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Chartists (Chartism)

The first mass revolutionary movement of the British working class in the 1830s and 1840s. Mass meetings and demonstrations involving millions of proletariat and petty-bourgeois were held throughout the country for years.

The Chartists published several petitions to the British Parliament (ranging from 1,280,000 to 3,000,000 signatures), the most famous of which was called the People's Charter (hence their name) in 1842, which demanded:

1) universal suffrage for men
2) the secret ballot
3) removal of property qualifications for Members of Parliament
4) salaries for Members of Parliament
5) electoral districts representing equal numbers of people
6) annually elected parliaments

The British Parliament did not approve the People's Charter, rejecting every petition.

The government subsequently subjected the Chartists to brutal reprisals and arrested their leaders. The remaining party then split as a result of a divide in tactics: the Moral Force Party believed in bureaucratic reformism, while the Physical Force Party believed in workers' reformism (through strikes, etc).

The Chartist movement's reformist goals, although not immediately and directly attained, were gradually achieved. In the same year as the People's Charter was created, the British Parliament instead responded by passing the 1842 Mining Act. Carefully valving the steam of the working class movement, British Parliament reduced the working day to ten hours in 1847.

See Chartists History Archive.

Cheka

See Also: Soviet Secret Police, NKVD

Chief Land Committee

The Chief Land Commmittee was set up by the Provisional Government in April 1917 under pressure of the growing peasant movement which demanded a solution to the land question. The overwhelming majority of the Committee's members were Cadets and Socialist-Revolutionaries. The Committee was to supervise the collection and working up of material for an agrarian reform, for which purpose local land committees were formed.

The formation of the Chief and local land committees was a political manoeuvre on the part of the Provisional Government assigned to drag out the settlement of the land question as long as possible, and to wean the peasant masses away from revolutionary forms of struggle by means of reforms from above that would leave landed proprietorship intact.

After the October Revolution the Chief Land Committee opposed the enforcement of Lenin's Decree on Land and was dissolved by a decision of the Council of People's Commissars in December 1917.

Chkheidze Group

A Mensheviks group in the Fourth Duma led by N. S. Chkheidze. During the First World War the Menshevik Duma group held a Centrist position, but in practice gave full support to the policy of the Russian social-chauvinists.