The other Russian revolutionaries

by Ben Soton

Felix Volkhovskii – A Revolutionary Life by Michael Hughes; Open Book Publishers, 356pp, rrp £22.95

When it comes to the Russian Revolution this paper tends to give wholehearted backing to Lenin and his group, the Majority faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), more commonly known as the Bolsheviks. This is not to say there were no other grouping and individuals working to bring about the end of Absolutism in Czarist Russia.  One such individual was Felix Volkhovskii, the subject of Michael Hughes’ book.      
Volkhovskii was born in 1846, in what is now Ukraine; his parents were from a minor aristocratic family and he led a privileged life.  He became involved in opposition politics whilst studying in St Petersburg and was eventually exiled to Siberia.  In 1890 he left Russia first to the United States then to Britain where, despite a brief return to his homeland around the time of the 1905 revolution, he spent the rest of his life.  Whilst in exile he was heavily involved with the Society for Friends of Russia Freedom and edited its publication Free Russia.  He died in 1914, three years before the overthrow of the Czar.        
The book gives a detailed study of the various organisations in opposition to the Czarist autocracy. These included Liberals who favoured reform but opposed any significant social change and the various revolutionary groups who supported social and political change through revolution. Meanwhile the book also explains the shift in emphasis away from the rural peasantry to the urban working class as the main revolutionary force. The strategy was ultimately taken up by the Lenin and the Bolsheviks who carried out the world’s first socialist revolution.
Volkhovskii, who later joined the Social Revolutionary Party, often referred to as SRs, favoured a broad front which include both Revolutionaries and Liberals.  History later proved this to be a pipe dream; with Russian Liberals being more fearful of the working class than the Czar. Indeed many Russian capitalists who upheld the liberal ideology had close connections with the Czarist state and the imperial court.  It took the crisis brought about by the First World War to bring an end to both the Czar and Russian capitalism, at least for a few decades.  
The book is in many ways an odyssey through the complex myriads of Russian opposition politics from the 1870s to the outbreak of the First World War.  As well as what could be described as the Russian solidarity movement in Britain.  However it gives little mention to either faction of the RSDLP and leaders such as Lenin and Stalin, or for that matter Trotsky.  Instead it features less well-known figures from the Social Revolutionary Party. The book may be an attempt on the part of certain sections of academia, motivated by either anti-communism or Russophobia to create a narrative that the Russian Revolution was essentially high-jacked by authoritarians; whilst true revolutionaries, such as Volkhovskii have been overlooked.  We know better!