POPULISTS

Populism (narodnichestvo) has traditionally been defined as a peasant-oriented socialism, rooted in a utopian fantasy that Russia could avoid a capitalist stage of development by relying on the peasant commune. The movement to which this term refers emerged in response to the paternalism and compromise that—according to Russia's student radicals—nullified the freedoms promised in the emancipation reforms of 1861. Inspired by the teachings of Alexander Herzen (1812–1870) and Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), the raznochintsy (young men and women of "mixed ranks" who were educated beyond their inherited station in life) insisted that progress toward social equality be immediately manifest in the daily lives of its advocates. In the search for a link between lofty ideals and daily practice, Nikolai Chernyshevsky's 1863 novel What Is to Be Done? became a blueprint for action. Students in the 1860s formed egalitarian communes, devised "fictitious marriages" that freed young women from the constraints imposed by upper-class families, and supported Polish struggles for independence from Russia in 1863. Appropriating the traditional peasant rebel slogan "Land and Liberty" (Zemlya i Volya), a loosely structured student network organized cooperatives, Sunday schools to foster worker literacy, and, in one case, a summer school for young peasants.

Declaring themselves revolutionaries and socialists, radicals looked to the peasant commune (mir, or obshchina) as an alternative to the greedy individualism of western capitalist nations. In the 1870s, inspired by an ideal of service, a sometimes mystical faith in "the people," and a search for redemption through sharing and lightening the burdens of a cruelly exploited peasantry, thousands of young students went out to the countryside in a "movement to go to the people" (khozhdenie v narod). Seeking to learn from, to teach, and to incite peasants to revolution, they worked as laborers, shepherds, and village schoolteachers; young women like Vera Figner (1852–1942) abandoned their European medical training in order to provide peasants with health care.

However, it turned out that radicals operating in the Russian countryside under the hostile surveillance of landlords, government officials, and police informants could not convince peasants to rebel—the only exception was in Chigirin, where a forged manifesto from the tsar urging peasants to attack landlords triggered an uprising. In contrast, the government was quite successful in its campaign to hunt down, arrest, abuse, and imprison student radicals by the hundreds. In response to government-sponsored political trials of hundreds who participated in the movement to "go to the people," the student Vera Zasulich shot and wounded the governor-general of St. Petersburg in 1878, and the radical movement entered a more violent phase. A new organization, Narodnaya Volya (People's Will) set out to eradicate by terrorist means the political system that had decimated their grassroots efforts of the 1870s. In March 1881, the executive committee of Narodnaya Volya (a group that included the well-born Sofya Perovskaya, the peasant Stepan Khalturin, and the worker Andrei Zhelyabov) succeeded in assassinating Tsar Alexander II (r. 1855–1881).

Although the autocracy executed the Narodnaya Volya assassins, the spirit of the "movement to go to the people" persisted. After completing prison terms for dissident radical activity, many veterans of that movement emerged to direct and organize the massive zemstvo statistical investigations of the last third of the nineteenth century. (Elected, estate- and locally based, zemstvo institutions had been established in the 1860s and charged by the state to hire statisticians to collect fiscal data.) Able to continue their work because the government was so desperately in need of the statistics that they were hired to collect, radical zemstvo statisticians interviewed some 4.5 million peasant households between the 1870s and 1905. In their documentation and analysis of peasant testimony, they far exceeded the government's narrowly fiscal agenda. Their statistical findings enabled the economist Nikolai Danielson (1844–1918) to convince Karl Marx (1818–1883) that in Russia at least, the powerful force of capitalism had not yet rendered the peasant commune obsolete.

In the 1890s, the views of Danielson and the later writings of Marx were anathema to Peter Struve (1870–1944) and Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), who were then engaged in a campaign to convince all and sundry that their brand of Marxism was infinitely different from and superior to all other traditions of Russian socialism. Their strategy of choice for discrediting political rivals was to denounce them as "populists" who ignorantly denied the existence of capitalism in Russia. In general, these accusations were false, and most of the accused denied that they were in fact populists. Yet, the notion that "populists" believed that Russia was "immune to capitalism" persisted for more than a century. Scholarly debates and disagreements over Marxism, populism, and the relationship between the two, would outlast both the imperial and soviet regimes.

See alsoAlexander II; Herzen, Alexander; People's Will; Russia; Slavophiles.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Figner, Vera. Memoirs of a Revolutionist. Authorized translation from the Russian; introduction by Richard Stites. DeKalb, Ill., 1991.

Kropotkin, Petr Alekseyevich. Memoirs of a Revolutionist. London, 1978.

Secondary Sources

Gleason, Abbott. Young Russia: The Genesis of Russian Radicalism in the 1860s. New York, 1980. Useful study of the "going to the people" movement.

Khoros, Vladimir. Populism: Its Past, Present, and Future. Translated from the Russian by Nadezhda Burova. Moscow, 1984. Balanced account of the pros and cons of Russian populism, considered in comparative historical perspective.

Kingston-Mann, Esther. "Deconstructing the Romance of the Bourgeoisie: A Russian Marxist Path Not Taken." Review of International Political Economy (2003): 93–117. Study of the Marxist-populist controversy as reflected in the work of Nikolai Danielson.

——. "Statistics, Social Change, and Social Justice: The Zemstvo Statisticians of Pre-Revolutionary Russia." In Russia in the European Context, 1789–1914: A Member of the Family, edited by Susan P. McCaffray and Michael Melancon. New York, 2005.

Pipes, Richard. "Narodnichestvo—A Semantic Inquiry." Slavic Review 23 (1964): 441–458.

——. Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870–1905. Cambridge, Mass., 1970.

Venturi, Franco. Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia. Translated from the Italian by Francis Haskell. New York, 1960. Classic study of the origins and development of populism from the 1830s to 1881.

Walicki, Andrzej. The Controversy over Capitalism: Studies in the Social Philosophy of the Russian Populists. Oxford, U.K., 1969. Valuable critical analysis of populist thought

Wortman, Richard. The Crisis of Russian Populism. London, 1967. Influential critical study of the psychology of Russian populism.

Esther Kingston-Mann