In the early debates, the revolution envisaged by the Russian populists was primarily a ‘social’ one, i.e. the transformation of the class nature of Russia, and not ‘simply political’, i.e. aiming at electoral franchise. An uprising of the peasant majority of the nation was to play a major role and other sub-groups of the labouring class and the revolutionaries of non-labouring class origin were to participate fully. Revolutionary populists turned the brunt of their propaganda firstly towards the peasants. As the attempts of the 1870s to propagate new revolutionary spirit among peasants proved disappointing, the centre of gravity shifted from rural propaganda to extra-rural action. By now a two-in-one struggle was increasingly envisaged: an attack on the state which was also the main capitalist and capitalism-inducing institution meant that political and social struggles intertwined. That made the confrontation more difficult, but also offered the opportunity, upon victory, to move with particular speed toward a combined political and social transformation. The majority in the main populist organisation, land and liberty (Zemlya i Volya), established in 1876, had consequently adopted a strategy of insurrection (perevorot), i.e. of immediate, direct and armed anti-state challenge. In 1879 the organisation split into the People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya) majority and the Black Repartition (Chernyi Peredel) – a minority which opposed the militants, the new anti-state line and the growing stress on armed action. The People’s Will was increasingly active in organising urban workers and even published an illegal newspaper specifically designed for them, but explained it not by the exclusive role of the proletariat, but by the tactical significance of this component of the general (‘triple’) labouring class, i.e. its being present at the centres of administration, where the main battle with tsardom was to be fought. The organisation operated vigorously in the army, incorporating a number of officers, and was increasingly influential with students and young intellectuals. Besides propaganda and the preparations of an uprising, the strategy of attempts at the lives of the tsar and the top officials was adopted as a major tactical weapon aiming to shake tsardom and to trigger off popular opposition and insurrection.18
A strong moralist and subjectivist streak was prominent within the populist Weltanschauung, inclusive of the writings of Chernyshevskii – a philosophical materialist and an admirer of Feuerbach. The impact of ideas was assumed and accentuated – to the populists a major determinant of the uneven development of societies and the ability of some of them to ‘leap’ over the stage of capitalism. The particular significance of intellectual elites as leaders and as catalysts of political action in a Russian-style society was stressed – a partial explanation of the way revolutionary populists built their organisation and chose their targets in armed action. For those reasons and also to provide the necessary cadres for the clandestine propaganda and for the armed action, exceptional stress was laid within the group on personality training, to inculcate modesty, integrity and totality of devotion. It made the People’s Will organisation famous throughout Europe for its discipline as much as for the asceticism and the courage of its members.19 The Russian image and self-image of ‘professional revolutionaries’ and ‘party cadres’ have their main origin there. More, of course, is at stake in so far as the impact of Russian revolutionary populism on the future Russian Revolution is concerned for the movement and the analysis it championed proceeded to unfold with considerable input into the revolutions of 1905-7 and 1917-20, including also what in the first decade of the twentieth century came to be called Bolshevism.
The attitude of the revolutionary populists to the Russian peasant commune was integral to their world-view. About three-fifths of the arable land of European Russia was in the hands of the peasant and cossack communes.20 Within them, each household held unconditionally only a small plot of land, i.e. house and garden plus its livestock and equipment. The use of arable land was assigned to a family on a long-term basis by its commune, the meadows were reassigned annually and often worked collectively, the pastures and forest were in common use. The diversity of wealth within the commune was expressed mainly in differential ownership of livestock, of non-agricultural property, and in some private land bought from non-communal sources. The use of wage-labour inside the commune was limited. Many vital services were run collectively by the commune: a village shepherd, the local guards, the welfare of the orphans, and often a school, a church, a mill, etc. An assembly of heads of the households controlled and represented communal interests: decided about the services, elected its own officers, and collected its informal taxes or dues. With the exception of some areas in the West (mostly ex-Polish) the assembly also periodically redivided the arable lands in accordance with some egalitarian principle, usually in relation to the changing size of the families involved. A number of peasant communes formed a volost, its officers local but authorised and controlled by state authorities. Despite its surveillance by the state, the commune played (also) the role of a de facto peasant political organisation, a collective shield against a hostile external world of squire, policeman, tax officer, robber, intruder or neighbouring village.21
To the revolutionary populist the peasant commune was the proof of the collectivist tradition of the majority of Russian people, which stayed alive in spite of its suppression by the state. They were not uncritical of it, but, on balance, considered the peasant commune a major asset to their plans.22 It was seen as a possible tool for the mobilisation of the peasants for the anti-tsardom struggle. It was to be a basic form of the future organisation of local power which would eventually rule Russia together with a democratically elected national government. For Chernyshevskii, it was also an effective framework for collective agricultural production in post-revolutionary Russia, which was to operate alongside the publicly owned industry and a minority of the private (and transitional?) enterprises. The image bears remarkable similarity to some of the realities, images and plans in Russia of the New Economic Policy period, 1921-7.
The most significant challenge to the revolutionary populism of the 1880s (and its substitution on the political map of Russia of the 1890s) was neither the Slavophiles and liberals to their ‘right’ nor the few Bakunist admirers of mass spontaneity to their ‘left’, but people who originated from the ‘moderate’ wing of their own conceptual fold. The main reason for the decline of revolutionary populism by the late 1880s was the defeat of their revolution, as the hope for an uprising receded, and the gallows, death in action and exile to Siberia silenced most of the People’s Will activists, while their critics’ voices gained in strength. A major argument against revolutionary populism came from an influential group which gathered around the journal Russkoe Bogatsvo, especially V. Vorontsov (who signed himself V.V.). They called for a moderate and evolutionary populism, with education as the major road forward and even with possible part-cooperation with government – a ‘legal populism’. They were finding an audience and a carrier in the type of the well-meaning, highly talkative but rather ineffectual provincial intellectual – often an employee of the educational and welfare service of the local authorities and the co-operative movement. It was they who came increasingly to dominate populism in the 1890s (and once again in 1907-17 after the defeat of the Revolution in 1905-7), diluting its content, turning its revolutionary wing into a ‘wild’ minority, and determining the whole movement’s eventual destruction. It was mostly they who ‘spoke on behalf of populism’ between 1887 and the end of the century.
A second attack on revolutionary populism came from the members of the Black Repartition group who parted company with People’s Will in 1879 over its insurrectionist designs. The leaders of that group, Plekhanov, Axelrod, Deutch and Zasulich, emigrated to Switzerland and after failing to make any headway with their own brand of populism, reorganised by 1883 and declared for marxism, scientific socialism, the necessity of a capitalist stage and a proletarian revolution on the road to socialism. They explained the failures of People’s