The intelligentsia did not consist of active revolutionaries, although it preferred the revolutionaries to the government, but it was from the intelligentsia that the professional revolutionaries were largely recruited. The lack of civil liberties and the prohibition of political parties made it necessary for socialists to use conspiratorial methods. Illegal parties had to have rigid centralized discipline. Yet the emergence of the professional revolutionary, imagined in romantically diabolical terms in the Revolutionary Catechism of Mikhail Bakunin (Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich) and Sergey Nechayev (Nechayev, Sergey Gennadiyevich) in 1869 and sketched more realistically in What Is to Be Done? by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin (Lenin, Vladimir Ilich), in 1902, was not entirely due to the circumstances of the underground political struggle. The revolutionaries were formed also by their sense of mission, by their absolute conviction that they knew best the interests of the masses. For these men and women, revolution was not just a political aim; it was also a substitute for religion. It is worth noting that a proportion of the young revolutionaries of the late 19th century were children of Orthodox priests or persons associated with religious sects. It is also worth noting that the traditional Russian belief in autocracy, the desire for an all-powerful political saviour, and the contempt for legal formalities and processes had left its mark on them. The autocracy of Nicholas II was, of course, odious to them, but this did not mean that autocratic government should be abolished; rather, it should be replaced by the autocracy of the virtuous.
Russian revolutionary socialism at the end of the century was divided into two main streams, each of these being subdivided into a section that favoured conspiratorial tactics and one that aimed at a mass movement to be controlled by its members. The Socialist Revolutionary Party (Socialist Revolutionaries; founded in 1901 from a number of groups more or less derived from Narodnaya Volya) first hoped that Russia could bypass capitalism; when it became clear that this could not be done, they aimed to limit its operation and build a socialist order based on village communes. The land was to be socialized but worked by peasants on the principle of “labour ownership.” The Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party (Social Democrats; founded in 1898 from a number of illegal working-class groups) believed that the future lay with industrialization and a socialist order based on the working class. The Socialist Revolutionaries were divided between their extreme terrorist wing, the “Fighting Organization,” and a broader and looser membership that at one end merged imperceptibly with radical middle-class liberalism. The Social Democrats were divided between Lenin's group, which took the name Bolshevik (derived from the Russian word for “majority,” after a majority won by his group at one particular vote during the second congress of the party, held in Brussels and London in 1903), and a number of other groups that were by no means united but that came to be collectively known as Menshevik (derived from the word for “minority”). The personal, ideological, and programmatic issues involved in their quarrels were extremely complex, but it is a permissible oversimplification to say that Lenin favoured rigid discipline while the Mensheviks aimed at creating a mass labour movement of the western European type, that the Mensheviks were much more willing to cooperate with nonsocialist liberals than were the Bolsheviks, and that Lenin paid much more attention to the peasants as a potential revolutionary force than did the Mensheviks. These divisions arose because the Mensheviks adhered to orthodox Marxism, while Lenin was prepared to rework basic Marxist thought to fit Russian political reality as he saw it.
Russification policies
After the Crimean War the Russian government made some attempt to introduce in Poland a new system acceptable to the Polish population. The leading figure on the Polish side was the nobleman Aleksander Wielopolski (Wielopolski, Count Aleksander). His pro-Russian program proved unacceptable to the Poles. Tension increased, and in January 1863 (January Insurrection) armed rebellion broke out. This rebellion was put down, being suppressed with special severity in the Lithuanian and Ukrainian borderlands. In order to punish the Polish country gentry for their part in the insurrection, the Russian authorities carried out a land reform on terms exceptionally favourable to the Polish peasants. Its authors were Nikolay Milyutin (Milyutin, Nikolay Alekseyevich) and Yury Samarin, who genuinely desired to benefit the peasants. The reform was followed, however, by an anti-Polish policy in education and other areas. In the 1880s this went so far that the language of instruction even in primary schools in areas of purely Polish population was Russian. At first, all classes of Poles passively acquiesced in their defeat, while clinging to their language and national consciousness, but in the 1890s two strong, though of course illegal, political parties appeared—the National Democrats and the Polish Socialist Party, both fundamentally anti-Russian.
After 1863 the authorities also severely repressed all signs of Ukrainian nationalist activity. In 1876 all publications in Ukrainian, other than historical documents, were prohibited. In Eastern Galicia, however, which lay just across the Austrian border and had a population of several million Ukrainians, not only the language but also political activity flourished. There the great Ukrainian historian Mikhail Hrushevsky and the socialist writer Mikhail Drahomanov published their works; Ukrainian political literature was smuggled across the border. In the 1890s small illegal groups of Ukrainian democrats and socialists existed on Russian soil.
From the 1860s the government embarked on a policy designed to strengthen the position of the Russian language and nationality in the borderlands of the empire. This policy is often described as “Russification.” The emphasis on the Russian language could also be seen as an attempt to make governing the empire easier and more efficient. However, though Russian was to be the lingua franca, the government never explicitly demanded that its non-Russian subjects abandon their own languages, nationalities, or religions. On the other hand, conversions to Orthodoxy were welcomed, and converts were not allowed to revert to their former religions. The government policy of Russification found its parallel in the overtly Russian nationalist tone of several influential newspapers and journals. Nor was Russian society immune to the attraction of national messianism, as the popularity of Nikolay Yakovlevich Danilevsky (Danilevsky, Nikolay Yakovlevich)'s Russia and Europe in the decades after its first appearance in 1869 attested. For most supporters of Russification, however, the policy's main aim was to consolidate a Russian national identity and loyalty at the empire's centre and to combat the potential threat of imperial disintegration in the face of minority nationalism.