In the meantime, the remnants of the Narodnik movement were attempting to regroup their forces in the towns under a new banner. In 1876, Zemlya i Volya was set up by the Natansons, Alexander Mikhailov, and George Plekhanov. The new underground organisation was headed by a General Council with a smaller elected Executive Committee (or Administrative Centre). Subordinate to these bodies were a Peasants’ Section, a Workers’ Section, a Youth (Students’) Section, and a new development, a ‘Disorganisation Section’, an armed wing for “protection against the arbitrary conduct of officials”. The programme of Zemlya i Volya was based on a confused idea of ‘peasant socialism’ – all land was to be transferred to the peasants and self-determination was to be granted to all parts of the Russian empire. Russia was to be run on the basis of self-governing peasant communes. However, all this was subordinate to the central objective of the revolutionary overthrow of the autocracy, which was to be carried out “as speedily as possible” – the extreme haste being due to the idea of preventing the undermining of the peasant commune (the mir) by capitalist development! Thus, the real originators of ‘socialism in one country’ were the Narodniks, who sought to deliver society from the horrors of capitalism by espousing the idea of a ‘special path of historical development’ for Russia, based on the supposed uniqueness of the Russian peasantry and its social institutions.
On 6 December, 1876, an illegal demonstration of anything up to 500 – mainly students – assembled on the steps of Kazan Cathedral, with cries of “land and freedom” and “long live the socialist revolution!” The demonstration was addressed by a 21-year old student called George Plekhanov, whose revolutionary appeal led to the beginning of years of exile and underground life. Born in 1855, the son of an aristocratic family from Tambov, Plekhanov, like many of his generation, cut his teeth on the writings of the great school of Russian democratic authors – Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, and, above all, Chernyshevsky. While still an adolescent, he joined the Narodnik movement, participating in dangerous missions, including the release of arrested comrades and even the liquidation of an agent provocateur. Arrested several times, he always succeeded in escaping from his tsarist captors.
Following his daring speech, Plekhanov was forced to flee abroad, but his prestige was such that he was elected, in his absence, as a member of the ‘basic circle’ of Zemlya i Volya. Returning to Russia in 1877, the future founder of Russian Marxism led a precarious underground existence. Armed with a knuckleduster and a pistol which he kept under his pillow at night, he went first to Saratov, on the lower Volga, where he was subsequently put in charge of the ‘worker section’ of Zemlya i Volya. The young man’s first-hand experience of work with factory workers had a profound effect on his thinking, which undoubtedly helped him to break with Narodnik prejudices and find a road to Marxism.
In December 1877, an explosion in the gunpowder store at an arms factory on Vasilevsky Island killed six workers and injured many more. The workers’ funeral turned into a demonstration. Plekhanov wrote a manifesto which ended with the words:
Workers! Now is the time to understand reason. You must not expect help from anyone. And do not expect it from the gentry! The peasants have long been expecting help from the gentry, and all they have got is worse land and heavier taxes, even greater than before … Will you too, the workers in towns, put up with this forever? (Ibid., p. 548.)
The author got his reply far sooner than he, or anyone else, expected. The economic boom which arose from the Russo-Turkish War (1877-78) created the conditions for an unprecedented explosion of strikes, spearheaded by the most downtrodden and exploited section of the class, the textile workers. Not for the last time, the more oppressed and volatile textile workers moved into action far more quickly than the big battalions in the metal industries. The workers went to ask for help from ‘the students’, through the agency of a number of individual worker-revolutionaries.
Plekhanov, as head of the worker section of Zemlya i Volya, found himself virtually in control of the movement. Unfortunately, the Narodniks had no idea what to do with a workers’ movement which did not really enter into their scheme of the universe. In the space of two years, St. Petersburg saw 26 strikes. Not until the massive strike wave of the 1890s was this to be equalled. The members of the Northern Union played a prominent part in these strikes, and, by the first months of 1879, it reached its high water mark, with 200 organised workers and another 200 in reserve, carefully distributed in different factories. They were all linked to a central body. The workers’ circles even had a library, also carefully split up between different underground groups and widely used even by workers outside the Union. The resourceful Khalturin set up an underground print shop. Obnorsky entered into agreements with a workers’ group in Warsaw, “the first example of friendly relations between Russian and Polish workers”, as Plekhanov observed with satisfaction. (Ibid., p. 556.)
But within months of the appearance of the first issue of its illegal journal, Rabochaya Zarya (Workers’ Dawn), the police smashed the Union’s print shop and the bulk of its membership was swept away by a wave of arrests into hard labour, imprisonment, and exile. The result of the breakup of this first solid organisation of the working class was catastrophic. Khalturin and others drew pessimistic conclusions and went over to terrorism. It took ten years and countless unnecessary sacrifices for the movement to get the terrorist bug out of its system.
From its very outset, the revolutionary movement in Russia was divided by the polemics between ‘educators’ and ‘insurrectionists’, the two lines being broadly identified with the respective positions of Lavrov and Bakunin. The failure of the movement ‘to the people’ brought this disagreement to the point of an open split. In the period 1874-75, there were thousands of political prisoners in Russia, youngsters who had paid the price for their defiance with the loss of their freedom. Some were later released on bail and kept under surveillance. Others were exiled to Siberia by administrative order. The rest merely rotted in jail awaiting trial. Of those who remained active and at liberty, some decided to return to the villages, but this time as school teachers or doctors, devoting their time and energies to humble educational work and waiting for better days. But for others, the realisation that Bakunin’s theory of an ‘instinctively revolutionary peasantry’ was false meant that an entirely different road had to be found.
Zemlya i Volya was never a mass organisation. A few dozen, mainly students and intellectuals in their 20s and 30s, made up its active membership. But the seeds of dissolution were present from the outset. Lavrov’s supporters looked to “open the people’s eyes” by peaceful propaganda. “We must not arouse emotion in the people, but self-awareness,” he argued. (Ibid., p. 556.) The frustrated attempts to provoke a mass movement of the peasantry by means of propaganda gave rise to a new theory whereby Bakuninism was stood upon its head. From ‘denying politics’ and especially political organisation, a section of the Narodniks effected a 180° turn and set up a secret, highly centralised terrorist organisation – the Narodnaya Volya – designed to provoke a revolutionary movement of the masses by means of the ‘propaganda of the deed’.
The latest military humiliation of tsarist Russia in the Russo-Turkish War revealed anew the bankruptcy of the regime and gave fresh heart to the opposition. The leaders of Narodnaya Volya were determined to wage a war against the autocracy in a kind of terrorist single combat which would encourage ‘from above’ the flame of revolt. A section of the youth was now burning with impatience. The words of Zhelyabov, future leader of Narodnaya Volya, sum the whole thing up:
“History moves too slowly. It needs a push. Otherwise the whole nation will be rotten and gone to seed before the liberals get anything done.”
“What about a constitution?”
“All to the good.”
“Well, what do you want – to work for a constitution or give history a push?”
“I’m not joking, just now we want to give history a push.” (Quoted in D. Footman, Red Prelude, p. 87.)
These four lines show up starkly the relation between terrorism and liberalism. The terrorists had no independent programme of their own. They borrowed their ideas from the liberals, who leaned upon them to give emphasis to their demands.
In the autumn of 1877, nearly 200 young men and women were brought to trial for the crime of ‘going to the people.’ They had already spent three years in jail without trial and there were numerous cases of ill-treatment meted out to the prisoners by brutal warders and officials. For the revolutionaries the systematic ill-treatment, torture, and humiliation suffered by the prisoners was the last straw. One particularly atrocious case caused widespread indignation in July 1877. When General Trepov, the notorious Petersburg police chief, had visited the Preliminary Detention Centre, a young ‘political’ called Bogolyubov refused to stand up. He was sentenced to 100 lashes on Trepov’s orders. A decisive turning point was passed in January 1878 when a young girl by the name of Vera Zasulich fired a shot at Trepov. This action, which Zasulich had planned and executed all on her own, was intended as a reprisal for the ill-treatment of political prisoners. After the Zasulich affair, the swing towards the ‘propaganda of the deed’ became irresistible, particularly since, against all expectations, the jury had found her not guilty.
Initially, the use of terror was conceived as a limited tactic for freeing imprisoned comrades, eliminating police spies, and for self-defence against the repressive actions of the authorities. But terrorism has a logic of its own. In a short space of time, the terrorist mania took possession of the organisation. From the outset, there were doubts about the ‘new tactics’. In the pages of the official party journal critical voices were raised:
We must remember that the liberation of the labouring masses will not be achieved by this (terrorist) path. Terrorism has nothing in common with the struggle against the foundations of the social order. Only a class can resist against a class. Therefore, the main bulk of our forces must work among the people. (Quoted in J. Martov, Obshchestvennoe i Umstevennoe Techeniye v Rossii 1870-1905, p. 44.)
The adoption of the new tactics caused an open split in the movement, between the terrorists and the followers of Lavrov who argued in favour of a prolonged period of preparation and propaganda among the masses. In practice, the latter trend was moving away from revolutionism, advocating the politics of ‘small deeds’ and a ‘little by little’ gradualist approach. The right wing of Narodnism was becoming indistinguishable from liberalism, while its more radical section prepared to stake everything on the force of the bullet and the ‘revolutionary chemistry’ of nitroglycerine.
In the recent period, attempts have been made by the modern terrorists to distinguish themselves from their Russian forebears. The Narodnik terrorists, it is asserted, believed in individual terrorism, substituting themselves for the movement of the masses, whereas modern proponents of ‘armed struggle’ or ‘urban guerrillaism’ see themselves only as an armed wing of the mass struggle, whose purpose is to detonate the masses into action. Yet the supporters of Narodnaya Volya never claimed to be acting as a self-sufficient movement. Their stated objective was to initiate a mass movement, based on the peasantry, which would overthrow the state and institute socialism. Their aim was also supposed to be the ‘detonation’ of the mass movement by giving a courageous example.
However, politics has a logic of its own. All the appeals of the Narodnaya Volya in the name of the masses merely served as a smoke-screen to reveal a deep-seated distrust in the revolutionary capacity of those same masses. The arguments advanced more than a century ago in Russia to justify terrorism have a strikingly similar ring to the arguments of ‘urban guerrilla’ groups in more recent times: “We are in favour of the mass movement, but the state is too strong,” and so on and so forth. Thus, the terrorist Morozov affirmed:
Observing contemporary social life in Russia the conclusion is reached that, because of the arbitrary conduct and violence of the government, no activity at all is possible on behalf of the people. Neither freedom of expression, nor freedom of the press exists to work by means of persuasion. In consequence, for every vanguard activist it is necessary, first and foremost, to put an end to the present system of government, and to struggle against it there is no other means than to do it with arms in hand. As a consequence, we will fight against it in the style of William Tell, until we reach the moment when we win free institutions under which it will be possible for us to discuss without obstacles in the press and in public meetings all the political and social questions, and decide upon them by means of the free representation of the people. (Quoted in S.H. Baron, Plekhanov, p. 56, my emphasis.)
The Narodniks were courageous but misguided idealists who confined their targets to notorious torturers, police chiefs guilty of repressive acts, and the like. More often than not, they subsequently gave themselves up to the police in order to use their trials as a platform for the indictment of existing society. They did not plant bombs to slaughter women and children, or even to murder ordinary soldiers. On the rare occasions they killed individual policemen, it was to get hold of weapons. Yet, despite this, their methods were completely incorrect and counterproductive, and were roundly condemned by the Marxists.
The allegedly ‘modern’ theories of urban guerrillaism only repeat in caricature form the old pre-Marxist ideas of the Russian terrorists. It is quite ironic that these people, who frequently lay claim to be ‘Marxist-Leninists’, have not the vaguest idea that Russian Marxism was born out of an implacable struggle against individual terrorism. The Russian Marxists scornfully described the terrorist as ‘a liberal with a bomb’. The liberal fathers spoke in the name of ‘the People’, but considered the latter too ignorant to be trusted with the responsible work of reforming society. Their role was to be reduced to passively casting a vote every few years and looking on while the liberals in Parliament got on with their business. The sons and daughters of the liberals had nothing but contempt for Parliament. They stood for the revolution, and, of course, ‘the People’. Except that the latter, in their ignorance, were unable to understand them. Therefore, they would resort to the ‘revolutionary chemistry’ of the bomb and the revolver. But, just as before, the role of the masses was reduced to that of passive spectators. Marxism sees the revolutionary transformation of society as a conscious act carried out by the working class. That which is progressive is that which serves to raise the consciousness of the workers of their own strength. That which is reactionary is that which tends to lower the workers’ own opinion of their role. From this point of view, the role of individual terrorism is a wholly reactionary one. Thus, the policy of individual terrorism is most harmful to the cause of the masses precisely when it succeeds. The attempt to find shortcuts in politics frequently leads to disaster. What conclusions are the workers supposed to draw from a spectacularly successful act of individual terrorism? Only this: that it is possible to attain their ends without any necessity for the long and arduous preparatory work of organising trade unions, participating in strikes and other mass actions, agitation, propaganda, and education. All that would be seen as an unnecessary diversion, when all that is needed is to get hold of a bomb and a gun, and the problem is solved.
The history of the twentieth century provides some tragic lessons in what happens when revolutionaries try to substitute the heroic actions of an armed minority for the conscious movement of the working class. Most often – as with the Narodnaya Volya – the attempt to challenge the might of the state by such methods leads to a terrible defeat and the strengthening of the very apparatus of repression that was meant to be overthrown. But even in those cases where, for example, a guerrilla war succeeds in overthrowing the old regime, it can never lead to the establishment of a healthy workers’ state, let alone socialism. At best, it will lead to a deformed workers’ state (a regime of proletarian Bonapartism) in which the workers are subjected to the rule of a bureaucratic elite. In fact, such an outcome is predetermined by the militaristic structure of terrorist and guerrillaist organisations, their autocratic command structure, lack of internal democracy and, above all, the fact that they function outside the working class, and independently of it. A genuine revolutionary party does not set itself up as a group of self-appointed saviours of the masses, but strives to give an organised and conscious expression to the movement of the workers themselves. Only the conscious self-movement of the proletariat can lead to the socialist transformation of society.
A section of the old Zemlya i Volya movement attempted to resist the trend towards terrorism, but was swept aside. An attempt to reach a compromise at the Voronezh Congress of June 1879 failed to stop the split which finally took place in October of that year with a formal agreement of both sides to dissolve the organisation. The funds were divided and both sides agreed not to use the old name. The terrorist faction adopted the name of Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will), while the remnants of the old school ‘village’ Narodniks took the name of the Cherny Peredel (Black Redistribution), echoing the old Narodnik idea of an agrarian revolution. It was from the latter organisation, led by Plekhanov, that the first forces of Russian Marxism were to emerge.