Viktor Chernov

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Viktor Mikhailovich Chernov (Russian: Виктор Михайлович Чернов; 1873 – 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, although he was more analyst than political leader.

Born in Novouzensk, a town southeast of Saratov, Chernov attended gymnasium in Saratov, a hotbed of radicalism, where he studied the works of Nikolay Dobrolyubov and Nikolay Mikhaylovsky, and 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 Will" (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 1902 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.

Under Alexander Kerensky's provisional government in 1917, Chernov was the Minister for Agriculture. He was also the last Chairman of the Russian Constituent Assembly until its disbandement on January 6, 1918. Following the Bolsheviks' rise to power, he became a member of an anti-Bolshevik government in Samara, before fleeing to Europe and then the United States. He died there, in New York City, in 1952.