‘Land and Freedom’¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter traces the emergence, internal contradictions, and eventual disintegration of the Narodnik movement, focusing on the organisation Zemlya i Volya (Land and Freedom) and its successor factions. The core argument is that Narodism, despite its revolutionary pretensions, was fundamentally a confused and pre-Marxist ideology that ultimately led to political dead ends—either a slide into liberalism or the catastrophic adoption of individual terrorism. The chapter identifies the Narodniks as the true originators of ‘socialism in one country’, arguing that their belief in a ‘special path’ for Russia, based on the peasant commune (the mir) and the supposed uniqueness of the Russian peasantry, was an attempt to bypass capitalist development. This theoretical error is presented as the root of their practical failures.
The narrative follows key figures, notably George Plekhanov, who began as a Narodnik activist—participating in dangerous missions, escaping arrest, and addressing the 1876 Kazan Cathedral demonstration—but whose direct experience organising factory workers in Saratov began to erode his Narodnik prejudices. The chapter highlights the strike wave of 1877–79, spurred by the Russo-Turkish War, which placed Plekhanov in charge of Zemlya i Volya’s worker section. However, the Narodniks had no coherent strategy for a workers’ movement. The Northern Union of Russian Workers, which organised 200 members with a library and links to Polish workers, was smashed by police within months. Its leaders, including Khalturin, drew pessimistic conclusions and turned to terrorism—a detour the chapter claims cost the movement a decade of unnecessary sacrifice.
The polemical thrust is directed against both the old Narodniks and their modern analogues. The chapter argues that the split between ‘educators’ (Lavrov) and ‘insurrectionists’ (Bakunin) was never resolved. The frustrated failure of the ‘movement to the people’ produced a 180-degree turn: from denying politics to embracing a secret, centralised terrorist organisation, Narodnaya Volya. The chapter quotes Zhelyabov’s desire to ‘give history a push’ and Morozov’s justification that no activity on behalf of the people was possible under tsarist repression, exposing the logic that substitutes an armed minority for mass struggle. The terrorists are described as ‘liberals with a bomb’—they borrowed liberal ideas but had contempt for parliamentary gradualism, yet their methods reduced the masses to passive spectators. The chapter explicitly condemns modern ‘urban guerrilla’ theories as a caricature of these pre-Marxist ideas, arguing that terrorism, even when successful, is reactionary because it lowers workers’ confidence in their own capacity and substitutes heroic acts for the long work of organisation, agitation, and education. The final split at the Voronezh Congress of 1879 produced Narodnaya Volya (terrorists) and Cherny Peredel (village Narodniks), the latter led by Plekhanov, from which Russian Marxism would emerge.