AHC: Left SR Russia

This area of history is not really one I am especially familiar with, so bear with me. Is it at all possible for the Left SRs to have formed a cohesive fighting force and effectively won the Russian Civil War - that is, win control of most of the former Russian Empire? If so, what would likely be the long-term effects?
 

trurle

Banned
With their social base lying among poor peasants, the likely outcome will resemble Cambodia. Terrible bloodbath with massacres of city populations, and dismantling of the infrastructure.
 
With their social base lying among poor peasants, the likely outcome will resemble Cambodia. Terrible bloodbath with massacres of city populations, and dismantling of the infrastructure.

Hmm. How likely is it that these groups could more fully align with the green peasant armies, such as they were?
 
With their social base lying among poor peasants, the likely outcome will resemble Cambodia. Terrible bloodbath with massacres of city populations, and dismantling of the infrastructure.

I think that some people overly romanticize the Left-SRs, but this is way too harsh. Their economic policies probably wouldn't have been great, but they weren't a bunch of psychopaths who wanted to empty cities or anything.
 

trurle

Banned
I think that some people overly romanticize the Left-SRs, but this is way too harsh. Their economic policies probably wouldn't have been great, but they weren't a bunch of psychopaths who wanted to empty cities or anything.
Yes they not. Unfortunately, in politics you do not need to be a psychopath to perform a massacre. You just need to have a slightly narrowed political group/party identity.
 
With their social base lying among poor peasants, the likely outcome will resemble Cambodia. Terrible bloodbath with massacres of city populations, and dismantling of the infrastructure.
I'm nowhere near a friend of Communist Regimes, but this statement is just plain ignorant.
 
They count. If person in question write and publish memoirs. Actual criteria for being evidence is about making family stories traceable.
The fact that the Left SRs tried to rise against the Bolsheviks for repressing trade unions and banning factory worker councils blows your "Khmer Rouge" argument out of the water.
 
With their social base lying among poor peasants, the likely outcome will resemble Cambodia. Terrible bloodbath with massacres of city populations, and dismantling of the infrastructure.

The late Oliver Radkey, probably the world's greatest expert on the SR's, rejected the notion that the Left SR's had their base in the village poor, just as he also rejected the Bolshevik charge that even the Left SR's were pro-kulak. According to Radkey, the Left SR's as much as the mainstream ones favored the middle peasant. Two passages from Radkey's *The Sickle Under the Hammer: The Russian Socialist Revolutionaries in the Early Months of the Soviet Rule* (New York: Columbia University Press 1963):

p. 138: "Like all Populists, the Left SR's favored the peasantry and harbored no illusions as to its fate under a Marxist regime. The attempt in Soviet historiography to portray even the Left SR's as champions of the kulaks has no foundation in fact except that here and there during the period of militant Communism the better-to-do peasants may have taken up with this party, simply because they were being harried like wild beasts and had no other place to go. The truth of the matter is that the Left SR's had no use for the village "rich," any more than they had for the "paupers" upon whom the Bolsheviks lavished so much attention as an element in the village which could be used for the purposes of a party determined in the long run to debase all peasants to the status of factory hand in the field. The Left SR's were par excellence the party of the middle peasantry, favoring the independent tillers of the soil who did not exploit the labor of others but worked their own allotments, individually at present, collectively in the future, after the advantages of toil in common had been disclosed to them and they had freely, of their own will, banded together with their fellows to conduct that type of economy which all socialists, Narodnik as well as Marxist, regard as superior to individual enterprise. That is the way the Left SR's looked at it, and if their views seem naive to Westerners steeped in the concept of private property, it can at least be said of them that they were sincere. They knew the danger that threatened the peasantry from both extremes, from the left as well as from the right. In the words of one of their leaders, "the peasant's interest does not lie close to the heart of the Social Democrat." Viewing with horror Lenin's design of pitting the peasants against one another in order to nullify their political influence, the Left SR's foresaw that the provisioning difficulties of the towns would give the signal for a campaign against the village..."

p. 215: "The analyses of these developments in the fight for the peasantry are least satisfactory in respect to the middle peasantry. While all revolutionary parties abominated the kulaks, all coveted the support of the independent tillers who did their own work without exploiting the labor of others (except that of their wives and children). Of course, the right SR's did not really abominate the kulaks, and, of course, the Bolsheviks had no use for independent tillers of the soil, with or without hired labor. But we are speaking now not of private convictions but of public affectation. Soviet analysts assign both the middle and poor peasantry to the extremist parties, reserving a special place of honor for the pauperdom as the village element most susceptible to Bolshevism — or least capable of resisting it. Since soldier delegates succumbed most readily to the blandishments of Bolshevism, an effort is made to equate delegates from the trenches with the village poor and have all eggs in one basket. This effort produces no real evidence and is not in the least convincing. Why a middle peasant or even a kulak in the trenches could not experience an equally strong revulsion of feeling as a hired hand against passing another winter in frozen muck is a question that Communist sources neither pose nor answer. Nor does Bykhovski [an SR] offer any proof for his attribution of the middle peasantry to the SR's after the breakup of the party. The Left SR's defended this type of peasant just as strongly and claimed just as fervidly to have his support.

"If there were any real way of establishing the relationship between type of peasant and political inclination, we should probably find that kulaks tended to be conservative (in the revolutionary sense), that paupers tended to yield to whatever influence played most strongly upon them, and that middle peasants were divided primarily according to temperament and local political influence, the slow and cautious ones siding with the SR's and the more forward ones, or those who were imbued with social hatred, adhering to the Left SR's. The bulk of the middle peasantry was undoubtedly center SR in Voronezh province and Left SR in neighboring Kharkov province, in accordance with the influence exerted by the dominant political organization. In Riazan province this group was split wide open, just like the former party itself. Finally, a deluded peasant of any type could be a Bolshevik. Amid the conflicting claims, one feature of the Extraordinary Peasants' Congress stands out clearly and unmistakably: there was a marked predominance of soldiers over civilians on the left and of civilians over soldiers on the right. The whole contest for the allegiance of the peasantry at the end of 1917, in fact, takes on the aspect of a duel between the front and the village, if allowance be made for a nonconforming minority on either side that cuts across the established pattern..."
 
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