page_title: People's Rights Party
section_title: Dissolution and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: People's Rights Party / History / Dissolution and legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Nikolay Sergeevich Tyutchev. 1910. Italy Русский: Николай Сергеевич Тютчев. 1910. Италия
context_page_description: The People's Rights Party, was a radical constitutionalist political party established in Tsarist Russia in 1893. The group's political leader was the agrarian populist Mark Natanson and its ideological leading light was the literary critic and public affairs commentator N.K. Mikhailovsky.
  While the People's Rights Party was small and short-lived owing to repression by the Tsarist political police, it has been remembered for its transitional place between the 19th Century Russian populist movement and a key 20th Century political organization, the Socialist Revolutionary Party.
context_section_description: The Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, had been aware of the activities of the ostensibly underground People's Rights Party very nearly from its beginning but had allowed the party to continue its activities until it could extract all the information possible about its participants and sympathizers. The publication of the group's program, written in the form of a manifesto, on February 19, 1894, escalated the situation from the perspective of the authorities. A coordinated raid was organized and executed on the morning of April 21, 1894, with simultaneous arrests made in five cities, including the group's headquarters city of Orël, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kharkov, as well as Smolensk, location of the party's secret press. A total of 52 arrests were made as part of the operation — a majority of the group's formal members.
  Mark Natanson, the head of the party, was among those arrested, with the resulting sentence consigning him to ten years of administrative exile in Siberia. Other top leaders arrested at the time included N.S. Tyutchev, A.V. Peshekhonov, and future leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party Victor Chernov. Those who were not arrested immediately halted their illegal political activity or fled the country. The organization was effectively destroyed with the one single blow.
  The party proved to be a political failure owing to its inability to conduct its activities in public and small size, combined with its extremely short lifespan. Nevertheless, the group has been regarded by intellectual historians as influential as a watershed in the process of demythologizing belief in the transformative essence of the peasant masses and in its abnegation of traditional Russian rejection of the norms of western constitutionalism as both a vehicle and a goal for change.
  Former members of the People's Rights Party would re-emerge as top leaders of the constitutionalist Union of Liberation or would join the Socialist Revolution Party after its organization in 1902.
caption: N.S. Tyutchev (1856-1924) as he appeared in 1910. Tyutchev was among those arrested by the Okhrana's coordinated raids of April 24, 1894.
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