Lev
Tikhomirov was
born in the Don province of Russia in 1850.
As a student he was deeply influenced by the ideas of Sergei
Nechayev and joined
the People's Will group.
In 1880
there was strong disagreement in People's Will
about the purposes of terrorism. One faction that included Nikolai
Morozov and Olga Liubatovich,
argued that the main objective was to force the government to grant
democratic rights to the people of Russia. However, another faction,
led by Tikhomirov, believed that it was possible for a small group
of revolutionaries to use terrorism in order to directly capture power.
Olga
Liubatovich and Nikolai Morozov strongly
disagreed with the ideas of Lev Tikhomirov.
They argued that this was an example of Jacobinism and would result
in the kind of dictatorship that had taken place after the French
Revolution. Liubatovich and Morozov left the organization and Tikomirov's
views prevailed.
After the
assassination of Alexander II Tikhomirov
fled from Russia. Tikhomirov lived in several European countries and
published biographies of Sophia Perovskaya,
Andrei Zhelyabov and Nikolai
Kibalchich.
In 1888
Tikhomirov apologized for his past revolutionary activities and was
allowed to return to Russia. He now became an opponent of reform and
became one of Russia's leading right-wing journalists. Lev
Tikhomirov
died in 1922.
(1)
Olga Liubatovich wrote about
her disagreements with Lev Tikhomirov in her memoirs published in
1907.
During the debates, the question of Jacobinism - seizing
power and ruling from above, by decree - was raised. As I saw it,
the Jacobin tinge that Tikhomirov gave to his program for the Executive
Committee gave to his program for the Executive Committee threatened
the party and the entire revolutionary movement with moral death;
it was a kind of rebirth of Nechaevism, which had long since lost
moral credit in the revolutionary world. It was my belief that the
revolutionary idea could be a life-giving force only when it was the
antithesis of all coercion - social, state, and even personal coercion,
tsarist and Jacobin alike. Of course, it was possible for a narrow
group of ambitious men to replace one form of coercion or authority
by another. But neither the people nor educated society would follow
them consciously, and only a conscious movement can impart new principles
to public life.
At this
point, Morozov announced that he considered himself free of any obligation
to defend a program like Tikhomirov's in public. I too, declared that
it was against my nature to act on the basis of compulsion; that once
the Executive Committee had taken on a task - the seizure of state
power - that violated my basic principles, and once it had recourse
in its organizational practice to autocratic methods fraught with
mutual distrust, then I, too, reclaimed my freedom of action.
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