Social-revolutionary historiography was founded at the same political conjuncture that shaped Alekseev and Myshkin’s speeches. It has already been seen that these speeches were, in part, reactions to the ‘official history’ of the ‘going to the people’ movement being put forward in the period 1875-7, in particular by the Ministry of Education and the Minister of Justice, Pahlen.
Where Pahlen’s history pointed to the influence of foreigners and émigrés to account for the radicalisation of the Russian youth, claiming as well the limited influence of both groups on the peasantry and other working people, Myshkin had argued instead the social determination of the actions of working people, claiming that the movements of the intelligentsia ‘above’ were mere reflections of the popular movements ‘below.’ While Pahlen explained the radical commitments of a small number of workers by the harmful influence of the ‘youth,’ Alekseev pointed to the terrible living conditions that had led some workers – and would eventually force the entire working class - to accept these teachings. Beneath the public face of social-revolutionary oratory, a hidden counter-history, related to the open one, was also being written. Myshkin’s confessions of 1876 were the founding document of the revolutionary historiography of ‘going to the people.’ The ‘confessions’ mixed overt doctrinal statements with autobiography, biography and objective historical description in reaction to the official history, thereby creating a text whose characteristics were shared by much of the historical literature to follow. The tensions between the free choice of the young people and their movements’ ‘reflection’ of the
150 popular movement below, between individuality as self-determination and class as the external force driving working-class radicalisation, were passed into revolutionary historiography wholesale. That part of Alekseev’s role as martyr-witness, demanding the balance of individual presence with the collective voice, was not limited to working people or their writings. A movement that saw its own writings as documents, and themselves as witnesses to a bigger history, necessarily encountered difficulties in its attitudes to its authors and their individual contributions, both as activists and as writers.
What distinguishes Myshkin’s memoir from the speeches is not political intention: both the speech and the confessions had explicitly political aims to counter the government’s take on the social–revolutionary movement for the sake of the understanding of Russian ‘educated society’
and the public as a whole. Instead, it is the desire to counter an ‘official history’ that had already documented the lives of particular people, had use these individuals as evidence of this or that explanation or proposition, and backed it up with pedantically detailed investigations and reports on conversations, minor events, meetings, literature, etc. Alekseev had spoken to give an image of the Russian working class as thoughtful and active (as opposed to the official notion of their essential passivity and naïveté); the official view was only personal to Alekseev in so far as he was part of these ‘working millions.’ His plurality in part reflected the plurality and indifference imposed by social classification. Myshkin’s ‘confessions,’ in contrast, responded to an official history that mentioned him by name, and documented his particular activities as
‘revolutionary typographer’ between 1871-4. The confessions were, therefore, both a defence of the movement as a whole and the self-defence absent - for political reasons - from his 1878 speech. If the speeches ‘depersonalised’ the actions of those prosecuted, the memoir promised to draw attention back to individuals and their actions. This double-movement, represented by Myshkin’s confessions and the two parts of his speech, pointing at once towards and away from individuals – was mirrored by developments within the revolutionary organisations forming on the ‘outside,’ in the aftermath of the routs, in 1875-6.
The experience of the destruction of the first narodnik circles - for some personal, for others a lesson learned at a distance - was then being taken into account in plans to reconstitute and reorganise what was left of the earlier circles into a more unified, stronger, more capable revolutionary network. The 1875 ‘Tsirkular’ (‘circular’) by Mark Natanson, sent to a number of circles in Russia and abroad, including the editors of Vperëd in London (still, at this point,
headed by Lavrov), was particular important in this regard. Natanson, in 1868-9 a founder of St.
Petersburg University’s student group and its library, which later developed into the chaikovskii circle,1 had just then been released from prison, having served time (along with V. Zasulich) from the early 1870s onwards in connection with the ‘Nechaev affair.’ Natanson particularly had been opposed to Nechaev’s methods in 1868-9, and was wrongly fingered by the Third Section as a sympathiser of the nechaevtsy. It was Natanson’s influence over the circles of 1869-70 that had the chaikovtsy reject Nechaev’s approach to revolution: party programmes, violent rhetoric, elaborate rituals and conspiratorial methods, centralised power, individual leadership of any kind. Yet now, in 1875, Natanson turned back to look at the rout of the chaikovtsy, the dolgushintsy, the buntary in the south, the workers’ circles, with a view to recovering for ‘the cause’ some of the methods pioneered by Nechaev and the circles of the late 1860s. Much of the latter half of the ‘Tsirkular’ focused on old issues of ‘propaganda and agitation,’ the attitudes of the narodniki to religious teaching and its use among the narod, and the possibility that propaganda materials should exaggerate or lie in order to achieve the movement’s aims.2 More important than the tactical and moral issues of ‘going to the people,’
however, was the attempt to understand the causes of the destruction of the earlier circles and ways to avoid its repetition. One cause was a lack of unity: each of the small circles has had to
‘take up all the functions of revolutionary activity independent of the others,’ resulting in a massive ‘waste of energy’ and a movement only characterised by its ‘limitations.’3 The separation of circles had bred mistrust and division, weakening the movement. What, then, had been the cause of division in the first place? The circles, Natanson argued, had formed around
‘personal ties of sympathy’ rather than doctrines: it was not the ideology of ‘the cause’ which created divisions, but the fact that these were circles of friends, family, zemliaki, tending towards isolation despite almost complete agreement with the other circles.4 ‘But now,’
Natanson went on,
The system of circles has discovered its own inadequacies and, on the other hand, the socialist party has behind it a certain extended period of activity, allowing it to pick out those people best suited to certain tasks and those wishing to do them. The unity based on personal sympathy should be replaced by unification around the cause itself.5
1 Morozov, ‘Ocherk…,’ RN 1, p. 210-3.
2 ‘Tkirkular o soedinenii kruzhkov,’ Spring-Summer, 1875, Vp. 2, p. 182-3; 185.
3 Ibid, p. 180.
4 Ibid, p. 180-1.
5 Ibid, p. 181.
152 Natanson, the federalist and arch-Bakuninist,6 was then arguing for a single, party programme and a single organisation, putting forward the possibility that this would be centralised, with its leadership determining the roles of members, and with a much more developed conspiratorial culture.7 Russian conditions demanded that the personal and ‘sympathetic’ bases that had left the chaikovtsy circle and others isolated, small and vulnerable should be discarded or at least dampened. They would be replaced by an organisation with a central programme, regulations, strict vetting of new members, code names, false names, false papers, separation of sections under central direction, a division of labour organised by the centre, and all the other conspiratorial trappings state officials had perceived everywhere in the activities of ‘going to the people’ (and for which they had prosecuted hundreds). Narodnaia Volia, founded in 1879 after the split of Zemlia i Volia (in part over the issue of terrorism and its use by revolutionaries), was famously praised by Plekhanov and later by Lenin for pioneering just such a centralised organisation. But by 1877 and 1878, Zemlia i Volia was already a conspiratorial organisation with the features suggested or argued for by Natanson in 1875. This is shown clearly in Plekhanov’s description of ZiV’s relations with the workers’ circles after 1876, and the return of some of the ‘veterans’ (Smirnov, Volkov) from prison:
The members of the organisation who were entrusted with the leadership of ‘workers’
matters’ (they were always few in number, at the most 4 or 5 people), were told to form a special circle from the young revolutionaries. These circles, properly speaking, did not belong to the Zemlia i Volia organisation, but since they were under the influence of its members, they could not but work in the spirit of its programme. Here is how these circles set up connections with workers: Given that, thanks to the propaganda of 1873-74, there were already quite a few revolutionaries in the workers milieu, the task of the zemlevol’tsy and their young assistants was, above all, to bring these already prepared people into the organisation. The ‘elders,’ for the greater part already experienced revolutionary-workers, uniting themselves with some reliable newcomers, comprised the core of the Petersburg workers’ organisation, with whom the intelligentsia mainly communicated. We could rely on those people absolutely: to be scared of being handed over [to the police] by them would have been absurd. None the less, understanding that ‘that butter doesn’t spoil the kasha’ [better too much than too little], and that caution was always required where secret revolutionary matters were concerned, even when it might seem quite superfluous, the zemlevol’tsy didn’t tell the experienced workers their addresses or their names (that is, the names under which they were listed by the police). I add that they never approached even a single worker under their own names: The address of a zemlevolets was usually fictitious, the name under which he lived - even within the organisation itself - was usually only known to a very few people: for instance, those involved in the same area of work as him. People engaged in other specialities had to be satisfied meeting him in a
6 ‘[Pis’mo] V. N. Smirnov - P. Kh. Idelson,’ 25 December, 1875, Vp. 2, p. 191.
7 ‘Tsikular…,’ Vp. 2, p. 181, 184.
‘conspiratorial’ flat, where general shkody would take place. The duty of leading the local workers circles, founded in one or the other part of Petersburg, fell to a central, specially selected workers’ group. The intelligentsia didn’t interfere with the local groups, limiting themselves to providing books, helping to run meetings at secret apartments, and so on.
Every local circle took responsibility for attracting new members. They were told that other circles existed in Petersburg, but only the central core of workers knew exactly what kind of circles and where they were. This central group would hold a general meeting every Sunday. The revolutionary intelligenty served as propagandists at the local circle meetings. Because the they were only known by their false names, if some spy had managed to get into the meeting, then he could only report back that a Fedorich or an Anton or Dedushka had ‘shaken the floorboards’ at a certain place and a certain time;
where to look for this Fedorich or Anton or Deduska remained a mystery. Following these men on the street was not so easy, because they could resort to special measures: in sight of the open courtyards and the cabbies, he would make a sudden turn into a place where there were no other cabs, get onboard, and inevitably the man following on foot would be left behind, etc., etc. Using such precautions, we were able to carry on with our work even during the riskiest periods, when those revolutionaries who didn’t belong to organisations (‘nihilists,’ as our jargon had it) fell into the hands of the vigilant police in droves due to the most petit trifles (Plekhanov, Appx. E: 303)
Thus, the ZiV was divided into two parts: a small, core group who knew each other personally, were tied together by long association (and ‘sympathy’), and accepted new members only reluctantly; and a peripheral ring of small circles, groups and a few individuals connected up by conspiratorial relations. The workers’ circles, for the most part on the periphery of both the ZiV and NV, were entrusted to veterans, whose relations with the shifting pattern of members was analogous to that of the ‘centre’ and its hanging branches. The worker Diakov Smirnov put it simply:
Around us it was all new people. Some of the workers from the Borisovskii fabrika (on the 8th line, between the river and Malyi Prospekt), who had at another time ‘gone to the people,’ apparently in Tverskaia guberniia. Two of them came back and then came to us – I don’t know about the rest. Of all the people who visited us we knew very few by their surnames (Smirnov, Appx. C: 288).
In that sense, the unification of the revolutionary organisation around ‘the cause itself,’
replacing the chaikovtsy’s synthesis of ‘self-formation’ and ‘political activism’ through
‘personal ties of sympathy,’ produced a tightening of the ‘central core’ and the friendships and loves that held them together, while creating a sort of atomisation everywhere else. Regulations of the ZiV and the NV, drawing on the experience gained from the trials of the late 1860s and the ‘Great Trials’ of 1877-8, set out in detail the theory and practice of ‘self-sacrifice,’ which was demanded of all members and associates. In a crisis, the personal ties holding the centre
154 together would fall away, protecting the ‘core’ group (in all but name, the leadership) and leaving for the public and official eye only the political martyr: the voice of ‘the cause.’
Still, it is well known that, from 1876 onwards, the ZiV group was considering ‘terror’ as a possible, useful tactic for the Russian socialists. Kravchinskii’s assassination of Mezentsev, and Zasulich’s (unsuccessful) attempt on Trepov, encouraged the terroristic inclinations of the ZiV, a factor leading in part to its split and the foundation of NV. Terrorism itself had the opposite effect than ‘conspiratorial culture.’ On the one side of the struggle and the other, terrorist acts highlighted the individual, individual choices, actions, powers, freedoms, and personalities.
Where the public self-sacrifice of the intelligent and worker-orators posited the abstract individuality of martyrdom (the voice of the cause; the voice of the workers), terror resuscitated the other side of lichnost’: the unique person, the hero. It is no surprise that this aspect of the NV’s activities became the best known, the most infamous, the most mythologized, in Russia and abroad, through the late 1870s to the early 1890s. Protestations as to the limited role of terror (especially by Kravchinskii and other members of the ZiV), or the ‘symbolic’ role of terroristic acts (the attempt to downplay personality and heroism in favour of ‘the cause’) could not dim the spotlight that necessarily fell on pistol wielding, bomb-throwing fanatics and their uniformed, blood-spattered targets. ‘Myth-making’ was already by the mid-1870s part of the intention of the behaviour and speech-making of the revolutionaries on trial. The same can be said of the terrorist campaigns of ZiV and NV in the late 1870s and early 1880s.8 The pursuit of Aleksandr II by small groups of conspirators, leading eventually to the Tsar’s death in a bomb blast in March, 1881, was confirmation of the symbolic, rather than the actual, powers of individuals on both sides of the struggle. The power attributed to the Tsar was mystical rather than real: it was perfectly clear to NV that the exploitation of the working people was only possible through the state system (including the bureaucracy, the landed nobility and the capitalist class created by the state).9 Its ideology was sustained not only by officialdom’s patronage systems and corruptions, but also by the passivity of a population grown used to its abuses. As before, the narod blamed the local officials for these abuses as Aleksandr, now the
‘Tsar-liberator,’ floated above criticism in the pristine space provided by mutual ignorance.10 His death was to awaken the narod from their apathetic slumbers; the inevitable public sacrifice
8 L. E. Patyk, ‘Remembering “The Terrorism”: Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinskii’s Underground Russia,’ Slavic Review, vol. 68, no. 4 (Winter, 2009), p. 760-1, 765-6.
9 ‘Programma Ispolnitel’nago komiteta’ and [Mikhailovskii], ‘Politicheskie pis’ma sotisalista,’ Narodnaia Volia, god.2, no.3, 1 January, 1880, in Lit. Partii NV: 1, p. 107-8 and 112-3.
10 ‘Peterburg, 20 Sentiabr,’ Narodnaia Volia, god. 1, no. 1, 1 October, 1879, Lit. Partii NV, p. 40-1.
of his assassins would be an enduring example of what could be done – even in conflict with the autocrat himself – by the young and seemingly powerless radicals. The continuity of the movement - it was thought - could be counted upon, since it transcended the efforts of individual revolutionaries, whether students, workers or peasants.11 Yet, it was still through individuals that the movement had to express itself: muzhik leaders in the villages were needed to exploit the bitter, yet still diffuse, dissatisfaction of the millions of peasants; worker-leaders (at the head of public protests, strikes, and violent, urban revolts) were needed to unify the peasant-workers in the centres of state power; underground revolutionaries were needed to protect the narod from the worst abuses of autocracy – by terror and assassination, if needs be.12 In the short term, it was hoped, the revolutionaries might at least fracture the mythical aura of power surrounding the distant and divine Tsar, exploiting the narod’s age-old distrust of local state officials and administrators – a distrust now proved rational by experience of the privation and repression that followed the famine of the mid 1870s, the war against Turkey in the mid- 1870s, and (of course) the ‘Great Trials’ of the socialist organisations of 1877-8. Revolutionary historiography, then, took this attitude to historical figures and thus to ‘individuals in history’
into itself as well as the depersonalised self-defence of the ‘Great Trials’ and conspiracy.
Alongside Myshkin and Alekseev’s martyr witnesses and the many memoirists that took on the role, there were also Kravchinskii’s Profiles and a slew of political adventure stories, with core members – exiled, executed, emigrated – the central characters.
As the struggle with the autocracy intensified in the last of the 1870s and the beginning of the 1880s, radicals became increasingly aware of the fragility of their organisations and the individual members who joined them. This was a movement whose belief in its own historical importance and fears of personal oblivion had, by the late 1870s, merged into a potent
‘historical consciousness,’ partly under repeated experience of state surveillance, arrest, detention, and trial, and partly under the influence of a strain of revolutionism that had long combined a longing for action with frequent, guilty returns to the written word. The confinement imposed upon the radicals and revolutionaries offered historical literature as a last means of struggle. For these men and women, most of whom (until the very late 1870s at least) were born into the Russian ‘educated classes’ (and were highly aware of the fact), writing had
11 ‘Programma Ispolnitel’nago komiteta,’ ibid, p. 107.
12 ‘My friends, I do not wish to die…but I tell myself, if there is no other way to socialism than across our dead bodies, then let our blood be spilt to redeem mankind’ (see ‘Pis’mo Vittenberg k tovarishcham,’ dated 10 August, 1879, Nardonaia Volia, god. 1, no. 1, 1 October, 1879, Lit. Partii NV, p. 8.
156 ceased to be anything more than an instrument of their political purposes. In both the literary and political senses, the movement of the 1870s followed the example of Chernyshevskii - practically-minded, self-disciplined, scientific, distant, now speaking to an audience of thousands - over those of Herzen, Bakunin and the men of their generation, whose writings until
156 ceased to be anything more than an instrument of their political purposes. In both the literary and political senses, the movement of the 1870s followed the example of Chernyshevskii - practically-minded, self-disciplined, scientific, distant, now speaking to an audience of thousands - over those of Herzen, Bakunin and the men of their generation, whose writings until