for centuries to come. For all that the most popular jacqueries (as in China and India) linked themselves to a national history of resistance, they rarely transformed the living conditions of the people, offering temporary respite at best. Razin, for instance, pledged to ‘wipe out the boyars and the nobles’, but his efforts failed at a time when Russian cities were strongholds of reactionary sentiment, dominated by nobles and their retainers, state bureaucrats of every kind and the army. ‘That is why’, wrote Trotsky, ‘after each of these grandiose movements … the Volga washed the bloodstains into the Caspian Sea, and the tsar’s and landlord’s oppression weighed heavier than ever.’1 Few decades that followed were unaccompanied by localised peasant risings.
The 1825 Decembrist uprising was the first major sign of urban discontent, a military revolt whose most radical leader, Pavel Pestel, was hugely influenced by the Jacobins and the French Revolution: Rousseau and Robespierre, Babeuf and Buonarotti. The ideological links between revolutionary Paris and the most radical sections of the Russian intelligentsia lasted for over a century following the Decembrist defeat; references to 1789, 1793 and 1815 are ubiquitous in the texts of Bakunin, Lenin, Trotsky and others. The impact of the December rebellion was electric. It enlarged the size of a small but active radical intelligentsia based in universities and literary circles. Pushkin, who had close friends among the Decembrist plotters, originally sent the eponymous hero of Eugene Onegin, badly disappointed in love, to join the Decembrists. Circumstances, however, compelled Pushkin to burn some of his verses and suppress others. This description of the vengeful tsar survived and was included in later editions:
A ruler, timorous and wily,
A balding fop, of toil a foe,
Minion of Fame by chance entirely,
Reigned over us those years ago.
We knew him not at all so regal,
When cooks, who were not ours, were sent
To pluck our double-headed eagle,
Where Bonaparte had pitched his tent.
The Decembrist mutiny was savagely crushed. Executions and imprisonment followed. Pushkin was distraught, but helpless. He was deeply touched when Maria Volkonskaya, a young woman he had known (possibly in the biblical sense) some years before in Tashkent, ignored the entreaties of her noble family and insisted on joining her imprisoned Decembrist husband, Prince Sergei Volkonsky, in Siberia. Pushkin knew she did not love Volkonsky, who was twice her age, but that only made her melancholic and courageous decision even more impressive in his eyes. It was, he reflected, the purest form of solidarity. He composed ‘Message to Siberia’ for Maria and, a week after her departure, pressed it into the hands of the wife of another Decembrist who was leaving Moscow to join her husband in internal exile:
Deep in the Siberian mine
Keep your patience proud
The bitter toil shall not be lost,
The rebel thought unbowed …
The heavy-hanging chains will fall,
And walls will crumble at a word,
And freedom greet you in the light,
And brothers give you back the sword.2
Rural unrest and urban dissidence made reform inevitable. In 1861, Tsar Alexander II, while retaining the other structures of absolutism, abolished serfdom. A wave of joy engulfed the countryside, till the dark side of the ruling began to sink in: the former serfs were burdened with redemption payments to their former masters, for the land they had obtained after abolition as well as the lands they had worked for centuries. The redemption payments could not be enforced, however, and the peasants’ spirits rose once again. The landlords were compelled to liquidate properties, marry into merchant families and invest in railways and factories in order to stay financially solvent, aiding the development of capitalism in Russia. The cities grew bolder and richer. Many began to ask why the creators of serfdom had not been abolished as well and, as is often the case, the reform led to more radical demands. In the countryside itself, half the peasants had never owned land as individuals, only as a village collective. Consequently, many peasants had little incentive to improve the land and became poorer as time went by. Simultaneously, social differentiation in the countryside began to sharpen, producing a group of wealthier peasants (the kulaks).
The end of serfdom was not accompanied by similar political reforms. Apart from a slight improvement on the judicial level, there was, uniquely for a European power approaching the twentieth century, no form of popular representation whatsoever. The tsar was the supreme ruler, appointing and dismissing ministers at will and wielding the power of life and death. Most courtiers appeared genetically sycophantic. A cumbersome and inert state bureaucracy carried out the instructions of the tsar. Police officers saw themselves as servants of power, not justice. Where was the opposition? What was the people’s will?
In 1860 the intelligentsia – an educated elite unconnected with the royal court – was infinitesimal, numbering between 20,000 and 25,000 in a largely peasant population of 60 million people. This social stratum began to regard itself as the only possible opposition to the autocracy. Its education, its ideals, its desire to do good, its passion for the Enlightenment and the French Revolution all created the basis for its politics in the decades that lay ahead. Many believed that the only way out was via ‘the propaganda of the deed’. Terrorism was carried out by individuals or tiny groups of conspirators, but support for it was much broader. In 1866, the first attempt on Alexander II’s life failed. The would-be-assassin, Karakazov, was in police custody when the tsar appeared. The conversation was brief but to the point.
‘Why did you shoot at me?’
‘Because’, responded an unabashed Karakazov, ‘you promised the peasants freedom and you deceived them.’
Lenin was born four years later in 1870. His generation grew up at a time when tsarist Russia was saturated with anarchist and radical ideas; women’s emancipation and an end to patriarchy (detested parental control of young women) were frequently discussed within intellectual circles, and terrorist acts against the powerful were viewed with awe and sympathy. Much of this was a consequence of the absolutist political structures, which provided the Russian segment of the newly developing Social Democratic movement with its unique characteristics. But there were other and larger fish in the pond.
The late nineteenth century witnessed a flowering of radical anarchism on virtually every continent. For almost half a century prior to the Russian Revolution of 1917, the dominant tendency on the radical left in Europe and elsewhere was anarchism rather than Marxism or socialism. Prince Kropotkin and Enrico Malatesta were more popular than Marx and Engels. Activists were far more drawn to the direct-action philosophy preached by Bakunin and Nechaev; the principles of The Revolutionary Catechism were viewed by many radicals as much more attractive than the message of The Communist Manifesto. Targeted assassinations of tsars and princes, presidents and prime ministers cheerfully carried out by individuals or small groups were considered by young activists of the period to be far more glamorous and effective than building a radical political party.
Primitive ‘anarchism’ in rural Russia had long predated any theorist in the country or elsewhere. Individual responses to institutionalised brutality were not uncommon. It was not the big landlords who were usually the targets, but their intermediaries. Bakunin, Kropotkin and Nechaev arrived much later. The first two of this remarkable triumvirate imbibed anarchism during long years of exile. Both came from the nobility. Prince Kropotkin was born two decades before the abolition of serfdom and, in his wonderful Memoirs of a Revolutionist, describes vividly how his
