‘Going to the People’

This movement of mainly upper-class youth was naïve and confused, but also courageous and utterly selfless, and left behind a priceless heritage for the future. While criticising the utopian character of their programme, Lenin always paid warm tribute to the revolutionary valour of the early Narodniks. He understood that the Marxist movement in Russia was raised on the bones of these martyrs, who cheerfully gave up wealth and worldly comforts to face death, prison and exile for the sake of the fight for a better world. Theoretical confusion was only to be expected in a movement still in its infancy. The absence of a strong working class, the lack of any clear traditions or model from the past to light their path, the dark night of censorship which prevented them from having access to most of the writings of Marx; all this deprived the young Russian Revolutionaries of the chance to understand the real nature of the processes at work in society.

To most of the youth, Marx was seen as ‘just an economist’, whereas Bakunin’s doctrine of ‘implacable destruction’, and his calls for direct action, seemed to be more in tune with the spirit of a generation tired of words and impatient for results. Pavel Axelrod, in his memoirs, recalls how the theories of Bakunin gripped the minds of the radicalised youth with its striking simplicity. (PB Axelrod, Perezhitoe i Peredumannoe, p. 111-2.) The ‘people,’ according to Bakunin, were revolutionary and socialist by instinct – going right back to the Middle Ages – as shown by peasant revolts, the Pugachev uprising, and even brigands, who were held up as a good example to follow! All that was required to ignite a universal revolt, he maintained, was for the students to go to the villages and raise the standard of revolution. Local uprisings would soon provoke a general conflagration, bringing the whole existing order crashing down.

In a striking passage, Trotsky graphically recaptures the spirit of these youthful pioneers:

Young men and women, most of them former students numbering about a thousand in all, carried socialist propaganda to all corners of the country, especially to the lower reaches of the Volga, where they sought the legacy of Pugachev and Razin.[2] This movement, remarkable in its scope and youthful idealism, the true cradle of the Russian Revolution, was distinguished – as is proper to a cradle – by extreme naïveté. The propagandists had neither a guiding organisation nor a clear programme; they had no conspiratorial experience. And why should they have? These young people, having broken with their families and schools, without profession, personal ties, or obligations, and without fear either of earthly or heavenly powers, seemed to themselves the living crystallisation of a popular uprising. A constitution? Parliamentarianism? Political liberty? No, they would not be swerved from the path by these western decoys. What they wanted was a complete revolution, without abridgement or intermediate stages. (L. Trotsky, The Young Lenin, p. 28.)

In the summer of 1874, hundreds of young people from upper or middle-class backgrounds went out to the villages, burning with the idea of rousing the peasantry to revolution. Pavel Axelrod, one of the future founders of Russian Marxism, recalls the radical break which these young revolutionaries had made with their class:

Whoever wished to work for the people had to give up university, renounce his privileged condition, and his family, turn his back even upon science and art. They had to cut all the bonds which linked them to the highest social classes, burn their bridges behind them. In one word, they had to voluntarily forget about any possible road of retreat. The propagandist, so to speak, had to effect a complete transformation of his inner essence, so that he would feel at one with the lower strata of the people, not only ideologically, but also in his habitual everyday behaviour. (P.B. Axelrod, The Working Class and the Revolutionary Movement in Russia, quoted in S.H. Baron, Plekhanov, p. 25.)

These courageous young men and women had no definite programme, other than to find a road to ‘the people’. Dressed in old working clothes bought from second-hand stalls in markets, clutching false passports, they travelled to the villages hoping to learn a trade which would enable them to live and work undetected. The wearing of peasants’ clothes was not the theatrical gesture it might appear at first sight. Kropotkin points out that:

The gap between the peasant and the educated people is great in Russia, and contact between them is so rare that not only does the appearance in a village of a man who wears the town dress awaken general attention, but even in town, if one whose talk and dress reveals that he is not a worker is seen to go about with workers, the suspicion of the police is aroused at once. (P. Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, vol. 2, p. 119.)

Unfortunately, this admirable revolutionary spirit was founded upon theories which were fundamentally unsound. The mystical idea of a ‘special Russian road to socialism’ which could somehow leap from feudal barbarism to a classless society, skipping the phase of capitalism, was the source of an endless series of errors and tragedies. A false theory inevitably leads to a disaster in practice. The Narodniks were motivated by revolutionary voluntarism – the idea that the success of the revolution can be guaranteed by the iron will and determination of a small group of dedicated men and women. The subjective factor,[3] of course, is decisive in human history. Karl Marx explained that men and women make their own history, but added that they do not make it outside of the context of social and economic relationships established independently of their will.

The attempts of the Narodnik theoreticians to establish a ‘special historical path’ for Russia, different from that of Western Europe, inevitably led them down the road of philosophical idealism and a mystical view of the peasantry. The theoretical confusion of Bakunin – a reflection of the very underdeveloped and inchoate class relations in Russia – found a ready audience among the Narodniks, seeking an ideological justification for their vague revolutionary aspirations.

Standing reality on its head, Bakunin portrayed the mir – the basic unit of the tsarist regime in the village – as the enemy of the state. All that was necessary was for the revolutionaries to go to the village and rouse the ‘instinctively revolutionary’ Russian peasants against the state and the problem would be solved, without recourse to ‘politics’ or any particular form of party organisation. The task was not to fight for democratic demands (since democracy also represented a form of state and therefore another expression of tyranny) but to overthrow the state ‘in general’ and replace it with a voluntary federation of local communities, based on the mir, purged of its reactionary features.

The contradictory elements of this theory rapidly became evident when the Narodnik youth attempted to put it into practice. The revolutionary exhortations of the students were met with sullen suspicion or outright hostility by the peasants, who frequently handed over the newcomers to the authorities.

Zhelyabov, one of the future leaders of the Narodnaya Volya party (People’s Will), graphically described the Narodnik youth’s desperate efforts to win over the peasants “like fish beating their heads against the ice”. (D. Footman, Red Prelude, p. 86.) Despite the terrible conditions of oppression and exploitation, the Russian peasant, who believed that “the body belongs to the Tsar, the soul to God and the back to the squire”, proved impervious to the revolutionary ideas of the Narodniks. The shock and disappointment of the intelligentsia is echoed in the words of a participant:

We ourselves were too blindly assured of the imminence of the revolution to notice that the peasants had not nearly as much of the revolutionary spirit as we wanted them to have. But we did notice that they all wanted the land to be divided up among them. They expected the Emperor would give an order and the land would be divided up… most of them imagined he would have had it carried through long ago if he had not been prevented by the big landowners and the officials – the two arch-enemies of both the Emperor and the peasants.

The naïve attempt to pass for peasants frequently had its tragicomical side, as one of the participants, Debogori-Mokrievich, recalls:

“The peasants did not want to let us stay the night in their cottages: quite obviously they did not like the look of our dirty, ragged clothing. This was the last thing we expected when we first dressed up as workmen.” (Quoted in D. Footman, Red Prelude, p. 47 and p. 49, my emphasis.)

Sleeping out in the open, hungry, cold and tired, their feet bleeding from long marches in cheap boots, the spirits of the Narodniks were dashed against the solid wall of peasant indifference. Gradually, inexorably, those who had not been arrested drifted back, disillusioned and exhausted, to the towns. The movement of ‘going to the people’ was swiftly broken by a wave of arrests – more than 700 in 1874 alone. It was an expensive defeat. But the heroic and spirited speeches of defiance hurled from the dock by the arrested revolutionists served to kindle a new movement which began almost immediately.

The Narodniks swore by ‘the people’ in every other sentence. Yet they remained completely isolated from the peasant masses they idolised. In reality, the entire movement was concentrated into the hands of the intelligentsia:

The Populists’ worship of the peasant and his commune was but the mirror image of the grandiose pretensions of the ‘intellectual proletariat’ to the role of chief, if not indeed sole, instrument of progress. The whole history of the Russian intelligentsia develops between these two poles of pride and self-abnegation – which are the short and long shadows of its social weakness. (L. Trotsky, The Young Lenin, p. 25, my emphasis.)

But this social weakness of the intelligentsia merely reflected the underdeveloped state of class relations in Russian society. The rapid development of industry and the creation of a powerful urban working class which was to be brought about by a massive influx of foreign capital in the 1890s was still the music of an apparently remote future. Thrust back upon their own resources, the revolutionary intelligentsia sought salvation in the theory of a ‘special Russian road to socialism,’ based upon the element of common ownership which existed in the mir.

The theories of guerrillaism and individual terrorism which have become fashionable among certain circles in recent times repeat in caricatured form the antiquated ideas of the Russian Narodniks and terrorists. Like the latter, they try to find a base in the peasantry of the Third World, in the lumpen-proletariat, in fact, any class except the proletariat. Yet such ideas have nothing in common with Marxism. Marx and Engels explained that the only class capable of carrying through the socialist revolution and establishing a healthy workers’ state leading to a classless society was the working class. And this is no accident. Only the working class, by virtue of its role in society and in production, especially large scale industrial production, possesses an instinctive socialist class consciousness. Not accidentally, the classical methods of struggle of the proletariat are based upon collective mass action: strikes, demonstrations, picket lines, the general strike.

By contrast, the first principle of every other social class is the individualism of the property owner and exploiter of labour, both big and small. Leaving aside the bourgeoisie, whose hostility to socialism is the first condition of its existence, we have the middle class, including the peasantry. The latter is the social class least able to acquire a socialist consciousness. In its upper reaches, the wealthy peasant, lawyer, doctor, parliamentarian, stand close to the bourgeoisie. However, even the poor landless peasant in Russia, although formally a rural proletarian, had a consciousness very far removed from his brothers in the cities. The one desire of the landless peasant was to possess land, i.e., to become transformed into a small proprietor. Individual terrorism and ‘guerrillaism’, in all its multiplicity of forms, are the methods of the petty bourgeoisie, particularly the peasantry, but also the students, intellectuals and lumpen-proletariat. It is true that under certain conditions – particularly in the present epoch – the mass of the poor peasants can be won over to the idea of collective ownership, as we saw in Spain in 1936. But the prior condition for such a development is the revolutionary movement of the working class in the towns. In Russia, the working class came to power by mobilising the poor peasants, not on the basis of socialist slogans, but on the basis of ‘land to the tillers!’ This fact, in itself, shows how far the mass of Russian peasants stood from a socialist consciousness even in 1917.

To the Narodniks, lacking in a sound theoretical basis, and setting out with a confused and amorphous concept of class relations (‘the people’), the Marxist argument of the leading role of the proletariat sounded like so much hair-splitting. What did the working class have to do with it? Clearly Marx and Engels had not understood the special situation in Russia! The Narodniks, in as much as they considered the role of the workers in the towns, regarded them as an aberration – as ‘peasants in factories’ capable of playing only the role of auxiliaries to the peasantry in the revolution – precisely the opposite to the real relationship of revolutionary class forces, as subsequent events demonstrated.

As a crowning paradox, despite all the prejudice of the Narodnik theoreticians, almost the only area where the revolutionary appeals got an echo was among the despised ‘town peasants’, as they called the factory workers. Like the modern guerrillas, the supporters of Zemlya i Volya (Land and Freedom) adopted the policy of taking revolutionary workers out of the factories and sending them to the countryside. Plekhanov, before he became a Marxist, participated in this kind of activity and was able to see the consequences:

The factory worker who has worked in the city for several years, feels ill at ease in the country and goes back to it reluctantly… Rural customs and institutions become unendurable for a person whose personality has begun evolving a little…

These were experienced people, sincerely devoted to and profoundly imbued with Populist views. But their attempts to set themselves up in the countryside led to nothing. After roving about the villages with the intention of looking for a suitable place to settle down (at which some of them were taken to be foreigners), they shrugged their shoulders at the whole business and finished by returning to Saratov where they established contacts among the local workers. No matter how astounded we were by this alienation from the ‘people’ of its urban children, the fact was evident, and we had to abandon the idea of involving workers in a purely peasant business. (Quoted in F. Dan, The Origins of Bolshevism, pp. 162-63.)

According to the Narodnik theory, the town worker was further away from socialism than the peasant. Thus, a Narodnik organiser in charge of work among the workers of Odessa complained that “the men in the workshops, spoiled by urban life and unable to recognise their links with the peasants, were less open to socialist propaganda”. (Quoted in F. Venturi, The Roots of Revolution, p. 511.) Nevertheless, the Narodniks did conduct work among the workers and obtained important results. The initiator of this pioneer work was Nikolai Vasilyevich Chaikovsky. His group established propaganda circles in the workers’ districts of Petersburg, where Kropotkin was one of his propagandists. Reality forced sections of the Narodniks to come face to face for the first time with the ‘worker question’ which, expelled by Bakuninist theories by the front door, persistently flew back through the window. Even at this very early period, the Russian working class, despite the extreme smallness of its numbers, was beginning to set its stamp upon the revolutionary movement.

The attitude of the workers to the ‘young gentlemen’ was instructive. The Petersburg worker IA Bachkin recommended to his fellow workers: “You must take the books from the students, but when they begin to teach you nonsense, you must knock them down.” It was possibly Bachkin of whom Plekhanov was thinking when he passed the remark about the unwillingness of the workers to go to the villages to work. Bachkin was arrested in September 1874 and, upon his release in 1876, he told Plekhanov that he was “ready, as before, to work for revolutionary propaganda, but only among the workers…
‘I don’t want to go into the country on any account’ he argued. ‘The peasants are sheep, they will never understand revolution’.” (Ibid., p. 800 in both quotes.)

While the Narodnik intelligentsia wrestled with the theoretical problems of the future revolution, the first stirrings of class consciousness were emerging in the urban centres. The emancipation of the serfs represented a collective act of violence against the peasantry in the interests of the development of capitalism in agriculture. The landlords were, in effect, ‘clearing the estates’ for capitalism, as Lenin explained, accelerating the process of inner differentiation of the peasantry through the crystallisation of a class of rich peasants (kulaks) at the top and a mass of impoverished peasants at the bottom. In order to escape the grinding poverty of village life, the poor peasants migrated in massive numbers to the towns, in search of jobs. In the period 1865-90, the number of factory workers increased by 65 per cent, with those employed in mining increasing by 106 per cent. AG Rashin demonstrates this process in table 1.1.

The development of industry experienced a particularly powerful impetus during the 1870s. The population of St. Petersburg grew from 668,000 in 1869 to 928,000 in 1881. Torn from their peasant backgrounds and hurled into the seething cauldron of factory life, the workers’ consciousness underwent a rapid transformation. Police reports charted the growing discontent and audacity of the workforce: “The crude, vulgar methods employed by factory employers are becoming intolerable to the workers,” complains one such report. “They have obviously realised that a factory is not conceivable without their labour.” Tsar Alexander read the reports and pencilled in the margin: “Very bad.”

The growth of this labour unrest permitted the establishment of the first organised workers’ groups. The Southern Workers’ Union was set up by E. Zaslavsky (1844-78). Son of a noble but impecunious family, he went ‘to the people’ in 1872-73, became convinced of the uselessness of this tactic and began propaganda work among the workers of Odessa. Out of these worker circles, with weekly meetings and a small subscription, the Union was born. Its programme started from the premise that “the workers can get their rights recognised only by means of a violent revolution capable of destroying all privileges and inequality by making work the foundation of private and public welfare”. (Quoted in F. Venturi, The Roots of Revolution, p. 515 and p. 516.) The Union’s influence grew rapidly until it was smashed by arrests in December 1875. The leaders were sentenced to hard labour. Zaslavsky himself got ten years. His health undermined by the harsh conditions of imprisonment, he became deranged and died of tuberculosis in prison.

A more substantial development was the Northern Union of Russian Workers, set up illegally in the autumn of 1877 under the leadership of Khalturin and Obnorsky. Victor Obnorsky, son of a retired NCO, was a blacksmith, then a mechanic. While working at different factories in St. Petersburg, he became involved in workers’ study circles, and had to flee to avoid arrest to Odessa, where he came into contact with Zaslavsky’s Union. He travelled abroad as a sailor, where he was influenced by the ideas of German Social Democracy. Returning to St. Petersburg, he met PL Lavrov and Axelrod, the leading lights in the Narodnik movement. Stepan Khalturin was an important figure in the revolutionary movement of the late seventies. Like Obnorsky, a blacksmith and a mechanic by trade, he began his activity in the Chaikovsky group, where he worked as a propagandist. In his series of pen portraits of Russian worker militants, Plekhanov has left an enduring picture of this working-class revolutionary:

When his [Khalturin’s] activities were still on the right side of the law, he willingly met students and tried to make their acquaintance, getting every kind of information from them and borrowing books. He often stayed with them until midnight, but he very rarely gave his own opinions. His host would grow excited, delighted at the chance to enlighten an ignorant workman, and would speak at great length, theorising in the most ‘popular’ way possible. Stepan would gaze carefully, looking up at the speaker. Every now and then his intelligent eyes would reflect an amiable irony. There was always an element of irony in his relations with the students… with the workers, he behaved in a very different way… he looked upon them as more solid and, so to speak, more natural revolutionaries and he looked after them like a loving nurse. He taught them, he sought books and work for them, he made peace with them when they quarrelled and he scolded the guilty. His comrades loved him dearly: he knew this, and in return gave them even greater love. But I do not believe that even in his relations with them, Khalturin ever gave up his customary restraint… In the groups he spoke only rarely and unwillingly. Among the workers of Petersburg, there were people just as educated and competent as he was: there were men who had seen another world, who had lived abroad. The secret of the enormous influence of what can be called Stepan’s dictatorship lay in the tireless attention which he devoted to every single thing. Even before the meeting began, he spoke with everyone to find out the general state of mind, he considered all sides of a question, and so naturally he was the most prepared of all. He expressed the general state of mind. (Ibid, p. 543.)

Khalturin was an outstanding representative of a type: the worker-propagandist active in the circles in the first period of the Russian labour movement. Yet even he was drawn into terrorist activities in the subsequent period, organising a spectacular attempt on the Tsar’s life.

1. Emilian Pugachev, a Don Cossack, led a great uprising of the Cossacks and serfs against the gentry in 1773, in the reign of Catherine the Great. The rebellion initially met with success, with the mass seizure of land and the capture of a string of imperial fortresses. The rebels took Kazan and could have taken Moscow but, despite riots which broke out in a number of towns, the peasant rebellion proved incapable of linking up with the urban masses against the common enemy – the gentry and the autocracy. Although the rebels proclaimed the abolition of serfdom, they lacked a coherent political programme capable of creating a broad revolutionary movement of the masses. This fatal weakness, plus localist tendencies, lack of organisation and discipline, eventually undermined the revolt. The rebellion disintegrated and Pugachev was executed in Moscow in January 1775.

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2. By the ‘subjective factor’ Marxists mean the conscious factor in history – the action of men and women to change their lives and destinies, as opposed to the objective conditions, established by social development, which provide the basis for such actions. Most specifically, it refers to the role of the revolutionary party and leadership in the struggle for the socialist transformation of society.

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