Southern Socialist Revolutionary Party

a revolutionary Populist organization that was formed in August 1897 in Voronezh at a congress of Populist representatives from Kiev, Poltava, Kharkov, Voronezh, and St. Petersburg.

The party’s program, as set forth in its “Manifesto,” was drawn up by the Voronezh group and adopted at the congress held in Kharkov in the summer of 1900. It demanded revolutionary democratic changes in Russia and declared that the “urban factory proletariat” alone could be the moving force of the revolution. The “Manifesto” was analyzed by G. V. Plekhanov, who raised the question of a union of the Southern Socialist Revolutionary Party with the Social Democrats in his article “New Wine in Old Bottles” (published in Iskra, 1900, no. 5). Unification proved impossible, however, because of the Southern Socialist Revolutionary Party’s turn toward the peasantry with the growth of the peasant movement.

In early 1902 the Southern Socialist Revolutionary Party merged with the Socialist Revolutionary Party.