land reform drove liberal opinion towards sympathy with the revolutionaries. They felt that public opinion was on their side, and finally resorted to organised terrorism. Yet their ends always remained
moderate enough. The open letter which they addressed to the new
Emperor in r 881 is mild and liberal in tone. 'Terror', said the celebrated revolutionary Vera Figner many years later, 'was intended to create opportunities for developing the faculties of men for service to
society.' The society for which violence was to blast the way was to
be peaceful, tolerant, decentralised and humane. The principal enemy
was still the state.
The wave of terrorism reached its climax with the assassination of
Alexander II in r 88 1 . The hoped-for revolution did not break out.
The revolutionary organisations were crushed, and the new Tsar
decided upon a policy of extreme repression. In this he was, on the
whole, supported by public opinion, which recoiled before the
assassination of an Emperor who had, after all, emancipated the
peasants, and was said to have been meditating other liberal measures.
The most prominent leaders of the movemen.t were executed or exiled ;
lesser figures escaped abroad, and the most gifted of those who were
still free- Plekhanov and Aksel rod-gradually moved towards Marxism.
They felt embarrassed by Marx's own concession that Russia could in
principle avoid passing through a capitalist stage even without the aid
of a communist world revolution -a thesis which Engels conceded far
more grudgingly and with qualifications-and maintained that Russia
had in fact already entered the capitalist stage. They declared that
since the development of capitalism in Russia was no more avoidable
than it had been in its day in the west, nothing was to be gained by
averting one's face from the 'iron' logic of history, and that for these
reasons, so far from resisting industrialisation, socialists should encourage it, indeed profit by the fact that it, and it alone, could breed the army of revolutionaries which would be sufficient to overthrow the
capitalist enemy-an army to be formed out of the growing city proletariat, organised and disciplined by the very conditions of its labour.
,,
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R U S S IAN T H INKERS
The vast leap forward in industrial development made by Russia
in the I 89os seemed to support the Marxist thesis. It proved attractive
to revolutionary intellectuals for many reasons: because it claimed to
be founded on a scientific analysis of the laws of history which no
society could hope to evade; because it claimed to be able to prove
that, although, as the pattern of history inexorably unfolded itself,
much violence, misery, and injustice were bound to occur, yet the
story would have a happy ending. Hence the conscience of those who
felt guilty because they acquiesced in exploitation and poverty, or at
any rate because they did not take active-that is, violent- steps to
alleviate or prevent them, as populist policy had demanded, felt
assuaged by the 'scientific' guarantee that the road, covered though it
might be with the corpses of the innocent, led inevitably to the gates
of an earthly paradise. According to this view, the expropriators
would find themselves expropriated by the sheer logic of human
development, although the course of history might be shortened, and
the birth-pangs made easier, by conscious organisation, and above all
an increase in knowledge (that is, education) on the part of the workers
and their leaders. This was particularly welcome to those who, understandably reluctant to continue with useless terrorism which merely led to Siberia or the scaffold, now found doctrinal justification for
peaceful study and the life of ideas, which the intellectuals among them
found far more congenial than bomb-throwing.
The heroism, the disinterestedness, the personal nobility of the
populists were often admitted by their Marxist opponents. They were
regarded as worthy forerunners of a truly rational revolutionary party,
and Chernyshevsky was sometimes accorded an even higher status and
was credited with insights of genius-an empirical and unscientific,
but instinctively correct, approach to truths of which only Marx and
Engels could provide the demonstration, armed as they were with the
instrument of an exact science to which neither Chernyshevsky, nor
any other Russian thinker of his day, had yet attained. Marx and
Engels grew to be particularly indulgent to the Russians: they were
praised for having done wonders for amateurs, remote from the west
and using home-made tools. They alone in Europe had, by I 88o,
created a truly revolutionary situation in their country; nevertheless
it was made clear, particularly by Kautsky, that this was no substitute
for professional methods and the use of the new machinery provided
by scientific socialism. Populism was written off as an amalgam of
unorganised moral indignation and Utopian ideas in the muddled
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R U S S IAN POP U L I S M
heads of self-taught peasants, well-meaning university intellectuals and
other social casualties of the confused interim between the end of an
obsolescent feudalism and the beginning of the new capitalist phase in
a backward country. Marxist historians still tend to describe it as a
movement compounded of systematic misinterpretation of economic
facts and social realities, noble but useless individual terrorism, and
spontaneous or ill-directed peasant risings-the necessary but pathetic
beginnings of real revolutionary activity, the prelude to the real play, a
scene of naive ideas and frustrated practice destined to be swept away
by the new revolutionary, dialectical science heralded by Plekhanov
and Lenin.
What were the ends of populism? Violent disputes took place about
means and methods, about timing, but not about ultimate purposes.
Anarchism, equality, a full life for all, these were universally accepted.
It is as if the entire movement-the motley variety of revolutionary
types which Franco Venturi describes in his book1 so well and so
lovingly-Jacobins and moderates, terrorists and educators, Lavrovists
and Bakuninists, 'troglodytes', 'recalcitrants', 'country folk', members
of 'Land and Liberty' and of 'The People's Will', were all dominated
by a single myth : that once the monster was slain, the sleeping
princess- the Russian peasantry-would awaken without further ado
and live happily for ever after.
This -is the movement of which Franco Venturi has written the
history, the fullest, clearest, best-written and most impartial account
of a particular stage of the Russian revolutionary movement in any
language. Yet if the movement was a failure, if it was founded on
false premises and was so easily extinguished by the tsarist police,
has it more than historical interest- that of a narrative of the life and
death of a party, of its acts and its ideas? On this question Venturi
discreetly, as behoves an objective historian, offers no direct opinion.
He tells the story in chronological sequence; he explains what occurs;
he describes origins and consequences; he illuminates the relations of