Socialist Federalists

Socialist Federalists 

a Georgian petit bourgeois nationalist party, founded in the early 20th century.

In 1901 a group of Georgian bourgeois nationalist intelligentsia met secretly and elected the main committee of the Socialist Federalist party, a committee that included A. Dzhordzhadze and G. Dekanozishvili. In 1904 the first conference of “Georgian revolutionaries”—actually Socialist Federalists—met in Geneva. In 1907 the party adopted a program, which combined Utopian socialism, Socialist Revolutionary and anarchist theories, and Georgian nationalism.

After the February Revolution of 1917, the Socialist Federalists demanded that Georgia be incorporated into the Russian Federation with territorial autonomy. In early 1921 the party split into leftists and rightists. The rightists subsequently gravitated toward the anti-Soviet parties or groups, while the leftists cooperated with Soviet power, winning elections both to the local soviets and to the All-Georgian Soviet and publishing the daily newspaper Tribuna. The Communist Party of Georgia criticized the antiproletarian ideology of the leftist Socialist Federalists. In November 1923 the leftist Socialist Federalists held their Second Congress, which decided on merger with the Communist Party. By resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia, some leaders of the leftist Socialist Federalists and some rank-and-file party members—workers and poor peasants—were accepted into the Communist Party.

REFERENCE

Dzhangveladze, G. A. “Deiatel’nosf KP Gruzii po ideinomu i organizatsionnomu razgromu melkoburzhuaznykh i burzhuaznykh partii (1921-1923).” In the collection Voprosy istorii Kommunisticheskoi partii Gruzii, no. 15. Tbilisi, 1967. (In Georgian; summary in Russian.)