Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism

One icy evening in January, 1881, a member of the People's Will, a revolutionary organization which for once was not an invention of Nechayev's, came to the secret quarters maintained by the society. Removing his snow-covered cap and coat, he dumbfounded the comrades present by placing on the table several slips of paper and saying: 'From Nechayev, out of the Ravelin.' In this coded letter the prisoner laid before the People's Will a scheme for setting him free and simultaneously seizing the fortress, as well as the Czar and all his kin. This was to be accomplished while they were attending services in the fortress cathedral. The organization was just then concentrating every ounce of its strength on a plan of its own for putting a violent end to the life of Alexander II, and refused to be diverted from it.

After the Emperor's death, some weeks later, Nechayev continued to communicate with the People's Will. He urged it to print a fake imperial ukase decreeing the restoration of serfdom and the extension of the term of military service, also to disseminate a circular marked 'Secret' and purporting to come from the Holy Synod. This was to apprize the clergy that the new Czar had lost his mind and to enjoin it to offer prayers for his recovery. A bogus manifesto was to follow, proclaiming that since the old Czar had been killed and the new one was insane, the country was now ruled by the Zemsky Sobor, which forthwith ordered the peasantry to seize all the land, slaughter the landlords and make short shrift of the police.

The People's Will did not heed this advice. Nor was it strong enough to offer Nechayev help in his plans for escape. He continued, however, to make preparations for it. And then in the autumn of 1881 the collusion between him and the guards was discovered, almost certainly owing to the treachery of a fellow prisoner. Over sixty men were arrested and tried, while Nechayev himself was subjected to a murderous regimen, which before long broke him in body and spirit. He died of scurvy on 21 November, 1882, the thirteenth anniversary of the murder of Ivanov.

It is scarcely astonishing to find that with the advent of Soviet power an attempt was made to rehabilitate Nechayev. One author described him as the originator of a new morality, a grandiose figure who left his imprint on the revolutionary movement. A book by another Bolshevik writer offered an apologia for Nechayev and indeed exalted him as a genius who anticipated the objectives and the methods of militant Communism. There were those, however, who opposed such unqualified glorification of the man. While commending Nechayev's revolutionary ardour and devotion to the interests of the masses, they condemned his tactics. This has become the approved Soviet attitude toward him.

Source URL: http://www.ditext.com/yarmolinsky/yar8.html

* * *

Road to Revolution

Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism, 1956.

Chapter 9

Populism

In a sense the dozen or so years after the Crimean War, that are somewhat improperly termed the "sixties," were the Russian equivalent of the Enlightenment, 'our brief eighteenth century,' as Leon Trotsky labelled the period. It was the seedbed of radical ideas. In his report on the state of his see for 1859, Metropolitan Philaret deplored the prevalence of 'censorious and blasphemous literature,' resembling the writings that had prepared the way for the French Revolution. Bakunin called Herzen 'our mighty Voltaire.' Indeed, Herzen, Chernyshevsky, Dobrolubov, Pisarev came close to being the counterpart of the Encyclopaedists. Like the latter, they attacked feudal privilege, absolutist rule, and Church authority, they professed materialism and attributed to the intellect a leading part in the dynamics of social change. But while the philosophes stopped short of questioning the right of private property, by and large the Russian ideologues were democrats committed to Socialism.

That doctrine, it has been pointed out, had secured the allegiance of a segment of the Russian educated public as far back as the 'forties. In the virtual absence of laissez-faire liberalism, it filled an ideological void for a tiny intellectual elite, alienated alike from the masses and from the emergent middle-class, cut off from political experience by a jealous government, and so doomed to spin out theories in a vacuum. From the first, the effort was to adapt socialist principles to Russian conditions, real or imaginary. The resulting incompletely integrated complex of ideas had as its core an ethically and emotionally motivated agrarian Socialism. It dominated the radical scene from the 'sixties until nearly the end of the century, when it found a formidable rival in Marxism. The name by which it went was narodnichestvo (populism). The term, which gained currency in the 'seventies, suggests the important part played in this ideology by the concept of narod (people), in the sense of demos, the broad social base, the great body of manual workers, specifically the peasantry. With concern for the material welfare of the masses went a mystique which surrounded 'the people' with a halo. Some viewed them as potentially or actually an irresistible historical force; others as the repository of all the virtues, the sole source of spiritual energy and thus the hope of the world.

The tendency to idealize the lower orders may be traced back as far as Radishchev. It was central to Slavophil thinking and cropped up among the Westernists, too. Under serfdom it was a manifestation of abolitionist sentiment and a symptom of the guilt felt by the more sensitive souls among the serf owners. The feeling was particularly widespread after the emancipation. Indeed, it was first recognized and labelled during the 'seventies. Perhaps 'the penitent noble' was a sign of the advanced decay of the gentry as a socially useful group. In any event, during the last third of the century the thinking of the intelligentzia revolved around 'the people.' 'Ideas, ideals, movements, tendencies,' writes a historian of the period, 'were accepted if deemed beneficial to the people, and rejected if considered useless or harmful to the people. A stern judgment from which there was no appeal weighed down upon Russian thought, conscience, and creative effort.' The populist motif runs through the body of major Russian fiction. In Tolstoy it was linked with a Rousseau-esque impulse to slough off the trappings of civilization; for Dostoevsky 'the people' were a vessel of grace and a haven of salvation. It may be noted that while the populists who were moved by a feeling of guilt sincerely desired to humble themselves before the people, they were not free from the pride of humility: a sense of belonging to an elite destined to lead the oppressed out of bondage.

A vision of the poor rising against their oppressors to possess the earth, narodnichestvo involved the conviction that by virtue of their temperament, their history, their folkways, the Russians were peculiarly fitted to realize the socialist ideal. The proposition had been formulated by Herzen, the begetter of Populism, which he called 'Russian Socialism.' As has been stated, it was he who had announced to the world that the muzhik, in the obshchina and artel, practised, in rudimentary form, the Socialism which was only preached in the West. He had concluded -- and Chernyshevsky agreed -- that in Russia the new society could grow from native roots, while elsewhere it could only be brought into being by a series of catastrophes.

At several points the theory was at variance with actuality. The village commune was not a manifestation of the Slavic folk genius and the survival remaining from a hoary past that Herzen believed it to be. The great age of the obshchina was under suspicion in his own lifetime, and the opinion now prevails that the institution was created by the State for fiscal purposes no earlier than the age of Catherine II. Furthermore, he disregarded the fact that hereditary land tenure existed in a large section of the Empire. Nor did he take sufficient account of the evidence -- it had been accumulating since the 1830's -- to the effect that the commune was in a precarious condition. In sum, Herzen's fantasy-laden conception of the obshchina was a social myth. As such, it possessed the effectiveness that creations of the kind often have. It helped to sustain faith in Socialism. The artel, too, was scarcely the model for a workers' co-operative that Herzen pictured. 'If you haven't worked in an artel,' wrote Turgenev, quoting a remark he had heard from a member of such an association, 'you don't know what a noose is.' It may not be irrelevant to note that the chief exponent of the doctrine of peasant collectivism was an expatriate who had never been close to the actualities of Russian rural life.

That the village land commune could become the foundation of the socialist order was the cardinal dogma of the populist creed. Herzen realized, it will be recalled, that the institution was not faultless, and in defending it Chernyshevsky stipulated, as a condition for its development, a successful revolution in the West. But the reservations suggested by the twin pillars of Populism were lost on their followers. For them the obshchina was a battle cry, a sacrosanct principle, for which one should be ready to lay down one's life.

The populist version of Socialism did not call for the nationalization of the country's economic resources and State control of production and distribution. Partly due to Bakunin's influence, the narodnik was hostile to centralized political authority. He wanted sovereignty to rest with the small, self-governing economic unit. The body politic held together by force he would replace with free productive communes spontaneously banded together in a loose confederacy. This is what was meant by social revolution, as against a change-over resulting in a representative regime. Far from Herzen's ambiguous feeling toward a political revolution was the conviction that this was unnecessary and indeed harmful, both as a distraction from the main goal and in its results. The argument ran that once economic equality was assured, the superstructure of autocracy was bound to crumble; on the other hand, political democracy by itself would favour the development of a competitive economy resting on private ownership of the means of production, and so benefit solely the propertied classes.

Eventually the populists abandoned their anarchist bias and apolitical position. Capitalism remained for them a veritable 'bugaboo,' a source of unmitigated evil. They feared that it would bring the horrors of pauperization and proletarianization, create a powerful bourgeoisie, undermine the collectivist tradition of the peasantry, and thus delay the advent of Socialism, if not make it impossible. A reassuring thought, fathered by the wish, was that Russian capitalism was an artificial growth without a future. Furthermore, there was nothing in the nature of things to prevent Russia from by-passing the capitalist phase. The country might develop in a way for which there was no precedent in the West, turning the curse of its backwardness into a blessing. This was a basic tenet of Populism, vigorously upheld alike by Herzen and Chernyshevsky. To them, as to their followers, history was a matter of genuine choices, 'dishevelled improvization,' not 'a providential charade,' as Herzen put it. Socialism, like every human aim, was to be achieved by a victory over the force of circumstance in a combat of uncertain issue. Populism combined enthusiasm for the collectivist principle with exaltation of the individual who, however dependent on his physical surroundings, was yet capable of 'changing the pattern in the carpet,' to use Herzen's phrase.

II

One of the ideologists of Populism did not come into prominence until the very end of the 'sixties. At that time Pyotr Lavrov was on the shady side of forty. By birth and psychological make-up he belonged to 'the repentant gentry.' For years he taught mathematics in military colleges, and to eke out his rather meagre salary he did a good deal of writing for the reviews, displaying varied learning and mildly radical leanings. He was involved with the Land and Liberty Society and in 1861-63 edited an encyclopedia, which was discontinued by official order after a reviewer in an ecclesiastical journal had likened it to the eighteenth-century Encyclopedie.

During the reaction that followed Karakozov's shot he spent some months in prison and was subsequently deported to a remote province. It was there that the middle-aged ex-professor composed a series of politico-philosophical essays entitled Historical Letters, which were serialized in a review in 1868-69. They struck a responsive chord and, somewhat to the author's surprise, at once became, in the words of a contemporary, 'a revolutionary gospel.'

The book was written primarily to combat certain trends that prevailed among the provincial intellectuals of the author's acquaintance and that he attributed to Pisarev's influence: a puerile scientism, a narrow individualism shunning social responsibilities, a breakdown of morals (which was soon to bear such evil fruit in the Nechavev incident). It appealed not to people's enlightened egoism, but to their sense of moral duty. Its main thesis was that the masses had paid with much sweat and blood for the existence of an intellectual elite, and that the time had come for the latter to liquidate the historic debt by leading the fight for social justice. Lavrov's readers took this to be a clear call to devote their lives to the cause of the people, and they responded eagerly.

He certainly had at heart the material welfare of the masses. Yet he assigned the chief part in the drama of history not to them, as other populists were apt to do, but to the intellectual minority. This, he told his readers, embodied thought, the truly creative principle which gives meaning to action by rendering it conscious, and is indeed the prime mover of progress. His hero was 'the critically thinking person,' a man or woman capable at once of perceiving where the true interests of the people lay and of formulating ideal goals. These persons must inevitably associate, act together, consider themselves parts of a larger whole. This whole was not the nation, not the State, but -- and here Lavrov was announcing a theme familiar to the present generation -- the Party.

His clamour for the repayment of the debt incurred by the intelligentzia was seconded by another unsystematic, if more prolific and effective author, a younger man, who early chose journalism as a career and refrained from casting his lot with active revolutionaries: Nikolay Mikhailovsky. He, too, was a 'penitent noble.' In fact, it was he who gave the phrase currency. He was convinced that the amortization of the debt must take the form of economic, not political, democracy. Like other exponents of Populism, he failed to perceive that the first was impossible without the second. Though prizing the blessings of freedom, he was ready to repudiate civil rights and liberties at the thought that they might only increase the age-old debt to the people, as had happened in the West. Such at least was his stand in the 'seventies.

His extreme animus against capitalism fed on the belief that it separated the producer from the means of production and, worse still, that by division of labour it tended to reduce the worker to a fractional human being and limit his solidarity with his fellows. More than any other champion of Populism, Mikhailovsky stressed the importance of the individual. For him man's attainment of his full statute was indeed the be-all and end-all of progress, and he was convinced that a society made up of units like the obshchina, offered the individual the best chances for self-fulfilment. Nor did he doubt that Russia was free to choose between Capitalism and Socialism, since he held with Herzen that history is the realm of the possible. No other populist thinker was so deeply preoccupied with the ethical principle. In dealing with human affairs, he insisted, the quest of truth was inseparable from the pursuit of justice. Like many of his contemporaries, he felt that Socialism was likely to succeed for the reason that it was morally right.

It is clear from the foregoing that the populist ideology was poles removed from Marxism. Soviet opinion has branded narodnichestvo as a petty-bourgeois idealistic pseudo-socialist doctrine. Herzen seems to have been unacquainted with the writings of Marx, and the two expatriates were separated by personal enmity, for which Marx's feud with Bakunin was only partly responsible. The works of Marx and Engels were apparently unknown to Chernyshevsky before his imprisonment. In 1872 a copy of Das Kapital reached him in his Siberian exile, and he is said to have found a word of praise only for the historical passages. Lavrov came under the influence of Marx and, in fact, acknowledged himself his disciple, but the Marxist conception of Socialism as, in the words of G. D. H. Cole, 'a summons to men to understand the irresistible historic tendencies and to work with them,' remained alien to him no less than to other narodniks.

Populist sentiment fed on the verse of Nekrasov, which pictured the virtues and sorrows of the peasantry, as well as on the semi-fictional prose of a school of authors who depicted the life of the urban and rural masses. Some of these writers viewed the scene through rose-coloured spectacles, others were realistic in their approach. Gleb Uspensky, for one, told his readers many bitter truths about the brutality and servility of the peasant, his lack of group solidarity, his tendency ruthlessly to exploit his fellows. He made the discovery that the obshchina was disintegrating and throwing up a predatory bourgeoisie, the kulaks, not a foreign body, but flesh of the flesh of the people. His audience failed to grasp the devastating import of the testimony marshalled in his sketches. What was prized in his pages was his compassion for the underdog and the feeling that deep within the soul of the people their moral sense was alive.

Factual reports on the conditions under which the masses lived also found eager readers. The work of this kind that made the greatest impression in advanced circles was by V. V. Bervi, who had first attracted the attention of the authorities by his protest against the arrest of thirteen Tver arbitrators and who was now writing under the pen name of Flerovsky. His book, The Condition of the Working-Class in Russia, appeared simultaneously with The Historical Letters. It was a sprawling, loose account, personal, direct, full of concrete details, the work not of a professional economist but of a man with an immense and first-hand knowledge of folk life.

By the working-class the author meant not only the wage-earners, but, above all, the peasantry. His books disposed for good and all of the argument that the masses in Russia were more fortunately circumstanced than their fellows in the West. He showed that the Russian miners and factory hands were worse off than the English proletarians. He found large-scale industry particularly destructive of the well-being of the workers. He also drew an appalling picture of the pauperization of the villagers as a result of the Emancipation -- a development anticipated by Chernyshevsky and others. To save the situation the author urged that the redemption payments be abolished and the obshchina freed from State tutelage and protected from kulak depredations.

Few books were as effective in arousing sympathy for the masses. Marx, after dipping into it -- he had started to learn Russian primarily to read this work -- gained the impression that 'a collapse of Russian might' was impending.

Flerovsky was the author of another book which enjoyed great popularity in radical circles: The ABC of the Social Sciences (1871). In its author's opinion a contribution to 'scientific' ethics, it is a survey of the history of civilization leading to the conclusion that solidarity, co-operation, and altruism are the sole factors of progress, and, incidentally, seeking to discredit the doctrine of natural selection as applied to man, which was also both Chernyshevsky's and Mikhailovsky's bete noire.

Although the two books were free from overt socialist and revolutionary tendencies, they attracted the attention of the police. In 1873 the author was arrested on suspicion of membership in a secret circle and deported to a distant northern town. Many years later he expatriated himself.

III

With the collapse of Nechayev's venture, the revolutionary cause suffered a setback. What momentarily helped to hearten the would-be insurgents was the Paris Commune. Lavrov attributed great importance to the impression it made. Acting on his own, a former member of the Smorgon Academy responded to the news by composing and printing secretly four numbers of a periodical leaflet entitled Gallows and signed 'Communist.' The first issue declared: 'The world revolution has begun! Rising over the ruins of Paris, it will make the round of the capitals of the world. The longed-for, the holy one will also visit our peasant. . . .' The last number, issued during the agony of Paris, wound up with a call to honest men everywhere to 'respond to perishing Paris, that it may know that its cause will be taken up again and advanced bravely and heroically. . . . To arms! To arms!'

The crushing of the Paris Commune was followed by a stirring event nearer home: the trial of the Nechayev group. After a delay of a year and a half it opened on 1 July, 1871, in the capital, and it lasted nearly three months. The defendants, who numbered eighty-seven, included Pyotr Tkachev. Nechayev's chief accomplices were given long terms of penal servitude. By a grim kind of poetic justice, one of them, after spending some ten years in a Siberian prison, was hanged by his fellow convicts on the mistaken suspicion that he had turned informer. Tkachev received a prison term of sixteen months.

The courtroom had been open to the public, and a full account of the proceedings, as well as the text of the Catechism of the Revolutionary, had been printed in the official gazette. The effect of all this publicity was not entirely what the authorities had expected it to be. The defendants spoke with 'the eloquence of fanatical conviction,' as a detective put it, 'that fascinated some of the students and young officers who found their way into the courtroom, in spite of the efforts of the police to fill it with respectable folk.' In the eyes of a few the Moscow Agricultural Academy, the chief theatre of Nechayev's activities, became almost holy ground.

The disclosures at the trial made a painful impression, however, on the majority of the radically-minded. To them Nechayev and his followers, far from being martyrs worthy of emulation, were a horrible example. The very idea of a centralized secret society was discredited. Alone, informal 'circles for self-education' and 'communes' persisted. Sometimes such a confraternity was a substitute for home and family, as the populist faith was a substitute for religion.

This did not satisfy the more earnest spirits. Since manual labour alone, preferably tilling the soil, was considered honest work and all exploitation was abhorrent, they concluded that the good life could be lived only in an agricultural settlement run on strictly communist principles. They knew, however, that such establishments would not be tolerated by the authorities. Thus it was that a number of young people began thinking of emigration, and to America. The remoteness and strangeness of the land made the enterprise more difficult, but also more attractive. Rumours of the astonishing liberty enjoyed in the United States and of the communist settlements existing there had reached the shores of the Neva. Like Russia half a century later, America was at this time regarded in advanced circles as a laboratory for social experiments.

By 1871 there was an American Circle in Kiev with a score of members and ambitious plans for establishing a network of communes in the United States. Some of the settlers were expected to return home armed with American passports and go on with the good work without fear of molestation by the authorities. The following year three young men sailed for the United States as scouts, but did not stay there for any length of time and failed to promote the plans of the Circle. Two other members started out for America, but got no farther than Switzerland. Returning home before long, they found that nothing remained of the group.

A much less ephemeral affair, and one that was an important link in the succession of revolutionary associations, was a group which originated in the late 'sixties as a 'commune': the Natanson Circle. It was so called after one of its founders, Mark Natanson, a Petersburg student like the rest of its members. From the first they had opposed Nechayev, and the trial only served to confirm them in their detestation of his programme and his tactics. The Circle established branches in Moscow and half a dozen other centres, and in the spring of 1871 the membership was swelled by a number of young women.

'The liberation of the people' was the ultimate objective. But conscious of their inability to reach the masses and believing that these were not ripe for revolutionary action, they were content, for the time being, to labour among people of their own kind, relying on the long-range method of indoctrination. They concentrated on supplying study groups with an appropriate selection of literature. The Circle purchased books in quantity from publishers at a discount and sold them at cost. Already in the summer of 1871 the works it disseminated could be found as far south as the Crimea and as far north as Vyatka (now Kirov). It also engaged in a little publishing on its own account, issuing a reprint of The Historical Letters, a revised edition of The Condition of the Working-Class in Russia, and a book on the Paris Commune. Being full-sized volumes accessible to the learned only, these publications were exempt from preliminary censorship, but the police confiscated all the copies they could lay their hands on. Natanson was arrested in November, 1871, and deported to a distant province.

The group then became known as the Chaikovsky Circle, after a member who represented it in business dealings. Not that this young man, a senior at the University, had any special prerogatives, 'Generalship,' hierarchy, blind obedience in the name of secrecy were anathema. There were no rules, no written statutes. Decisions were made by unanimous consent. From first to last the Circle was an informal association of men and women united by friendship, mutual confidence, the belief that their work must be done with clean hands. An atmosphere of ethical rigour and dedication to the populist idea dominated the group. The members were expected to maintain exacting standards in their personal conduct. Even moderate drinking was frowned upon. Chaikovsky later called the organization 'a knightly order.'

The flock was not, however, without a black sheep. The group owned a small printing press in Zurich. It was run by V. Alexandrov, a one-time medical student and a founder of the Circle, with money supplied by Pisarev's sister, a young woman who worked as a typesetter at the press. When the five thousand roubles, which was all she owned, gave out, Alexandrov suggested that she obtain more funds for the establishment by selling herself to an old man. This she did, and then committed suicide (in 1875).

Throughout the existence of the Chaikovsky Circle thirty men and women belonged to the Petersburg centre and forty or fifty to the branches. Not a few of the members were outstanding personalities. Among those whose names will be met with again were Sergey Kravchinsky and Leonid Shisko, both officers who had early retired from the army, Dmitri Klemenz, a science student, Prince Peter Kropotkin, scion of one of the first families of the land and graduate of the Corps of Pages, the most exclusive military school in the country, which had ties with the imperial household. At the age of thirty he had given up a brilliant scientific career as a geographer to devote himself to the revolutionary cause. The Moscow cell included Nikolay Morozov, son of a rich landowner, and Lev Tikhomirov, a law student, both still in their teens, as well as Mikhail Frolenko, a student of the Agricultural Academy. The most prominent of the women was Sofya Perovskaya. In 1870, at the age of seventeen, she had run away from an aristocratic home -- General Perovsky was at one time Governor of the capital -- to join a 'commune' of women, some of whom were nominally married, and all of whom attended the pedagogical courses recently thrown open to women.

This handful of intellectuals developed an activity which made it the centre of populist propaganda in the early 'seventies.

IV

The Chaikovsky Circle was not content to confine its activities to the student youth. The populist faith demanded an effort to reach the masses, that is, above all, the peasantry. But how was this to be done? As a clerk in a zemstvo board, a teacher, a rural nurse, one could get opportunities for propaganda among the village folk. Yet revolutionaries were temperamentally unfit for the patient, humdrum routine which this method demanded. Proselytizing among the men employed in the mills and factories of the capital was a more rewarding, if also a more hazardous, task. From the summer of 1872 onward, several members, Sofya Perovskaya among them, took time off from other duties to devote themselves to it. Meeting secretly with small groups of workmen, they taught them their letters and indoctrinated them with Socialism. The branches of the Circle, too, turned their attention to wage-earners.

In spite of the paucity of propagandists and the unsystematic character of their truly pioneering effort, it continued to bear ample fruit until the end of 1873, when both the proselytizers and many of their converts found themselves in prison. The embryo of a labour organization, which was beginning to form under the guidance of the Circle, was destroyed. This helped to centre attention on the village. The agitators could not but notice that they were most successful in dealing with unskilled workers, recent arrivals from the countryside, who had a peasant mentality and had not lost touch with their rural background, returning to their native hamlets for holidays or during the slack season. These raw semi-proletarians were indeed sought out, since it was hoped that they would act as intermediaries between the intellectuals and the peasants.

As a matter of fact, when the arrests began some of the proselytized workmen returned to their village homes, and at least one of them for months busied himself spreading the gospel of revolt among the peasants. Similar attempts were made by more than one member of the Circle. In the autumn of 1873, two woodcutters appeared in a Tver village. One of them was Kravchinsky, the other was Dmitry Rogachev, also a member of the Chaikovsky Circle. He had undergone a kind of religious conversion to the people's cause after hearing a workman in a tea-house tell the grim story of his life. The two men let no opportunity for propaganda slip. One day as they were walking down the road, they were overtaken by a peasant, driving. At once they started urging him to refuse to pay taxes and quoted Scripture to prove that it was right to rebel. The muzhik whipped up his horse, which broke into a trot. The propagandists trotted after. He set his horse to galloping, but the pair could gallop as fast as his bony nag. They did not stop haranguing until they were out of breath.

They were not long allowed to carry on in this uninhibited fashion. At the end of November they were arrested, but managed to escape the rural police. When, in the small hours, they reached a forest, they embraced, not to celebrate their temporary safety, but their permanent outlawry: henceforth, they said to each other, their lives belonged to the people.

For propaganda among peasants appropriate literature was required: pamphlets couched in simple language and sparing the religious sentiments of the folk. Half a dozen of them were run off the Circle's Swiss press, mentioned earlier, and smuggled into the country. In addition, several leaflets were printed secretly in a village near Moscow on the initiative of another populist group.

The idea of carrying the revolutionary message to the masses was not a new one. The slogan 'To the people!' was launched by Herzen in The Bell back in 1861, when, with the closing of the University of Petersburg, many youths had been left without an occupation. It was echoed with a strong conviction by Bakunin and Nechayev. They had urged the students to leave their books and 'go to the people,' live among them, merge with them and fight for their interests. Excursions into the countryside for propaganda purposes were either planned or attempted by individuals and groups throughout the 'sixties. It has been seen that in the winter of 1868-69 the issue was under discussion among the undergraduates in the capital. In the years immediately following, the debate grew in volume and liveliness. There was near unanimity on the necessity for the agitators to identify themselves with the people, but no agreement as to just what the immediate objective of the propaganda should be. Two trends asserted themselves, producing a factional schism, which first took shape among the Russians who had gone to Switzerland as political refugees or as students.

A large number of them were concentrated in Zurich. The University and the Polytechnic there attracted young men expelled from schools of higher learning at home and young women who were still disbarred from them. One hundredand forty Russian girls registered at the University for the year 1872-73. Not arew of those who arrived abroad without any radical convictions quickly acquired them there. A case in point is that of Vera Figner, a young married woman who was studying medicine in order to alleviate the sufferings of the poor. Before long she made her own 'the ideal of the prophets and martyrs of the socialist evangel,' as she phrased it in her memoirs.

The revolution haunted the thoughts of many of these young Russians. Small wonder then that when Bakunin came to Zurich for a short stay in the summer of 1872 he made a great impression there. He was about to be expelled from the International because of his opposition to the policy of the General Council led by Marx. Two years previously that organization had included a tiny Russian section which supported Marx and was indeed represented by him in the General Council, so that he jestingly signed a letter to Engels, 'Secretary for Russia.' But by now the handful of Russian Marxists had faded away, while Bakunin's followers, enrolled in a secret Brotherhood, formed a small, but influential group in Zurich.

Not long after Bakunin had left the city Lavrov had arrived there. He had escaped abroad two years earlier, in order to join a woman whom he loved and to devote himself, without being molested by the police, to an ambitious History of Thought. In Paris he enrolled in the local section of the International, and he visited London in a vain effort to obtain help from that body for the Commune. On that occasion he made the acquaintance of Marx and Engels.

He seems to have intended to hold aloof from the struggle in Russia. Yet in March, 1872, at the request of the Chaikovsky Circle he undertook to edit a revolutionary organ for home consumption. It was to be called Vperiod! (Forward!) and printed in Zurich. As a radical leader Lavrov left much to be desired. Essentially a theorist and a pedant, he was at home in the study, not at a gathering of plotters. Furthermore, his faith in revolution was of recent date: in The Historical Letters he had assigned to 'critical thought' the task of preventing, not calling forth, a social upheaval.

Lavrov shared Bakunin's fear and hatred of Leviathan, but on one important point he failed to see eye to eye with the anarchist: he did not believe that Russia was ripe for an immediate overturn and envisaged a lengthy period of peaceful propaganda. As a result, in Zurich he became the eponymous head of the anti-Bakuninist faction. In the superheated, unhealthy air breathed by the expatriates there the division between the Lavrovists and Bakuninists became a violent feud. For a time feeling ran so high that Bakunin's followers dared not venture into the street unarmed. Then a split occurred in the ranks of his own Brotherhood. In the summer of 1873, shortly before that group had fallen apart, it printed a collection of Bakunin's essays under the title, Statehood and Anarchy. The book was to become the chief vehicle of anarchist propaganda in Russia.

Almost simultaneously with this work the first issue of Forward! came off the press. Some zealous Bakuninists consigned copies of it to the flames and even accused Lavrov of being in the pay of the Russian police. Only one other volume of the miscellany appeared in Zurich, in March 1874. The previous May the Petersburg Government gazette carried a notice to the effect that if women students continued to attend courses at the University of Zurich after the first of the following year, on returning home they would be debarred from all occupations the exercise of which required official sanction. The reason given was that these young women had fallen under the pernicious influence of revolutionary agitators, and, further, that they were scandalizing the local population by practising 'the communist theories of free love.' As a result, some women students transferred to other foreign universities, some went home to attend courses recently opened to the sex in Moscow. The Russian contingent in Zurich rapidly dwindled, Lavrov removing himself and his review to London in the spring of 1874.

Bakunin had stayed on in Switzerland. While he kept aloof from Russian affairs, his ideas were achieving a considerable vogue in the country of his birth. In September 1873 he announced publicly that he was withdrawing from the political arena and would no longer disturb anyone's peace. This did not prevent him from taking a hand a year later in a futile attempt to start a social revolution in Italy. The short time that was left him was a period of dejection and disillusionment. He lost his faith in the revolutionary passion of the masses and in human decency. 'If there were only three people in the world,' he is reported to have observed, 'two of them would unite to oppress the third.' And Nechayev's former ally wrote to a would-be Russian activist that nothing solid can be built on fraud and that without a high humane ideal no revolution can triumph. Abandoned by most of his comrades-in-arms, the father of international anarchism died at Berne in 1876.

In the early years of the Soviet era there was a tendency to exalt Bakunin as a towering revolutionary figure. In a monumental biography he was described as a forefather of the Russian Communist Party, a man who had foreseen the course of the October Revolution and had 'laid the foundation for the concept of Soviet power,' in fact, a forerunner of Lenin. But the part of an ancestor of Bolshevism scarcely fitted the arch-foe of the authoritarian State for whom freedom was the highest good. Since the 'thirties he has been under official anathema as an enemy of the working-class and a betrayer of the revolution.

V

Copies of Forward! and Statehood and Anarchy reached Petersburg in the autumn of 1873, and presently the feud between Lavrovists and Bakuninists was being carried on at home. The former were the smaller faction. There were probably no more than thirty active Lavrovists in the capital and a few in Moscow. They dressed better, their hair and speech alike were smoother than their opponents'. Using less vehement language, they were apt to come off badly in debate. Altogether they were too tame for the times. Bakuninism had a much greater appeal. Indeed, it won the sympathy of the impetuous Kravchinsky and several other members of the Chaikovsky Circle, which had originally sponsored Lavrov and his review.

That group was drifting to the left. There was talk of replacing the loose coterie with a formal association. The task of formulating a plan for it fell to Kropotkin. The two documents he drafted postulated the complete and irrevocable identification of the activist with the people, and reflected a strong Bakuninist bias natural to a man who was convinced that to place the means of production in the hands of the State was suicide for society, since this was likely to result in 'economic despotism, far more dangerous than merely political despotism,' as he put it in his memoirs. The reorganization failed to materialize because by March, 1874, arrests had deprived the Circle of its most active members, including Perovskaya and Kropotkin. He was seized the day after he had delivered a brilliant paper on the glacial period before a session of the Imperial Geographic Society, of which he was a member.

This did not act as a deterrent. Since the prison gates might close upon them at any moment, the activists felt that they must bestir themselves. This meant 'going to the people,' or at least preparing for it. Enthusiasm for this course was infecting hundreds.

Student meetings, milling with noisy crowds, followed one another in the capital. Other centres, too, were agitated. Discussions were endless. The Lavrovists' stand was that the would-be propagandist must undergo a long, arduous intellectual training to fit himself for his task. Moreover, since the people did not understand their own interests nor know their friends from their enemies, a lengthy period of peaceful indoctrination was necessary.

The Bakuninists dismissed all that as an attempt, dictated by cowardice and sluggishness, to relegate the revolution to an indefinite future. The idea of placing so much emphasis on book learning! Did the prospective agitator have to master all the sciences listed in Comte's classification, from astronomy on down? Why, the 'three R's' were sufficient baggage for him. One man gave the opinion that the accumulation of knowledge was as immoral as the accumulation of material goods. And surely the peasants needed no enlightenment. They lived by a traditional philosophy grounded on belief in equality, and hostility toward private property and centralized political authority alike. Undoubtedly they would be the first to get rid of the State. Hadn't the master written: 'The Russian people are socialists by instinct and revolutionaries by nature'? All the agitator had to do was to organize their revolt.

Bunt (revolt, mutiny) was the Bakuninists' open sesame. Hence they liked to speak of themselves as buntars. They believed that even localized and abortive uprisings were desirable because of their educational influence and cumulative effect. But if they used the language of violence, it was without realizing what the words meant. 'Our "blood,"' as a contemporary put it, 'was not accompanied by pain. Our "rebellion" was more of a moral rebirth than a bloody reshuffling.' By the same token, the militant slogans represented not so much a programme of action as a dream of freedom and equality on earth which was a substitute for a lost faith in Heaven.

The two factions were not without common ground. Both emphasized the economic aspect of the coming upheaval. To the first issue of Forward! Lavrov contributed an essay in whicn the American Revolution was contrasted with the Pugachov jacquerie -- the two events occurred at about the same time -- and dismissed as belonging to a dead past, since it had left the social and economic status of the colonies intact. Again, the Lavrovists and the buntars shared the conviction that to be at all effective the propaganist, if he belonged to the privileged classes, as was nearly always the case, must completely identify himself with the common people. He must give up his own way of life and adopt the occupation, dress, food, habits, even Kropotkin for one believed, to church-going and keeping the fasts.

Agreement on this point left not a few debatable details. Should an agitator settle in a given community or travel from place to place? Should women be encouraged 'to go to the people'? By and large, the consensus was that a manual skill would be useful to the intellectuals in their new life and might come in handy in exile, too. Besides, working with their hands would help them 'rub off civilization,' as the phrase went. Late in the 'sixties a circle was planning to open a shop where its members could learn a trade. Now such establishments had become a reality. Headed by Shishko, a group of students allied with the Chaikovsky Circle set up a locksmiths' shop in the capital. Two separate carpentry shops and a cobblers' shop were functioning in Moscow. In the provinces, too, there were places where one could learn how to handle an axe, a saw, an awl. Sometimes a workshop would serve as a secret meeting-place. Attached to it there might be a 'commune,' i.e., a dormitory, with Spartan beds and a few other pieces of furniture.

Even the matter of proper diet for the propagandist was a subject of argument. Should he indulge in meat, which seldom figured in the people's regimen? Many, no doubt, recalled that Rakhmetov, in What's To Be Done? by Chernyshevsky, ate oranges in town, but not in the country, since they were not part of the customary fare of the peasantry. And what of personal relations? At least one narodnik, of gentle birth, reached the conclusion that it was his duty to marry a peasant woman.

Preparing to 'go to the people,' some youths left the university before they received their diplomas. Others tore them up. Kropotkin, in bidding farewell to his scientific career, explained that to have continued his geological studies would have been to take the bread out of the mouths of the people. Those who clung to their books or were sceptical about what a handful of transmogrified students could achieve in the villages were apt to be branded as reprobates. What may be called the populist fixation was at its height. Mikhailovsky cited the case of a revolutionary who reproached a comrade with having spent three years in prison, since he stayed there at the expense of the people. The same author imagined a narodnik asking himself, on the eve of being hanged, if he wasn't thereby robbing the people of the birchwood and the labour that had gone to make the gallows.

Narod, the people, their grandeur and their misery, were the object of adulation, the focus of attention. The major famine of 1873-74, which gripped the Volga region, could not but sharpen the sense of compassion and the urge to action. Oh, the joy of becoming one with the masses, of drowning in that great sea! The sentiment was mixed with the urge to set the sea on fire. History itself, as Chaikovsky had put it, had placed upon that generation the responsibility of announcing to the people the truth that would make them free.

Source URL: http://www.ditext.com/yarmolinsky/yar9.html

* * *

Road to Revolution

Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism, 1956.

Chapter 10

The Children's Crusade

And now at last people had had enough of doubting and questioning. The time had come to act.

It was the spring of 1874. The ice on the rivers was breaking up and wild geese were flying north. The season itself was a spur. For several weeks there was an exodus from the two capitals and other centres of young people wearing the coarse clothes of the peasantry. On being asked by friends where they were going, they answered simply: 'V narod' ('To the people'). Here, for the first time in the history of Russian radicalism, was something that approached a mass movement. Hundreds of men and women, perhaps two or three thousand, which is Kropotkin's estimate, were on the march.

They travelled singly or in small groups, often on foot. Strong legs are mentioned as essential to an agitator's equipment. A man would have a few roubles in his pocket or between the double soles of his footgear and a false passport stuck in the cuff of his boot, together with a tobacco pouch. His bundle might hold a map, some pamphlets, a few tools, which he did not always know how to use. He would perhaps have the address of a place where he could spend the night, receive messages, collect mail. In many cases his adopted role was that of an itinerant craftsman, but occasionally he would attach himself to a work gang, say of carpenters or stevedores, establish himself as a village shopkeeper or hire himself out as a farmhand, often at the risk of betraying his incompetence. Some joined the migratory workers who streamed south at harvest time.

There were not a few women among the propagandists, and they were models of courage and endurance. Such a one was Catherine Breshkovsky, who had deserted husband and child to head a circle known as 'the Kiev commune' and who eventually became 'the little grandmother of the Russian revolution.' Men and women travelled together on a comradely footing, and sometimes a couple settled in a village as man and wife, though the relation might be nominal.

For some the occasion may have been in the nature of a lark. For many the propaganda expedition was also a pilgrimage to the living shrine of the People or a cross between a reconnaissance and a field trip: an attempt to learn at first hand what the masses were like and to get a taste of the life they lived. There were those who felt that they were missionaries of a new gospel and, in fact, not without satisfaction they anticipated martyrdom. One young woman had a fixed idea that a revolutionary was most effective when he suffered for the cause. A participant in the movement reports that he saw some propagandists pore over the pages of the New Testament. A wooden cross stood on a shelf in the headquarters of a tiny circle the members of which were the first to 'go to the people.' They dreamed of a new faith that would at once steel the intellectuals with fresh courage and enlist the religious sentiment of the masses on the side of revolution. Lavrov has it that the intention of the agitators was not to accomplish something of practical value, but to perform a podvig, a deed of self-abnegation and spiritual merit. At the time, he wrote, Populism resembled a religious sect rather than a political party.

If the 'going to the people' was something of a crusade, it was a children's crusade. Those who participated in it had no clearer idea of what they had to cope with than the followers of the shepherd boy Stephen had had. Their enthusiasm was only exceeded by their ignorance and naivete. The movement was spontaneous and unorganized. In the capital an attempt was made to set up a central directing committee and a common treasury, but within a few weeks these dissolved into thin air. No leadership came from the Chaikovsky Circle. It had been seriously weakened by arrests, and at the outset of the crusade Chaikovsky himself abandoned the cause of revolution, joining a newly founded religious sect that preached non-resistance to evil. [Together with the founder of the sect and a number of his followers, Chaikovsky spent some time in a rural commune established in Kansas by a compatriot who had gone to America back in 1868. He found the experience deeply disappointing, and in 1879 settled in London. Having repatriated himself many years later, he headed the short-lived anti-Soviet Government of Northern Russia, and in 1919 left Archangel for Paris, dying in exile.]

Each of the little local groups acted more or less on its own. The means at their disposal were meagre, wealthy supporters being few and far between. A printing press in Moscow turned out pamphlets and blanks for bogus passports, and here and there quarters were provided which could be used by agitators as hideouts and supply bases. Of course, there were always sympathizers who could be counted on for assistance. On one occasion the niece of the Governor of Moscow enabled Nikolay Morozov to change into peasant clothes in the Governor's mansion.

In good time the authorities reported that they had found evidence of propagandist activity in thirty-seven (out of the forty-nine) provinces. The figure was an exaggerated one, but the agitators undoubtedly wandered over an extensive area. From the two capitals they travelled into the central provinces. The Volga and Don regions were their particular goals: the land of the Razin and Pugachov rebellions, it was held, was bound to be fertile ground for revolutionary propaganda. From Kiev and other southern cities the Ukrainian territory was invaded as far as the Crimea. Half a dozen students, having gained the impression from a book on the prison system that gangs of escaped convicts were roaming the Ural Mountains, went there to organize the fugitives into a revolutionary fighting force.

Several men made the sectarian villages their goal. The notion that the religious dissidents were apt to prove especially susceptible to propaganda against the existing order had originated in Herzen's entourage. In 1862-4 The Bell had carried a special supplement intended to win over Old Believers. As a result of his contacts with them, the man chiefly active in this field ended by losing his own faith in revolution.

Siberia and the sections of the country inhabited largely by non-Russians were not visited by the propagandists. What could be expected from people who lacked the collectivist tradition of the Great Russians?

Theoretically, the choice of locale was of no importance, at least to the buntars. So much dynamite had accumulated all over the country, they assumed, that an explosion was bound to occur no matter where the match was applied. They intended to foment local revolts. The Lavrovists, on the other hand, planned to prepare the peasants gradually for eventual action. The former wanted to work on people's emotions, the latter would appeal to their intelligence. All that the propagandists of either persuasion did was to hand out the same pamphlets and talk in the same general terms of the ultimate objectives: land to the peasants, mills and factories to the workers, freedom and equality for all.

II

They had started out in the full flush of enthusiasm. At first, in addition to the moral satisfaction of having broken with the ugly past, there was the pleasure of ready camaraderie, the delight of tramping the open road in the soft air of spring, of sleeping under the stars, and the thrill of being mistaken for a genuine man or woman of the people. But as the days wore on, roughing it proved too much for the less sturdy souls, and some turned back.

Those who were able to bear the privations discovered other difficulties. Often there was no work to be had. Babes in the wood found themselves in strange predicaments. Those who had rigged themselves out in the shabbiest clothes, hoping thus to gain the peasants' confidence, discovered that villagers were unwilling to give a night's lodging to such ragged strangers, suspecting them to be thieves. Morozov all but betrayed himself when he sat at table with his peasant hosts. They ate out of a common bowl, and he disgraced himself because he did not know that they took turns in dipping their spoons into the dish. Two 'peasants' travelling together were forced to flee the countryside because Easter had come, and one of them being a Protestant and the other a Moslem, they did not know how to behave.

The most disheartening difficulties presented themselves when the actual business of propaganda was attempted. The pamphlets available for distribution were unsatisfactory. Besides, few villagers were literate. A man might accept a booklet gratefully, but only because it made such fine cigarette papers. The peasants may have been born socialists, but they did not behave like them. They definitely plumped for private ownership. Oddly enough, it was the ancients who proved the least unresponsive to socialist, anarchist, egalitarian ideas. The younger men were, as a rule, rugged individualists. One householder, having heard an agitator picture the coming repartition of land, exclaimed: 'Won't that be great when we divide up the land! I'll hire two farmhands and live like a lord!'

The peasants listened to the talk of the new order as to Church sermons or fairytales that did not touch reality. They had apparently given up the belief that the charter of 'the true freedom' was being concealed from them. Yet the hope that there was to be a general redistribution of the land had not died out. Universal military service had been introduced early in the year, and the peasants argued that if all were to serve, all were to have an equal share of the land. It was expected, however, that the initiative would come from the Czar. His prestige was still enormous.

The artel, allegedly a germ of Socialism, on closer acquaintance turned out to be little else than a crew of workmen hired by a contractor and exploited by him to the limit. At the end of a day's work the men were too tired to take any interest in the message of revolt. Equally futile were attempts to proselytize the schismatics. Smug and bigoted, they proved even less receptive than the Orthodox folk. The Volga country disappointed all expectations. The peasants there had profited by the emancipation and so were even less susceptible to subversive influences than the rest.

The propagandists who tried to rouse the people to immediate action fared no better than their more moderate comrades. The peasants who agreed that something must be done would say: 'Let someone else start, we shan't lag behind.' Here and there an agitator gifted with personal magnetism and natural tact succeeded in winning the devotion of a group of simple men, so that they were prepared to follow him through thick and thin. But such instances were rare. One man who was working in a smithy roused the workmen to such a pitch of indignation that they were ready to fight. But there were no arms forthcoming, and if there had been, plans for action were wanting. He could only bid them wait, and they had not waited long before their enthusiasm evaporated. The youths who had set out to recruit escaped convicts into a revolutionary army returned after a month's stay in the Urals without having seen a single convict.

The authorities gave currency to the report that the peasants themselves handed the troublemakers over to the police. This was not generally the case. The crusaders were undone by their own carelessness. They conducted copious correspondence in an easily decipherable code and took few precautions of any kind. Spring was hardly over when the police were on their trail. On the last day of May the gendarmes raided a cobblers' shop at Saratov. The place was a receiving station for boxes marked 'lemonade,' which contained underground literature in sheets. They came from Moscow, where they were printed on a press owned by one, Ippolit Myshkin, who had put his legitimate establishment at the disposal of the local circle. He seems to have made his first acquaintance with revolutionary ideas while acting as a court stenographer in the Nechayev trial. The sheets were stitched together at the Saratov shop and thence shipped to various points for distribution. Among those arrested at the cobblers' shop was a fifteen-year-old boy, who blabbed. From Saratov the trail led naturally to Moscow and other centres. The police made the most of the clues. In July they were considerably helped by an informer. Before autumn was well under way most of the propagandists were in prison.

III

Looking back on what Kropotkin called 'the mad summer of 1874,' one of the crusaders observed that if they had been let alone, with autumn they would have returned to the lecture halls and laboratories in a chastened mood. Another propagandist eventually came to the conclusion that if he and his comrades had been allowed to live among the people a year or two they would have lost their faith in the peasant revolution. But they were not let alone. Arrests spared them the bitterness of disillusionment and robbed them of the lessons of experience.

A few, notably Kravchinsky and Myshkin, escaped the net by crossing the border. Abroad, they prepared themselves for resumption of work among the people. Others managed to elude the police without expatriating themselves. Catherine Breshkovsky was arrested, but not her companion, Yakov Stefanovich, a former seminarist turned medical student. Rogachev was at liberty, towing barges on the Volga, roaming the countryside as a huckster, acting as a Bible reader in a sectarian village. But those who persevered wanted the old enthusiasm. It was, as one man phrased it, 'like building a battery under fire.'

New converts were not entirely lacking, but they came from the intelligentzia. The effect of the crusade had been less to rouse the peasantry than here and there to win over to the cause a member of the educated public. By the following spring a sadly depleted band had re-formed ranks and was prepared to make a second attempt, in the face of grave discouragement.

By then the Chaikovsky Circle was no more. It was replaced by a semblance of an organization known as the Moscow Circle. Its nucleus was a coterie of young women most of whom had studied medicine at the University of Zurich. They had been known as "the Frietsch girls' because they all lodged with a certain Frau Frietsch. The sorority had included Vera Figner, Sofya Bardina, three Subbotina sisters. A curious "figure at its meetings was grey-haired Mme Subbotina, 'mother of the Gracchae,' who shared the radical convictions of her daughters. After the official warning to women students the members of the group scattered, but continued to keep in touch. In the summer of 1874 some of them were staying in Geneva.

The event of the season was a conference of Caucasian separatists. A handful of students, mostly Georgians, opposed secession from Russia on the ground that a concerted effort of all the peoples of the Empire to overthrow the existing order would be of greater benefit to the suppressed national minorities. They found kindred spirits in 'the Frietsch girls.' These were now interested in curing the ills of society rather than bodily ailments. Just then news of mass arrests were coming from Russia. The Caucasians discovered that their new friends, like themselves, were troubled by the thought that it was their duty to leave their books, return home and step into the breach. Before the year was out both the young men and the young women were entraining for Russia. Vera Figner alone remained behind to complete her studies.

The Moscow Circle came into being early in 1875 as a result of a merger between some of the former 'Frietsch girls' and the Caucasian students. Mme Subbotina was missing: she had been arrested for propaganda among the peasants and held up officially as a horrible example of the encouragement that the young received from their elders.

The group began as an informal band of like minded people. The fear of centralized control, left by Nechayev, was still potent. But these young people were so ambitious -- they aimed at nothing less than a revolutionary society on a national scale -- that they had to overcome their distaste for organizational bonds. In February 1875 a constitution was adopted, together with the high-sounaing name of the All-Russian Social-Revolutionary Organization. At the time it comprised twenty-one persons. They enjoyed complete equality and were obliged to serve in rotation for one month on the executive committee. A member was required to divest himself of all possessions and personal ties and to become a worker or a peasant, if he was not one already. As the purpose of the Organization was to gather within its fold all existing revolutionary elements, it refrained from formulating a credo, steering a middle course between Bakuninism and Lavrovism. A new feature was a plan to form organized bands, intended, on the one hand, to rouse the people, and, on the other, to terrorize the Government and the privileged classes and arrange for the escape of imprisoned comrades. The Circle thus sanctioned the use of force against the old order, but it did so reluctantly. It favoured the employment of persuasion in dealing not only with potential friends, but even with actual enemies, and it insisted that, while the necessities of the struggle forced a revolutionist to cut himself off from the body politic, he remained subject to the dictates of morality. The ghost of Nechayey still had to be laid.

Although the group aimed at carrying propaganda to the peasantry, it began by approaching city workers. Several young women hired themselves out as factory hands. The first to do this was Betty Kaminskaya, daughter of a Jewish merchant, or Maria Krasnova, soldier's wife, according to her forged passport. She was seen off by three comrades in the small hours of an icy January morning. As the frail young thing, huddled in a peasant sarafan, disappeared behind the bleak walls of the old paper mill, her escorts felt as though they had accompanied her to her execution. Indeed, Betty, and those who followed her example, had to endure an ordeal. They lived in dismal barracks attached to factories, slept on vermin-infested mattresses, ate wretched food, and slaved for intolerably long hours. The work itself was extremely trying. The young women suffered their martyrdom cheerfully. It did not last long. As they talked to their fellow workers freely and distributed underground pamphlets, within a few weeks they drew suspicion on themselves and had to leave the factories.

The results of the first two months of activity were gratifying. Cells had been formed in a score of large mills and in some small plants. Preparations for the departure of members to various centres on propaganda assignments were under way when, early in April, a third of the membership were arrested at the headquarters of the circle, and this for lack of elementary precautions. Undismayed, the others set out for their respective destinations. They were now more circumspect, but the police had names and addresses, as well as the key to the code they used. By August the All-Russian Social-Revolutionary Organization was wiped out.

IV

The Moscow group, like the Chaikovsky Circle before it, had given attention to city workers chiefly because it hoped that these barely urbanized peasants would carry the socialist message back to the countryside. The first revolutionary organization made up of wage earners and seeking to represent them as a distinct class was formed in Odessa late in 1874. This South Russian Union of Workers owed its existence to the initiative of E. Zaslavsky, a university graduate and a follower of Lavrov, who after 'going to the people' had lost faith in the revolutionary potentialities of the peasantry. 'The liberation of the workers' was the objective and revolution the means of obtaining it. In addition to spreading socialist ideas among factory hands, the Union conducted several strikes. Arrests put an end to its activities a few months after the Moscow Circle had met a similar fate.

The Union, with its proletarian complexion, was an isolated phenomenon. The village continued to hold the centre of the stage. In the spring of 1875, as has been noted, 'going to the people' was resumed. The results were no less disappointing, and the thin ranks of the propagandists continued to be decimated by arrests. Profound disillusionment with peaceful propaganda and a mood of despondency set in. 'Already we are bankrupt,' wrote Kravchinsky to Lavrov in the autumn. 'Life is barely stirring. Soon it will cease altogether.' He attributed this state of affairs to the Fabian policy of his correspondent. 'If persisted in,' he declared, 'the forces of revolution would entirely be wasted, and the burning embers of the intelligentzia extinguished without having kindled the masses. One mutinous act, even if unsuccessful, would achieve more than a decade of indoctrination.' In a subsequent letter he told Lavrov that an overwhelming majority had realized this and had turned away from him.

Indeed, the moderate sector was shrinking. The extremists were strongest in the South. Romantic idealization of the tradition of Cossack insurgency had not died out there. Kiev and Odessa harboured small, close-knit groups of buntars. They had given up careers open to university graduates and, in fact, looked askance at intellectuals. Some of them were 'illegals': men and women who were wanted by the police and so had gone underground. They had forged identity papers or none, and lived the lives of the hunted. The status involved such prestige that occasionally an activist who had not been compromised would go illegal just for the glory of it. At this time the secret service was rather lax in the South, and the illegals felt fairly safe.

In the summer of 1875 an Odessa group launched a plan to incite the peasants of the village of Korsun, Kiev province, to expropriate the landlords and offer armed resistance to the authorities. The place was chosen because it had been the scene of a spontaneous rising during the Crimean War. The obshchina did not exist in the South and the agitators were not unaware that it was a far cry from dividing the land among individual households to Socialism. But they were willing to let the future take care of itself. Seizure of land, they said to themselves, was a revolutionary act, which might prove the spark to start a larger conflagration. Kiev buntars offered a helping hand, and by Lent, 1876, a foothold was secured at Korsun and several other villages, and underground literature was being peddled at country fairs. As only a few of the conspirators proved equal to the task of recruiting villagers for the impending clash with the troops, the others decided to busy themselves collecting funds for weapons, ammunition and horses. Moreover, a fake imperial manifesto urging the peasants to revolt was to be printed.

The hope was to arm ten thousand men. Before long the number was scaled down to one thousand. Actually, enough cash was obtained to buy thirty cheap revolvers. The manifesto did not materialize. The recruiting of prospective insurgents proceeded at a snail's pace. And then came the coup de grace. A participant, on being arrested, turned informer and was released. Up to this time renegades had been left alone. But now the mood had changed. On the night of 11 June, 1876, three men assaulted the traitor in a street in Odessa and left him for dead. But the job was botched, and the man remained alive. He continued to betray his former comrades, and there was nothing left for them to do but to abandon all the settlements. They gathered in Kharkov and then scattered, a disheartened and demoralized lot. Soon thereafter many were arrested.

In one instance the buntars did come near starting a popular rising. For some years a number of villages in the Chigirin district, not far from Kiev, had been in a state of turmoil owing to a bitter feud between two groups of peasants. At the time of the emancipation some families managed to secure more land than they were entitled to, and with the years the inequality of holdings had increased. The more prosperous villagers wanted to legalize this state of affairs by signing deeds which would grant them ownership of their present holdings in perpetuity. The less favoured peasants, on the other hand, demanded an equable redistribution of the land according to the number of male souls (dushi) in each family, as had been the rule under collective tenure. They came to be known as dusheviks. Furthermore, influenced by rumours, some of them began to doubt the legality of the payments they were required to make for their allotments, and the old story about an imperial manifesto, granting the people the entire land, which the gentry and the officials had concealed, took on a new lease of life among them.

If only the Czar himself could be reached! He was sure to be on their side. Delegates went off to the capital with a petition, but they were stopped en route and sent back under guard. One of them escaped arrest and on returning home reported to his fellow villagers that the Czar had admitted inability to help them and enjoined them to seize the land by force and set up obshchinas to ensure equality. The peasants did not take this step, but, in the firm belief that they were acting in accordance with the Czar's will, they refused to put their mark on the official deeds and some would not make the customary payments. In May, 1875, troops were called in, and many of the recalcitrants were flogged. Yet nothing could break their spirit. Then about a hundred men were jailed, their allotments auctioned off and their families reduced to beggary.

Learning of the situation in the Chigirin district, the agitators in the Kiev province saw an opening. They recognized that if they claimed to act in the Czar's name, they were bound to be listened to. The use of fraud was distasteful to them, but they overcame their scruples. A group was formed for the purpose of turning the dusheviks' passive resistance into an insurrection.

The soul of the enterprise was Yakov Stefanovich, the youth who had accompanied Catherine Breshkovsky on her propaganda tour and who had also played a leading part in the Korsun affair. In the winter of 1875-76 he succeeded in gaining the confidence of some of the dusheviks imprisoned in Kiev. As they received no maintenance, they went out to work during the day, returning to jail to sleep. Striking up an acquaintance with these men, he represented himself as a delegate to the Czar from the dusheviks in a certain village (which he had visited at great risk), and he overwhelmed the simple souls by offering to intercede before the Czar for their village as well. He promised to be back from the capital in May. In June he sent word that his mission had been successful and that he was returning with important papers. Winter had already set in when Stefanovich faced the peasants. He brought with him two gilt-edged printed documents, the contents of which he communicated to them under a most solemn oath of secrecy.

One was an 'Imperial Manifesto.' Herein the Czar declared that by the ukase of 1861 he had given the peasants all the land gratis, but that the gentry had defrauded them of the better part of it. He had finally become convinced, the manifesto went on, that he was powerless to fight the landlords single-handed, since the Heir Apparent was on their side. He therefore ordered his faithful subjects to form secret druzhinas (bands) to prepare for an uprising. Once the people had won, land would become as free a possession as water or sunlight, and liberty and happiness would reign.

The other document was the druzhina Statutes. They required a member to take a solemn oath of allegiance to the druzhina, to arm himself with a pike, and to pay small monthly dues. Treason was punishable by death. A 'band' was to consist of twenty-five men, headed by a starosta (elder). These were to elect an ataman, who was responsible to a soviet (council) of commissars, appointed by the Czar. Stefanovich styled himself 'Commissar Dmytro Naido.' Both the Manifesto and the Statutes bore the Emperor's signature and were provided with a large gold seal, inscribed: 'Seal of the Soviet of Commissars' and showing a pike and an axe crossed. The two documents seem to have been printed in Geneva and reprinted at a secret press in Kiev.

The papers made an immense impression. Doubters were swept off their feet. Druzhinas sprang up like mushrooms. On a single night three hundred men, meeting secretly, took the oath. One of them was so overcome by what was happening that he went mad. By the middle of 1877 the membership had reached about one thousand. In spite of the number of people involved, there was not a single case of defection or betrayal, although the ataman's enthusiasm for the cause did not prevent him from embezzling the funds entrusted to him. Finally, when the organization had been in existence nine months and at a time when preparations for the rising had not yet started, the police discovered the conspiracy owing to the indiscretion of a member while under the influence of horilka (brandy). Stefanovich and his comrades were apprehended in September, 1877. For months the ringleaders were being hunted down. The last arrest was made in May of the following year.

V

The Bakuninists, with their emphasis on direct action and their feeble interest in theory, wrote and printed little. In 1875 they launched a monthly entitled Rabotnik (Worker), printed in Geneva. It was the first revolutionary journal addressing itself to Russian proletarians and peasants. During the fifteen months of its existence the paper had an extremely limited circulation and scarcely reached its intended public, few members of which, indeed, were literate.

More people read the bi-weekly Vperiod!, which Lavrov launched in addition to the miscellany under the same title. The initial issue, like that of Rabotnik, was dated 1 January, 1875. The journal was, in a sense, a sequel to The Bell, but did not achieve either its popularity or prestige. The editor, some contributors, and the printers all shared a London flat, forming a kind of lay brotherhood. From the Forward! press, as from that of The Worker, came propaganda pamphlets both for intellectuals and the masses. The pieces for the latter were like those that the Chaikovsky Circle had produced. In one of them the devil, intent on plaguing mankind, invents the priest, the noble, and the merchant.

The bi-weekly recorded the revolutionary struggle at home and had much to say about the international socialist and labour movement, even reporting strikes in New York and Chicago. Occasionally it printed verse, such as 'The New Song,' from the pen of Lavrov himself, which eventually became the Russian Marseillaise. It opens with a call to spurn the old world, and the refrain to its five octaves summons the worker to rise against his enemies. The last stanza predicts that after the struggle is over, the sun of justice and brotherhood will rise, blood will have bought the happiness of children, falsehood and evil will have been banished forever, and the nations will be as one 'in the free realm of holy labour.'

Considerable space was given to theoretical discussion. It was directed against Bakuninism with its assumption of Russia's readiness for revolution, its reliance on blind action, its appeal to elemental passions. In the West the future of Socialism was bound up with the evolution of capitalism and the political activity of the industrial proletariat, but in Russia, Lavrov held, Socialism was a movement of ideas deriving much of its authority from ethical imperatives. He did not blink the fact that the eventual overturn, of necessity a social cataclysm, meant war with all its horrors, but he insisted that the conflict must be carried on within the bounds of revolutionary morality, the heart of which was justice and love of humanity. His belief in the efficacy of peaceful indoctrination was unshaken. In the issue of the journal dated 1 June, 1876, this trained mathematician presented a piece of computation whereby he arrived at the conclusion that within six years one hundred propagandists could secure 35,950 converts. Even a third of this number, he argued, would constitute a formidable revolutionary army.

He wanted it to be an army of workers and peasants. The intellectuals must take the initiative, but Lavrov fervently hoped that when the hour of decision struck, leadership would be in the hands of the people. Forward! firmly opposed the idea of a small band of conspirators seizing political power and decreeing the new order into existence. With an insight of which he was rarely capable he pictured the result of the dictatorship of a revolutionary minority. The abolition of private property by such a regime, he wrote, would be only nominal. Actually the capital owned by the propertied classes would pass into the hands of 'a gang of ten thousand acting under the red flag of the social revolution.' On the morrow of the coup a struggle for power would begin, with disastrous effects. An overturn carried out by the masses before they had received a sufficient amount of socialist enlightenment, or by a dictatorial minority, would only lead, he concluded, to an exchange of one set of exploiters for another.

These shafts were aimed at the few Russian disciples of Augusts Blanqui who enlivened the radical scene. Back in 1873 Zurich held, in addition to Lavrovists and Bakuninists, a tiny group of Blanquists, also known as Jacobins, who were committed to a programme of dictatorship by a revolutionary minority. The cell, which Nechayev may have helped to form, found an articulate leader in the person of his former associate, Pyotr Tkachev. Having served his prison term and been deported to a provincial town, he had escaped abroad with the aid of members of the Chaikovsky Circle, who had hoped that he would contribute to Forward! From the first, however, he and Lavrov found themselves at odds, and in the spring of 1874 he issued a pamphlet in which he savagely attacked the editor as, horrible to say, a preacher of peaceful progress, a man who unwittingly played into the hands of the police. Delaying the revolution might prove fatal, he argued. For while in the West the growth of capitalism brought the hour of the triumph of Socialism nearer, in Russia it had the opposite effect. Hence, it was now or never.

In his reply Lavrov denounced his critic as an irresponsible demagogue who did not realize how disastrous a revolution without the participation of the people would be. Friedrich Engels took up the cudgels for Lavrov and drew a vitriolic retort from Tkachev, to the effect that Russia was closer to the social revolution than the West: if she had no proletariat, neither did she have a bourgeoisie, and the people were communist by tradition and revolutionary by instinct. (He was echoing Bakunin.) Engels dismissed these remarks as puerile, but conceded that the Russian revolution was on the way and could only be retarded by a successful war or a premature uprising. There the debate rested.

By the end of 1875 Tkachev had acquired a medium for spreading his ideas: Nabat (Tocsin), a journal sponsored by a group of Russian and Polish Blanquists and printed in Geneva. In the leading article of the opening issue he again attacked Lavrovism, pointing out the dangers of procrastination and calling for immediate action. The revolutionary cohort, he insisted, must be ready to risk defeat, in the conviction that severe discipline, centralized command, swift action, utter intransigeance would assure it victory. 'The preparation of a revolution is not the work of revolutionaries,' he wrote. 'That is the work of exploiters, capitalists, landowners, priests, police, officials, conservatives, liberals, progressives, and the like. Revolutionaries do not prepare, they make a revolution.' They were of necessity a minority, Tkachev went on. For only the few were morally and intellectually advanced enough to cherish the ideal which is the final goal of progress: absolute, 'organic,' as he put it, equality, the foundation of the society of the future. This superiority entitled them to material power. The transformation of moral into material power was indeed 'the essence of every true revolution.' Since power is concentrated in the state, the elite, a close-knit fighting body, must take possession of it, not to destroy it, as Bakunin's followers demanded, but to use it in the interest of the cause.

Tkachev's conception of the revolution was not entirely dictatorial. The new government, he held, must persuade the people to accept its policies, propaganda following, not preceding the overturn. Furthermore, he had it that once the citizenry had been re-educated and the socialist order firmly established, the State would lose its raison d'etre and wither away. He conceded that the conquest of power could not be achieved without popular support. But he saw the Russian masses as a purely destructive force, and the belief that, left to themselves, they could bring about their own liberation was to his thinking a dangerous delusion. History, he maintained, had placed the task of organizing the revolution, initiating it and directing its course upon the shoulders of the moral and intellectual elite. Variations on this authoritarian, anti-democratic theme dominate the pages of Tocsin. The Lavrovists and Bakuninists alike abhorred Tkachev's cfoctrine as a scheme to impose the new order on the people by force, to drag them into the millennium by the scruff of their necks, as it were. What, they asked, would keep the socialist dictators from abusing their authority? The Nabat programme was, in Kravchinsky's words, nothing but vileness and political revolution. The fact that Tkachev remained abroad in safety, while urging others to risk their lives, did not go unnoticed. In any case, the circulation of his paper was extremely limited, and his followers both at home and abroad were a negligible splinter group. His seemed a lost cause. Before many years passed, however, his programme won adherents, and eventually it was to be carried out, with what results the world now witnesses. Writing in 1902, Lenin said that the attempt to seize power, prepared by what Tkachev had preached -- he had in mind the effort of the People's Will -- was 'majestic'

VI

By the beginning of 1875, 770 propagandists (612 men and 158 women) had been ordered to be arrested, 717 had actually been seized and 267 of them remained in custody. The number of converts to revolution made at this cost was estimated at twenty to thirty. Between the middle of 1873 and the end of 1876, 1,611 political suspects eighty-five per cent of them men, were questioned; 557 of them were dismissed for lack of evidence, 450 were placed under police surveillance, 79 were deported to distant parts of the Empire and 525 were held for court trial. The majority of these, the more serious offenders, were under twenty-five years old and one out of four was a minor. More than half belonged to the privileged, though not necessarily well-to-do, classes and fully half were high school and university students. The official investigator reported that students of medicine and the natural sciences were the most hardened criminals, and the 46 women awaiting trial were more fanatical than the men.

The majority of the defendants were not allowed to face their judges until 1877. Two mass trials were staged in the capital before a special session of the Senate.

The first, known as the Trial of the Fifty, and involving former members of the Moscow Circle, was held in March and lasted three weeks. The public was admitted in limited numbers, and sympathizers eager to gain admission went so far as to print counterfeit tickets. The defendants were charged with having formed an illegal association aimed to overthrow the existing order and with dissemination of printed matter inciting to revolt. During the proceedings they behaved with a courage and dignity which won general admiration. The presence in the dock of attractive and obviously high-minded young women was particularly affecting. The prisoners boldly asserted their convictions. In fact, at the conclusion of the trial, when, in accordance with accepted procedure, they addressed the court, they turned the dock into a rostrum.

Sofya Bardina was the first to speak. In a low, soft voice she denied the intention of undermining the foundations of property, family, religion, and the State. She and her comrades, she said, merely defended the worker's right to the full product of his labour. As for religion, she personally 'had always been true to its spirit and essential principles in the pure form in which they were preached by the founder of Christianity.' And neither she nor her co-defendants wanted to destroy the State. They were peaceful propagandists working for universal happiness and equality.

The next defendant to speak was a tall, lean workman in a loose peasant blouse belted with a narrow strap. This was Pjotr Alexeyev, a weaver, who had been won over by Sofya Perovskaya and had joined the Moscow Circle. In vehement tones he pictured the intolerable lot of the wage-earner, concluding that the working people must depend on themselves and expect no help except from the student youth. 'They alone will be our inseparable comrades until the moment when millions of working people raise their muscular arms . . .' Here the presiding Senator made an attempt to stop the speaker, but he went on: 'and the yoke of despotism, protected by soldiers' bayonets, will be pounded to dust.' Both speeches, which had been carefully edited and rehearsed, were excised from the court records, but they were printed secretly and became revolutionary classics.

Prison terms, Siberian exile, hard labour were the lot of the condemned. The severity of the sentences intensified public sympathy for them. Money and other gifts poured in, and, as one of the Subbotina sisters put it, the women held 'a salon' in jail, receiving a number of titled ladies. Poems were written to the prisoners, and a dirge composed three years earlier by the now dying Nekrasov was circulated, with the report that he had composed it on his sick-bed as a lament for the condemned.

The cases were appealed, and the sentences rendered less onerous. Before the prisoners separated to go to their various places of confinement, each received a crucifix, the only personal possession a convict was allowed. It was inscribed on the reverse side with the initials of the Russian Social-Revolutionary Association. All that remained to many of them was an obscure martyrdom. Shortly after leaving prison. Alexeyev was murdered by Yakut robbers, whose crime might have gone undiscovered if they had not made a song about their exploit. Sofya Bardina, after some years in Siberia, escaped abroad, where, in 1883, at the age of thirty, she took her own life. It is said that one of the things that drove her to suicide was her inability to stomach the terrorist phase of the revolutionary movement.

A few weeks after the Trial of the Fifty, members of the South-Russian Workers' Union faced the court. Then came the Great Trial, which lasted from 18 October, 1877, to 23 January, 1878. The case of Revolutionary Propaganda in the Empire, as it was officially called, involved many of those who 'had gone to the people.' The preliminary inquiry had dragged on for some four years. It has been estimated that 3,800 persons, including witnesses, were drawn into this mass trial. Scores died of disease in prison, committed suicide or went mad there. After indictment, a few escaped. Only 198 were finally brought to the capital from the various parts of the country, to be tried by a special tribunal. In the course of the trial, death further reduced the number of defendants to 193. Some of them had but a remote connexion with the revolutionary movement, and indeed, there were those who were initiated into it by being dragged into the case. As one historian put it, the trial was a conference of activists arranged by and at the expense of the government. What was in fact the result of the unco-ordinated efforts of separate groups was presented by the prosecution as the concerted action of a single secret society, and this in spite of the fact that the authorities had a clear picture of the actual situation.

Nominally the proceedings were public, but the courtroom was only large enough to hold the judges, the prisoners, and their counsel. The defendants protested. Thereupon the prisoners were divided into groups, each of which was to be tried separately. Since they were being tried as a body, many objected to this arrangement and decided to sabotage the proceedings. They had to be dragged before the judges by main force and then they refused to answer questions. They delegated one of their number, however, to speak for them. This was Ippolit Myshkin, accused, with three others, of having organized the Society. In the courtroom, the four occupied a raised, railed-off platform which the defendants called Golgotha.

Against a barrage of interruptions from Senator Karl Peters, the presiding judge, Myshkin delivered a vigorous declaration of his and his comrades' convictions, which they had composed jointly. Acknowledging himself a member of the Social-Revolutionary Party, by which he merely meant a company of like-minded men and women, he said that their aim was to establish a free union of autonomous communes. It would come about through a popular rising against an intolerable system.

The climax of the speech came when Myshkin, prevented from relating the tortures to which he had been subjected in prison, cried out that this was no trial, but 'a farce, indeed something worse,' and, in defiance of Senator Peters' orders to remove him, went on to declare that the Senators were prostituting themselves by selling 'everything dear to humanity for promotion and fat salaries.' The courtroom was in an uproar. Women became hysterical; some fainted. The judges, appalled, filed out, Senator Peters forgetting to declare the court adjourned.

Nearly half of the defendants, Sofya Perovskaya among them, were acquitted. The others received sentences varying from five days in prison to ten years of hard labour. Furthermore, the court petitioned the Emperor to free sixty-two of those found guilty, in consideration of the fact that they had served their term during preliminary detention, and to reduce the penalties of the others, except Myshkin. Contrary to custom, the court's petition was not granted, and it was said that the penalties were indeed increased in a dozen cases.

Two days after the verdict had been handed down in its final form, a group of the condemned signed a statement which was, in effect, a last testament. It was subsequently printed abroad and smuggled into Russia. The signatories reaffirmed their allegiance to the 'Popular-Revolutionary Party,' and urged the comrades who remained behind to carry on the fight against a system which was the misfortune and shame of Russia.

The greater number of those acquitted were deported to distant parts of the empire by administrative order. Myshkin was executed in 1885 for attacking a prison warden.

The revolutionaries used the public trials as a forum from which they proclaimed the high motives that prompted their actions. In this way they added considerably to the moral capital accumulated by the cause and ultimately bequeathed to wastrel heirs. The government had hoped to arouse public opinion against the rebels. The opposite effect was produced. As a result, during the life of the old regime political cases received a minimum of official publicity.

Source URL: http://www.ditext.com/yarmolinsky/yar10.html

* * *

Road to Revolution

Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism, 1956.

Chapter 11

Land and Liberty

Neither the Lavrovists nor the buntars had anything to show for their pains. As the year 1876 wore on, the mood of disillusionment and discontent deepened. When autumn came, the activists still at liberty gathered in the capital and other centres as if by prearrangement. People who had been in various sections of the country had an opportunity to mingle and compare notes. It was plain that, as Kravcbinsky put it, socialist propaganda was making no more impression on the masses than a beanshooter would on a stone wall. Why had they failed to win the ear of the peasant? Had their message been too remote for his needs? Was there something basically wrong with their whole outlook? Both factions, as well as Tkachev's followers, agreed that the lack of co-ordination and centralization was a source of great weakness. What could be achieved, it was asked, by scattered handfuls of people, without a general staff, without a plan of concerted action? Each group, indeed, each individual had carried on independently, but was so linked with others that the mistakes of one endangered many. The slogan of the moment became: 'Let us organize!'

Out of this searching of souls came a revision of the programme and tactics of the movement. Out of it came also an attempt to bring the dispersed forces together in a secret society conceived on a national scale. For some time Mark Natanson, founder of the Chaikovsky Circle, had been applying his uncommon organizing abilities to that end. Having served his term of forced residence in a provincial town, he came back to the capital late in 1875 and immediately set to work. To establish connexions and gain recruits he visited the radical centres at home and travelled abroad, conferring with Lavrov in London and persuading several expatriates to return to Russia. His efforts led to the formation, in 1876, of the first fairly substantial revolutionary organization on Russian soil: the Society of Land and Liberty. Sometimes this league and those that succeeded it were spoken of as the Social-Revolutionary Party. In careful usage, however, that high-sounding phrase designated merely those who sympathized with the radical ideology. The Party, in this sense of the word, formed the loose medium within which associations of fully committed militants functioned. The name, Land and Liberty, it will be recalled, has already figured in these pages as that of a secret society which had a shadowy existence in the early 'sixties.

In June, 1877, arrest put a period to Natanson's activities. His wife stepped into the breach, but she, too, soon found herself behind bars. This was not an irreparable loss, for the society included several other able and zealous organizers. One of them was a former engineering student, Alexander Mikhailov, of whom more later. Another was Aron Zundelevich, who accomplished miracles as a smuggler of men and literature, and so was known as the society's Foreign Office. The membership's ranks were swelled by the prisoners released after the Great Trial. For a while they had formed a separate circle, headed by Sofya Perovskaya. Before long, however, she herself and most of her following were within the fold of Land and Liberty. Certain individuals and groups, particularly in the South, retained their distaste for the discipline that goes with organizational ties and preferred to remain unaffiliated, but they were under the influence of the Society and occasionally worked with it. In fact, its statutes provided for 'separatist' members who joined the Society on a contractual basis for the execution of a definite task and were otherwise free from any obligation to the Party.

At the outset Land and Liberty formulated its platform. 'We narrow down our demands,' this began, 'to those that can be realized in the near future, that is, to the demands and desires of the people.' The first and foremost of these was that the entire land be turned over to the peasants and distributed equally among them. 'We are convinced,' a parenthesis followed, 'that two thirds of the land will be held communally.' Another plank in the platform had to do with centralized State authority. The statement, as revised in April, 1878, opened thus: 'Our ultimate political and economic ideal is anarchy and collectivism.' The membership, however, was far from unanimous in favour-ing the abolition of the State. There were those who were content to leave it to the people to determine the political structure of the future society. Some were even prepared to retain the monarchy, if the citizenry so desired. The people were trusted to do right, or rather, it was assumed that right resulted from the exercise of their will.

The Society's objective, it was stated, could only be secured by means of a violent overturn. Herzen's ambivalent attitude toward the use of force had been overcome. The revolution must be carried out by the masses. Nothing should be forced upon them, or done behind their backs. All the Party could do was to offer the initial impetus and some guidance. And speed was of the essence of the matter. The growth of capitalist economy, sedulously fostered by the Government, was undermining the obshchina and perverting the people's ideas about land ownership and the ordering of society.

Populism now lost much of its vagueness. The loose ideological complex had become the credo of an organized revolutionary body. In the process the centre of gravity shifted from Socialism to the demands and beliefs of the people. 'Realizing the impossibility, under present conditions, of inculcating in the masses other and, from an abstract viewpoint, perhaps nobler ideals, we have resolved to write on our banner the historic formula, "Land and Liberty!"' Thus the revised platform of the Society. It was a deviation from what Herzen, Chernyshevsky, Bakunin, and Lavrov had taught, a deviation made at the end of a road strewn with disappointments. Those who were uneasy about the compromise had a ready poultice for their consciences. Since the Russians were inherent collectivists, they said to themselves, the satisfaction of the people's aspirations must inevitably lead to Socialism. Some felt that the Society's programme was simply the Russian variant of the foreign doctrine that Socialism was. Kraychinsky, who had joined Land and Liberty in the summer of 1878, wrote shortly afterwards: 'Five years ago we cast off German [i.e. European] clothes and put on homespun kaftans in the hope that the people would admit us into their midst. Now we see that it is not enough -- the time has come to strip the German clothes off Socialism itself and dress it, too, in homespun.' Whether or not these populists felt that they were making a concession to the force of circumstance, they believed that they were being wonderfully practical, indeed, that they were playing the game of Realpolitik.

Their programme met with some criticism. In a journal issued at Geneva by a group of Bakuninists, a dissenter warned against throwing Socialism overboard and acting in the name of popular ideals. For one thing, the liberty the masses desired was vague enough to admit of worship of the Czar. As for communal land ownership, it could easily bolster a state more conservative than any in existence. Did not the reactionaries themselves prize the obshchina as an insurance against social upheaval? And even if it were possible to effect an agrarian revolution, what of the growing proletariat in the cities? The working men, who were without a collectivist tradition, might well wreck the whole enterprise.

Land and Liberty could get little aid or comfort from the Lavrovists. Numerically they had always been weak, and they were rapidly losing ground. In December, 1876, delegates from the several circles met in Paris. This was the first, and the last, Lavrovist conference. In the course of it Lavrov resigned his editorship of Vperiod! The relations between him and his flock had become strained for reasons not only ideological but personal as well. His predicament was not unlike what Herzen's had been a decade earlier. Furthermore, the financial support received by the review had become irregular, and its staff was reduced to semi-starvation.

Thus, by the end of 1876 the faction was without a leader and without an organ. The miscellany bearing the title Forward! managed to come out once more, in 1877, but the biweekly folded up. Lavrov withdrew temporarily into private life. A few of his former disciples continued to spread Socialism among factory hands and called themselves Marxists. Others argued that the work of organizing the proletariat could not begin until the liberals had obtained political freedom for the people. In the meantime they confined themselves to peaceful activities of a cultural nature. According to Lavrov himself, by 1878 the group lowered its flag and ceased to exist.

It was the Bakuninist faction that lived on in the Society of Land and Liberty. The revolutionary populists were buntars who had come to see things in a less unreal light and who, moreover, showed less resistance to organizational discipline.

II

According to the statutes of the Society, it consisted of regional and functional groups, with a Centre or Basic Circle, situated in the capital. This was in effect a close-knit body of professional revolutionists. Completely dedicated men and women, they could own no property and were subject to the control of the organization in personal matters, but they were not required to adopt the people's mode of living. They elected a small executive committee and were supposed to meet in plenary session from time to time. The Centre imposed a certain amount of discipline on the subsidiary groups, but left them a large measure of autonomy. Their activity was confined to a definite area or to a special type of work, and the demands made on the members were, apparently, not exacting. There was considerable opposition to tightening the organizational ties. One gets the impression that not a few of the provisions of the statutes remained on paper.

No more than a score of activists made up the Centre. The rest of the membership, including 'the separatists' mentioned above and fellow travellers, probably never exceeded two hundred. This handful comprised nearly all the most earnest and energetic spirits that the revolutionary cause could muster at the time.

Attached to the Centre was an establishment for the forging of identity papers, which was called, with an unwonted attempt at humour, the Heavenly Chancery. There was also a clandestine press. This was a precious possession, a symbol of power, at once a rallying ground and a sanctum. Kravchinsky recalled that he entered the dingy flat where it was installed 'with the sense of awe experienced by the faithful crossing the threshold of a temple.' The establishment was presided over by middle-aged, near-sighted Maria Krylova, nicknamed 'Mother of God.' She and her assistants led a life of voluntary imprisonment in the quarters which housed the shop. The fewest persons were permitted to enter the premises, in order to bring supplies and take away the printed matter. The press managed to carry on for four years under the very noses of the gendarmes. From it came an account of the Great Trial, some two score leaflets and pamphlets, as well as the Society's two organs. Some of the issues of the latter ran to three thousand copies. The Party no longer depended on the emigres for underground literature.

The revolutionaries were acquiring mastery of some of the elements of conspiratorial technique. They had learned certain tricks to throw off undercover men. For meetings they maintained special quarters, which were also used as hide-outs and communication posts. Such a kvartira was usually a modest flat rented by an actually or nominally married couple who kept a 'maid.' Hers was the most difficult part, for she had to deal with the other servants in the house, the porter and the tradespeople. Every effort was made not to arouse the suspicion of the neighbours. Care was taken to choose a lodging with windows facing the street or courtyard. A signal in one of them was a warning.

Counter-espionage was carried on for the Society by a member who was a Government clerk. At Mikhailov's suggestion, this Nikolay Kletochnikov entered the service of the Third Division and, having access to the secret files, kept the organization informed of the activities of the police.

Contributions from sympathizers formed a considerable part of the Society's income. Another source was the sale of publications. Twelve hundred copies of the first issue of Land and Liberty were sold on the day of its appearance. Of course, the Party had at its disposal the property of the members of the Centre. Among them was 'the millionaire,' also known as 'the saint of the revolution,' Dmjtry Lizogub [Under a transparent pseudonym he figures in Tolstoy's story, 'Human and Divine,' as a revolutionary whose heart is open to the message of Christ.], who had inherited a fortune worth 150,000 to 180,000 roubles and who wished nothing better than to devote all he had to the cause. But before his possessions could be turned into ready cash he was arrested, and in the end the Society got only a sum estimated between a few hundred and a few thousand roubles. The recently published expense account of Land and Liberty shows that during the last ten months of its existence the total outlay amounted to 5,964 roubles and 95 kopecks.

The act by which Land and Liberty first drew public attention to itself was a meeting on 6 December, 1876, in front of the Kazan Cathedral in Petersburg. This was the first open reyolutionary demonstration to take place in Russia. 'Three or four hundred participants, mainly students, gathered in the cathedral, where they ordered a prayer for the health of 'God's slave' Nikolay, meaning Chernyshevsky, and others, all martyrs to the people's cause. When the crowd emerged from the cathedral, an impromptu speech was made by a fiery young student, one Georgy Plekhanov, whose name was to become inextricably linked with the history of Russian Socialism. He excoriated the Government for rotting the country's best sons in prison. Thereupon a peasant lad, waving a red banner on which the words 'Land and Liberty' were embroidered in white silk, was hoisted on the shoulders of the crowd. A girl with flowing hair cried 'Forward!' and the demonstrators, swelled by the curious, moved down the Nevsky shouting: "Long live Land and Liberty! Long live the people! Death to the czars!' A few minutes later the procession was broken up by policemen, plain-clothes men and hoodlums. Some of the marchers were severely beaten. Over thirty men and women were seized, a few of them innocent bystanders and none of them members of the Society. They were given a speedy trial and received heavy penalties.

It appears that the demonstration had originally been planned by a group of workmen as a protest against the hardships of their lot, but that the students had taken it over, much to the disgust of the factory hands. The 'seventies were a period of rapid industrial expansion, and, what with the shameless exploitation that prevailed, there was considerable labour unrest. The decade was marked by sixty-six strikes in Petersburg alone. The Society did not fail to take advantage of the situation. It had a hand in several of the strikes that occurred in the capital. A leaflet that it printed was composed by the strikers themselves and entitled: The Voice of the People Housed By and Working For the Rascal Maxel (Maxwell, a manufacturer of British extraction). The populists no longer sought to convert factory workers in order to provide agitators for the villages. It was beginning to be realized that the wage-earners, though a product of the evil bourgeois order, had great revolutionary potentialities and could become a valuable ally of their rural fellow workers.

Already at this time there existed in the capital the nucleus of a revolutionary organization of a purely proletarian complexion: The Northern Union of Russian Workers. An offshoot of a workmen's circle, it came into being late in 1878 and was headed by two men of the people. The metal workers, who made up most of the membership -- this amounted to some two hundred men -- were a refractory lot. They were rather antagonistic to their mentors, the students, resenting particularly the factional strife to which these intellectuals were addicted. The Union lasted only a year. Two secret service agents, a married couple, found their way into it, and as a result the police were able to crush it. A remnant of the organization managed to start the first Russian underground paper written for and by city workers. The proof sheets of the initial, and last, issue of Rabochaya zarya (Workers' Dawn) were seized, together with the Union's press, in March, 1880.

Work among various sections of the population was conducted by special groups. A futile attempt was made to win over religious sectarians. The notion that they were particularly accessible to revolutionary propaganda had a strong hold on the radicals. Apparently nothing was done to enlist highway robbers, described in the statutes as a promising social category. Much attention was given to the student body. This was in a constant state of unrest. The Society had a hand in the disturbances which occurred in the universities in 1878. A member composed the petition requesting the right to form corporate organizations, which the students of the Medico-Surgical Institute in the capital handed to the Heir Apparent. The disorders resulted only in arrests and deportations.

The peasants continued to be the main object of concern. As few propagandists were available, it was decided to confine activities to the section of the Volga region extending from Nizhny-Novgorod (now Gorky) to Astrakhan, as a land where the tradition of rebellion was believed to be still alive. Flying propaganda tours were now no longer in order. The agitators were to live among the peasants and become 'citizens' of the locality where they were settled. It was not essential that they should disguise themselves as men or women of the people. They might choose an occupation that befitted an educated person. Once they had gained the confidence of the people, they were to take advantage of their position to stimulate in the villagers a sense of dignity and solidarity, to bolster up the prestige of the mir, to teach them how to protect their interests in the day-to-day struggle against landowners and officials. This was called 'propaganda by facts.' The settlers were also to seek out malcontents and born leaders, and form fighting units in preparation for local risings which were to be a prelude to a general overturn. The idea of using fraudulently the people's faith in the Czar for purposes of agitation was broached but resolutely rejected. The Chigirin affair was generally frowned upon. It had been carried out by men outside the ranks of Land and Liberty.

Ambitious plans were made: the agitators in each province were to be directed by a 'centre' in the provincial capital, and all the threads were to converge in the Basic Circle. Actually no more than a score of men and women established themselves in several villages. They did not stay there very long. Some found their humdrum tasks uncongenial; others had to leave their posts because they were compromised by the arrest of a comrade or because the hostility of the local powers proved too much for them. Vera Figner's was a case in point. It will be recalled that she had remained in Switzerland, when the rest of 'the Frietsch girls' left, to complete her medical course. But in response to Natanson's call she had returned home a few months before graduation. Now a member of Land and Liberty, she settled as a nurse in a Samara (now Kuibyshev) village. Overwhelmed by the poverty and squalor in which the villagers lived, she was too busy with her hordes of patients to think of anything but the immediate task. 'As far as propaganda was concerned,' she wrote in her memoirs, 'I didn't even open my mouth.' In the midst of her absorbing work she had to disappear because a letter involving her was found on an arrested comrade.

By the end of 1879 there wasn't a single clandestine rural cell in existence. Populism had suffered another defeat.

III

Aside from propaganda, which fell under the head of 'organization,' the Society's statutes called for disorganizing activities. These included the liberation of prisoners. On 11 August, 1876, even before Land and Liberty had come into being, several of Kropotkin's comrades contrived his escape from a prison hospital located on the outskirts of the capital. Smuggled out of Russia, he remained an emigre until in his old age the Revolution enabled him to repatriate^ himself. He died in 1921, a staunch opponent of the Soviet regime. After the conclusion of the Great Trial a futile attempt was made to free Myshkin. The escape of Stefanovich and two of his comrades from a Kiev jail was engineered, in May 1878, by Frolenko, who had hired himself out as a prison guard and came to be entrusted with the keys to the cells.

Doing away with informers was another 'disorganizing' practice. An unsuccessful attempt to kill one was made in June, 1876. The same year a spy was killed. The following year a renegade turned informer was dispatched. The youthful idealists were developing a cold cruelty. By its high-handed and often brutal treatment of propagandists, the Government was 'turning flies into hornets,' as one of them phrased it. They took to carrying concealed firearms, and sometimes these went off. In 1878 and 1879 there were several cases of armed resistance to arrest.

Under the heading of 'disorganization' the statutes prescribed 'systematic destruction of the most harmful or prominent members of the Government, and in general of people who are the mainstay of the political and social order we hate.' There was nothing systematic about this terrorism. It began as spontaneous acts of self-defence and revenge.

The first official thus attacked was General Trepov, Chief of Police in the capital. On 25 July, 1877, he visited the House of Preliminary Detention, where political prisoners were held pending trial or transfer to another jail. Annoyed by the behaviour of a certain Bogolubov. who had just been condemned to fifteen years of hard labour for demonstrating before the Kazan Cathedral, he ordered him flogged. Although Trepov's order was illegal, it was carried out with the approval of the Minister of Justice. Bogolubov's comrades in prison were roused to a frenzy of protest. When the news leaked out, indignation in radical circles knew no bounds. Several men came from the South, bent on vengeance. They were forestalled by Vera Zasulich, the young woman first mentioned in connexion with Nechayev's exploits.

Because of a letter received from him, she had been imprisoned for two years, then deported, and afterwards, while she was in Kharkov studying to be a midwife, kept under police surveillance. Eventually she fell in with a group of buntars. Since the spring of 1877 she had been in the capital, working as a typesetter on the press of Land and Liberty. When she heard of the outrage committed against Bogolubov, who was a complete stranger to her, she inquired if the Society was planning any action against Trepov, and received an evasive answer. Time was passing, and nothing was being done. She decided to take matters into her own hands.

She was staying with another girl, and the two made up their minds that on the same day they would attempt to assassinate both Trepov and the prosecutor in the Great Trial, which was then drawing to a close. They postponed action until the verdict was handed down, so as not to influence it adversely. Vera Zasulich described her state as neither life nor death, but she was completely self-possessed. The trial came to an end on 23 January, 1878, and the following morning she called on the Chief of Police while he was receiving petitioners and fired a shot at him point-blank, inflicting a grave, though not fatal, wound. To avoid injuring anyone else, she promptly dropped the revolver and gave herself up. Her comrade failed to get her man: he happened not to receive visitors when she called at his office.

Curiously enough, the would-be assassin was held to be not a political, but a common criminal. And so the case was tried publicly by a jury. There was no doubt in anyone's mind as to the verdict. It happened that the counsel for the defence, unlike the prosecutor, was a brilliant lawyer and the presiding judge a man of liberal sympathies. During the proceedings there were moments when it seemed that Trepov, not the assailant, was on trial. Nevertheless, the verdict of not guilty brought in by the jury on 31 March came as a complete surprise to the prisoner, while delighting a large segment of the public, including some highly stationed functionaries.

Vera Zasulich became the heroine of the hour, admired even in the salons, though there was some disappointment at her being a dowdy girl with somewhat Mongoloid features, past her first youth, who had the unpleasant habit of shouting like one deaf when she forgot herself. 'Glory to the Russian nation that has produced a woman capable of such a deed!' wrote Plekhanov in a special leaflet issued by Land and Liberty. Another underground sheet declared her acquittal to be the beginning of a new era. According to the Revue des Deux Mondes, for forty-eight hours Europe forgot everything to talk only of the new Judith, the Muscovite CharlotteCorday. There were sanguine spirits who saw the jury's amazing verdict as the fall of the Russian Bastille.

The Bastille stood firm. An hour or two after the court was emptied, the Czar issued an order for the girl's rearrest. The word was late in reaching the prison, to which she had returned to fetch her belongings, and she emerged from the gates unmolested, to be greeted by an enthusiastic crowd and borne down the street. Police and gendarmes soon appeared on the scene. They placed her in a carriage and attempted to disperse the assemblage. A scuffle ensued, in the course of which several shots rang out, and when it was over, there remained on the spot the body of a nineteen-year-old boy. Land and Liberty blamed the gendarmes for his death. Vera Zasulich believed that he had committed suicide. If so, he acted either in a state of hysterical exaltation or in an effort to distract the attention of the police from their quarry. As a matter of fact, in the confusion the girl was whisked off, and a few days later escaped abroad, settling in Geneva, where Henri Rochefort, the Communard, found a room for her.

In one sense her shot did open a new era: it initiated a series of acts of violence on the part of the revolutionaries. In February a spy was killed and an attempt was made on the life of the assistant public prosecutor in Kiev. In May the Chief of the Gendarmerie in the same city was assassinated. The Government was not intimidated. Political prisoners continued to be mistreated, and on 2 August there was an execution in Odessa of a revolutionary who in resisting arrest wounded some of his captors. Two days later Kravchinsky, who had returned from abroad to edit the organ of Land and Liberty, stabbed to death General Mezentzev, the head of the Third Division, in broad daylight in the very heart of the capital. He had attacked his victim as he did on the chivalrous theory that only a hired murderer struck from behind, and he escaped in a carriage drawn by the very racehorse that had carried Kropotkin to liberty. The effect of this terrorist act was stunning. It was as if the city woke up that morning, the~assassin wrote, to find 'that the ground under it was mined.' Years afterwards a comrade of Kravchinsky remarked that in view of the utter inefficiency of the police under Mezentzev, every effort should have been made to protect the man.

The Government's reply to this assassination was a ukase handing over all political offences involving the use of force to military courts. This proved no deterrent. In February, 1879, Prince Dmitry Kropotkin, cousin of the anarchist and himself Governor-General of Kharkov, who was held responsible for the brutal treatment of politicals in the Kharkov Central Prison, was fatally wounded, and in March there was an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Mezentzev's successor. This was General Drenteln, who had erected deportation to the dreaded Yakutsk tundras into a system. [The attack was carried out by Leon Mirski, a twenty-year-old student. He is said to have been motivated, in part, by the desire to impress his fiancee, who had been thrilled by Kravchinsky's exploit. Arrested several months later and incarcerated in the Fortress of Peter and Paul, it was he who is believed to have informed against his fellow prisoner, Nechayev.] Also two spies were done away with. Then, on the morning of 2 April, Alexander Solovyov, an 'illegal' who had returned to Petersburg from a village settlement, discharged a revolver at the Emperor as the latter, in taking his constitutional, was crossing the Palace Square, but did not injure him. The assailant was seized, court-martialled, and, on 28 May, hanged. 'He combined the courage of a hero,' Vera Figner wrote of him, 'with the self-abnegation of an ascetic and the kindness of a child.' Earlier in the month Valerian Osinsky, a fragile youth who was the leading Southern terrorist, was executed after watching the capital punishment of two comrades. Before the end of the year eleven men, including Lizogub, were put to death.

IV

At first the 'disorganizing' activities were warmly acclaimed by the membership of Land and Liberty. Soon, however, 'terror,' as these acts came to be called, began to be frowned upon. Some held that it was using up too large a share of the Society's severely limited resources, both human and financial. Moreover, along with the emphasis on terror went an ideological shift that was heresy and, indeed, apostasy in the eyes of simon-pure populists. These believed that 'disorganizing' should play a subordinate part and be employed only as a weapon of self-defence. It was not the business of Land and Liberty, they argued, to kill high Government officials, but to arouse the masses to active protest in the name of their economic interests. The propertied classes -- they were the enemy. 'Let the Government take a neutral stand in the duel between the revolutionists and the exploiters,' Kravchinsky, for one, was naive enough to say, 'and it will not be molested.' In any event, political regimes were a matter of indifference to the people. When the forest was cleared away, the wolves perished of themselves: once the iniquitous social order was destroyed, the monarchy would collapse of its own weight.

This strict apolitical stand, an aberration characteristic of Populism, was, however, beginning to be seriously challenged. The idea of an offensive against the monarchy in the name of political democracy was coming to the fore. The attempt to rouse the masses had obviously failed. And that in spite of the fact that the agitators were no longer callow youths and that they had adopted what they considered a practical programme. In an effort to find a way out of the impasse, the populists were beginning to question some of the dogmata of their faith. Might not a constitutional regime guaranteeing civil liberties prove a blessing, after all? The propertied classes could not be expected to battle for such a regime. The monarchy gave them all they wanted: cheap labour and freedom to plunder. It was therefore incumbent on the revolutionists to fight the autocracy, taking care not to sacrifice the distant goal to the nearer one. If the greater revolution could not yet be carried out, perhaps a less ambitious programme could be effected by conspirators striking a blow at the central Government. Terroristic acts were being committed in self-defence and in vengeance; could not terrorism be used as a weapon of offence, designed to wrest from the Czar liberal concessions? Would not heroic deeds shatter the apathy of the masses and destroy the prestige of the Government?

As the year 1878 opened this prestige was at a low ebb. The Russo-Turkish conflict had laid bare the incompetence and corruption of the bureaucracy, and the Treaty of Berlin, signed in July, was a humiliating conclusion to an inglorious and costly war. It seemed an easy matter to overthrow a regime so deficient in leadership. The first issue of Land and Liberty, dated October, 1878, had it that the revolution was a question of days, perhaps of hours. Even the patient liberals were stirring. Shortly after the assassination of Mezentzev the Emperor appealed to the population for assistance in combating the revolutionary movement. In response one zemstvo board hinted, in an address to the Czar, that the sovereign who had liberated the Bulgarians from the Turkish yoke and granted them a representative regime could do no less for the Russian people who had borne the burden of the war. There were liberals who went so far as to negotiate for a common front with the revolutionists. It is possible that the lull in terrorist acts during the winter of 1878-9 was the result of these discussions. A few arrests and deportations, and the flare-up of the constitutional movement was over, but it had encouraged the political orientation within Land and Liberty.

This orientation was strongest in the South. Radicals of Jewish birth, belonging as they did to a group that was denied elementary human rights, were apt to welcome a liberal regime more warmly than others. Aron Zundelevich, for one, said that he loved America. Civil liberties figure in the platform of the Northern Union of Russian Workers, printed early in 1879. In Plekhanov's words, it made the orthodox populists feel like a hen that had hatched a duckling. When in the pages of Land and Liberty the Union was gently but firmly upbraided for tainting Populism with political demands, it had the good sense to retort that there was nothing inconsistent about fighting for social revolution and fighting for 'political liberty,' since the one would be served by the other.

The political trend found its most extreme expression in a splinter group, the Society of the People's Liberation, which originated late in 1877. It consisted of Tkachev and the handful of his fellow 'Jacobins' at home and abroad. Nabat, the little review which he ran, was its organ. According to its statutes, the organization aimed to overthrow the monarchy and, having seized power, decree an order based on political and economic equality. 'That the Society may flourish and achieve its great aims,' Section 12 runs, 'all means are considered good.' Land and Liberty professed the same belief, but adhered to the standards of ordinary morality, while the Society of the People's Liberation reverted to Nechayev's ways. Its allegedly all-powerful Central Committee urged the members to spy on one another and to infiltrate other revolutionary organizations, so as to bore from within.

The few leaflets bearing the Society's imprint stress the conquest of political power and play down the social revolution. A pamphlet brought out soon after Vera Zasulich's shot is the earliest attempt to justify the tactics of systematic terror. It scorns 'anarchist chimeras and Utopias' as well as 'bourgeois theories of individual freedom,' hails a return to the path followed by Karakozov and Nechayev, urges that type be melted down for bullets and shots be substituted for sermons.

It is uncertain if the Society of the People's Liberation attempted to put its theories into practice. Its following was very small, but not negligible, at a time when all the radical trends were represented by lilliputian groups. It claimed credit for the acts of terror which marked the year 1878. This the populists, including Vera Zasulich, Kravchinsky, and Stefanovich, flatly denied, declaring publicly that Russian social-revolutionaries could have nothing in common with the editors of Nabat or the theories they promote. It is not impossible that the group had a hand in some terrorist acts. The expropriation of the Kherson branch of the Imperial Treasury in the summer of 1879 was the work of a member of the Society. A million and a half roubles were taken, but the police recovered most of the money.

Late in 1878, at a conference of the editors of Land and Liberty, Morozov remarked that he intended to contribute an article to Nabat. A fellow editor recoiled in horror. 'There isn't a single revolutionary in Russia,' he cried, 'who would approve the seizure of the government by a group of conspirators.' Morozov ventured to doubt this, and justly. 'If there are such,' was the response, 'they are our enemies!'

V

The question of the place of terrorism in the activities of Land and Liberty had become a storm centre. The advocates of the dagger and the pistol looked down upon the derevenshchiks ('villagists,' i.e., partisans of work among the peasantry) as ne'er-do-wells, as peaceful triflers, while the latter regarded the terrorists as renegades. The unity of the organization was in jeopardy.

The lack of harmony was particularly glaring in the management of the review, Land and Liberty. The editorial board was a house divided against itself. It consisted of Kravchinsky, Klemenz, and Morozov. Kravchinsky, although he had himself carried out a spectacular political murder, held no brief for terror and was, indeed, like Klemenz, an orthodox narodnik. On the other hand, Morozov was an enthusiastic adherent of a terrorist conspiracy against the Government. A frail, gentle youth, he cast himself in the role of a William Tell and walked around armed to the teeth.

When Kravchinsky escaped abroad, he was replaced by Plekhanov and Tikhomirov, a new member of the group. Tikhomirov kept to the middle of the road, but Plekhanov was an uncompromising enemy of the political orientation and of terror. As a result, Morozov found himself blocked. Yet the paper failed to maintain a consistent policy on the acute question of terrorism and presented a spectacle of ideological confusion. This by no means disconcerted those who, like Mikhailov, cared little for theory. What was important, he said, was not the contents of the journal, but the fact that it was printed and distributed in defiance of the law.

In March, 1879, the Society started another periodical, Listok (Bulletin), which came out at shorter intervals. Here Morozov had things rather his own way, except that he had to cope with the head printer, Maria Krylova, a fanatical 'villagist,' who went into hysterics whenever she was handed copy with the tenor of which she disagreed. Listok was, in fact, the organ of the terrorist faction of the Society. Its second issue carried a paean to 'political assassination' as the most effective weapon in the revolutionary arsenal. The article brought home to all the conviction that the Society was headed for a split.

The terrorists were mostly active in the South. In a sense they were an organization -- a very loose one -- within an organization. Their link with the Petersburg Centre was weak. Never numbering more than fifteen, they styled themselves 'The Executive Committee of the Social-Revolutionary Party.' Its seal, showing an axe, a dagger, and a revolver crossed, was first used in a leaflet issued by the Committee on the occasion of the murder of a spy in Rostov on 1 February, 1878. Such leaflets, listing the charges against the victim, were usually issued after each terrorist act. The Committee also sent warnings and threats to officials.

Solovyov's attempted regicide caused a great stir in the Society. On arriving in the capital, he had applied to Land and Liberty for assistance in carrying out his plan. The meeting at which the matter was discussed witnessed a violent clash of the two factions. The orthodox populists argued that the people's veneration for the Czar should be respected, that an attack on him might result in a popular outburst against the propagandists settled in the villages and lead to reprisals threatening the existence of the Society. Some wanted the would-be regicide seized and tied up as a madman.

In the end it was decided that the Society could not offer the man any aid, but that neither could it forbid individual members to help him. He was refused the use of the racehorse that had whisked Kropotkin and Kravchinsky to liberty and that was kept in a livery stable for just such occasions. But several members enabled him to obtain the revolver he fired at the Czar and the dose of poison with which he unsuccessfully tried to kill himself.

As was anticipated, Solovyov's shot led to severe repressive measures, which hampered the Society's activities. Under these circumstances, was the attempt on the Czar's life to be repeated? And how was the factional struggle to be dealt with? Something had to be done. It was finally agreed to call a conference in Voronezh to decide the future policy of the organization. The city boasted a venerable shrine visited by throngs, and it was thought that the simultaneous arrival of a dozen or two men and women would not attract attention.

The partisans of political action overestimated the strength of their opponents. They believed that, being in the minority, they would simply be expelled from the Society. They resolved to organize beforehand, so as to be able to act as a group immediately upon expulsion. Accordingly, on 15 June, they gathered, secretly from the rest, at Lipetzk, not far from Voronezh. The meetings -- they lasted three days -- were held in a grove which was the town's picnicking grounds. In all a dozen persons participated in the deliberations. They included several activists who were not members of the Society, as well as Stepan Shiryayev, the moving spirit of a newly formed terrorist circle, which went by the name of 'Liberty or Death' and seems to have been loosely affiliated with Land and Liberty. The conferrers acted as though the schism had already taken place. On the other hand, they were willing to continue under the banner of the Society, provided they were free to carry on the fight in their own way. The gathering deviated sufficiently from populist orthodoxy to pronounce itself for a political revolution, with terror as part of its tactics. It also adopted the elaborate statutes of a conspiratorial society, centralized, hierarchical, close-knit. Mikhailov made a fiery speech, which was an indictment of the Czar and pointed to a continuation of the attempts at regicide.

From Lipetzk the conferrers made their way to Voronezh to take part in the conventicle there. Opening on 18 June, this went on for three or four days and was attended by a score of men and women. It happened that the 'politicals' were in the majority, so that their expulsion was out of the question. The spirit of compromise ruled the conference. Alone Plekhanov took an intransigeant stand, arguing that terror was incompatible with propaganda among the masses and indeed meant the death of revolutionary Populism. He stomped out of the conference in a huff and sent in his resignation, pointing out, among other things, that the 'disorganizing' activities were disorganizing not the Government but the Society.

The programme of Land and Liberty was left practically intact. Propaganda was placed on an equal footing with 'disorganizing' activities, which were to include a kind of agrarian terrorism, resembling Irish 'Ribbonism,' and a majority voted for regicide. The Executive Committee, as the terrorist group continued to be known, was allotted one third of the funds and given full autonomy. Moreover, the 'politicals' managed to secure control of the Society's journal and to get two of their men, Mikhailov and Frolenko, on to a newly elected three-man Board.

After Solovyov's shot it became impossible to continue the propaganda among the Petersburg workmen, so Plekhanov, who had quit the Society, went to Kiev. Mikhailov, too, happened to be there. The former friends were now profoundly at variance. '1 love the work among the people.' Mikhailov told Plekhanov's wife, 'I was ready to carry it on at any cost, but ... we are powerless to accomplish anything under the autocracy, all our people will perish without results. We have only one alternative: either to give up revolutionary activity or engage the government in single combat. We have enough strength, heroism, capacity tor self-sacrifice to follow the latter course.'

For a while it looked as though Land and Liberty had weathered the storm. It was a storm in a tea-cup: at the time of the Voronezh conference the regular membership of the Society consisted of thirty-three men and women. But the peace that had been patched up was a bad peace. Friction between the two factions, far from ceasing, had increased. Reinforced by new arrivals from abroad, including Stefanovich and Vera Zasulich, who, curiously enough, abhorred the emphasis on terror and the trend toward political revolution, the 'vil-lagists' started planning to resume work among the peasants, but no serious effort was possible: energy was used chiefly to remove misunderstandings and stop wrangles. Not a single issue of either Land and Liberty or The Bulletin appeared after the conference. There was no mending the breach. So distressing was the schism that it is said to have driven one youth to attempt suicide. The situation was all the graver as arrests had nearly wiped out the cells in the South and had weakened the Northern Centre.

There was no alternative but to sever the ties that connected the 'Executive Committee" with the Society. A commission was appointed to liquidate the organization and divide the assets between the two factions. On 15 August, 1879, Land and Liberty ceased to exist.

Source URL: http://www.ditext.com/yarmolinsky/yar11.html

* * *

Road to Revolution

Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism, 1956.

Chapter 12

The People's Will

A separate existence was now assumed by what had been the two factions of Land and Liberty. It had been agreed that neither should use that name. Accordingly, the group of orthodox populists called itself Narodnaya Partiya (Popular or People's Party), but was better known as Chornyi Peredel (Black Repartition,) a phrase describing the periodic redistribution of land and taxes by the mir. It was also the title of the organization's journal which bore the motto, 'Land and Liberty!' on its masthead.

When it was formed, in the autumn of 1879, Black Repartition consisted of a score of men and women. Of organizing talent there was little, except for Pavel Axelrod, a former member of the Chaikovsky Circle, later a buntar, successful in propagandizing factory hands. Plekhanov, a born ideologue, was the brains of the group. It also included Yakov Stefanovich and Lev Deutsch, 'the Orestes and Pylades of the revolution.' The fact that Vera Zasulich, who had returned from abroad in 1879, was a member of the group did most to raise its prestige. In the division of the assets of Land and Liberty it had come off rather badly. The other faction got 'the Foreign Office' in the person of Zundelevich, as well as the Heavenly Chancery and the printing press. The loss of this last was particularly serious. After some weeks another press was obtained. The business of setting it up, preparing the text of the opening number of the new journal and collecting the funds necessary to cover the cost of the issue absorbed most of the group's energies during the first months of its existence.

The new year brought disaster. Plekhanov, as well as Stefanovich, Deutsch and Vera Zasulich fled to Switzerland, and this they did not merely to escape arrest. They withdrew from the battlefield in a mood of discouragement and apathy. Chornyi Peredel was left practically leaderless. And then, a typesetter on the secret press having turned informer, the police seized it, together with all the copies of the first issue of the journal, and arrested the four people who ran the press, including 'the Mother of God.' Other arrests followed, and it looked as if it was all up with the group.

It survived the crisis, chiefly owing to Axelrod's energy and devotion. He kept it alive by making a number of proselytes, mostly students and young naval officers. The first issue of Chornyi Peredel, with the original date, 15 January, 1880, but with some additions to the text, was reprinted in London and copies smuggled into Russia. The editors proclaimed their anarchist faith and in the next breath swore allegiance to 'the principles of scientific socialism.' The leading article, by Plekhanov, was a vigorous restatement of the populist thesis. A large proportion of the slim issue was given over to an account of the Chigirin affair, from the pen of Stefanovich himself. An editorial note stated that the publication of the piece implied no approval of exploiting 'the political idols' of the masses.

The second number of Chornyi Peredel carried 'the Programme' of the group. It did not differ much from that of the defunct Land and Liberty. The organization set itself the long-term task of agitating for an agrarian revolution, which was to be the first step toward a complete reconstruction of society on socialist foundations. This, however, did not mean the teachings of Marx and Engels, but the platform of the Bakuninist wing of the International, which had not survived its founder and was then largely a memory. Political action was described as 'necessary,' but given a subordinate place, as was propaganda among industrial workers. In commenting on the Programme, Plekhanov took exception to this last point. It was wisest, he wrote, to distribute available energies rather evenly between town and country, choosing the slogan: 'Worker, take the factory; peasant, take the land.' The centre of gravity in Russia was shifting toward1 industry, so that 'we cannot determine beforehand from what classes of the working population the main cadres of the social-revolutionary army will be recruited when the hour of the economic overturn strikes.'

Axelrod, who had gone to Geneva to submit the draft of the statutes to the expatriate members, failed to return. The arrest, in July, of Yelizaveta Durnoyo was another serious blow to the group: she was its chief 'angel.' The daughter of a wealthy army officer and the niece of the Governor of Moscow, she is said to have turned over to the Society the sum of sixteen thousand roubles. Against odds, the work was carried on, largely by new converts, of whom there were about thirty. In addition to the main circle in Petersburg, there was a branch in Moscow, as well as handfuls of adherents in Kazan and in several southern centres. The distaste for subordination prevalent among the people who gravitated toward Black Repartition made the provincial cells virtually independent.

The situation was fraught with irony. The groups were supposed to centre their efforts on the peasantry, and the membership waxed eloquent on the need of getting closer to the rural masses. Yet they failed to secure a foothold in a single village. Propaganda outside intellectual circles was confined to city workers. Study groups were formed for factory hands, and aid was offered to strikers. The society helped, in the spring of 1880, to revive the Union of South-Russian Workers, which had been in suspended animation since 1875. Its new phase lasted no more than a year, but in that period it had a membership of some six hundred in Kiev along. The Union adhered to orthodox Populism, but advocated terrorism, though only against economic exploiters, not against officials. To assist the propagandist, Black Repartition printed half a dozen issues of a review, Zerno (Seed), written down to the level of the simple workman and offering him popular essays in Marxist economics and stories with a message.

Three more numbers of Chornyi Peredel came out, the last one dated December, 1881. The journal gave the organization whatever body and substance it possessed. A number of leaflets and a revised version of the Programme, dated 7 April, 1881, were also issued. Here nationalization of the land, the factories, and the other major means of production is substituted for 'redistribution of the land,' the objective that had figured in the earlier text. Further, the document recognizes the existence of a proletariat with interests and ideals different from those of the peasantry. All these publications were run off on a clandestine press in Minsk under idyllic circumstances made possible by the laxity of the local police. An emissary from the capital discovered to his horror that on a vacant lot near the house where the press was located boys flew kites with discarded sheets of Chornyi Peredel.

II

The other faction, which espoused political revolution and the tactics of terror, took the name of the Party (or Society) of the People's Will (Narodnaya Volya). The term volya means 'freedom' as well as 'will.' It was used here in the latter sense. A member of the Party was a narodovoletz.

Structurally the new society was closely patterned on Land and Liberty. The People's Will was organized as an association consisting of a central nucleus exercising a measure of control over local chapters, which functioned in the provinces, and over special units which confined their activities to occupational groups, such as workmen, students, army officers. The hard core of the organization was known as 'the Executive Committee.' This was the direct descendant of the cell of that name which had existed within Land and Liberty and which had formally constituted itself at the Lipetzk Conference in June, 1879. The statutes adopted by the Conference became the statutes of the People's Will.

The Executive Committee was a misnomer: it was a self-appointed and self-perpetuating body. The Committee had a monopoly on the more ambitious terroristic enterprises, but by no means limited itself to them. It formulated the policies of the Party and sought to maintain its ideological unity. Every effort was made to build it into a myth, to create the impression that it was an august, inaccessible, all-powerful body carrying on its activities behind an impregnable wall of secrecy. The fewest persons came in direct contact with the members. In dealings with the outside world these were required to pass themselves off as its 'agents.' It also had real agents: activists connected with subsidiary groups who were called upon to assist the centre. A Managing Board, elected by the Committee, acted during the intervals between its sittings. Once admitted to the Committee, one could not resign. This rule, like others, seems to have remained on paper.

In the half dozen years of the Executive Committee's existence, fewer than fifty men and women served on it. Because of arrests, the number of members who were active at any one time was considerably smaller. The total membership was authoritatively estimated at five hundred. This figure apparently does not include fellow travellers. A list of persons associated, however tenuously, with the People's Will, compiled by a group of survivors of the movement, comprises over two thousand two hundred names. The register covers the entire period of the Party's life, including the 1886-96 decade when its existence was nominal.

The strength of the People's Will lay in the fact that the membership included a few dedicated spirits, men and women animated by the faith that makes heroes and martyrs. The biographies of those who made up the revolutionary elite were apt to have certain features in common. Such a man would early be responsive to radical ideas and hospitable toward populist sentiment; while at school or in the university, he would be active in a reading club or a propagandist group; his studies would be interrupted, because he would be deported for participation in academic disturbances, or else he would abandon the lecture hall to 'go to the people.' He would suffer exile or imprisonment, which would enhance his sense of martyrdom, and nourish dreams of violent upheavals; on being released, he would join Land and Liberty, unless preferring the part of a free-lance buntar; finally he would find himself in the ranks of the People's Will. Not that the social background of the activists, men and women, was the same. Frolenko was the son of a charwoman; Shiryayev was born into the family of a serf. Trigoni's father was a Major-General, and Sofya Perovskaya was the daughter of the Governor of Petersburg. But in the main, the People's Will, like the rival faction, was an organization of intellectuals or semi-intellectuals recruited from the middle-class, the clergy, the lower gentry. Even those who were of peasant or proletarian stock had had the benefit of an education. If culturally it was a rather homogeneous group, it reflected the ethnic variety of the vast country. In addition to Great Russians, the Executive Committee included a Ukrainian, three Jews, several persons of Germanic stock, the offspring of a Russian-Norwegian marriage, another of a Russian-Georgian union, a woman of Polish descent and the son of a Greek.

Alexander Mikhailov was perhaps the greatest asset the organization possessed. He was its watchdog. Day in, day out, he preached and practised discipline and caution, fighting tooth and nail for centralized control. He devoted himself to building up the apparatus of the People's Will, as he had previously built up that of Land and Liberty. No detail capable of menacing the safety of the Party escaped him. He knew how to order and use men, and he obeyed the rules he laid down. A stutterer, like many earnest people, he had no private ambitions, no personal ties. His room was enlivened solely by the motto: 'Do not forget your duty.' The cause was his religion. It was inseparable from his belief in God, that is, he said, in truth, justice, love. But there was something businesslike and matter-of-fact about the way he worshipped his deity. His last testament was a set of practical injunctions to his comrades. Although he was aware that as a revolutionary he was a doomed man, he considered himself particularly fortunate. 'From my earliest youth,' he wrote at the end of his career, 'a lucky star has shone over my head.' Annihilation held no terrors for him. 'Who does not fear death,' he liked to say, 'is almost omnipotent.'

Mikhailov exemplified the sober, puritanical, ascetic type of revolutionary. Among his fellows the antipodal type of the dare-devil, exuberant romantic, acting out of an impulse to live fully and strenuously, was also represented. Such was Alexander Barannikov, born, like Mikhailov, into a family of gentlefolk. Finding military school uncongenial, he escaped from it by making the authorities believe him drowned. He was then eighteen. Leaving the capital, he fell in with a group of agitators in the Don region and worked as a field hand, a fisherman, a stevedore. Then he joined a village settlement planted by Land and Liberty, but soon grew impatient with peaceful activities. When the Serbs rose against Turkey, he went to Montenegro to learn how partisans fight and saw some action. Returning to Russia, he took part in the assassination of Mezentzev, and he naturally found himself in the ranks of the People's Will. His character was in keeping with his appearance : jet-black hair -- his mother was a Georgian -- eyes so dark that they seemed without pupils, a tense, passionate air. Living in the moment, reaching out for experience, he yet gave the impression of a tightly wound spring. An avenging angel, as he was called, he was a figure out of a Byronic romance. His testament, penned in prison in the expectation of execution -- he was actually given in 1882 a life term of hard labour, from which death delivered him a year later -- ends with this rhetorical apostrophe to his comrades: 'Live and triumph; we triumph and die.'

Another striking figure was Mikhail Grachevsky, a former divinity student turned village teacher and, later, mechanic. With his nominal wife he occupied the flat in which one of the Party's printing presses was installed. He was a fanatic, a spiritual descendant of the schismatics who burned themselves to death rather than yield an iota of their faith. Sentenced to a life term of hard labour, he was kept in a Schlüssenburg prison. As a protest against the regime there, he ended his life, in 1887, by setting himself on fire after soaking his clothes with kerosene from his lamp.

The Executive Committee was a band of conspirators and political assassins. Andrey Zhelyaboy reluctantly accepted this role, but it did not fit him. Powerfully built, full-blooded, magnetic, possessed of great drive and energy, somewhat histrionic yet capable of clear thinking, he had the makings of a tribune or a leader of men. 'There was about him,' wrote a comrade, 'a certain ruthlessness, of the kind that goes with strength moving forward irresistibly and pushing others before it.'

For an unusually long time he was content to remain an obscure soldier in the ranks. And then, overnight, he found himself among the top commanders of the small cohort of the revolution. Born a serf, he grew up in the Crimea, a frontier region where the peasantry was less cowed than in central Russia. His former owner saw him through secondary school, and a scholarship enabled him to study law at the University of Odessa. He had come under the sway of radical ideas while still at school, and as a student he held clandestine classes for seamstresses, reading to them Hood's 'Song of the Shirt.' His academic career came to an end in 1871, when he was twenty-one, because he had led a student protest against a tactless professor.

He eked out a meagre living in Odessa by teaching school and tutoring. His circumstances did not improve when he married the daughter of a well-to-do industrialist. Nor did marriage dampen his interest in the revolution. He leaned toward Lavrovism, but did not 'go to the people.' In the winter of 1874-75 he spent some months in prison. Released, he resumed his former mode of life, except that during the summer he would be farming in his native village. His wife worked with him in the fields, but sometimes she would lie down in a ditch and cry, remembering her piano. For a narodnik, he showed a curious interest in the political radicalism professed by the groups of Ukrainian nationalists that existed at this time, though he could not work up any enthusiasm for their programme of turning the Empire into a federation of states.

A defendant in the Great Trial of 1877-78, he was acquitted. He returned to farming, but soon reappeared in Odessa, where he assumed the status of an illegal. Though aware of the objections to it, he had come to the conclusion that the use of terror was unavoidable. 'History moves terribly slowly,' he told a friend, 'we must give it a push.' At the Lipetzk conference, where his appearance was something of a surprise, he leapt to the fore. Both at that gathering and at the Voronezh meetings he espoused a political orientation so warmly that he scandalized the orthodox populists. 'He is a constitutionalist!' they cried, appalled, after listening to one of his speeches. A novice among veterans, he was soon the moving spirit behind the activities of the People's Will.

Its feminine members rendered the organization indispensable services in various auxiliary capacities. The top leadership included at least three women. A conspirator of both temperament and conviction was Maria Oshanina (nee Olovennikova), the eldest of three sisters, all of whom were in the revolutionary movement. Among her plain, blowsy female comrades she stood out because of her looks and her manners. She had character and courage and intelligence, but, sceptic that she was, lacked the moral integrity and austere devotion to the cause that distinguished Vera Figner and Sofyja Perovskaya. The former had given up peaceful propaganda and was elected to the Executive Committee. A rather mediocre organizer, she was an effective agitator. In her bearing there was something that suggested the figure of Victory.

Perovskaya joined the People's Will after much hesitation, but once in its fighting ranks, she became irreplaceable. Like Mikhailov, she embodied duty and discipline. If she was severe with others, she was even more so toward herself. She not only planned and directed; she was the first to go under fire, and she chose the most responsible and dangerous post. The blonde, thin-lipped, big-browed, self-possessed slip of a girl, who in spite of her severe garb looked younger than her twenty-six years, concealed a heart of steel under her gentle exterior. A comrade must have had her in mind when he observed to a fellow revolutionary: 'Have you noticed that our women are more cruel than we men?'

During the Land and Liberty days she had, among other things, taken charge of correspondence with political prisoners. She would also visit them in an effort to keep up their morale. In this way she came to know Tikhomirov. The two fell in love and indeed, decided to get married. But nothing came of it. According to Tikhomirov, she could submit in love only to a man stronger than herself, which he was not. He added that when she met a strong man in the person of Zhelyabov, she became his slave. A comrade called Zhelyabov her first and only love. Presumably, it was not an unrequited passion. When Zhelyabov joined the terrorists he had abandoned his wife and infant son, while breaking the other ties that bound him to the old existence.

Although emotionally involved, Sofya Perovskaya shrank from accepting personal happiness as long as comrades were languishing behind bars or perishing on the scaffold, and while the people were suffering under the yoke of despotism. Some of her fellow activists held that love and marriage were incompatible with work for the revolution. Yet a professed Amazon, Olga Lubatovich, fell madly in love with Morozov. It was said that when they were together Fate itself could not touch them. He was arrested while she was in Geneva, where she had gone to be delivered of their child. Men and women, thrown together in this dangerous life, not unnaturally entered into intimate relations. Unions were formed, with or without benefit of clergy. Barannikov married Maria Oshanina. Children were born, sometimes in prison or in Siberian exile. A nominal marriage on occasion turned into a real one. It would seem that in personal relations the same intensity often obtained that marked the feeling for the cause.

III

The beginnings of the People's Will were not inauspicious. It started out with a nucleus that had been in existence for some years. There was money in the cashbox, and a sizable printing-press was at its service. It lost no time in making itself heard. Early in October, 1879, the first issue of its organ, also called Narodnaya volya, was being eagerly if stealthily read. The opening statement was a declaration of loyalty to the slogan of 'Land and Liberty.' But the keynote was sounded in an article from the pen of Tikhomirov, entitled 'Delenda est Carthago.' The Czar's autocratic regime was the Carthage that must be utterly destroyed. The cry reverberates throughout the literature put forth by the Society. It was repeated with what was practically its dying breath in the editorial dated 1 October, 1885, which appeared in the last issue of Narodnaya volya.

Here was a sharp departure from populist orthodoxy. Several considerations were advanced to justify the political orientation. The Russian State, it was argued, was the chief exploiter and oppressor and the mother of all exploitation and oppression. As long as it existed, the lot of the masses could not be bettered. In Russia reform meant revolution. A representative government was bound to benefit the people. Again, the despotic system must be annihilated before a powerful middle-class was formed under its aegis. In the West the monarchy had been overthrown by the bourgeoisie. In Russia the historic task fell to the masses and their vanguard, the Party. And let there be no fear that in attacking the State the revolutionaries would be pulling chestnuts from the fire for others: there was no organized force in the country capable of snatching the fruits of victory from the people. In fact, the Society's spokesmen asserted that in Russian circumstances a political revolution could not but be also a social revolution. The theory did much to help a narodnik overcome his taste for political action.

The People's Will did not share the anarchist animus against all centralized political authority. On the other hand, the idea of the Party seizing power and dictatorially effecting an economic revolution was generally repudiated as 'a despotic Utopia.' Narodnaya volya did not consider its break with the apolitical stand as a betrayal of Populism. Its 'Programme,' printed in the third issue of its organ, dated 1 January, 1880, opened with the statement: 'According to our fundamental convictions, we are socialists and populists.' To the framers of this document Populim was, above all, a democratic faith in the will of the people as the only source and sanction of social institutions, while Socialism was a vague ideal of justice and equality ensuring the material welfare of the community and the spiritual self-realization of the individual. Belief in the collectivist instincts of the Russian masses was unshaken. Socialism and Populism acting as guarantors of each other -- such was, indeed, the philosophy of the People's Will. 'The people's welfare and the people's will are our two most sacred and inseparable principles.'

'It is important for the masses to achieve a better social order,' reads an article in the fourth issue of Narodnaya volya, 'but it is even more important for them to achieve it by their own efforts. . . .' A popular revolution replacing the monarchy with a regime permitting the masses to express their will through elected representatives was a consummation ardently desired. But the Programme, mentioned above, called upon the Party to take the initiative in effecting the overturn without waiting for a popular uprising and, indeed, without counting on it. The People's Will obligated itself, however, to see to it that the Provisional Government created by the triumphant revolution should promptly hand over its power to a Constituent Assembly. The Programme declared that the Party would submit to the people's will, as expressed through this democratically elected body, but would support a platform of its own in the electoral campaign and in the Assembly. A postscript to the document had it that in fighting the government, all means were permissible, that the forces of the opposition, whether affiliated with the Society or not, would be aided and abetted, and finally that 'individuals and groups standing outside our struggle with the government were considered neutral: their persons and property were inviolate.'

The aims, structure, and activities of the organization were also outlined in another official statement entitled 'The Preparatory Work of the Party.' Here the overthrow of the autocracy through a popular rising preceded by a series of terroristic acts was designated as the immediate task. 'The Party must have the strength to create for itself a moment favourable to action, to start the enterprise and bring it to a successful conclusion.' The ultimate goal was a political and social order under which the people's will is the sole source of law. It was, however, explicitly stated that the Party did not presume to be the bearer of that will.

It would be misleading to give the impression that there was anything monolithic about Narodnaya volya. Both ideologically and organizationally it was a loose body. As in the case of its rival, Chornyi Peredel, there were divergent trends in it. A prospective member of the Executive Committee was not asked about the exact tenor of his views, but whether he was ready to lay down his life for what was vaguely referred to as the cause of freedom. Some accepted the theory that the political and social revolution would occur simultaneously, others envisaged a long interval between the two. The most that Zhelyabov, for one, expected from the Party's efforts was a regime that would hamper its activities less severely. There were those who would wrest concessions from the government rather than overthrow it, and for whom the ultimate goal of Socialism was eclipsed by the nearer objective of political democracy. On the other hand, several people were receptive to the idea that the Party should seize power and decree Socialism into existence. In an article contributed to the Party organ, Mikhailovsky observed that the vicissitudes of the coming struggle were unforeseeable, adding prophetically: "The Russian popular uprising may produce an ambitious man of genius, a Caesar, a demigod, before whom our unhappy country will bow its head."

Nor was there complete unanimity on tactics. Terror had its enthusiasts like Morozov, who attempted to erect it into a philosophy, if not into a mystique. He exalted systematic political assassination as the most equitable and suitable form of revolutionary struggle. For the most part, however, the membership regarded it, not without misgivings, as a matter of policy dictated by Russian conditions, as a measure which enabled strength to come forth out of weakness. At the news of President Garfield's death the Executive Committee prepared a statement protesting in the name of the Russian revolutionaries against political assassination in a country like the United States where 'the free popular will determines not only the law, but also the person of its administrators.'

IV

'The Preparatory Work of the Party' assigned great importance to city workers as a potential revolutionary force. The efforts to secure a foothold among them were not without success. Workers' circles sprang up in the two capitals and in several provincial cities. By the time the People's Will was constituted, the Northern Union of Russian Workers had been broken up, yet the seeds it had planted had not all been lost. The beginning of the 'eighties was marked by an industrial depression which resulted in lay-offs, and there was much unrest among factory hands. Several hundreds of them lent an ear to the propagandists. Along with lessons in the 'three R's,' proselytes were offered indoctrination in economics according to Marx and Lassalle, as well as talks on such subjects as the struggles of the Irish peasantry, the French Revolution, the Paris Commune. The cells had statutes of their own, drafted in the autumn of 1880, but they did not differ much from the Party's Programme. At the end of the year the first issue of Rabochaya gazeta (The Workers' Gazette) made its appearance, thanks chiefly to Zhelyabov's initiative and energy. One of the policies of this publication during its brief existence -- it lasted a little over a year -- was opposition to the building of railways and factories, on the ground that they undermined peasant trucking and village crafts!

Theoretically, the rural masses bulked large in the plans of the organization. Only they could insure the victory of the revolution, it was argued, even if the initiative was to come from another quarter. The Party had no doubts that its programme would be welcomed by the villagers. It was conceded, however, that only outstanding. individuals from among the peasantry could be won over in the immediate future. Narodnaya volya gave up all thought of 'going to the people' and no longer clung to the belief that Cossacks and sectarians were apt to be particularly hospitable to the message of revolution, though Alexander Mikhailov for one, long cherished the plan of incorporating the clandestine organization of the schismatics into the Party.

The People's Will managed to devote some of its energies to proselytizing among the intelligentzia and the student youth. These exertions were not very fruitful. Not many individuals from among the educated public were induced to join the ranks of the activists, though a number contributed money and on occasion carried out minor assignments. The student body provided the Executive Committee with several agents. Zhelyabov was instrumental in forming a student group with cells in more than one school of higher learning in the capital. On 8 February, 1881, during the annual convocation at the University of Petersburg, the group got up a protest demonstration against the Minister of Education who had been appointed the previous spring. A leaflet was distributed among the audience, one student made an incendiary speech, and another walked up to the Minister and slapped his face. The unfortunate affair was condemned by the majority of the students. As a matter of fact, the policy followed by the new Minister, compared with that of his predecessor, was rather liberal.

Infiltrating the armed forces was held to be a vital and urgent task. Propaganda among common soldiers and sailors devolved upon the workers' circles, and apparently no headway at all was made in that direction. But a number of cells with a membership confined to commissioned officers were established in scattered army and navy units. In the autumn of 1880 Zhelyabov, with the aid of three Midshipmen, succeeded in welding these groups into an autonomous body, the Military-Revolutionary Organization of the People's Will, with a central board located in the capital and represented on the Executive Committee. Time was when army men had been urged to resign their commissions and 'go to the people.' They were now exhorted to stay in the service and seek to gain the confidence of the men under their command, without trying to win them over to the cause. The officers were to wait for the call from their Board, meanwhile carrying out certain orders issued by the Executive Committee. They obligated themselves to take up arms in support of a popular rising or of a military insurrection aiming to seize supreme power in order to set up a representative government. 'Popularization of socialist teaching' was included in the propaganda conducted by the Military-Revolutionary Organization.

The People's Will was not averse to a united front with the liberals. The statutes recommended seeking to persuade them that for the time being their interests were identical with those of the revolutionaries, both being forced 'to act together against the Government.' There was no actual attempt, however, to make common cause with the moderate opposition. As a matter of fact, it was held that the monarchy was in a moribund state and that its overthrow would prove an easy task.

In its proselytizing efforts the Party depended to a considerable extent on the printed word. As has been seen, shortly after it was constituted, it began issuing a journal. On 18 January, 1880, in the small hours, the secret press was raided. The half a dozen people who ran it offered armed resistance to arrest. One man shot himself dead to avoid being taken, and the rest were seized, together with the equipment and all but two hundred copies of the third issue of Narodnaya volya. While the police was being held off, most of the compromising papers were destroyed, so that the arrests did not spread, and by the time spring came, another press was functioning. It produced several issues of Listok (The Bulletin), and in the autumn the printing of Narodnaya volya was resumed, while toward the end of the year Rabochaya gazeta was launched. Extraordinary precautions were taken to safeguard the printing establishment from the gendarmes.

Like previous groups, the People's Will maintained several secret flats in the capital and elsewhere. Security demanded that such quarters should be used for one purpose only and by the fewest people, that as far as possible they should be isolated, so that the loss of one flat should not lead to the loss of others. Lack of funds often made this impossible. Meetings might take place in a kvartira where explosives and excavating tools were stored and where sheets of publications were stitched together and passports forged. One of the flats in the capital was reserved for the headquarters of the Executive Committee, but sometimes it was forced to meet under conditions that violated the safety rules worked out by Alexander Mikhailov.

He was the Party's bursar. The rental of the secret quarters, the printing, the maintenance of professional revolutionaries who lacked means of subsistence, travelling, and particularly terrorist activities demanded the outlay of rather substantial sums of money. Kravchinsky estimated that three of the attempts on the life of Alexander II involved the expenditure of thirty to forty thousand roubles. While information about the income of the organization is fragmentary, there can be no doubt that it was not seldom in financial straits. In June, 1879, while the Executive Committee was still nominally part of Land and Liberty, its cashbox held two thousand five hundred roubles. Vera Figner recalled that the People's Will received a portion of Lizogub's fortune amounting to eight thousand roubles. An equal amount was contributed by the Subbotina sisters. The possessions of the members of the Executive Committee were at its disposal, but there were no moneyed people among them. In fact, many of them were apparently supported by the Party. The subsidiary groups were under obligation to turn over to the Committee a portion of what they took in, but this was a meagre and uncertain source of revenue. The sale of publications and photographs of revolutionary martyrs was a more reliable way of getting cash. Probably the largest source of income was the purses of sympathizers. A memoirist mentions a donation of ten thousand roubles from a zemstvo leader. The contributions from 'sympathizers with the struggle for the people's liberation' -- they were listed thus in the Party's organs -- included substantial sums. Between 1 March and 15 July, 1881, they amounted to over twenty-seven thousand roubles. Tikhomirov estimated the Party's annual budget at eighty thousand roubles.

Land and Liberty had rejected the method of obtaining funds by robbing -- 'expropriating' was the term used -- State banks. The People's Will adopted this procedure, on the ground that since it was at war with the government, the latter's property was a belligerent's legitimate booty. In December, 1880, preparations were started to expropriate the Treasury in Kishinev, but the enterprise was abandoned. In 1882 an attempt at expropriation was made at Gori, Georgia, the birthplace of Joseph Stalin, but proved a fiasco. Hopes of securing some funds from abroad were entertained, but it is uncertain if these materialized.

V

There was little factional strife between the People's Will and Black Repartition. The members visited each other's secret quarters, borrowed money from one another, shared information, and helped each other in various ways. The assassination of an informer, carried out in February, 1880, was decided upon jointly by both organizations. The hope persisted that the two groups would sooner or later compose their differences and reunite.

The schism was hardly six months old when an attempt was made to effect such a merger. Axelrod, who represented Black Repartition in the negotiations, argued that fighting the government was not fighting for Socialism and that not to make this clear was to create confusion. Accordingly, he demanded that the organ of the People's Will should declare itself candidly to be a journal of political revolution. The Executive Committee offered instead to add Axelrod to the editorial staff of Narodnaya Volya and give him a free hand in preaching Socialism. Nor did Axelrod's other condition, namely, that the group for which he spoke should retain freedom of action after the merger, prove acceptable. The parley came to nothing, and the two organizations continued to carry on independently. From time to time orthodox populists joined the People's Will, but only as individual converts.

The members of the two factions were separated by differences of temperament, not unlike those that kept apart the buntars and the Lavrovists. The ideological causes of the rift have already been indicated, except the attitude toward the nationality problem. Like its parent body, Black Repartition advocated the political self-determination of the ethnic groups which the Empire had absorbed in the course of its expansion. In Russian radical circles the idea became current in the 'sixties and gained further authority in the next decade. A journal published in 1878 in Geneva by 'Populists-Bakuninists' pleaded for the break-up of the Empire, pointing out, among other separatist tendencies, that Eastern Siberia, because of its economic interests, might in time gravitate toward the United States rather than toward Petersburg or Odessa. The revised programme of Black Repartition included the demand for 'the independence of the nationalities mechanically bound together in the united all-Russian Empire.'

The orthodox populists accused their adversaries of standing for a centralized State dominated by the Great Russian nationality. The People's Will rejected the impeachment, insisting that it favoured the widest application of the principle of local autonomy and indeed did not deny the subject nationalities the right to secede from the Empire, but admitted that the disintegration of Russia was not its ideal. It preferred to keep out of its platform a demand that, on the one hand, had bitter enemies and, on the other, was, as the Executive Committee put it, 'an invention.' 'Where,' asked Zhelyabov, 'are our Fenians, our Parnell?'

Indeed, at this time the non-Russian population of the Empire evinced but little interest in local autonomy along ethnic lines, let alone secession. Poland alone harboured a powerful separatist movement. Yet the few socialist groups that existed in Warsaw in the late 'seventies were not interested in the restoration of Poland's independence. They held this to be a deviation from the class struggle, to which their efforts were confined. The so-called Ukrainian movgment, which had lingered on among the intellectuals of Kiev, Kharkov, and Odessa since the 'forties, aimed only at cultural autonomy and held aloof from both Socialism and revolution. Men and women of Little Russian (Ukrainian) stock were prominent among the narodniks, but they were apt to think of themselves as Russians first and foremost. Hardly any propaganda literature in the Ukrainian vernacular was produced by the revolutionaries. The appearance of such literature would have been a double challenge to the authorities, for on 18 May, 1876, a ukase made the printing and importation of Little Russian publications a criminal offence.

Among the revolutionaries there was a scattering of men and women belonging to the other national minorities, but they were for the most part alienated from their own people. This was especially true of the Jews.

Very few Jews worked for the radical cause in the 'sixties. In the following decade the number increased. Among the politicals arrested between the middle of 1873 and 1 January, 1877, Jews constituted seven per cent of those placed under police surveillance, fifteen per cent of those deported and four and a half per cent of the serious offenders who were tried in court -- sixty-six persons in all. Of the members of the People's Will who were given a court trial over fourteen per cent were Jews. They constituted fifteen per cent of all the politicals arrested in 1884-90 (579 out of 4,307 persons). Jews were outstanding among the radical leadership. Mark Natanson founded the Chaikovsky Circle and rallied the scattered forces of revolution under the banner of Land and Liberty; Lev Ginzberg headed the Lavrovist faction; Pavel Axelrod saved the frail barque of Black Repartition from foundering; Savely Zlatopolsky was prominent in the 'Executive Committee'; his brother Lev invented the code used by the People's Will.

Like their Gentile comrades, most of the Jewish radicals were of the intellectual type. They had received an education in the government schools thrown open to their people by Alexander II. The nihilist philosophy of the liberation of the individual from the bonds of authority and tradition held a strong appeal for youths eager to escape from the ghetto. Indeed, the trend represented by Pisarev had a repercussion in the neo-Hebrew literature of the period. Of the several hundred Jews who attended the Russian universities in the 'seventies, many embraced with a newcomer's zeal the world of advanced ideas into which Russian books carried them.

Only a few of the proselytes attempted to carry the socialist message to Jewish artisans and wage-earners in their own language. Aaron Liberman argued in the pages of Vperiod! (in 1875) that his people offered grateful soil for the socialist seed: 'Revolution is our tradition; the community is the basis of our legislation. Anarchy was our oldest social order. . . .'

In 1876 a group of 'Jewish socialist-revolutionaries' issued an appeal to Jewish intellectuals, in Russian and Hebrew, urging them to turn their attention to their own people. The call fell on deaf ears. By and large, the intellectuals subscribed to the then current notion that their own people were a parasitic body of shopkeepers and money-lenders who could not be expected to play any part in building the socialist future. They overlooked the fact that a considerable proportion of the group belonged to the working class. It was true, however, that the poverty-stricken Jewish masses, living their traditional life in ghetto seclusion, were even less accessible to ideas of political and social insurgency than were their Gentile neighbours, while the moneyed people -- a small group of nouveau-riche merchants, bankers and railroad magnates -- were completely loyal to the existing order.

Years were to pass before it was borne in on the Jewish radicals that there was work for them in their own vineyard. In the meantime they were eager to 'go to the people' -- to the Russian people. Osip Aptekman, for one, was so determined to remove all barriers between himself and the Russian peasants that before he made his pilgrimage to the people he joined the Orthodox Church. 'And let me tell you,' he recalled, 'I felt as though I had been regenerated. "I am going to the people," I thought, "indeed not as a Jew but as a Christian; I am at one with the people." Others submitted to baptism in order to conclude a marriage, real or fictitious, with a person of Christian faith -- mixed marriages occurring frequently in radical circles and the law forbidding marital union between Jew and Gentile. They severed the ties that bound them to their own people apparently without compunction. Jewishness was not a vexing problem to them, and if it did trouble them, they said to themselves that the social revolution would liquidate the Jewish question for good and all.

Baptism may have given an Aptekman spiritual satisfaction. It is doubtful if it added to his effectiveness as a propagandist. The barrier between the common people and the intellectual was, of course, even greater when the latter was of alien stock and tradition. Where Jews could be of most service was in the printing and distribution of literature and in organizational work. They found themselves in the faction that embraced the political orientation. A democratic regime assuring equality before the law to all citizens could not but attract members of a group deprived of elementary civil rights. Populism, with its Slavophil roots, its cult of the peasantry, its sense of indebtedness to the masses, could have only a superficial hold on the Jew.

The People's Will generally was not overmuch concerned with the country's ethnic heterogeneity. It held that the united efforts of all the sections of the population should be directed against the common enemy, the autocracy. The alleged nationalist aspirations of the minorities seemed a threat to the cause. It was only after the achievements of the revolution had been securely established by the Constituent Assembly that the component nationalities should be allowed freely to determine their status. Thus the People's Will differed from Black Repartition only in that it relegated the self-determination of national minorities to the post-revolutionary period. There were members of both factions, however, who held nationalism to be a divisive force, harmful to the cause of social emancipation. Fundamentally, Russian radicalism had no room in its scale of values for cultural pluralism. It was believed that the imminent social upheaval would wipe out all national differences, turning them, as Lavrov put it, into 'a pale tradition of history.'

Source URL: http://www.ditext.com/yarmolinsky/yar12.html

* * *

Road to Revolution

Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism, 1956.

Chapter 13

Man Hunt

From the first, the 'Executive Committee' was a fighting body designed to carry on a kind of guerrilla warfare by means of acts of terror. Foremost among these was the assassination of the Czar. In a society where all political authority ultimately derived from the monarch, the resentment of the enemies of the existing order was bound to centre on him. Since the days of the Decembrists, and even earlier, the thought of regicide had haunted many heads like some archetypal urge.

The Ishutin group had produced Karakozov, and Nechayev, too, had played with the idea of killing the Emperor. In the summer of 1878 Solomon Wittenberg, a former engineering student who was the son of a poor Jewish artisan, procured a quantity of pyroxilin. With the aid of a comrade who was a sailor, he was planning to lay a mine in the Odessa harbour where the Czar was expected to land. Arrested, he was sentenced to death. He turned down a scheme for his escape from prison because it involved danger for some of the guards. It is reported that he asked his mother if he should embrace Orthodox Christianity in the hope of having his life spared, and that she shook her head and said quietly: 'Die as the Jew that you are,' whereupon he made a deep bow to her. In his last testament he wrote: 'Of course, I do not want to die, and to say that I die willingly would be a lie on my part, but this should not cast a shadow on my faith and the strength of my convictions. Consider that the highest example of loving kindness and self-sacrifice was undoubtedly the Saviour, and yet even He prayed: "Let this cup pass from me!" . . . Nevertheless, in the same spirit I say to myself: "If it cannot be otherwise, if, in order for Socialism to triumph, it is necessary that my blood be shed, if the transition from the present order to a better one is impossible without stepping over our corpses, then let our blood be shed, in redemption, for the good of humanity. And that our blood will serve as a fertilizer of the soil upon which the seed of Socialism will sprout, that socialism will triumph, and soon -- this is my faith!" ' And he concluded with a private word to a friend begging that all thought of vengeance be laid aside.

On 11 August, Wittenberg was hanged, together with his accomplice, at a public ceremony attended, under official orders, by the entire school population above the age of twelve.

Alexander Solovyov's attempt on the Czar's life has already been dealt with. The repressions unleashed by the Government after that event did anything but discourage the thought of regicide. Plans to kill the Governors-General were abandoned in favour of the more ambitious enterprise. The Executive Committee condemned the Emperor to death on 25 August, 1879, or on the following day, which happened to be the anniversary of his coronation.

The design was to dynamite the train carrying the Czar from his summer residence at Livadia (near Yalta) back to the northern capital. The idea of employing Alfred Nobel's invention seems to have originated among southern hotheads as far back as 1873 or 1874. In those days dynamite was something of a novelty in Russia. The use of it in the Russo-Turkish War made is popular. A sample of it was brought from Switzerland, but it was found impossible to import the stuff or purchase it at home, and the Party had to have it manufactured by its own technicians. This work had been started while Land and Liberty was still in existence. Soon after the formation of the People's Will, the Executive Committee had at its disposal about a hundred kilograms of dynamite. It was prepared chiefly by Nikolay Kibalchich, a former engineering student who was the son of a priest. He had served a three-year prison term for having subversive literature in his possession, and when in 1878 he regained his liberty, he decided that he could best serve terrorism by devoting his life to the study of explosives.

At first it was believed that the Czar would proceed from the Crimea to Odessa by sea, and the decision was to blow up his train as it left the seaport on its northward journey. Having secured the position of a trackman on the Odessa railway, Frolenko, aided by several men, including Vasily Merkulov, a carpenter, began excavating a tunnel under the track. Early in November it became known, however, that the Emperor had abandoned his sea trip to Odessa. The weather was foul, and he was a poor sailor. So the preparations were discontinued.

The Czar proceeded north by rail from Simferopol via Kursk and Moscow. Such an eventuality had been foreseen, and it was decided to blow up the imperial train near Alexandrovsk (now Zaporozhye). On 1 October Zhelyabov appeared in this small town and gave himself out to be a merchant who intended to set up a tannery there. He secured a plot of ground, bought a wagon and a team of horses, and moved into a modest flat with his 'wife' (Anna Yakimova, the daughter of a village priest, who looked like a sturdy young peasant woman). With them were two 'workmen' (Tikhonov, a weaver, and Okladsky, a carpenter). Zhelyabov played the part of a small tradesman admirably.

The plan was to mine the track at a point where the railroad ran on top of an embankment seventy-five feet high. Two metal cylinders containing dynamite and provided with electric detonators were to be placed under the sleepers some eighty yards apart. The cylinders and the explosive were brought from Kharkov, the detonators were filched from a powder plant by an employee. Kibalchich and another technician had a hand in these preparations, but the work proper was performed by Zhelyabov and his 'workmen.'

Running parallel to the railway track was a road separated from it by a ravine. To channel off the water that accumulated at the bottom there was a culvert under the embankment. Several times during the night guards with lanterns examined the culvert to make sure that it was not clogged up, and the track, too, was patrolled periodically. The conspirators had to work during the intervals between inspections. Zhelyabov was at this time suffering from night blindness and was helpless in the dark, so that he had to be led by the hand to and from work. Yet he insisted on taking part in the actual digging and in placing the mines himself. The autumn rains had come and the nights were chilly. He had to work sprawling in the mud, wet to the bone and shivering with cold. Sometimes the men lost their way and fell into pits filled with water.

When the second mine was being laid, the conspirators came near being discovered by a trackman. The nervous tension grew intolerable. The men were sure that they were being watched. And what if snow came, showing their footprints plainly? One night Zhelyabov leapt from bed in his sleep several times and crawled on the floor, shouting: 'Hide the wire! Hide the wire!'