In
1869, two Russian writers, Mikhail Bakunin
and Sergi Nechayev published the
book Catechism of a Revolutionist.
It included the famous passage: "The Revolutionist is a doomed
man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property
nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose,
one thought, one passion - the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely
by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order
and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners,
conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy
and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose - to destroy it."
The book
had a great impact on young Russians and 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 members began to be arrested and imprisoned.
In 1878 Vera Zasulich, a member of Land
and Liberty, heard that one of her fellow comrades, Alexei Bogoliubov,
had been badly beaten in prison, she decided to seek revenge. Zasulich
went to the local prison and shot General Trepov, the police chief
of St. Petersburg.
Zasulich
was arrested and charged with attempted murder. During the trial the
defence produced evidence of such abuses by the police, and Zasulich
conducted herself with such dignity, that the jury acquitted her.
When the police tried to re-arrest her outside the court, the crowd
intervened and allowed her to escape.
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.
(1)
Mikhail Bakunin and Sergi
Nechayev, Catechism of a Revolutionist (1869)
The
Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs,
sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire
being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion - the revolution.
Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every
link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with
the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He
is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose
- to destroy it.
He
despises public opinion. He hates and despises the social morality
of his time, its motives and manifestations. Everything which promotes
the success of the revolution is moral, everything which hinders it
is immoral. The nature of the true revolutionist excludes all romanticism,
all tenderness, all ecstasy, all love.
(2)
In her memoirs Vera Figner explained how
her political views developed while she was living in Geneva.
Our circle in Zurich had arrived at the conviction
that it was necessary to assume a position identical to that of people
in order to earn their trust and conduct propaganda among them successfully.
You had to "take to plain living" - to engage in physical
labour, to drink, eat, and dress as the people did, renouncing all
the habits and needs of the cultural classes. This was the only way
to become close to the people and to get a response to propaganda;
furthermore, only manual labour was pure and holy, only by surrendering
yourself to it completely could you avoid being an exploiter.
(3)
In 1876 Vera
Zasulich attempted to kill the police chief,
General Trepov after he had given the order to beat fellow revolutionary,
Alexei Bogoliubov.
Now Trepov and his entourage were looking at me, their
hands occupied by papers and things, and I decided to do it earlier
than I had planned - to do it when Trepov stopped opposite my neighbour,
before reaching me.
And suddenly
there was no neighbour ahead of me - I was first.
"What
do you want?"
"A
certificate of conduct."
He jotted
down something with a pencil and turned to my neighbour.
The revolver
was in my hand. I pressed the trigger - a misfire.
My heart
missed a beat. Again I pressed. A shot, cries. Now they'll start beating
me. This was next in the sequence of events I had thought through
so many times.
I threw
down the revolver - this also had been decided beforehand; otherwise,
in the scuffle, it might go off by itself. I stood and waited.
Suddenly
everybody around me began moving, the petitioners scattered, police
officers threw themselves at me, and I was seized from both sides.
(4)
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.
(5)
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.
(6)
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.progra
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".
(6)
David Shub was a member of the Social
Democratic Labour Party and was a loyal supporter of George
Plekhanov.
A split occurred in the Land and Freedom group in
1879, when an executive committee was set up to organize terrorist
acts. A small faction, headed by George Plekhanov, rejected the policy
of terrorism and became known as the Black Repartition.
The larger
group called itself the People's Will. Both believed that the Russian
peasant was by nature strongly inclined to Socialism. Contrary to
the Marxist notion that only the industrial working class could bring
Socialism, they believed that in Russia the peasant could play the
same role as the industrial proletariat in other countries. But the
People's Will believed that Socialism could not be realized for some
time; the immediate goal was the expropriation of the estates in favour
of the peasantry and the establishment of civil liberty.
On Sunday
13th March 1881, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by members of
the People's Will.
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