In the first phase the radicals were deeply influenced by the teaching of Peter Lavrov, whose Historical Letters (1869) emphasized the duty of the intelligentsia—who had acquired their culture and education at the expense of the common folk—to repay their enormous debt by bringing culture and education to the folk. Although Lavrov’s challenge to ‘repentant noblemen’ initially encouraged attempts to disseminate books and literacy, it eventually mushroomed into a more radical campaign of ‘going to the people’ in 1874–6. That new phase drew less from Lavrov than from the anarchist teachings of M. Bakunin and P. Kropotkin, who believed that the peasantry was innately revolutionary and needed only encouragement. As a result, several thousand members of the urban intelligentsia flooded into the countryside—as teachers, blacksmiths, and the like—for the purpose of fusing with the people. Despite some positive response by the peasantry, the police easily identified and arrested most of these urban misfits and effectively decimated the rank-and-file activists. Though nominally still espousing confidence that revolution could still come from below, the intelligentsia now turned to terrorism—violent attacks on high-ranking officials, the emperor included—in a vain, but desperate attempt to ignite popular revolt and obtain vengeance for the uncompromising violence and repression of the state. Organized in a conspiratorial organization called ‘Land and Freedom’ (Zemlia i volia), the terrorists waged war on the autocracy and bureaucracy even as some of their number continued attempts to ignite a popular Jacquerie from below.
By 1879, however, revolutionary populists turned increasingly to terrorism and, for all practical purposes, abandoned hope of popular insurrection. As the organization’s very name ‘the People’s Will’ (Narodnaia volia) suggested, the revolutionaries now envisioned themselves as the agents of revolution acting on behalf of the peasantry. This phase of the populist movement drew on the teachings of P. Tkachev, who emphasized that Russia’s very backwardness meant the lack of a strong bourgeoisie or nobility and hence the lack of a real social base for autocracy. ‘In reality’, he wrote, ‘the [state’s] power is only apparent and imagined; it has no roots in the economic life of the people, and it does not embody the interests of any class’. But this desperate paroxysm of violent terrorism also derived from fear: their encounter with the village (reinforced by the vignettes of populist writers and the numbers of the zemstvo statisticians) revealed that the commune was beginning to dissolve, that the collective was giving way to the kulak. Russia’s very development posed the danger that the commune, its special path to the future, was heading unmistakably towards disintegration. It was thus becoming increasingly urgent, the populists believed, that they strike down the very embodiment of the hateful state—the emperor himself.
Counter-Revolution and Counter-Reform
Although the crescendo of revolutionary violence provided one major reason for the government’s retreat from the liberal reformism of the 1860s, it was not the only or even the primary reason. No less important was the simple fact that the liberal reforms had failed to work as anticipated or, indeed, had sometimes created new problems while aggravating old ones. Moralizing historians have long been wont to blame the revolutionary intelligentsia for Russia’s failure to tread the Western liberal path, but in fact the reforms—themselves deeply influenced by Western models—proved highly dysfunctional and destructive.
The zemstvo reform that established elected bodies of self-government is a case in point. In part, the government was dismayed to find that these organs promptly proceeded to raise political demands—above all, that the edifice be crowned by a national zemstvo. Although the government for the moment was able to stifle such pretensions, in moments of crisis—as in the late 1870s—the zemstvo liberals seized upon the government’s weakness and vulnerability to renew their demand for political, not mere administrative, reform. No less important, the zemstvo failed to exercise its authority and in fact proved highly lethargic, falling far short of expectations. While most nobles had little interest in levying local property-based taxes to build schools for peasants, the latter lacked the means to build schools that seemed to offer no immediate material benefit.
