‘Going to the People’¶
Core Argument¶
In the 1870s, the ‘going to the people’ movement saw hundreds of upper-class youth, driven by a naive yet courageous selflessness, abandon their privileged lives to rouse the Russian peasantry to revolution. Lacking a strong industrial working class, clear revolutionary traditions, or access to Marx’s writings under Tsarist censorship, these young Narodniks were drawn to Bakunin’s doctrine of ‘implacable destruction’. Bakunin’s claim that peasants were instinctively revolutionary and that students needed only to spark revolt in the villages proved disastrously utopian. In the summer of 1874, these young people cut ties with their class, dressed as peasants, and dispersed into the countryside. They were met not with revolutionary fervour but with suspicion and hostility; peasants often handed them over to the authorities. The movement was crushed by mass arrests—over 700 in 1874 alone. The Narodniks’ theory of a ‘special Russian road to socialism’, which held that Russia could skip the capitalist stage of development, was fundamentally unsound. Their revolutionary voluntarism ignored objective social and economic conditions: the peasantry desired land ownership, not socialist collectivism.
Ironically, the only echo of their propaganda came from the very group they dismissed as ‘town peasants’—the nascent industrial working class. Early workers’ organisations, such as the Southern Workers’ Union (1875) and the Northern Union of Russian Workers (1877), indicated a growing class consciousness among the urban proletariat. A key figure in this first period of the Russian labour movement was Stepan Khalturin, an outstanding worker-propagandist. Among students, Khalturin was a quiet observer, gathering information and borrowing books while rarely expressing his own views, his intelligent eyes reflecting an amiable irony as students lectured him at length. With workers, he was transformed: a loving nurse who taught them, found them work, mediated quarrels, and maintained a quiet dictatorship based on tireless attention to detail. Before any meeting, he spoke with everyone to gauge the mood, considered all sides, and arrived most prepared to express the collective state of mind. Yet even Khalturin was later drawn into the dead end of terrorism, organising a spectacular attempt on the Tsar’s life—a path that Lenin would later condemn as a diversion from the real revolutionary work of building a mass party.