In March 1938, at the last of the great Moscow show trials organized by the triumphant Stalinist leadership of the Soviet state, Joseph Stalin’s disgraced rival Nikolai Bukharin confessed: “I admit I am guilty of treason to the socialist fatherland, the most heinous of possible crimes, of the organization of kulak uprisings, of preparations for terrorist acts, and of belonging to an underground anti-Soviet organization.”¹ To historically minded listeners, Bukharin’s confession might have recalled the first major Soviet show trial, the trial of more than twenty leading Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) in 1922. The crimes to which Bukharin confessed—maintaining treasonous...

The first months of 1918 may seem in retrospect an interlude of relative calm and pluralism in Soviet Russia, but contemporaries understood that civil war was upon them. The nonpartisan dailyPetrogradskoe ekhobegan to carry regular updates under the rubric “Civil War.” The newspaper’s reports focused on the disintegration of the Russian empire and the fighting that ensued as the Bolsheviks sought to reassemble the Russian state. Such warfare broke out first in Ukraine, where Bolshevik forces fought a successful campaign in January against units loyal to the Rada in Kiev. The “Civil War” rubric also incorporated reports on...

In May 1918 the Central Committee dispatched leading Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) to the Volga and Urals to organize the uprising approved at the Eighth Party Council. Dmitrii Donskoi traveled to Saratov to serve as chief organizer, and other Central Committee members dispersed to take over the leadership of local party organizations in the provincial capitals of the Volga, Black Earth, and Urals. The SR leadership hoped to overthrow Soviet power along a line from Perm’ to Tsaritsyn using party peasant detachments and the veterans unions.¹ The leadership hoped eventually to reopen the Constituent Assembly, but for the moment it planned...

The city of Samara, the seat of the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly, spreads along the left bank of a great bend in the Volga, where the river snakes east around the Zhiguli ridge before resuming its flow south to the Caspian Sea. There in the summer and early fall of 1918 the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) secured their principal opportunity during the civil war to build a revolutionary alternative to Soviet power. This was a critical moment, because the Bolsheviks had not yet succeeded in their efforts to monopolize revolutionary discourse and establish their vision of the civil...

In the vast spaces behind the Eastern front, the Czechoslovak rebellion and the overthrow of Bolshevik rule opened a protracted struggle for power. While Komuch struggled to secure itself on the Volga, the Provisional Siberian Government in Omsk emerged as the principal power in Siberia over the course of summer, and a host of other governments established themselves in the Urals, Central Asia, and Far East. These governments drew on different political discourses to advance their claims to rule and to contest the claims of their rivals. Most also participated in the effort to form an all-Russian government that would...

As 1918 drew to a close, the stark choice between the Bolsheviks and the Kolchak government returned the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) to the dilemmas they had faced in the first months of the year. No less than in early 1918, the SRs believed that Bolshevik rule spelled doom for the revolution, whose salvation depended on the reconvocation of the Constituent Assembly. The Bolsheviks were clearly not going to resuscitate the Assembly, however, and the effort to fight for it had proved a dismal failure. To many SRs, the history of the Eastern front seemed to corroborate the analysis of the...

“The terrifying thing about the modern dictatorships,” George Orwell remarked in 1939, “is that they are something entirely unprecedented. Their end cannot be foreseen.”¹ The extraordinary difficulty of imagining an end to the dictatorship indeed aptly sums up the predicament of the anti-Bolshevik parties as the Whites passed from the scene and the Soviet victory became increasingly difficult to deny over the course of 1920 and 1921. For liberals and socialists working in the main line of the intelligentsia tradition, dominated as it was by images of 1789, 1848, and 1871, the Russian Revolution had broken the mold of European...

In an influential essay of 1985, the historian Sheila Fitzpatrick persuasively argued that the civil war was the formative experience of the Bolshevik party.¹ She directed her argument primarily at an interpretive tradition that sought the origins of Stalinist mentalities and institutions in Lenin’s prerevolutionary writings, and her work formed part of a larger historiographical shift away from ideas and inevitability, toward contingency, circumstance, and the exigencies of war in the development of Bolshevik authoritarianism. This chapter suggests that a concept of experience based on the work of the anthropologist Victor Turner can introduce greater analytical precision to the commonsense...