On 1 March, 1881, the carriage of Tsar Alexander II was passing along the Catherine Canal in St. Petersburg, when a young man suddenly threw what looked like a snowball. The explosion that followed missed its mark, and the Tsar dismounted, unharmed, to speak to some wounded Cossacks. At that moment, a second terrorist, Grinevetsky, rushed forward and with the words “it is too early to thank God”, threw another bomb at his feet. An hour and a half later, the Emperor of All Russia was dead. This act marked the culmination of one of the most remarkable periods in revolutionary history – a period in which a handful of dedicated and heroic young men and women took on the combined might of the Russian tsarist state. Yet the very success of the terrorists in eliminating the figure at the apex of the hated autocracy simultaneously dealt the deathblow to the so-called Party of the People’s Will which had organised it.
The phenomenon of the Russian Narodniks (‘populists,’ men of the people) was a consequence of the extreme belatedness of Russian capitalism. The decay of feudal society proceeded faster than the formation of the bourgeoisie. Under these conditions, sections of the intelligentsia, especially the youth, broke away from the nobility, bureaucracy, and clergy and began to look for a way out of the social impasse. However, when they looked around for a point of support within society, they could not be attracted by the crude, backward and underdeveloped bourgeoisie, while the proletariat was still in its infancy, unorganised, politically untutored, and small in numbers, particularly in comparison with the many millions of peasants who made up the dumb, oppressed, and crushed majority of Russian society.
It was therefore understandable that the revolutionary intelligentsia should look to the ‘people’ in the person of the peasantry as the main potential revolutionary force within society. This movement had its roots in the great turning point in Russian history in 1861. The emancipation of the serfs that took place in that year was by no means, as has been frequently suggested, the result of the enlightened benevolence of Alexander II. It flowed from the fear of a social explosion after Russia’s humiliating defeat in the disastrous Crimean War of 1853-56, which, like the later war with Japan, served to cruelly expose the tsarist regime. Not for the first, nor the last time, military defeat revealed the bankruptcy of the autocracy, providing a powerful impetus to social change. But the Edict of Emancipation solved none of the problems and, indeed, made the lot of the mass of the peasants considerably worse. The landlords naturally made off with the best plots of land, leaving the most barren areas to the peasants. Strategic points such as water and mills were usually in the hands of the landlords who forced the peasants to pay for access. Worse still, the ‘free’ peasants were legally tied to the village commune or mir which had collective responsibility for collecting taxes. No peasant could leave the mir without permission. Freedom of movement was hampered by the system of internal passports. The village commune, in effect, was transformed into “the lowest rung of the local police system”. (See Bernard Pares, A History of Russia, p. 404.)
To make matters worse, the reform allowed the landlords to cut off and appropriate one-fifth (in some cases, two-fifths) of the lands formerly cultivated by the peasants. They invariably chose the best and most profitable parts – woods, meadows, watering places, grazing grounds, mills, etc. – which gave them a stranglehold over the ‘emancipated’ peasant. Year after year, a greater number of peasant families sunk hopelessly into debt and impoverishment as a result of this swindle.
The emancipation of the serfs was an attempt to carry through reform from the top to prevent revolution from below. Like all important reforms, it was a by-product of revolution. The Russian countryside had been shaken by peasant uprisings. In the last decade of the reign of Nicholas I, there were 400 peasant disturbances, and an equal number in the following six years (1855-60). In the space of 20 years (1835-54), 230 landowners and bailiffs had been killed, and a further 53 in the three years before 1861. The announcement of the emancipation was met by a further wave of disorders and uprisings, brutally suppressed. The hopes placed by an entire generation of progressive thinkers on the ideas of reform were cruelly betrayed by the results of the emancipation, which turned out to be a gigantic fraud. The peasants, who believed that the land was rightfully theirs, were cheated in all directions. They had to accept only those allotments laid down by the law (by agreement with the landlord) and had to pay a redemption fee over a period of 49 years at 6 per cent interest. As a result, the landlords retained approximately 71,500,000 dessiatines of land, and the peasants, representing the overwhelming majority of society, only 33,700,000 dessiatines.
In the years after 1861, the peasantry, hemmed in by repressive legislation on ‘poverty lots’ and impoverished by the weight of debt, staged a series of desperate local uprisings. But the peasantry, throughout history, has always been incapable of playing an independent role in society. Capable of great revolutionary courage and sacrifice, its efforts to shake off the rule of the oppressor have only succeeded where leadership of the revolutionary movement has been taken up by a stronger, more homogeneous and conscious class based in the towns. In the absence of this factor, the peasant ‘jacqueries’,[1] from the middle ages onwards, have inevitably suffered the cruellest defeats. The result of the scattered nature of the peasantry, its lack of social cohesion, and lack of class consciousness.
In Russia, where capitalist forms of production were still at the embryonic phase, no such revolutionary class existed in the towns. Yet a class, or more accurately caste, of largely impoverished students and intellectuals, the raznochintsy (those without rank) or ‘intellectual proletariat’ proved exceptionally sensitive to the subterranean mood of discontent which lay deep within the recesses of Russian life. Years later, the terrorist Myshkin declared at his trial that “the movement of the intelligentsia was not artificially created, but was the echo of popular unrest.” (Quoted in L. Trotsky, The Young Lenin, p. 29.) As always, the ability of the intelligentsia to play an independent social role was no greater than that of the peasantry. Nevertheless, it can act as quite an accurate barometer of the moods and tensions developing within society.
In 1861, the very year of the Emancipation, the great Russian democratic writer Alexander Herzen wrote from exile in London in the pages of his journal Kolokol (The Bell) urging the youth of Russia to go “to the people!” The arrest of prominent publicists like Chernyshevsky (whose writings were influenced by Marx and who had a big impact on Lenin and his generation) and Dimitri Pisarev, demonstrated the impossibility of peaceful liberal reform. By the end of the decade of the 1860s, the basis of a mass revolutionary movement of populist youth had been laid.
The appalling conditions of the masses in post-reform Russia moved the best sections of the intelligentsia to anger and indignation. The arrest of the most radical of the democratic wing, Pisarev and Chernyshevsky, only served to deepen the alienation of the intellectuals and push them further to the left. While the older generation of liberals accommodated themselves to the reaction, a new breed of young radicals was emerging in the universities, immortalised in the figure of Bazarov in Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons. The hallmark of this new generation was impatience with the fumbling of the liberals, whom they treated with contempt. They believed fervently in the ideas of a complete revolutionary overturn and a radical reconstruction of society from top to bottom.
Within 12 months of the emancipation, the ‘reforming Tsar’ had moved towards reaction. There was a clampdown on intellectuals. The universities were placed under the oppressive vigilance of the reactionary Minister of Education, Count Dimitri Tolstoy, who imposed an educational system designed to crush independent spirits and stifle imagination and creativity. The schools were forced to teach 47 hours of Latin a week and 36 hours of Greek, with a heavy emphasis on grammar. Natural science and history were excluded from the curriculum as potentially subversive subjects – and the system of policing the mind was rigidly enforced under the baleful eye of the school inspector. The heady days of ‘reform’ gave way to the bleak years of police surveillance and grey conformity. The move to reaction was intensified after the unsuccessful Polish uprising of 1863. The revolution was drowned in blood. Thousands of Poles were killed in battle, and hundreds were hanged in the repression that followed. The brutal Count Muravyov personally hanged 128 Poles and transported 9,423 men and women. The total exiled to Russia was twice that number. Peter Kropotkin, the future anarchist theoretician, witnessed the sufferings of the Polish exiles in Siberia where he was stationed as a young captain of the Imperial Guard:
I saw some of [them] on the Lena, standing half naked in a shanty, around an immense cauldron filled with salt brine, and mixing the thick, boiling brine with long shovels, in an infernal temperature, while the gate of the shanty was wide open to make a strong current of glacial air. After two years of such work, these martyrs were sure to die from consumption. (P. Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, vol. 1, p. 253.)
But, beneath the permafrost of reaction, the seeds of a new revolutionary revival were swiftly germinating. The case of Prince Kropotkin is a striking example of how the wind blows the tops of the trees first. Born into an aristocratic family, this one-time member of the Imperial Corps of Pages was, like many of his contemporaries, affected by the terrible suffering of the masses and driven to draw revolutionary conclusions. A keen scientist, Kropotkin vividly describes in his memoirs the political evolution of an entire generation: “But what right had I to these higher joys,” he asked himself, “when all around was nothing but misery and the struggle for a mouldy bit of bread; when whatever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotion must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not bread enough for their children?”
The cold cruelty towards the Poles showed the other face of the ‘reforming Tsar’, a man who, in Kropotkin’s words, “merrily signed the most reactionary decrees and then afterwards became despondent about them”. (Ibid., vol. 2, p. 20 and p. 25.) The corrupt and degenerate system of autocratic rule, the dead hand of bureaucracy, the all-pervasive whiff of religious mysticism and obscurantism roused all the living forces of society to revolt. “It is bitter,” wrote the poet Nekrasov, “the bread that has been made by slaves.” The revolt against slavery spurred the revolutionary student youth to search for a way out. Echoing Herzen, their watchword became: “V Narod!” (To the people!). To these courageous and dedicated youth, the words uttered by Herzen made an indelible impression: “Go to the people… That is our place… Demonstrate… that from among you will emerge not new bureaucrats, but soldiers of the Russian people.” (Quoted in SH Baron, Plekhanov – The Father of Russian Marxism, Spanish edition, p. 21.)
-
This refers to the numerous peasant uprisings that took place in France during the late Middle Ages. They invariably had an extremely violent character.