Tsarist Russia 115party could make a revolution, fearing that Marxists wanted to replace a
bourgeois state with a proletarian state, a state all the same.
Unlike revolutionary nihilists and anarchists who dreamed of a sponta
neous peasant uprising, Sergei Nechayev (1847—1882) held that a small,
tightly organized revolutionary group could begin the peasant revolution that
would sweep away autocratic oppression. “The revolutionary is,” Nechayev
wrote, “a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no affairs, sentiments,
attachments, property, not even a name of his own. Everything in him is
absorbed by one exclusive interest, one thought, one passion—the revolu
tion.” After murdering one of his colleagues, Nechayev was arrested and sent
to prison, where he died.
During his anguished life, Nechayev had battled the populists (narod
nifei). The populists developed their doctrine in response to nihilism and
retained the Slavophiles’ faith in the Russian peasantry. They were roman
tic collectivists who idealized the Russian peasant community. In contrast
to Chernyshevsky, who wanted to teach the peasants, the populists wanted
to learn from them. In the early 1870s, several thousand young Russians,
who had been members of circles of intellectuals, went from Saint Peters
burg and Moscow into the countryside. Many had been influenced by Peter
Lavrov (1823-1900), who lamented in his Historical Letters (1869) that the
gap between the intellectuals like himself and peasants had become even
greater over the previous decades. These upper-class Russians resembled
the conscience-stricken gentry of the 1830s and 1840s. “Going to the peo
ple” and dressing like peasants, they also wanted to prepare revolution by
helping to educate the peasants. Some of those attracted to direct revolu
tionary action worried that the emancipation of the serfs might create a
class of conservative peasant proprietors. Time seemed to be running out
for Russia to take its own path to socialism before capitalism became
entrenched in Russia, as it had in Western Europe.
In 1878, a revolutionary populist shot and wounded the governor
general of Saint Petersburg. Another attack that year, carried out by the
“disorganization section” of Land and Freedom, struck down the head of
the Third Section police. A wave of strikes by industrial workers convinced
the terrorists that revolution was not far away.
Twice more, Tsar Alexander II escaped assassination attempts. In the hope
of placating his enemies without destroying the foundations of the autoc
racy, Alexander disbanded the Third Section. He dismissed the minister of
education, whose restrictive policies on university admission were unpopu
lar, and announced the formation of a new consultative assembly. But in
1881, members of “People’s Will” struck, hurling a bomb near Alexander’s
sleigh. When the tsar foolishly stepped from the sleigh to inspect the dam
age, another man threw a bomb that killed him. However, the assassination
did not prove to be the revolutionary spark anticipated by those who carried
it out. Millions of the tsar’s subjects mourned the ruler who had freed them.