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THE JEWS UNDER ALEXANDER II
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22. THE JEWS UNDER ALEXANDER II
The first of Alexander's great reforms, but the one having perhaps the most profound long-term consequences for the empire as a whole and for the tsar in particular, related to the Jews. In 1856, in the coronation manifesto, the Jews were placed on the same basis as the rest of the population in relation to military service. In the same manifesto, all their (very large) debts incurred in non-payment of taxes over the previous years were forgiven.
"More expansively than this," writes Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "Alexander II expressed his intention to resolve the Jewish question - and in the most general sense favourably [for the Jews]. For the whole way in which the question was posed was radically changed. If under Nicholas I the government had set itself the task, first, of reforming the inner way of life of the Jews, gradually clearing it up through productive labour and education, in this way leading to the removal of administrative restrictions; then under Alexander II, by contrast, the government began by removing external restrictions and impediments, without searching deeply into possible inner causes of Jewish isolation and sickliness, and hoping that then all remaining problems would be solved of themselves; it began 'with the intention of merging this people with the native inhabitants of the country', as the sovereign command of 1856 put it."224
During the rest of the reign almost all the restrictions on the Jews were dismantled. Jews were now to be found in all parts of the empire, and the share of trade and industry owned by them rapidly increased - as did their overall numbers, to almost 4 million by 1880. The Jews also benefited from other reforms, such as the abolition of the poll-tax on urban dwellers in 1863.
However, the emancipation of the serfs hit the Jews hard in three ways. First, the social gap between the free Jews and peasant serfs was abolished - the peasants were now as free as the Jews. Secondly, the liberated peasants were now freed from the strict prohibition of buying and selling goods through an appointed middle-man - who in the western provinces was almost always a Jew. Thirdly, the government's establishment of agricultural credit at very reasonable rates, together with the development of consumer and credit associations, squeezed out the Jew's role as provider of credit (at extortionate rates).225
Alexander I's plan to draw the Jews into agriculture was abandoned by Alexander II. In 1866 he rescinded the special decrees on transforming the Jews into farmers in the South-Western region of "New Russia". Since they had proved incapable of working the land independently, the Jews were given the opportunity to become craftsmen and merchants. They were allowed to buy out the land plots they had been given, and then to resell them at great profit.
However, this measure created some further problems. For the Russian peasants who were neighbours of the Jewish colonists were angry that, while they did not have enough land, the Jews had been given more than enough - and were then able to lease the land out to the Russians at a high price. It was this fact that led in part to the sacking of several Jewish settlements during the disturbances of 1881-1882.226
Alexander's reforms with regard to Jewish military recruitment also did not reap the results hoped for. The Jews very often did not respond to the call-up. Thus in the period 1876-1883 31.6% of Jews called up did not respond - the figure throughout the Empire was 0.19%.
When the government offered privileges in military service to those with education, the Jews suddenly converted to the idea of accepting Russian education. By 1887 13.5% of all university students in the country were Jews, and the figures were much higher in cities such as Kharkov and Odessa.227 According to the theory, this should have been a good thing - it was the government's aim to assimilate the Jews into Russian culture through education. However, Russian education in this period was rapidly becoming radicalised. And so the institutions that, as it was hoped, would make the Jews into model Russian citizens and patriots in fact turned them into - revolutionaries... Thus Solzhenitsyn writes: "It is precisely under Alexander II, when the restrictions on Jewish life in Russia were so weakened, that Jewish names begin to be encountered amidst the revolutionaries... In the student disturbances of 1861 we encounter Mikhoels, Utin and Gen."228
Again, David Vital writes: "A breakdown based on official records of the calling, social status, and origin of 1,054 revolutionaries arrested, tried, condemned, and sent into punitive exile or placed under police surveillance in the course of the round-up of dissidents in 1873-7 showed that 68 - 6.5 per cent - were Jews. Of 79 condemned to exile 12 were Jews: 15.2 per cent. These were not immensely large figures, but they do illustrate the fact that the Jewish contingent was already strikingly in excess of the Jewish proportion of the total population of the empire."229
In fact, the exposure of the younger generation of Jews to goy literature was the cause of a profound change within Jewry itself. Many young fanatics who had immersed themselves in the study of the Talmud now abandoned Talmudism, and even the external appearance of Talmudic Jewry, and immersed themselves instead in Turgenev, Belinsky, Dobroliubov, Chernyshevsky, Pisarev and Nekrasov. They became socialists and joined the populist movement [narodnichestvo], distancing themselves more and more from their own people.230
Meanwhile, most Jews remained fenced off by Talmudic edicts from Russian culture and even the Russian language. Even among the russified Jewish intelligentsia voices were heard warning against complete assimilation. Thus in 1868 Perets Smolenskin warned that, in adapting to the general culture, the Jews should preserve their national spiritual character. And the Petersburg newspapers Rassvet [Dawn] and Russkij Evrej [Russian Jew] "strengthened the attraction of Jewish youth towards the study of the Jewish past and present life. At the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s there arose a watershed between the cosmopolitan and nationalist tendencies in Russian Jewry. 'In essence the leaders of Rassvet no longer believed in the truth of assimilation... Rassvet, without realising it, went along the path of ... the excitation of national self-consciousness... it had a vividly expressed national bias... the illusions of russification... were dispelled...'"231
In 1869 the baptized Jew Jacob Brafmann published Kniga Kagala (The Book of the Kahal), in which, on the basis of a detailed translation of the acts of the Minsk kahal at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, he exposed and interpreted the kahal system, demonstrating the complete rightlessness of the majority of the members of the Jewish community. In 1976 the New Jewish Encyclopaedia confirmed that the material used by Brafmann "is genuine and the translation of it quite accurate". And in 1994 the Russian Jewish Encyclopaedia declared that "the documents published by Brafmann are a valuable source for the study of the history of the Jews in Russia at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century".
"Brafmann asserted that 'State laws cannot annihilate that harmful power hidden in Jewish self-government... According to his words, this organization is not limited to local kahals... but encompasses, he says, the Jewish people throughout the world... and in consequence of this the Christian peoples cannot be delivered from Jewish exploitation until everything that aids the isolation of the Jews is destroyed'. Brafmann supported 'the view of the Talmud as not so much a codex of a religio-national character, but rather "a civil-political codex", which went "against the flow of the political and moral development of Christian countries"', creating 'a Talmudic republic'. He insisted that 'the Jews constitute a State within the State', that the Jews 'consider themselves not bound by State laws', the Jewish community has 'as one of its basic aims "the darkening of the mind of Christians" to turn them only into fictional owners of the property that belongs to them'. More broadly, he 'accused the Society for the Spreading of Enlightenment among the Jews and the Universal Jewish Union (the Alliance Israélite) of being a part of "a world-wide Jewish conspiracy"'...
"The State Council, 'softening the decisive phraseology of the Book of the Kahal', declared that the external distinguishing of the Jews from the rest of the population could be achieved by administrative measures, this 'will in no way guarantee the annihilation of the self-enclosed and almost anti-Christian feelings of the Jewish communities', but 'the isolation of the Jews which is so harmful for the State' can be 'annihilated, on the one hand, by a weakening, as far as possible, of the social links of the Jews among themselves and of the Jewish elders' abuse of their power, and on the other hand, which is still more important, by the spread of enlightenment among the Jews'."232
"I.S. Aksakov, a constant opponent of complete emancipation for the Jews, already at the end of the 50s had tried to restrain the government 'from too bold steps' along this path. When a law was passed giving state service to Jews with degrees, he objected (1862), saying that the Jews were 'a handful of people who completely reject the Christian teaching, the Christian ideal and moral code (and consequently all the bases of the social existence of the country), and confess a teaching that is contrary and hostile to it'. He was not in favour of equality for the Jews in political rights, although he was completely in favour of their having equality in purely civil rights, so that the Jewish people "should be provided with complete freedom of existence, self-government, development, education and trade... even... that they should be allowed to live throughout Russia'. In 1867 he wrote that economically 'one should not talk about the emancipation of the Jews, but about the emancipation of the Russians from the Jews'. He noted the deaf indifference of the liberal press to the peasants' condition and needs. And now Aksakov explained the way of pogroms in 1881 as the display of popular anger against 'the oppression of the Russian local population by Jewry', which is why during the pogroms there was 'no burglary', only the destruction of property and 'some kind of simple-minded conviction of the rightness of their actions'; and he repeated that the question should be put 'not about the equality in rights of the Jews with the Christians, but about the equality of the Christians with the Jews, and about the removal of the rightlessness of the Russian population before the Jews'...
"The writer D. Mordovtsev, who was sympathetic to the Jews, in his 'Letter of a Christian on the Jewish question', which was published in the Jewish newspaper Rassvet [Dawn], pessimistically called on the Jews 'to emigrate to Palestine and America, seeing this as the only solution of the Jewish question in Russia."233
Again, in 1879 Constantine Pobedonostev wrote to Dostoyevsky: "They are at the root of the revolutionary socialist movement and of regicide, they own the periodical press, they have in their hands the financial markets; the people as a whole fall into financial slavery to them; they even control the principles of contemporary science and strive to place it outside of Christianity."234
And Dostoyevsky himself wrote: "Jewry is thriving precisely there where the people are still ignorant, or not free, or economically backward. It is there that Jewry has a champ libre! And instead of raising, by its influence, the level of education, instead of increasing knowledge, generating economic fitness in the native population, - instead of this, the Jew, wherever he has settled, has still more humiliated and debauched the people; there humaneness was still more debased and the educational level fell still lower; there inescapable, inhuman misery, and with it despair, spread still more disgustingly. Ask the native populations in our border regions: What is propelling the Jew - has been propelling him for centuries? You will receive a unanimous answer: mercilessness. 'He has been prompted so many centuries only by pitilessness for us, only the thirst for our sweat and blood.'
"And, in truth, the whole activity of the Jews in these border regions of ours consisted of rendering the native population as much as possible inescapably dependent on them, taking advantage of the local laws. They always managed to be on friendly terms with those upon whom the people were dependent, and, certainly, it is not for them to complain, at least in this respect, about their restricted rights compared with the native population. They have received from us enough of these rights over the native population. What, in the course of decades and centuries, has become of the Russian people where the Jews settled is attested by the history of our border regions. What, then? - Point to any other tribe from among Russian aliens which could rival the Jew by his dreadful influence in this connection! You will find no such tribe. In this respect the Jew preserves all his originality as compared with other Russian aliens, and, of course, the reason therefore is that status in statu of his, the spirit of which specifically breathes with pitilessness for everything that is not Jew, with disrespect for any people and tribe, for every human creature that is not a Jew. And what kind of justification is it that in Western Europe the nations did not permit themselves to be overwhelmed, and that thus the Russian people themselves are at fault? Because the Russian people in the border regions of Russia proved weaker than the European nations (and exclusively as a result of their cruel political circumstances), for this sole reason should they be completely crushed by exploitation, instead of being helped?
"And if reference is made to Europe, to France, for example, - there too, hardly has their status in statu been harmless. Of course, there, Christianity and its idea have been lowered and are sinking not because of the Jew's fault, but through their own fault; nevertheless, it is impossible not to note also in Europe the great triumph of Jewry which has replaced many former ideas with its own.
"Oh, it goes without saying that man always, at all times, has been worshipping materialism and has been inclined to perceive and understand liberty only in the sense of making his life secure through money hoarded by the exertion of every effort and accumulated by all possible means. However, at no time in the past have these tendencies been raised so cynically and so obviously to the level of a sublime principle as in our Nineteenth Century. 'Everybody for himself and only for himself, and every intercourse with man solely for one's self' - such is the ethical tenet of the majority of present-day people, even not bad people, but, on the contrary, laboring people who neither murder nor steal. And mercilessness for the lower classes, the decline of brotherhood, exploitation of the poor by the rich, - oh, of course, all this existed also before and always; however, it had not been raised to the level of supreme truth and of science - it had been condemned by Christianity, whereas at present, on the contrary, it is being regarded as virtue.
"Thus, it is not for nothing that over there the Jews are reigning everywhere over stock-exchanges; it is not for nothing that they control capital, that they are the masters of credit, and it is not for nothing - I repeat - that they are also the masters of international politics, and what is going to happen in the future is known to the Jews themselves: their reign, their complete reign, is approaching! We are approaching the complete triumph of ideas before which sentiments of humanity, thirst for truth, Christian and national feelings, and even those of national dignity, must bow. On the contrary, we are approaching materialism, a blind, carnivorous craving for personal material welfare, a craving for personal accumulation of money by any means - that is all that has been proclaimed as the supreme aim, as the reasonable thing, as liberty, in lieu of the Christian idea of salvation only through the closest moral and brotherly fellowship of men.
"People will laugh and say that this is not all brought about by the Jews. Of course, not only by them, but if the Jews have completely triumphed and thriven in Europe precisely at the time when these new principles have triumphed there to the point of having been raised to the level of a moral principle, it is impossible not to infer that the Jews, too, have contributed their influence to this condition& The summit of the Jews is assuming stronger and firmer power over mankind seeking to convey to it its image and substance. Jews keep vociferating that among them, too, there are good people. Oh, God! Is this the point? - Besides, we are speaking not about good or bad people. And aren't there good people among those? Wasn't the late James Rothschild of Paris a good man? - We are speaking about the whole and its idea; we are speaking about Judaism and the Jewish idea which is clasping the whole world instead of Christianity which 'did not succeed'."235
Of course, the views of Dostoyevsky, Aksakov and other Russian "antisemites" are profoundly unfashionable today. Most critiques of Russian anti-Semitism simply ignore the facts about the Jews in Russia cited above. However, a more intelligent and interesting critique has been presented by Sir Geoffrey Hosking, who takes up the hint given here by Dostoyevsky that the Jewish idea took the place of Christianity, "which 'did not succeed'".
According to Sir Geoffrey Hosking, "Anti-Semitism was a kind of frustrated Slavophilism, conceived in awareness of the ways in which Russians had failed to fulfil their potential nationhood. In the interests of great-power status, the Russians had spurned their myth of the chosen people and the empire of truth and justice. The Jews, by contrast, continued to believe that they were a chosen people and to hold to their messianic prophecies. Where Slavophiles dreamed of a peasant commune based on Orthodox principles, the Jews seemed still to have successful communities ruled over by their religious leaders. They had succeeded where the Russians had failed: in making a messianic religion the essence of their national identity."236
We may concede a degree of psychological truth in this analysis: the Russians were failing "to fulfil their potential nationhood", if that nationhood was perceived as being the mission of the Third Rome, that is, of being the bearer of "light from the East", the universal truth of Orthodox Christianity, to the benighted nations of Europe and Asia. Far from converting the Europeans to Orthodoxy, the Russians were being converted in large numbers to various westernizing ideologies. Nor, in spite of flourishing missions in Alaska and (a little later) Japan, were they much more successful in Asia, where the very earthly motivations of great-power politics, little different from those of their great rivals, the British, prevailed.
Now a sense of failure can be treated in two ways: in the Orthodox way, by repentance and the confession of sin, and in the fallen way, by exaggerated self-assertion and the blaming of others. Slavophilism at its best, as we find it in Khomiakov and Kireyevsky, or, somewhat later, in Dostoyevsky and Tiutchev, implicitly contained a message of repentance: that Russia was falling away from her vocation as God's people, and she should return to the traditions of the pre-Petrine, Muscovite period, when she had been more faithful to her heavenly calling. But in some of its later varieties, as we shall see in more detail later, Slavophilism degenerated into mere nationalist self-assertion. Russia, it was maintained, was great not only, or even primarily, because she was the bearer of the one truth to all nations (messianism), but also in a purely secular, material sense, or as embodying the last and greatest in the historical series of world civilizations (Danilevsky).
The Jews were unique among Russia's national rivals in being no threat to her (yet) in purely political terms, but a direct threat in terms of messianic mission. For the Jews, like the Russians, claimed to be the nation that knows the truth, the bearer of God's saving message to the world. But the Jewish God was definitely not the Russians' God - not Jesus Christ. And Judaism was aimed at protecting the Jews against the influence of this Russian God, Who happened to be a Jew by race, but Whom the Jews had crucified and continued to anathematize. So in religious terms - and Russia's national "myth", to use Hosking's word, was nothing if not religious - there could be no compromise, no living together in amity between these two most religious of peoples. It was a matter of kto kogo?, to use Lenin's phrase: who would rule whom? - and the constant strife between Jews and Russians in the Western Borderlands was therefore both wholly predictable and essentially unavoidable. Moreover, as Hosking rightly points out, the relative success of the Jews in maintaining their religious identity was an implicit rebuke to the Russians, who were losing theirs. In fact, it was hardly a coincidence that the appearance of the Jews in large numbers in the Russian lands towards the end of the eighteenth century had coincided almost exactly with the nadir of Russian religious consciousness in the reign of Catherine II. It was as if God had introduced the Jews into Russia to remind the Russians: "Just as the Jews fell away from Me when they chose national self-assertion instead of Me, so you can fall away if you pursue great-power wealth and status at the expense of faithfulness to My commandments. And just as they fell from being My People to being My fiercest enemies, so it can happen to you."
23. THE DEVILS
Although Jews predominated in the terrorist movement, they were not alone. The first "pure" Russian terrorist was Bakunin - but he lived abroad. More typical of the young devils who came to dominate the revolutionary underground inside Russia was Nicholas Ishutin.
Ronald Seth writes: "He was the son of a merchant and of a mother who came of a noble family. When he was two both his parents died, and he was brought up until he was eleven by relatives of his father. In 1863 he entered Moscow university, where he quickly gathered round him a group of young men upon whom he was soon exerting a quite extraordinary influence.
"Ishutin was not an intellectual, and though his scorn of learning might have been a pose, he had not been long at the university when he decided to give up his studies in order to devote all his time to The Cause. Many of his followers imitated their leader in this.
"The group quickly became strong and active, and determined, as they phrased it, 'to go to the people', they sacrificed not only careers but all personal belongings. As a practical step in making contact with the people they set up co-operative and friendly societies for the workmen, artisans and students."
However, this romantic Populist phase did not last long. For in fact "all Ishutin's efforts and multifarious schemes were directed to one sole end - the creation of a revolutionary force. To achieve this he tossed all scruples out of the window, and introduced a new approach to the means by which the end might be attained - naked terrorism.
"The group believed that a peasant revolution would take place within five years. Their conception of this revolution differed from any previous conception of popular revolt; it was to be radical and 'economic' and nothing must be allowed to prevent its happening.
"The ruthless extremist policy preached by Ishutin did not appeal to all the members of the group, and as a result, between 1865 and 1866, there came into being a smaller group-within-the-group who were prepared to transmute into activity the extreme ideas of their leader. Named by Ishutin The Organization, this smaller group consisted mostly of extremely poor young men, many of whom were the sons of country priests whose modus vivendi differed little from that of the peasants. A few came from peasant families.
"Even this small and select band, however, did not entirely respond to all the aims of its founder. Extremist propaganda and agitation, yes - but not out and out terrorism, and this last was dear to Ishutin's heart. So within The Organization there also developed another group, a secret cell, even more select, composed of students who lived together 'in common'. They gave themselves the name Hell.
"The existence of Hell was to be kept secret even from the members of The Organisation."237
It was an appropriate name for a truly demonic organization, whose layers within layers recall Weishaupt's Illuminati in the French revolution. However, it was not Ishutin's Hell that was destined to create the spark of revolution. After another member of the organization, Demetrius Karakozov, made a failed attempt to assassinate the Tsar, he and Ishutin were tried and sentenced to death. Karakozov was hanged, but Ishutin's sentence was commuted to hard labour in Siberia. There he died of tuberculosis, having spent the last eleven years of his life insane.238
The next terrorist leader was Sergius Nechayev, a teacher of Holy Scripture who from his student years devoted himself to political activity. (The combination of seminary training and revolutionary activity was not uncommon. Dobroliubov was the son of a priest. Stalin was a seminarian.)
In 1869 Nechayev went abroad with a false passport to Geneva, where he joined Bakunin and Ogarev, a friend of Herzen's. Like Bakunin, he was an anarchist: "We are destroyers," he declared, "others will create".
Together with Bakunin Nechayev wrote The Revolutionary's Catechism, which declared: "1. The revolutionary is a doomed person. He has neither his own interests, nor affairs, nor feelings, nor attractions, nor even name. Everything in him is swallowed up by a single exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion - the revolution.
“In the depth of his essence he has broken - not in words only, but also in fact - every bond linking him with the civil order and with the whole civilized world, with all the laws, decencies, social conditions and morality of this world. He is its pitiless enemy, and if he were to continue to live in it, then it would only be in order to destroy it more reliably.
“The revolutionary despises all doctrinaire attitudes and has rejected secular science, presenting everything to future generations. He knows only one science - the science of destruction. For this and only for this has he studied mechanics, physics, chemistry and, perhaps, medicine.
“He despises and hates contemporary social morality in all its manifestations. Morality for him is that which aids the triumph of the revolution. Immorality and crime is everything that hinders it.
"7. The nature of the genuine revolutionary excludes all romanticism, all sensitivity, exaltation or amusement. It excludes even personal hatred and revenge. Revolutionary passion, having become in him an everyday, every-minute phenomenon, must be united with cold calculation...
"25. In coming closer to the people, we must first of all be united those elements of the people's life which since the time of the foundation of the Muscovite State power have not ceased to protest, not in words, but in deeds, against everything that is directly or indirectly linked with the State: against the nobles, against the officials, against the popes, against the world of Guilds and against the rich peasant, the devourer of the mir. We shall unite with the savage world of the thieves, this true and only revolutionary in Russia..."
In Nechayev's plan for the revolution, various public figures were to be shot, but Alexander II himself was not to be killed, but would be publicly tortured and executed "before the face of the whole of the liberated plebs, on the ruins of the State".239 Then, after the great work of destruction, all power would necessarily be concentrated in the hands of a Central Committee. Everybody was to undertake physical work. Dissidents were to be executed...
In August, 1869, Nechayev returned to Russia as the self-styled representative of the World Revolutionary Movement at Geneva and organized a 'Society of National Retribution' in Moscow. On 21 November he and four members of the Moscow 'group of five' murdered the fifth member of the group, a young student of the Moscow Agricultural College called Ivanov, for allegedly refusing to carry out the instructions of the Geneva committee. Ivanov was strangled, then shot, and his body was weighted with stones and thrown into the pond.
"Dostoyevsky's description of Shatov's murder [in The Devils] follows closely the description of Ivanov's murder. After the murder, Nechayev, like Peter Verkhovensky in the novel, escaped first to Petersburg and then abroad. He went back to Geneva, where he rejoined Bakunin and Ogaryov and assisted them in their abortive attempt to revive Herzen's London journal The Bell. His ruthlessness in carrying out Bakunin's own principle that the end justifies the means appalled even Bakunin, who soon broke with him. Nechayev then went to London, where he began publishing his terrorist journal Village Commune, which was sharply condemned by Engels...
"He later returned to Switzerland, where he was arrested by the Swiss police on an extradition order as a criminal and not a political offender and handed over to the Russian police. On 8 January 1873 he was tried for murder by the Moscow District Court and sentenced to twenty years' penal servitude. He was not sent to Siberia, however, but incarcerated in the Peter and Paul fortress in Petersburg, where he died one year and ten months after Dostoyevsky, in November 1882."240
In about 1870, writes Richard Pipes, "radical youths became increasingly interested in the newly emancipated peasant. The leading theoretical lights of this period, Michael Bakunin and Peter Lavrov, called on young people to abandon universities and go to the village. Bakunin wished them to carry the message of immediate rebellion. He believed that the muzhik [peasant] was a born anarchist, and only a spark was needed to set the countryside on fire. That spark was to be carried by the intelligentsia in the form of revolutionary 'agitation'. Lavrov adopted a more gradual approach. Before he would turn into a revolutionary, the Russian peasant needed exposure to 'propaganda' which would enlighten him about the injustices of the Emancipation Edict, about the causes of his economic predicament, and about the collusion between the propertied classes, the state and the church. Inspired by these ideas, in the spring of 1874 several thousand youths quit school and went 'to the people'. Here disappointment awaited them. The muzhik, known to them largely from literary descriptions and polemical tracts, would have nothing to do with idealistic students come to save him. Suspecting ulterior motives... he either ignored them or turned them over to the rural constabulary. But even more disappointing than the peasants' hostility, which could be explained away by his ignorance, were his ethics. Some radical youths scorned property because they came from propertied backgrounds: they associated concern for wealth with their parents, whom they rejected. Hence they idealized the rural commune and the artel. The muzhik, living from hand to mouth, looked at the matter quite differently. He desperately wanted to acquire property... The intellectuals could indulge in talk of selfless brotherhood because, being supported by their families or the government (by means of stipends), they were not required to compete with one another. The muzhik, however, was always competing for scarce resources...
"In response to these disappointments, the radical movement broke up into warring factions. One group, called narodniki from their unbounded faith in the narod or people, decided that it was improper for intellectuals to foist their ideas upon the masses. The toiling man was always right. Intellectuals should settle in the village and learn from the peasant instead of trying to teach him. Another group, convinced that this method would end in renunciation of revolution, began to veer towards terrorism. A third developed an interest in western Social Democracy and, having concluded that no social revolution in Russia was possible until capitalism had done its work, braced themselves for a long and patient wait."241
The "going to the people" movement had petered out by 1875. It was replaced, on the one hand, by Socialist Revolutionary movements such as Land and Liberty and The People's Will, and on the other by the Marxist Social Democratic movement. Both movements wanted revolution; but since the Marxists, led by George Plekhanov, did not believe that the revolution could come to Russia before it had become an industrial country, and that it was the workers, not the peasants, who would spearhead it, attention focussed on the Socialist Revolutionary terrorists who wanted apocalypse now.
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