The SRs participated in the activities of Soviets at all levels, their positions were especially strong in the Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies. The SR leaders along with the Mensheviks played a leading role in managing the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTSIK) of Soviets. Since May 1917, representatives of the party were part of the coalition Provisional Government (Aleksander Kerensky, Victor Chernov, Nikolay Avksentiev, Semyon Maslov). In the autumn of 1917, the crisis of the Provisional Government’s policy led to a loss of authority and a decrease in the real influence of the SRP, which officially supported the coalition with the bourgeois parties.

 

The SR leadership was negative about the October coup. The SRP faction left the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, while the left SRs remained at the Congress and entered the new Central Executive Committee. On October 27, the SRP Central Committee expelled members who had supported the Bolsheviks from the party (in November, the left SRs officially formed an independent party). Kerensky sent General Pyotr Krasnov’s 3rd Cavalry Corps to Petrograd (October 25–29) and the anti-Bolshevik Committee for the Salvation of the Motherland and the Revolution formed upon the initiative of the SRs (Abram Gots and others) organized a Junker mutiny in Petrograd (October 29). However, these and other attempts to overthrow the Soviet government ended in vain.

 

At the elections to the Constituent Assembly in November 1917, the SRs received 370 seats out of 767 (48.8 %). Together with national SR organizations (81 seats were given to Ukrainian SRs) and groups close in ideology, the share of SRs reached 60 %. The SRs considered the Constituent Assembly the highest form of the expression of the people’s will, the decisive legitimate authority. Victor Chernov was elected Chairman of the Constituent Assembly, leaving Maria Spiridonova, the candidate of the Bolsheviks and left SRs, behind. At the only meeting of the Constituent Assembly, the Social Revolutionaries refused to discuss the “Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited People” that was read out by the VTSIK Chairman Yakov Sverdlov, which accelerated the dispersal of the meeting by the Soviet authorities.

 

The 8th Council of the SRP (May 1918) decided to launch an armed struggle against the Bolsheviks to restore the Constituent Assembly and local self-government bodies. The uprising of the Czechoslovak Legion provided the SRs with an opportunity to establish their power in the Volga region, the Urals, and Siberia. In June 1918, a Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch) was formed in Samara under the chairmanship of the Socialist Revolutionary Vladimir Volsky. The Social Revolutionaries had a majority in the Siberian Regional Duma (Tomsk), which declared Siberia an autonomous region and formed the Provisional Siberian Government headed by the Socialist Revolutionary Pyotr Derber. The Social Revolutionaries also prevailed at the State Conference in Ufa (September 1918), which resulted in the formation of the Provisional All-Russian Government (Ufa Directorate) headed by Nikolay Avksentiev.

 

On November 18, 1918, Aleksander Kolchak carried out a military coup in Omsk, overthrew the Ufa Directorate, and established a military dictatorship. The SR leaders were arrested (Volsky, Chernov, etc.), some were expelled (Avksentiev, Zenzinov). In these circumstances, in June 1919, the 9th SRP Council shifted to the “third force” tactics (refusal to support both the Reds and the Whites; struggling against any dictatorship for genuine democracy). This tactic was opposed by representatives of extreme wings within the SRP. Some right-wing Social Revolutionaries decided to cooperate with the Kolchak regime. In their turn, in early 1919, the left-wing representatives signed an agreement with the Bolsheviks on joint actions against Kolchak. In October, they formed an independent organization, the Minority of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (Volsky, Konstantin Burevoy, etc.).

 

In Siberia and the Far East, the SRs fought against the Kolchak regime. They played a leading role in the formation of the Political Center (November 1919), which at the beginning of 1920, conducted a successful uprising against Kolchak and established its power in Irkutsk (at the end of January, it handed it over to the Bolsheviks). Referring to the need to unite democracy in the fight against right-wing forces and Japan, the SRs joined the coalition government created by the Bolsheviks in Vladivostok—the Regional government of Primorye Zemstvo (1920), and then they joined the Government of the Far Eastern Republic.

 

Part of the Social Revolutionaries in the European part of the country also prioritized the fight against the Whites. In Ukraine, SR organizations headed by the All-Ukrainian Regional Committee fought against the forces of Anton Denikin. The Social Revolutionaries who dominated the Committee for the Liberation of the Black Sea Region and led the Green movement in this region directed their forces to fight against the Whites. In the territories occupied by Poland and the forces of Pyotr Wrangel, the SRs waged a “revolutionary struggle” against their power, including terror.

 

Since 1920, repressions against the SRs had strengthened in the Russian SFSR. In the summer of 1922, the Bolsheviks organized a show trial of SRP members accused of anti-Soviet terrorist activities. In 1925, with the arrest of the last composition of the SRP Central Bureau, the activities of the SRs in the USSR actually stopped. In emigration, organizations and groups of Social Revolutionaries operated for several more decades until the mid-1960s.