(1) David Shub was a member of the Social Democratic Labour Party who emigrated to the United States. Later he wrote about the leadership of the Socialist Revolutionaries.
While conflict raged in Social Democratic ranks, the Revolutionary movement was not marking time in Russia. A new party had come on the scene and had stirred fresh currents in the Russian people. This was the Socialist Revolutionary Party. The leaders of the party were Catherine Breshkovsky, who had served six prison terms and spent more than twenty years in Siberia; Mikhail Gotz, son of a Moscow millionaire and a famous Siberian exile; Gregory Gershuni, whose Terrorist Brigade carried out the assassination of leading reactionary Ministers and Governors; Victor Chernov; and a number of old revolutionaries of the People's Will.
(2) Victor Serge, Year One of the Revolution (1930)
The SR Battle Organization was founded by Gregory Gershuni in 1902; its first act, in the same year, was the execution of the Minister of Education Sipyagin by the student Balmashev (who was later hanged). On the day after the murder, the SR party published under a similar verdict. The arrest of Gershuni, who was delivered to the police by Azef, caused the latter's promotion to the top leadership of the terrorist detachment. A man named Boris Savinkov, for whom terrorism was a vocation and whose courage was indomitable, now found himself under the orders of the agent-provacateur. In 1904 the Prime Minister, Plehve, fell mutilated by Yegor Sazonov's bomb. Sazonov had organized the assassination on instructions from Azef.
(3) Praskovia Ivanovskaia , who served fifteen years in prison for her part in the assassination of Alexander II, also helped to murder Vyacheslav Plehve.
The conclusion of this affair gave me some satisfaction - finally the man who had taken so many victims had been brought to his inevitable end, so universally desired.
(4) Edward Judge, Plehve: Repression and Reform in Imperial Russia (1983)
Azef sat in a very dangerous position, especially after Gershuni's arrest, and he had to think first of his own safety. A continual series of arrests, and a long train of assassination attempts gone awry, could only help convince his SR colleagues that they had a traitor in their midst. If he were found out, his game would be over, and so, most probably, would be his life. On the other hand, if he could successfully plan and accomplish the murder of Plehve, his position among the SRs would be secured. Azef had little love for Plehve: as a Jew, he could not help but resent the Kishinev pogrom and the minister's reputed role.
(5) Robert Bruce Lockhart, report sent to the British government (13th March, 1917)
So far the people of Moscow have behaved with exemplary restraint. For the moment, only enthusiasm prevails, and the struggle which is almost bound to ensure between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat has not yet made its bitterness felt.
The Socialist Party is at present divided into two groups: the Social Democrats and Soviet Revolutionaries. The activities of the first named are employed almost entirely among the work people, while the Social Revolutionaries work mainly among the peasantry.
The Social Democrats, who are the largest party, are, however, divided into two groups known as the Bolsheviki and the Mensheviki. The Bolsheviki are the more extreme party. They are at heart anti-war. In Moscow at any rate the Mensheviki represent today the majority and are more favourable to the war.
(6) George Buchanan, My Mission to Russia and Other Diplomatic Memories (1922).
The Social Revolutionaries (SRs) were agrarian, in contradistinction to the Social Democrats, who represented the interests of the proletariats of the towns. The watchword of the former had always been "Land and Liberty". During the latter part of the last and the commencement of the present century they had adopted terrorism as a weapon for attaining their ends.
(7) Nikolai Sukhanov, was a leading member of the Petrograd Soviet. In his book The Russian Revolution 1917, he recalled his impression of Victor Chernov.
In the creation of the SR Party Chernov had played an absolutely exceptional role. Chernov was the only substantial theoretician of any kind it had - and a universal one at that. If Chernov's writings were removed from the SR party literature almost nothing would be left.
Without Chernov the SR Party would not have existed, any more than the Bolshevik Party without Lenin - inasmuch as no serious political organization can take shape round an intellectual vacuum.
But Chernov - unlike Lenin - only performed half the work in the SR Party. During the period of pre-Revolutionary conspiracy he was not the party organizing centre, and in the broad area of the revolution, in spite of his vast authority amongst the SRs, Chernov proved bankrupt as a political leader.
Chernov never showed the slightest stability, striking power, or fighting ability - qualities vital for a political leader in a revolutionary situation. He proved inwardly feeble and outwardly unattractive, disagreeable and ridiculous.
(8) Mark Vishniak, a member of the Socialist Revolutionaries, later wrote about his impressions of Victor Chernov at the first meeting of the Constituent Assembly.
His speech was couched in the language of internationalist and socialist ideas, with occasional undertones of demagogy. It was as though the speaker was deliberately seeking a common language with the Bolsheviks, and trying to persuade them of something instead of dissociating himself from them and standing up against them as representatives of Russian democracy.
