The ultimate political goal of the People’s Will was the convocation of a National Assembly through which the nation would express its wishes. The People’s Will was a highly centralized organization, the decisions of the Executive Committee being binding on all followers, known as “vassals.” Members were expected to dedicate themselves totally to the revolutionary cause, and if called upon, to sacrifice to it their properties and even their lives.
The emergence of the People’s Will marked a watershed in the history of the Russian Revolution. For one, it established violence as a legitimate instrument of politics: enlightenment and persuasion were rejected as futile and even counterproductive. But even more important was the arrogation by the revolutionary intelligentsia of the right to decide what was good for the people: the name People’s Will was a deceptive misnomer, since the “people” not only did not authorize an organization of thirty intellectuals to act on their behalf but had made it unmistakably clear that they would have no truck with anti-tsarist ideology. When the terrorists defined as one of their tasks “lifting the revolutionary spirit of the people,” they were well aware that the real people, those tilling the fields and working in the factories, had no revolutionary spirit to lift. This attitude had decisive implications for the future. Henceforth all Russian revolutionaries, whether favoring terrorism or opposed to it, whether belonging to the Socialist-Revolutionary or the Social-Democratic Party, assumed the authority to speak in the name of the “people”—an abstraction without equivalent in the real world.
The terrorist campaign launched by the People’s Will against a government entirely unprepared for it—the Third Department, in charge of state security, had about as many personnel as the Executive Committee—succeeded in its immediate objective: on March 1, 1881, Alexander II fell victim to a terrorist bomb. The political benefits of this outrage were nil. The public reacted with horror and the radical cause lost a great deal of popular support. The government responded with a variety of repressive measures and counterintelligence operations which made it increasingly difficult for the revolutionaries to function. And the “people” did not stir, unshaken in the belief that the land which they desired would be given them by the next Tsar.
There followed a decade of revolutionary quiescence. Russians who wanted to work for the common good now adopted the doctrine of “small deeds”—that is, pragmatic, unspectacular activities to raise the cultural and material level of the population through the
Radicalism began to stir again in the early 1890s in connection with the spurt of Russian industrialization and a severe famine. The Socialists-Revolutionaries of the 1870s had believed that Russia would follow a path of economic development different from the Western because she had neither the domestic nor the foreign markets that capitalism required. The Russian peasantry, being poor and heavily dependent on income from cottage industries (estimated at one-third of the peasant total income), would be ruined by competition from the mechanized factories and lose that little purchasing power it still possessed. As for foreign markets, these had been preempted by the advanced countries of the West.* Russia had to combine communal agriculture with rural (cottage) industry. From these premises Socialist-Revolutionary theoreticians developed a “separate path” doctrine according to which Russia would proceed directly from “feudalism” to “socialism,” without passing through a capitalist phase.
This thesis was advanced with the help of arguments drawn from the writings of Marx and Engels. Marx and Engels initially disowned such an interpretation of their doctrine, but they eventually changed their minds, conceding that there might be more than one model of economic development. In 1877, in an exchange with a Russian, Marx rejected the notion that every country had to repeat the economic experience of Western Europe. Should Russia enter the path of capitalist development, he wrote, then, indeed, nothing could save her from its “iron laws,” but this did not mean that Russia could not avoid this path and the misfortunes it brought.40 A few years later Marx stated that the “historical inevitability” of capitalism was confined to Western Europe, and that because Russia had managed to preserve the peasant commune into the era of capitalism, the commune could well become the “fulcrum of Russia’s social rejuvenation.”* Marx and Engels admired the terrorists of the People’s Will, and, as an exception to their general theory, Engels allowed that in Russia a revolution could be made by a “handful of people.”41
