village-centered revolution. The peasantry distrusted these young in-
tellectuals and either ignored them or turned them over to the local
authorities. In 1875 the Third Section, the tsar’s secret police, issued
750 arrest warrants for men and women engaged in populist political
activities. Populism was not defeated by the Third Section; rather it
was driven underground and became increasing tempted by violence.
The most revolutionary wing of populism was Narodnaya volya,
the “People’s Will,” which believed that only violence against the
ruling class could liberate the country. The leadership of Narodnaya
volyabelieved that their primary target was Tsar Aleksandr II. Be-
ginning in 1879, the group repeatedly tried to kill the tsar, planting
bombs on train tracks and in the Winter Palace, the tsar’s residence.
The incompetence of the Third Section is nowhere better illustrated
than in its failure to protect the sovereign.
On 13 March 1881, Narodnaya volyaassassins ambushed the tsar
and mortally wounded him. The assassins were quickly rounded up.
After a trial, five of them were publicly hanged. The tactics of Naro-
dnaya volyawere adopted by the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s
Battle Organization, which saw political assassination as a crucial
ingredient of liberation of the Russian people.NEW ECONOMIC POLICY (NEP). Faced with massive peasant
rebellions, Vladimir Leninagreed to an armed truce with the coun-
tryside in 1921. The New Economic Policy ended the forced ex-
propriation of the peasants’ grain crop and allowed them to sell
their produce on an open market. The NEP created a period of rel-
ative prosperity and intellectual freedom. The NEP also saw a re-
duction of terror. The number of political arrests and executions
dropped drastically as the security service was kept on a tighter
reign. But from the point of view of the Communist Partyand the
OGPU, the NEP allowed the emergence of two enemy classes: a
small class of better-off peasants, often referred to as kulaks, and
traders who were damned as “Nepmen.”
NEP was a compromise that threatened the party’s monopoly of
power. In the countryside, the Communist Party lost much of its au-
thority; the peasants maintained a monopoly on the cities’ food sup-
ply, and the Soviet Union was unable to pay for needed industrial
technology with grain. Joseph Stalin’s answer to the crisis was col-172 •NEW ECONOMIC POLICY (NEP)06-313 G-P.qxd 7/27/06 7:56 AM Page 172