page_title: Narodnaya Volya
section_title: The Populist background
hierarchical_section_title: Narodnaya Volya / History / The Populist background
caption_attribution_description: Для издания И.Н. Кнебеля "Русская история в картинах"
context_page_description: Narodnaya Volya was a 19th-century revolutionary political organization in the Russian Empire which conducted assassinations of government officials in an attempt to overthrow the autocratic system and stop the Government reforms of Alexander II of Russia. The organization declared itself to be a populist movement that succeeded the Narodniks. Composed primarily of young revolutionary socialist intellectuals believing in the efficacy of terrorism, Narodnaya Volya emerged in Autumn 1879 from the split of an earlier revolutionary organization called Zemlya i Volya.
  Based upon an underground apparatus of local, semi-independent cells co-ordinated by a self-selecting Executive Committee, Narodnaya Volya continued to espouse acts of revolutionary violence in an attempt to spur mass revolt against Tsarism, culminating in the successful assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March 1881—the event for which the group is best remembered.
context_section_description: The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 did not suddenly end the state of grim rural poverty in Russia, and the autocracy headed by the Tsar of Russia and the nobles around him, as well as the privileged state bureaucracy, remained in firm control of the nation's economy from which it extracted pecuniary benefits. By the beginning of the 1870s, dissent regarding the established political and economic order had begun to take concrete form among many members of the intelligentsia, which sought to foster a modern and democratic society in Russia in place of the economic backwardness and political repression which marked the old regime.
  A set of "populist" values became commonplace among these radical intellectuals seeking change of the Russian economic and political form. The Russian peasantry, based as it was upon its historic village governing structure, the peasant commune (obshchina or mir), and its collective holding and periodic redistribution of farmland, was held to be inherently socialistic, or at least fundamentally amenable to socialist organization. It was further believed that this fact made possible a unique path for the modernization of Russia which bypassed the industrial poverty that was a feature of early capitalism in Western Europe—the region to which Russian intellectuals looked for inspiration and by which they measured the comparatively backwards state of their own polity.
  Moreover, the radical intelligentsia believed it axiomatic that individuals and the nation had the power to control their own destiny and that it was the moral duty of enlightened civil society to transform the nation by leading the peasantry in mass revolt that would ultimately transform Russia to a socialist society.
  These ideas were regarded by most radical intellectuals of the era as nearly incontestable, the byproduct of decades of observation and thought dating back to the conservative Slavophiles and sketched out by such disparate writers as Alexander Herzen (1812–1870), Pyotr Lavrov (1823–1900), and Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876).
  Socialist study circles (kruzhki) began to emerge in Russia during the decade of the 1870s, populated primarily by idealistic students in major urban centers such as St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. These initially tended to have a loose organizational structure, decentralized and localized, bound together by the personal familiarity of participants with one another. Efforts to propagandize revolutionary and socialist ideas among factory workers and peasants were quickly met with state repression, however, with the Tsarist secret police (Okhrana) identifying, arresting, and jailing agitators.
  In the spring of 1874 a mass movement of Going to the People began, with young intellectuals taking jobs in rural villages as teachers, clerks, doctors, carpenters, masons, or common farm laborers, attempting to immerse themselves in the peasants' world so as to better inculcate them with socialist and revolutionary ideas. Fired with messianic zeal, perhaps 2,000 people left for rural posts in the spring; by the fall some 1,600 of these found themselves arrested and jailed, failing to make the slightest headway in fomenting agrarian revolution. The failure of this movement, marked by a rejection of political arguments by the peasantry and easy arrests of public speakers by local authorities and the Okhrana, deeply influenced the revolutionary movement in years to follow. The need for stealth and secrecy and more aggressive measures seemed to have been made clear.
caption: Boris Kustodiev, Liberation of peasants (1907). Painting of peasants hearing the reading of the Emancipation reform of 1861 from the steps of the local manor.
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