People's Socialists and Labor Group in 1917: Unity or Association? Bulletin of Science and Practice

The relevance of the problems of this study is due to the enduring importance of finding opportunities for compromise and unity of the progressive political forces of the country in critical, crisis periods of its history. The article examines aspects of cooperation, commonality and differences in the ideological views of two prominent political organizations of 1906-1917: the People's Socialist Party (PNS) and the Trudoviks, which united during the Great Russian Revolution in the summer of 1917 to form the People's Socialist Party of Labor. It is shown that, despite very productive cooperation in preparing a number of key programmatic issues (for example, agrarian), submitted for discussion in the State Duma and supposed to be consistently resolved in the course of the struggle for social justice, absolute political agreement between the People's Socialists and the Trudoviks did not occur. The factors that prevented this are analyzed: first, the desire of the Trudoviks to maintain the image of a non-partisan, non-ideological peasant faction, then the extremely difficult conditions for open opposition activity and the actual departure of the PNS from the political arena (1908-1916); Finally, the unwillingness of the Trudoviks to interact with the liberal parties during the revolutionary transformations of 1917 and disagreements with the Popular Socialists during the development of a project to resolve the national question. It is concluded that at the time of the creation of the united TNSP, the opportunity for organic unity was missed, and the party became more of an association than a team of genuine like-minded people.