Throughout recent history student groups have always led the progressive charge in times of change and upheaval, and the tightly controlled nation of 19th Century Tsarist Russia was no exception. Beginning in the 1870's, thousands of university students and activists took not to the streets of Moscow or St. Petersburg, as was the case in the 1910’s, but to the rural countryside, where they expected to find a nobly bucolic Russian peasant class waiting to offer lessons in the ideal society. Instead, what they found was radically different from the hope and optimism they had been promised, and this disappointment would help shift the direction of the revolutionary movement towards Communism.
The Situation Prior to the Movement
Political power in Tsarist Russia was concentrated within the royal family, or, depending on the autocratic leanings of the Tsar, a very small minority of rich nobles and ministers. The majority of the laboring classes, on the other hand, were impoverished rural farmers beholden to absentee landlords or powerful town elders. While the Industrial Revolution, which had created a class of urban workers in Western Europe and the United States, arrived late to Russia, the revolutionary mentality of these countries was in full swing. Students and radical thinkers gathered in reading circles and clubs to debate the merits of various political philosophies, and the heroes of this "revolutionary class" were writers like Marx, Alexander Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin.
The words "Russia" and "revolution" are traditionally synonymous with Communism, however, with a low level of industry and no urban worker base, the primary ideology of anti-government activists during the 1860's and 70's was Populism, which focus on the agrarian countryside. Narodnik writers praised the virtues of the rural farmer, and suggested the coming revolution was to be carried out by the peasants, albeit with some prodding by the intelligentsia. Impressed by these theories, thousands of students and activists, independent of any central authority or command, took to the countryside to live amongst the small farmers.
The Narodniks As a Group
Who were these volunteers, in Russian, "Narodniks," and what were their motivations for such a radical pilgrimage? For all their notions of peasant nobility and superiority, most of the activists were upper-middle class university students, sons and daughters of privileged urbanities. Their goal was twofold, one, to undercut the monopolies of the well-off peasants (kulaks) by setting up cooperative markets, and two, to present superior revolutionary ideals of liberty and self-determination to the oppressed serfs.
The Failure of the "Go To the People" Movement
As the movement progressed, it became clear the Narodniks had both overestimated the peasants’ willingness to cast aside their traditional way of thinking and underestimated the power of the kulaks and the church. After official emancipation of the serfs in 1851, these two groups had risen to fill the power vacuum, and had no intention of relinquishing political or economic control.
Often Narodniks found themselves at odds with the very people they had come to help. Peasant mobs, incensed by kulak propaganda or religious fervor, attacked and murdered students and their few village sympathizers. Even when not faced with violence, young Narodniks were shocked at some of barbaric practices, customs and superstitions of the peasants, some more appropriate for the Dark Ages than a modern society, and the farmers proved unwilling to change the unwritten laws that had governed their lands long before the revolution was even a pipe dream.
Consequences and Future Russian Revolutionaries
Eventually, the Narodnik movement fizzled out, the largely upper-middle class activists having failed to connect with their underprivileged countrymen. Hundreds were arrested, and their mass trials provided the young revolutionaries with effective pulpits for their ideas. Others turned to anti-government terrorism, convinced the state was responsible for engineering conflict between the peasants and the kulaks. This "us versus them," mentality, so central to Bolshevik ideology, only prompted increasing cycles of escalating violence between the two sides, which would lead to the violent revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and the rise of Lenin and the Soviet Union.
Sources
Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 (New York: Penguin, 1996) 139-143
