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By the late 1870s-early 1880s
the assassination attempts against the Tsar were no longer
connected with concrete events. The motivation behind them
became more complex and not immediately obvious. The
revolutionaries were increasingly worried about the growing
signs that their cherished ideal of equality and justice, based
on the free communal organization of the future life of the
people, was under threat from some new phenomena and processes
generated by the reforms of Alexander II. Despite the
half-and-half nature of the reforms and the fact that the
commune had been retained, new capitalist relations, the growing
stratification of the peasantry into better-off and poor were
undermining the commune, were eroding the traditional conditions
of village life. But without the village commune the populist
ideal did not exist, it simply fell to the ground. For these
reasons, by the late 1870s, the revolutionaries had come to
regard the outcome of the reforms not only as the deception of
the popular masses, but as a much more serious crime - as an
attempt to deprive the people of the very possibility of a
radiant socialist future.
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In these
circumstances any means of struggle were justified and permissible
following the precept of ‘the ends justify the means’. Terror became
for the Narodniks a matter of principle, a method to achieve
political and social transformation. The direct, uncompromising
confrontation between the revolutionaries and the Winter Palace
resembled a duel (at that time duels were an accepted norm of
settling quarrels among the gentry). In the end it led to a tragic
situation in which Alexander turned into the executioner of
revolutionaries, while the revolutionaries ended up as the
executioners of the Tsar Liberator.
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The
terrorists were firmly convinced that they were acting in the name
and best interests of the Russian people, and, indeed, they enjoyed
certain sympathy among Russian educated and well-to-do classes.
However, the toiling masses, with the exception of a very small
number of worker-revolutionaries, never showed any signs of sympathy
for the men and women who were staking their lives, as they
believed, on the people’s behalf. Popular reactions to terrorism
ranged from violent condemnation to irritation or, at best,
indifference. The Emperor remained sacrosanct as the ‘Tsar
Liberator’, while the educated revolutionaries represented, in the
eyes of the peasants, the very people who were hoping to enslave
them again. The peasants believed that the assassination attempts
were the wicked deeds of the landowners, seeking to avenge
themselves for the loss of their slaves.
After
several unsuccessful attempts the Tsar Liberator was finally blown
to pieces on 1 March 1881 by a terrorist bomb. Five leaders of the
conspiracy - members of the ‘People’s Will’ - were arrested, tried
and publicly hanged. The rest of the radical intelligentsia was
decimated by imprisonment, exile and emigration. The ‘People’s Will’
had rocked the country’s political system to its foundation.
However, it failed in its expectations to achieve the overthrow of
tsarism.
The struggle
of the ‘People’s Will’ played an important role in the Russian
revolutionary movement. Its greatest contributions were the
principle of taking direct action against the tsarist regime and its
emphasis on the political struggle. The important lesson of the
revolutionary crisis of the late 1870-early 1880s was that the
peculiar conditions in Russia did make it possible for a tiny group
of revolutionary intellectuals-conspirators to create a deep-seated
political crisis, to throw the whole, machinery of government into
disarray and nearly bring the government to its knees in the
absence of a mass movement or even of mass support. The lesson was
not lost on a later generation of revolutionaries.
Following
the assassination of Alexander II, revolutionary Narodnichestvo
entered a period of decline. Its followers deeply felt the acute
ideological crisis of the movement and the gulf that still separated
them from the ‘people’. Yet, the decades of theoretical inquiries
and practical work of agitation and political action had not been in
vain. The generation of the
raznochintsy
had formulated the goals of overthrowing autocracy and stirring
up the masses to revolution. It had begun to lay down the principles
for the creation of a political party. It had set up a whole network
of secret organizations. Finally, it had produced the type of
intrepid Russian revolutionary, whose revolutionary energy and
fanatical devotion to the cause were combined with highly developed
conspiratorial skills.
