The Death of an Autocrat¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter opens with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II on 1 March 1881, an act carried out by the terrorist Grinevetsky of the People’s Will after an initial bomb missed its target. This event is presented as both the high point and the death knell of the Narodnik movement. The core argument is that the populist turn to individual terror was a product of Russia’s specific historical conditions: the belated development of capitalism meant that the bourgeoisie was too weak and the proletariat too embryonic to lead a revolution, leaving the radical intelligentsia to look to the peasantry as the sole revolutionary force.
The chapter grounds this analysis in the fraudulent Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861, which it describes not as enlightened reform but as a panic response to military defeat in the Crimean War and a wave of peasant disturbances. The reform is exposed as a swindle: landlords kept the best land, peasants were burdened with redemption payments over 49 years, and the village commune (mir) was turned into a police instrument. The result was deepening impoverishment and debt, not liberation. Evidence is drawn from Bernard Pares and from the statistics on land distribution—71.5 million dessiatines retained by landlords against 33.7 million for the vast peasant majority.
The chapter argues that the peasantry, despite its capacity for sacrifice, is historically incapable of independent revolutionary action, scattered and lacking class consciousness. In the absence of a strong urban class, the intelligentsia—the raznochintsy or intellectual proletariat—became a sensitive barometer of discontent but could not substitute for a genuine revolutionary class. The movement’s origins are traced to Herzen’s call “to the people!” and the radicalisation of figures like Chernyshevsky and Pisarev after their arrests. The reactionary turn after 1861, exemplified by Count Tolstoy’s oppressive educational reforms and the brutal suppression of the Polish uprising of 1863 (with Muravyov personally hanging 128 Poles), is shown to have driven the youth further left.
The chapter draws on Kropotkin’s memoirs to illustrate the moral revulsion that propelled aristocrats into revolution, and on Turgenev’s Bazarov to capture the new generation’s contempt for liberal fumbling. The polemical thrust is against the illusion that peaceful liberal reform was possible under tsarism, and implicitly against the Narodniks’ strategic error of substituting individual terror for mass class struggle. The death of the autocrat, the chapter concludes, simultaneously destroyed the party that killed him.