PEOPLE'S WILL, THE

The People's Will was the most famous illegal revolutionary organization in late nineteenth-century Russia. This "party," as it was termed, represented the culmination of the rapidly evolving revolutionary movement of the 1870s, the decade when radical members of the intelligentsia first made contact on a significant scale with Russian peasants and workers, the narod, or common people. The ideology of this movement was a peasant-oriented socialism known as narodnichestvo (populism). The umbrella group Land and Freedom (Zemlya i Volya ), which linked most of the radical circles at the time, split in 1879 over frustration at government repression and the lack of effective peasant response to the group's propaganda initiatives. Those radicals who were determined to incorporate the new tactic of terrorism into their activity formed a party called the People's Will (Narodnaya Volya). By terrorism they meant primarily the targeting of hated government officials for assassination. This extreme measure was variously justified as a means of exerting pressure on the government for reform, as the spark that would ignite a vast peasant uprising, and as the inevitable response to the regime's use of violence against the revolutionaries.

The People's Will was headed by an Executive Committee, including such famous figures as Andrei Zhelyabov and Sofia Perovskaya. Day-to-day activities were supervised by special subgroups in charge of propaganda and organization of three critical groups—workers, students, and military officers—and included underground printing operations; keeping an eye on police infiltration efforts; and planning and carrying out assassinations. In addition to well-organized groups in St. Petersburg and Moscow, there was a growing number of provincial organizations, mostly circles of students and workers. The participation of a small number of women represented a noteworthy development. While historians have tended to identify the People's Will with its small but well-defined Executive Committee, the organization in fact encompassed a broad range of members and supporters, numbering in the thousands, as well as many sympathizers. More peaceful activities, however, were overshadowed by the aura of drama and violence surrounding the party's daring struggle against the tsarist regime, culminating in the assassination of the tsar, Alexander II, on March 1, 1881. In the predictable aftermath, five members of the People's Will were hanged and many more imprisoned.

Contrary to the standard historiographical treatment, the People's Will did not disappear from the scene following March 1, but rather continued to exist in a more widespread and decentralized form. Radicals calling themselves narodovoltsy (supporters of the People's Will) continued to engage in propaganda and organizing activities among students and workers in provincial towns and industrial centers, as well as in St. Petersburg and Moscow, throughout the 1880s and into the 1890s. By this time, narodovoltsy were taking second place in the revolutionary movement to radicals who identified themselves as social democrats (Marxists). The populist tradition experienced a revival with the formation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party during the early twentieth century. In a sense, however, both revolutionary parties of the period leading up to the 1917 revolution, the Social Democrats as well as the Socialist Revolutionaries, can be considered the heirs of the People's Will, whose banner, at a crucial stage, symbolized the revolutionary movement in Russia.

See also: land and freedom party; populism

bibliography

Naimark, Norman M. (1983). Terrorists and Social Democrats: The Russian Revolutionary Movement Under Alexander III. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Offord, Derek. (1986). The Russian Revolutionary Movement in the 1880s. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Pearl, Deborah. (1996). "From Worker to Revolutionary: The Making of Worker Narodovol'tsy." Russian History 23(1–4):11–26.

Venturi, Franco. (1966). Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia, tr. Francis Haskell. New York: Universal Library.

Deborah Pearl