The politics of Russian populism, 1894-1929: V. A. Miakotin, A. V. Peshekhonov, and the Popular Socialist Party

My dissertation explores the politics of Russian populism between 1894 and 1929 through the careers of the populist publicists and politicians V. A. Miakotin and A. V. Peshekhonov, who were the founders and leaders of the Popular Socialist Party. Within both Western and Soviet historiography, populism has been overshadowed by Marxism, primarily due to the ultimate victory of the Bolsheviks. The richness of prerevolutionary Russian political culture has thereby been obscured, as have the very factors that determined the outcome of the Russian Revolution of 1917. I contend that the ideology of the Popular Socialists not only reflected the wider character of prerevolutionary political culture, but helped to shape that culture. In particular, the statism professed by the Popular Socialists had come to pervade Russian political discourse by the end of 1917. Moreover, the Popular Socialists helped to popularize a mentality of anticapitalism that molded the fate of the 1917 Revolution.;The ideology of the Popular Socialists was fundamentally ambivalent, and represented an attempt to reconcile the antinomies of the individual and society, Russia and the West, and the intelligentsia and the people. The October Revolution and the Civil War victory of the Bolsheviks doomed the attempt to reconcile these contradictory elements, and so led to the collapse of prerevolutionary populism. The dissolution of populism was reflected by the very different paths that Miakotin and Peshekhonov followed after the Civil War.;My dissertation is composed of ten chapters, grouped into three parts. Part One traces the development of Russian populism until 1894, describes the youths of Miakotin and Peshekhonov, explores populist historiography through the historical works of Miakotin, and examines the populist conception of society through the statistical works of Peshekhonov. Part Two focuses on the formation of the Popular Socialist Party during the 1905 Revolution. Part Three examines the politics of the Popular Socialists during the 1917 Revolution, the Civil War, and the 1920s. The dissertation concludes by contemplating the fate of populism within the context of Russian political culture. The dissertation is based on numerous published and unpublished sources, many of them never before employed by Western scholars.