The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, also known as the Left SRs or Left Esers, were a radical left-wing party that played a significant role in early Soviet Russia. The group emerged as a faction of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (SR) and was known for its strong opposition to World War I and Russia’s involvement in it. Their anti-war stance forced a split in the SR party, a working coalition with the Bolsheviks and some participation in the first Soviet government. The coalition soon faltered, however, and in July 1918, the Left SRs engaged in an ill-fated uprising against the Bolsheviks that spelled their doom.
Emergence
As the name suggests, the Left SRs were a radical left-wing faction of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. Until the revolution of 1917, the SRs had been Russia’s largest socialist political party. Large, populist and broad-based, the SRs had long contained a range of political views and conservative, moderate and radical factions.
The outbreak of World War I exposed critical fault lines within the party, whose members grew increasingly divided over how Russia should respond. The majority of SRs believed it was necessary to support the war effort, whether for nationalistic reasons or to defend the Russian people from German aggression. Those on the party’s left, however, adopted an anti-war position similar to that of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
The SRs refused to participate in the second, third and fourth Dumas, considering it an ineffective and irrelevant body. The February Revolution revived the party’s involvement in politics, however, and its members again became active, this time within the Soviets and in lobbying for the Constituent Assembly.
Several SR leaders would become ministers in the Provisional Government during 1917, most notably Alexander Kerensky (a member of an SR faction, the Trudoviks) and Victor Chernov. The party’s continued support for the war, however, saw its left-wing faction grow in size and move towards an alignment with the Bolsheviks.
The SRs split
The split in the SR movement was finalised by the events of October 1917. Defying the mainstream party, dozens of Left SRs contributed to preparations for the overthrow of the Provisional Government. One was Pavel Lazimir, a significant leader of the Petrograd Soviet who became chairman of the Bolshevik-dominated Military Revolutionary Committee.
On October 26th, when the Second Congress of Soviets was informed that Red Guards had arrested the Provisional Government and seized power, most SR delegates stormed out of the building – a famous flashpoint when Leon Trotsky famously consigned them to the “dustbin of history”. After the walkout, 179 Left SR delegates remained in the congress.
This triggered their expulsion from the SRs and reconstitution as an independent party. While accurate numbers are unknown, the Left SR faction enjoyed widespread support in Petrograd, among soldiers and urban workers, even among peasants in regions such as Ukraine. The split may have taken as much as one-third of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party’s support.
Coalition partners
Shortly after the October Revolution, Lenin offered the Left SRs roles in a coalition government. The group wanted a broad-based Soviet government, however – a “united revolutionary front”, as one called it – and rejected the offer.
The Left SRs held their first party congress in early December, debating and formulating their position. This led to a tactical shift and the party accepted the Bolshevik offer, filling seven portfolios in the newly formed Sovnarkom. The most notable ministries held by Left SRs were justice (Isaac Sternberg) and agriculture (Andrei Kolegayev). Left SRs also occupied 29 seats in the Central Executive Committee, less than half of Bolsheviks’ 62 seats.
Despite their coalition with the Bolsheviks, the outlook of the Left SRs remained more inclusive and conciliatory. Party leaders like Boris Kamkov wanted to retain contact with moderate socialist groups like the Mensheviks and mainstream SR party, with a view to integrating them into the Soviet government. This, of course, was not to be.
“The Left SRs were hardly less radical than the Bolsheviks themselves (they tended to stress peasant interests)… It is nevertheless possible that over a period of years, the coalition could have led to mutual restraint, which might in due course have mitigated the worst features of totalitarianism… It soon became clear, however, that the Bolsheviks did not want to share power with any party.”
Dmitri Volkogonov, historian
Maria Spiridonova
The Left SRs had no single leader during this period but its talisman and figurehead was Maria Spiridonova. As a young activist from the Tambov region, Spirodonova joined the Socialist-Revolutionaries at a time when its radicals were heavily engaged in political terrorism. In January 1906, Spiridonova murdered a local landowner and police chief. She was arrested, beaten and sexually assaulted by local Cossacks, then spent a decade in a Siberian katorga.
Spiridonova’s trial and mistreatment at the hands of the Cossacks attracted national press attention – in part, because she was able to leak handwritten details to the press while in captivity. As a consequence, Spiridonova because something of a cause celebre, a victim both of political exploitation and tsarist brutality.
Released from prison after the February Revolution, Spiridonova relocated to the Siberian town of Chita, where she briefly served as its mayor. In May, she moved to Moscow and began working for the Socialist-Revolutionary Party at grass roots level. She was a candidate for leadership positions in the SR party but soon gravitated to its Left faction.
Points of difference
Under Spiridonova’s influence, the Left SRs supported much of the Bolshevik programme, though some points of difference emerged in the first weeks of 1918. Land reform, reorganisation of the peasantry and rural self-sufficiency were at the forefront of the Left SR agenda. Lenin, however, rejected these as “bourgeois-tinted dreams”.
Of greater concern to Left SRs like Kamkov was the exclusion of non-Bolshevik socialist and Soviet voices from government. Left SR leaders opposed the closure of the Constituent Assembly, though they were outnumbered and thus outvoted by the Bolsheviks.
The extralegal violence of the emerging Cheka was accepted as necessary by some Left SRs but condemned by others. Isaac Steinberg, the Left SR lawyer and commissar for justice in the first Sovnarkom, regularly criticised the Cheka, called for oversight of its activities and an inquiry into its conduct, with little success.
Split with the Bolsheviks
The fragile alliance between the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs was ended by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Left SRs considered the March 1918 agreement an act of treachery, marked by cruel disregard for Russian peasants living in affected territories, and they opposed it intensely.
Once the Bolsheviks had accepted and ratified the Brest-Litovsk agreement, Left SR commissars resigned from the Sovnarkom, leaving it entirely in Bolshevik hands, though they continued to participate in the Congress of Soviets.
Other measures taken by the Bolsheviks in 1918 widened the rift between the two parties. Among policies bitterly opposed by the Left SRs were the imposition of state control in factories, the restoration of the death penalty, and the introduction of war communism.
In the spring of 1918, the German army occupied Ukraine and violently suppressed peasant opposition there; the Bolshevik government did nothing in response. The outraged Left SRs lobbied the Fourth Congress of Soviets (July 1918) to have the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk nullified, calling for a new declaration of war against Germany. The motion was defeated by the Bolshevik majority.
The Left SR uprising
The following day, July 6th 1918, a clique of Left SRs took matters into their own hands, assassinating the German ambassador, Count Mirbach. Inspired by their success, a brigade of around 1,800 soldiers loyal to the Left SRs bombarded the Kremlin, seized control of communications posts and detained several high-ranking Bolsheviks, including Cheka boss Felix Dzerzhinsky.
The rebels held the upper hand in Moscow for a day, their troops outnumbering soldiers loyal to the Bolsheviks almost three to one. Further east, Left SR military commander Mikhail Muravyov captured Lenin’s hometown of Simbirsk and established a ‘Volga Soviet Republic’.
With the city’s workers unwilling to defend the Bolsheviks, the Left SRs might have swept into the Kremlin to arrest Lenin and other members of the government. The uprising was a mostly spontaneous event, however. Unlike the Bolsheviks in October 1917, their leaders had made no planning or provision for seizing power. Indeed, some Left SR leaders knew little or nothing about the uprising.
The party dissolves
Though it took several days, the SR revolt was eventually crushed by Red Army and Cheka reinforcements. Around 950 Left SRs were hunted down, arrested and given a show trial in late 1918. They were treated with comparative leniency, with only 13 given short sentences in Soviet labour camps. Maria Spiridonova, for example, was sentenced to just one year in prison.
Many Left SRs fled to Ukraine, where popular support for the group remained strong, and attempted to rebuild the party there. Ukraine was still occupied by German forces, so some Left SRs engaged in acts of resistance and terrorism. In late July, a group including Irina Kakhovskaya and Boris Donskoy assassinated Field Marshal von Eichhorn, the German military governor.
The onset of the Civil War and the widening of the Red Terror brought a stronger crackdown on non-Bolshevik parties. The Left SR movement was declared illegal in February 1919 and Spiridonova was arrested again for publicly criticising the government. She would spend the next few years either in hiding or exile, then the last 15 years of her life in Stalinist prisons. In September 1941, she was executed in a forest alongside 156 other political prisoners.
Other prominent Left SRs suffered a similar fate or were chased into exile. Boris Namvok was arrested numerous times before being executed in 1938 on Stalin’s orders. Isaac Steinberg, the former justice minister who had tried to rein in the Cheka, fled to Germany and later worked to resettle Jewish refugees from Nazism. Other Left SRs were chased into exile, many fighting with peasant militias against the Red Army during the Russian Civil War.
1. The Left SRs were a radical faction of the Socialist-Revolutionary party. Like the SRs, they wanted land reform and worker control, however, the Left SRs employed terrorism to achieve their goals.
2. The Left SRs split from the mainstream Socialist Revolutionary party in 1917 because of its support for World War I and continued Russian involvement. They aligned with the Bolsheviks and accepted the October Revolution.
3. Though there remain points of difference with the Bolsheviks, several Left SR leaders later joined the Soviet government. They later resigned in objection to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
4. In July 1918, Left SRs murdered the German ambassador and launched a spontaneous attempt to seize control of Moscow and other Russian cities – but this uprising was unplanned and disorganised, so was quickly suppressed.
5. The party continued to operate in Ukraine and other regions but quickly dissolved. Most of its leaders were either arrested or forced into exile, while others participated in the Russian Civil War.
Citation information
Title: ‘The Left SRs’
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: https://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/left-srs/
Date published: July 19, 2018
Date updated: March 2, 2025
Date accessed: October 11, 2025
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