In
1876
a secret society, Land and Liberty, was
formed. The group, led by Mark Natanson,
demanded that the Russian Empire should be dissolved. It also believed
that two thirds of the land should be transferred to the peasants
where it would be organized in self-governing communes. It remained
a small group and at its peak only had around 200 members.
Undercover
agents employed by Okhrana soon infiltrated
the organization and in 1877 members began to be arrested. This included
Mark Natanson who was imprisoned in
Siberia where he was to remain for the next eleven years.
In October,
1879, the Land and Liberty split into two
factions. The majority of members, who favoured a policy of terrorism,
established the People's Will. Others, such
as George Plekhanov formed Black Repartition,
a group that rejected terrorism and supported a socialist propaganda
campaign among workers and peasants.
The group
remained small and had little influence. In 1880 the leaders such
as George Plekhanov, Vera
Zasulich, Lev Deich and Pavel
Axelrod went to live in Geneva.
(1)
Olga
Liubatovich was in Geneva with Vera
Zasulich when news arrived that Alexander Soloviev had attempted
to kill Alexander II.
In the spring of 1879, the unexpected news of Alexander
Soloviev's attempt on the life of the Tsar threw Geneva's Russian
colony into turmoil. Vera Zasulich hid away for three days in deep
depression: Soloviev's deed obviously reflected a trend toward direct,
active struggle against the government, a trend of which Zasulich
disapproved. It seemed to me that her nerves were so strongly affected
by violent actions like Soloviev's because she consciously (and perhaps
unconsciously, as well) regarded her own deed as the first step in
this direction.
Other émigrés
were incomparably more tolerant of the attempt: Stefanovich and Deich,
for example, merely noted that it might hinder political work among
the people. Kravchinskii rejected even this objection. All of us knew
from our personal experience, he argued, that extensive work among
the people has long been impossible, nor could we expect to expand
our activity and attract masses of the people to the socialist cause
until we obtained at least a minimum of political freedom, freedom
of speech, and the freedom to organize unions.
(2)
When the Land
and Liberty movement split in October, 1879, Olga
Liubatovich joined the People's Will group.
Stefanovich
became the head of the Black Repartition, and his friends Vera Zasulich
and Lev Deich joined him. But even ardent populists like Vera Figner,
who had been working in one of the countryfolk settlements in the
provinces, and Sophia Perovskaia joined the People's Will, the group
that had taken up arms to defend the people and their apostles.
Black Repartition
was stillborn; it left no visible traces of its work among the people
at the end of 1879 and the beginning of 1880, because no such activity
was possible on a broad scale. After a series of failures, Stefanovich,
Deich, Plekhanov, and Zasulich returned abroad.
As for
me, naturally I joined the People's Will. The Executive Committee
of the People's Will soon began to chart its own course. Its initial
plan had been to carry out a number of actions against the governor-generals,
but this decision was called into question at one open-air meeting
in Lesnoi: shouldn't we concentrate all our forces against the Tsar
instead, it was asked. We resolved that this should indeed be the
goal of the Executive Committee. The implementation of that decision
engaged the People's Will right up to March 1, 1881.
(3)
Elizabeth Kovalskaia
was a member of Land and Liberty and later
joined the Black Repartition faction.
In the spring of 1879, after Governor Krapotkin was
assassinated, there was a wave of searches and arrests in Kharkov.
I had to flee and go understanding for good. I spent brief periods
of time in various cities, reaching St. Petersburg in the fall of
that year. By this time, Land and Liberty had split into the People's
Will and Black Repartition. Firmly convinced that only the people
themselves could carry out a socialist revolution and that terror
directed at the centre of the state (such as the people's Will advocated)
would bring - at best - only a wishy-washy constitution which would
in turn strengthen the Russian bourgeoisie, I joined Black Repartition,
which had retained the old Land and Liberty program.
Joining
Black Repartition had involved accepting the basic principles of the
Land and Liberty program. Those principles had, in fact, guided my
own political work previously; my reservations about joining the organization
concerned tactics. The experiences of the revolutionaries who had
worked in the countryside had not been very successful. From my various
approaches to the masses, I had gradually come to the conclusion that
two activities should be paramount. The first was economic terror.
Now, the program of Black Repartition included this, but the party's
emphasis was on local popular uprisings. In my opinion, economic terror
was more readily understood by the masses; it defended their interests
directly, involved the fewest sacrifices, and stimulated the development
of revolutionary spirit. The other major task was organizing workers'
union, the members of which would rapidly spread revolutionary activity
from the cities to the native villages; and there, too, economic terror
should be the heart of the struggle.
I recall a very stormy meeting about the printing
press which Black Repartition held in one of its conspiratorial apartments.
Maria Krylova, who had been serving as the proprietress of Land and
Liberty's printing operation, emphatically refused to let the People's
Will have the press - she was even prepared to use arms against them,
if they took any aggressive actions to get it. George Plekhanov was
also strongly opposed to giving up the press, but at the same time,
in his characteristic manner, he wittily and venomously ridiculed
Krylova's plan for "armed resistance".
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