acton, Vladimir Chernaiev, and William G. Rosenberg. London: Arnold.

—SARAH BADCOCK

Viktor Mikhailovich Chernov (Russian: Виктор Михайлович Чернов; 1873 – 1952) was a Russian revolutionary and one of the founders of the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party. He was the primary party theoretician or the 'brain' of the party, although he was more analyst than political leader.

Born in Novouzensk, a town southeast of Saratov, Chernov attended gymnasium in Saratov, a hotbed of radicalism, where he studied the works of Nikolay Dobrolyubov and Nikolay Mikhaylovsky, and by the end of the 1880s he was involved in revolutionary activity. He attended the law faculty of Moscow University and in the early 1890s joined the narodniks; in 1894 he joined Mark Natanson's "People's Will" (Narodnoe pravo) group, an attempt to unite all the socialist movements in Russia, and with other members was arrested, jailed, and exiled. After spending some time organizing the peasants around Tambov, he went abroad to Zurich in 1899. He joined the Socialist-Revolutionary Party upon its founding in 1902 and became the editor of its newspaper Revolutionary Russia. He returned to Russia after the Revolution of 1905; after boycotting the elections for the First Duma, he won election to the Second Duma and became a leader of the SR faction.

Under Alexander Kerensky's provisional government in 1917, Chernov was the Minister for Agriculture. He was also the last Chairman of the Russian Constituent Assembly until its disbandement on January 6, 1918. Following the Bolsheviks' rise to power, he became a member of an anti-Bolshevik government in Samara, before fleeing to Europe and then the United States. He died there, in New York City, in 1952.

References

• http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9023845, accessed October 2, 2005.
• http://www.bartleby.com/65/ch/Chernov.html, accessed October 2, 2005.

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