Even as the government embarked on the Great Reforms, it encountered not only dissatisfaction among peasants and nobles, but also opposition from an important new force in society—radical youth who collectively came to be called the ‘intelligentsia’. Although Russia had had its share of radicals before, they had not constituted a self-conscious social group, with a distinctive identity and subculture. By the 1860s, however, they had gained sufficient critical mass and developed a new social identity, first as ‘the new people’ (from N. G. Chernyshevskii’s novel, What is to be Done? [1863]) and eventually as the ‘intelligentsia’. Set apart by a special subculture (with distinctive dress, speech, mores, and values), still drawn disproportionately from the upper reaches of society, the intelligentsia none the less conceived of itself as a supraclass force and charged with representing the interests of ‘society’, especially its lower orders. Sharing a common Weltanschauung (which provocatively abjured their fathers’ idealism and romanticism in the name of science and materialism), they believed that they could escape the elusive, ethereal forces of history and, with the aid of science and rational planning, construct society and state along entirely new lines. The model for young radicals was skilfully etched in Ivan S. Turgenev’s famous novel, Fathers and Sons (1862), with the sharp contrast between the older generation and the archetypical lower-class antithesis, Bazarov.
The radicals of the 1860s, still few in number but concentrated in the capitals, marked the first real effluence of an organized revolutionary movement. For the most part these early radicals waged the fight with proclamations, like that of Young Russia in 1862: ‘With full faith in ourselves and our strength, in the people’s sympathy for us, in the glorious future of Russia (to whose lot it has fallen to be the first country to achieve the glorious work of socialism), we will utter a single cry: “To the axe!!” and then strike the imperial party without restraint … in the city squares … in the narrow streets of the cities, in the broad avenues of the capital, in the villages and in the small towns’. These early revolutionaries, however, also established the first conspiratorial organizations to wage a battle against autocracy in the name of the people. Alarmed by the upsurge of student disorders, revolutionary proclamations, scattered acts of random violence (from the fires of St Petersburg in 1862 to the failed assassination of Alexander II in 1866), the government grew increasingly repressive in seeking to contain this new and growing wave of radicalism.
The 1860s were only a pallid harbinger of what would come in the 1870s. In contrast to the 1860s, this next stage was marked by an idealization of the peasantry and, especially, hopes that they were on the verge of a bloody Jacquerie against the nobility and autocracy. Later encapsulated in the term ‘populism’ (narodnichestvo), the movement of the 1870s emphasized both the significance of the peasant commune (as an embryonic unit of communism), but also the moral and spiritual strength of the people. The movement indeed affected a whole generation of intellectuals, from writers wont to celebrate the peasantry to zemstvo statisticians intent upon demonstrating the economic superiority of communal agriculture. But for the populist radicals eager to demolish autocracy and truly emancipate the people, it was axiomatic that the peasantry itself was a vital revolutionary force that at most required the co-ordination of the intelligentsia.
