Viktor Chernov

Viktor Chernov
Chairman of the Russian Constituent Assembly
In office
January 18, 1918 – January 19, 1918
Personal details
Born Viktor Mikhailovich Chernov
(1873-12-07)December 7, 1873
Novouzensk, Russian Empire
Died April 15, 1952(1952-04-15) (aged 78)
New York, USA
Political party Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Mensheviks)
(1898–1912)
Socialist Revolutionary Party
(1912–1940)
Occupation Revolutionary, political activist, writer

Viktor Mikhailovich Chernov (Russian: Ви́ктор Миха́йлович Черно́в; December 7, 1873 – April 15, 1952) was a Russian revolutionary and one of the founders of the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party. He was the primary party theoretician or the 'brain' of the party, and was more analyst than political leader.

V.M. Chernov.

Biography

Early years

Viktor Chernov was born in Novouzensk, a town southeast of Saratov in Samara guberniya. He was the son of a former serf peasant who had risen to become a low-level functionary in the local civil service.[1]

Chernov attended gymnasium in Saratov, a hotbed of radicalism, where he joined a populist discussion circle in which he studied the works of Nikolay Dobrolyubov and Nikolay Mikhaylovsky. His radical proclivities attracted the attention of the local police and Chernov transferred to school in Iurev for his final year of study.[1]

Chernov enrolled in the Law department of Moscow University, where he once again joined a radical discussion circle, defending populist views against Marxists.[1] He was arrested for his political activities in the spring of 1894 and spent 9 months in Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg.[1] Following his incarceration, Chernov was sentenced to a period of administrative exile in central Russia.[1]

Political career

By the end of the 1880s he was involved in revolutionary activity. He attended the law faculty of Moscow University and in the early 1890s joined the Narodniks; in 1894 he joined Mark Natanson's "People's Right" (Narodnoe pravo) group, an attempt to unite all the socialist movements in Russia, and with other members was arrested, jailed, and exiled. After spending some time organizing the peasants around Tambov, he went abroad to Zurich in 1899. He joined the Socialist-Revolutionary Party upon its founding in 1901 and became the editor of its newspaper Revolutionary Russia. He returned to Russia after the Revolution of 1905; after boycotting the elections for the First Duma, he won election to the Second Duma and became a leader of the SR faction.

In 1907 he published Philosophical and Sociological Studies in which he espoused the viewpoint of Richard Avenarius. As such, he was one of the Russian Machists criticised by Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909).[2]

Under Alexander Kerensky's provisional government in 1917, Chernov was the Minister for Agriculture. He was also Chairman of the Russian Constituent Assembly, which was dissolved by the Bolsheviks shortly after it began meeting in January 1918. He became a member of an anti-Bolshevik government leading the more moderate Social Revolutionaries in Samara, before fleeing to Europe and then the United States.

Chernov died in New York City in 1952.

Sources

Footnotes

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Maureen Perrie, "Viktor Mikhailovich Chernov," in George Jackson with Robert Devlin (eds.), Dictionary of the Russian Revolution. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989; pp. 116-119.
  2. ↑ Lenin, Vladimir (1909). Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Moscow: Zveno Publishers.
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