3
The
Revolutionary Path of the Intelligentsia
An
intellectual of plebeian origin, Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov had
entered the ranks of the bureaucracy but had not blended
indistinguishably into it. His children felt no ties whatever with
the bureaucratic milieu; revolutionary struggle became their
profession. The movement of liberation, before becoming a mass
movement toward the end of the century, passed during its earlier
decades through a rich experience on a laboratory scale. One cannot
understand the destiny of the Ulyanov family without understanding
the logic of this earlier independent revolutionary movement of the
Russian intelligentsia, and therewith the logic of its collapse.
In
one of the famous political trials of the 1870s, known as ‘the case
of the 193’, the principal defendant advanced the thesis that,
after the peasant reform, there had arisen, outside the peasantry
itself, ‘a whole faction … prepared to respond to the call of the
people, and serving as the nucleus of a social revolutionary party.
This faction was the intellectual proletariat.’ These words of
Ippolit Myshkin correctly describe, though they do not evaluate, the
essence of the phenomenon. The decomposition of the feudal society
proceeded at a faster pace than the formation of the bourgeoisie. The
intelligentsia, a product of the decay of the old classes, found
neither an adequate demand for its skills nor a sphere for its
political influence. It broke with the nobility, the bureaucracy, the
clergy, with their stale culture and serf-owning traditions, but it
did not effect a rapprochement with the bourgeoisie, which was still
too primitive and crude. It felt itself to be socially independent,
yet at the same time it was choking in the clutches of tsarism. Thus,
after the fall of serfdom, the intelligentsia formed almost the sole
nutritive medium for revolutionary ideas – especially its younger
generation, the poorest of the intellectual youth, university
students, seminarians, high-school boys, a majority of them not above
the proletariat in their standard of living and many below it. The
state, having need of an intelligentsia, reluctantly created one by
means of its schools. The intelligentsia, having need of a reformed
regime, became an enemy of the state. The political life of the
country thus for a long time assumed the form of a duel between the
intelligentsia and the police, with the fundamental classes of
society almost entirely passive. With a malicious glee, but not
without some reason, the prosecutor at Myshkin’s trial pointed out
that both the ‘more advanced circles’ (that is, the propertied
classes and the older generations of the intelligentsia itself) and
the circles ‘deprived of education’ (that is, the masses of the
people) were immune to revolutionary propaganda. In such conditions
the outcome of the conflict was predetermined. But since the struggle
was forced upon the ‘intellectual proletariat’ by its whole
situation, it had to have some grand illusions.
Having
just broken away in the realm of consciousness from medieval customs
and relationships, the intelligentsia naturally regarded ideas as its
chief power. In the 1860s it embraced a theory according to which the
progress of humanity is the result of critical thought. And who could
serve better as the representatives of critical thought than itself,
the intelligentsia? Frightened, however, by its small numbers and
isolation, the intelligentsia was compelled to resort to mimicry,
that weapon of the weak. It renounced its own being, in order to gain
a greater right to speak and act in the name of the people. Myshkin
pursued this course in continuing his famous speech. But ‘the
people’ meant the peasants. The tiny industrial proletariat was
only an accidental and unhealthy branch of the people. The Populists’
worship of the peasant and his commune was but the mirror image of
the grandiose pretensions of the ‘intellectual proletariat’ to
the role of chief, if not indeed sole, instrument of progress. The
whole history of the Russian intelligentsia develops between these
two poles of pride and self-abnegation – which are the short and
the long shadows of its social weakness, The revolutionary elements
of the intelligentsia not only identified themselves theoretically
with the people, but tried in actual fact to merge with them. They
put on peasants’ coats, ate watery soup, and learned to work with
plough and axe. This was not a political masquerade, but a heroic
exploit. Yet it was founded on a gigantic quid
pro quo.
The intelligentsia created a ‘people’ in its own image, and that
biblical act of creation prepared for it a tragic surprise when the
time came for action.
The
earliest revolutionary groups set themselves the task of preparing a
peasant uprising. Had not the peasant’s capacity for revolt been
demonstrated, after all, by his entire past history? And now the
‘critically thinking personality’ was to replace Stepan Razin and
Yemelyan Pugachev. This hope was not, it seemed, a mere castle in the
air. In the years of preparation and carrying out of the reforms,
there was peasant unrest in various parts of the country. In some
places the government was compelled to resort to military force,
though in a majority of cases matters went only as far as a
traditional, old-time horsewhipping. These peasant disturbances
provided a stimulus for the formation, in 1860 in Petersburg, of a
small underground organization known as ‘Young Russia’. Its
immediate aim was: ‘a bloody and implacable revolution, which shall
radically change the whole foundation of contemporary society.’ But
that revolution was slow in coming. Without altering its views, the
intelligentsia decided that this meant a brief delay. New circles
arose, preparing the insurrection. The government answered with
repressive measures whose fury gives the measure of its fright. For
attempting to issue a proclamation to the peasants, Chernyshevsky,
the famous Russian political writer and genuine leader of the younger
generation, was pilloried and condemned to hard labour. By this blow
the tsar had hoped, with some reason, to behead the revolutionary
movement for some time to come.
On
4 April 1866 the twenty-five-year-old Dimitri Karakozov, a former
student from the petty nobility, fired the first bullet at Alexander
II as the tsar emerged from the Summer Garden. Karakozov missed the
tsar, but ended the ‘liberal’ chapter of Alexander’s reign.
Attacks on the press, and police invasions of peaceful homes, put
fear in the hearts of the liberal circles – none too brave to begin
with. The independent elements of the bureaucracy began to fall in
line. From that time on, we may assume, Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov
stopped singing the songs of his youth. With the help of a sterilized
classicism, a system for crippling young brains, Count Dimitri
Tolstoy, the minister of education, decided to strangle free thought
in the very embryo. A monstrous system was developed. Alexander and
Vladimir Ulyanov had to make their way through the tortures of this
police classicism, in which Athens and Rome served merely as gateways
to tsarist St Petersburg.
Six
years elapsed between the first proclamation and the first armed
attack on the tsar. The intelligentsia thus completed, in the dawn of
its revolutionary activity, its first small cycle: from the hope for
an immediate peasant uprising, through the attempt at propaganda and
agitation, to individual terror. Many similar mistakes, experiments,
and disappointments lay ahead. But, from that moment, from the
abolition of serfdom, begins a unique phenomenon in world history:
six decades of underground exploits by a body of revolutionary
pioneers leading to the explosions of 1905 and 1917.
Two
years after the Karakozov affair, an obscure provincial teacher,
Nechayev, instructor in theology in a parish school, one of the
mightiest figures in the gallery of Russian revolutionaries,
attempted to create a conspiratorial society called ‘The People’s
Revenge’, or ‘The Axe’. Nechayev arranged for a peasant
uprising to occur on the tenth anniversary of the reform, 19 February
1870, when the transitional relations in the villages were, according
to the law, to be replaced by permanent ones. The preparatory
revolutionary work was to proceed in accordance with a strict
timetable: until May 1869, in the capital and the university centres;
from May to September, in the gubernias
and county seats; from October, ‘in the very thick of the people’;
in the spring of 1870, a ruthless popular reckoning with the
exploiters was to begin. But again no insurrection followed. The
affair ended with the murder of a student suspected of betrayal.
Having escaped abroad, Nechayev was turned over to the tsar by the
Swiss Government and ended his days in the Peter and Paul Fortress.
In revolutionary circles the word Nechayevism was long to be a term
of harsh condemnation, a synonym for risky and reprehensible methods
of attaining revolutionary goals. Lenin was to hear himself accused
hundreds of times of ‘Nechayevist’ methods by his political
opponents.
The
1870s opened a second cycle in the revolutionary movement,
considerably wider in scope and intensity but reproducing in its
development the sequence of stages already familiar to us: from the
hope for a popular uprising and the attempt to prepare it, through
clashes with the political police with the people looking on
indifferently, to individual terror. Nechayev’s conspiracy, built
wholly upon the dictatorship of a single person, evoked in
revolutionary circles a sharp reaction against centralism and blind
discipline. Reborn in 1873, after a short calm, the movement took on
the character of a chaotic mass pilgrimage of the intelligentsia to
the people. Young men and women, most of them former students,
numbering about a thousand in all, carried socialist propaganda to
all corners of the country, especially to the lower reaches of the
Volga, where they sought the legacy of Pugachev and Razin. This
movement, remarkable in scope and youthful idealism, the true cradle
of the Russian revolution, was distinguished – as is proper to a
cradle – by extreme naivete. The propagandists had neither a
guiding organization nor a clear programme; they had no
conspiratorial experience. And why should they have? These young
people, having broken with their families and schools, without
profession, personal ties, or obligations, and without fear either of
earthly or heavenly powers, seemed to themselves the living
crystallization of a popular uprising. A constitution?
Parliamentarism? Political liberty? No, they would not be swerved
from the path by these Western decoys. What they wanted was complete
revolution, without abridgements or intermediate stages.
The
theoretical sympathies of the youth were divided between Lavrov and
Bakunin. Both these captains of thought had come from the nobility,
and they had been educated in the same military schools in
Petersburg, Mikhail Bakunin ten years earlier than Pyotr Lavrov. Both
ended their lives as émigrés – Bakunin in 1876, when Vladimir
Ulyanov was still in baby shoes, Lavrov lived till 1900, when Ulyanov
was becoming Lenin. The former artillery officer, Bakunin, had
already emigrated for the second time and progressed from democratic
pan-Slavism to pure anarchism, when the artillery-school teacher,
Colonel Lavrov, an eclectic with an encyclopedic education, began to
develop in legal journals his theory of ‘the critically thinking
personality’, a kind of philosophic passport for' the Russian
‘nihilist’. His doctrine of duty to the people fitted to
perfection the Messianism of the intelligentsia, whose theoretical
haughtiness was combined with a constant practical readiness for
self-sacrifice. The weakness of Lavrovism lay in its failure to
indicate any course of action aside from the abstract propaganda of
revealed gospel. Even such wholly peaceful educators as Ilya
Nikolayevich Ulyanov might sincerely consider themselves followers of
Lavrov. But for this very reason it did not satisfy the more resolute
and active among the young. Bakunin’s doctrine seemed incomparably
more clear, and, better still, more resolute. It declared the Russian
peasants to be ‘socialist by instinct and revolutionary by nature’.
It saw the task of the intelligentsia as a summoning of the peasants
to an immediate ‘universal destruction’, out of which Russia
would emerge a federation of free communes. Patient propagandism
could only fall back under this assault from integral rebellion. In
the full armour of Bakuninism, which became the ruling doctrine, the
intelligentsia of the 1870s considered it self-evident that they need
only scatter the sparks of ‘critical thought’, and both steppe
and forest would burst into a sheet of flame.
‘The
movement of the intelligentsia’, Myshkin later testified at his
trial, ‘was not artificially created, but was the echo of popular
unrest.’ Although in a broad historical sense true, this idea could
in no way establish a direct political connection between popular
discontent and the revolutionary designs of the rebels. By a fatal
combination of circumstances, the rural districts, which had been
restless throughout almost the whole of Russian history, quieted down
just at the moment when the cities became interested in them, and
quieted down for a long time. The peasant reform had become an
accomplished fact. The naked, slave-like dependence of the peasant
upon the lord was gone. Thanks also to the high price of grain
prevailing ever since the 1860s, the standard of living of the upper
and more enterprising layers of the peasantry, controllers of its
social opinion, was on the rise. The peasants were inclined to
attribute the plundering character of the reform to a resistance on
the part of the landlords to the will of the tsar. Their hopes for a
better future rested with that same tsar. He was called upon to set
right that which the landlords and functionaries had ruined. These
moods not only rendered the peasants inhospitable to revolutionary
propaganda, but inclined them to see in the enemies of the tsar their
own enemies. The intelligentsia’s impassioned, impatient, and
powerful attraction toward the peasantry clashed with the peasants’
embittered distrust for everything that issued from the gentry, from
city folk, from educated people, from students. The villages not only
did not open their arms to the propagandists, but repelled them with
hostility. This fact decided the dramatic course of the revolutionary
movement of the 1870s, and its tragic end. Only a new generation of
peasants, growing up after the reform, was to gain an acute new
awareness of its land hunger, its burden of taxation, its oppression
as a class, and undertake – this time under the guiding influence
of
the working class – to smoke out the landlords from their settled
nests.
But it took a quarter of a century to bring this about
In
any case, the movement ‘to the people’ during the 1870s suffered
a complete defeat. Neither the Volga nor the Don nor yet the Dnieper
region responded to the call. Moreover, carelessness in the
precautions necessary for illegal work soon betrayed the
propagandists. An overwhelming majority of them – more than seven
hundred persons – had been arrested by 1874. The public prosecutor
conducted two great trials, which are remembered in the history of
the revolution as ‘the case of the 50’ and ‘the case of the
193’. The challenge thrown in the face of tsarism by the condemned
over the heads of the court stirred the hearts of several generations
of the young.
This
costly experience demonstrated the fact that short raids on the
villages would not suffice. The propagandists decided to try a system
of genuine settlement among the people, moving to the country and
living there as craftsmen, traders, clerks, medics, teachers, etc. In
its scope, 'this movement, which began in 1876, was considerably less
chaotic than the first wave, that of 1873, Disappointment and
repression had given rise to a selective process. In going over to a
settled mode of life, the propagandists found themselves obliged to
dilute the strong wine of Bakuninism with Lavrovian water. Rebellion
was crowded out by educational work, work in which individual
socialist preaching occurred only as an exception.
In
accord with the Populist doctrine, which denied a future to Russian
capitalism, the proletariat was assigned no independent role at all
in the revolution. It happened accidentally, however, that
propaganda, designed in its content for the villages, found a
sympathetic response only in the cities. The school of history is
rich in pedagogical resources. The movement of the 1870s was perhaps
most instructive in the fact that a programme carefully cut to the
pattern of a peasant revolution, succeeded in assembling only the
intelligentsia and some individual industrial workers. This exposed
the bankruptcy of Populism and prepared the first critical elements
of its revision. But before arriving at a realistic doctrine grounded
upon the actual trends within society, the revolutionary
intelligentsia had to experience the Golgotha of the terrorist
struggle.
The
overly remote and completely uncertain day of the eventual mass
awakening of the people did not correspond at all to the passionate
expectations of the revolutionary circles in the cities. Here the
fierce governmental assault on the propagandists of the first line –
years of pre-trial detention, decades at hard labour, physical
violence, insanity, and suicide – awakened a burning desire to pass
from words to action. But how else could the immediate ‘work’ of
small circles express itself than in isolated blows at the most hated
representatives of the regime? Terrorist moods began to make their
way more and more insistently. On 24 January 1878, a solitary young
girl shot the Petersburg chief of police, Trepov, who had recently
ordered a prisoner, Bogolyubov, subjected to corporal punishment.
This pistol-shot of Vera Zasulich – twenty years later Lenin was to
work on the same editorial staff with this remarkable woman – was
merely the instinctive expression of a passionate indignation. Yet in
this gesture lay the seed of a whole political system. A half year
later on the streets of Petersburg, Kravchinsky, a man equally
skilled with pen and dagger, killed the all-powerful chief of
gendarmes, Mezentsev. Here, too, it was a matter of avenging
slaughtered comrades in arms. But Kravchinsky was no longer a loner;
he acted as a member of a revolutionary organization.
The
‘colonies’ scattered among the people had need of leadership. A
little experience of the actual struggle overcame their prejudices
against centralism and discipline, which had seemed somewhat tinged
with ‘Nechayevism’. The provincial groups readily adhered to the
newly formed centre, and thus from selected elements was formed the
organization called Land and Freedom, a body of revolutionary
Populists truly admirable in the composition and solidarity of its
cadres. But alas, the attitude of these Populists toward the people,
who were proving so unsympathetic to the bloody sacrifices of the
revolutionaries, became more and more touched with scepticism.
Zasulich and Kravchinsky seemed by their example to be summoning
their followers to seize weapons and, without awaiting the masses,
rise immediately in defence of themselves and their own. Half a year
later, after the murder of Mezentsev, a young aristocrat, Mirsky –
this time on the direct decision of the party – shot at Drenteln,
the new chief, but missed!
At
about the same time, in the spring of 1879, a prominent provincial
member of the party arrived at the capital with a proposal to kill
the tsar. The son of a minor government official, educated at
government expense and afterwards a district teacher, Alexander
Solovyov had passed through the serious schooling of revolutionary
settlements in the villages of the Volga before despairing of the
success of propaganda. The leaders of Land and Freedom hesitated.
This terrorist leap into the unknown frightened them. The party
refused its sanction, but this did not stop Solovyov. On 2 April, in
Winter Palace Square, he fired three shots from a revolver at
Alexander II. This attempt was also unsuccessful; the tsar escaped
unharmed. The government, of course, came down with a new hail of
reprisals upon the press and the youth of the country: Solovyov’s
attempt bears the same relation to the movement ‘to the people’
of the 1870s as Karakozov’s does to the first attempt at propaganda
in the preceding decade. The symmetry is all too obvious! But the
second revolutionary cycle was incomparably more important than the
first, not only in the number of people drawn into the movement, but
in their temper and experience and in the bitterness of the struggle.
The attempt of Solovyov, which Land and Freedom found it impossible
to disavow, did not remain, like the shot of Karakozov, an isolated
act. Systematic terror became the order of the day. The war with
Turkey, disturbing the national economy and leading to the
capitulation of Russian diplomacy at the Congress of Berlin (1878),
shook Russian society deeply, lowered the prestige of the government,
and gave rise to exaggerated hopes among the revolutionaries,
impelling them upon the road of direct political struggle.
In
June 1879, breaking with the group of orthodox Populists who refused
to forsake the villages, Land and Freedom shed its skin, and entered
the political arena as the People’s Will. To be sure, in its
manifesto the new party did not renounce propaganda among the masses.
On the contrary, it decided to devote two thirds of the party funds
to it, and only one third to terror. But this decision remained a
symbolic tribute to the past. The revolutionary chemists had no
difficulty in explaining in those days that dynamite and
nitroglycerine, widely popularized by the Russo-Turkish War, could be
easily prepared at home. The die was cast. At the same moment,
propaganda, having disappointed all expectations, was once and for
all replaced by terror, and the revolver, having revealed its
inadequacy, was replaced by dynamite. The whole organization was
reconstructed to answer the needs of terrorist struggle. All forces
and all funds were devoted to the preparation of assassinations. The
‘villagers’ among the revolutionaries felt utterly forgotten in
their faraway corners. They tried in vain to create an independent
organization, the Black Redistribution (Chorny
Peredel),
which was, however, destined to become a bridge to Marxism and had no
independent political significance, The turn to terror was
irreversible. The programmatic announcements of the revolutionaries
were revised to correspond with the demands of the new method of
struggle. Land and Freedom had spread the doctrine that a
constitution was in itself harmful to the people, that political
freedom ought to be one of the by-products of a social revolution.
The People's Will acknowledged that the achievement of political
liberty is a necessary precondition for social revolution. Land and
Freedom had tried to see in terror a mere signal for action given to
the oppressed masses from above. The People’s Will set itself the
task of achieving a revolution by terrorist ‘disorganization’ of
the government. What had been at first a semi-instinctive act of
revenge for victimized comrades was converted by the course of events
into a self-contained system of political struggle. Thus the
intelligentsia, isolated from the people and at the same time pushed
forward into the historic vanguard by the whole course of events,
tried to offset its social weakness by multiplying it with the
explosive force of dynamite. It converted the chemistry of
destruction into a political alchemy.
Together
with the change of tasks and methods, the centre of gravity of the
work was abruptly shifted from village to city, from the cities to
the capital. The headquarters of the revolution must henceforth
directly oppose the headquarters of the government. At the same time,
the psychological make-up of the revolutionary was altered and even
his external appearance, With the disappearance of his naive faith in
the people, his carelessness with regard to conspiracy became a thing
of the past too. The revolutionary pulled himself together, became
more cautious, more attentive, more resolute. Each day he was faced
anew with mortal dangers. For self-defence he carried a dagger in his
belt, a revolver in his pocket People who two or three years before
had been learning the shoemaker’s or carpenter’s trade in order
to merge with the people were now studying the art of assembling and
throwing bombs and shooting on the run. The warrior replaced the
apostle. While the rural propagandist had dressed almost in rags in
order to resemble ‘the people’ more closely, this urban
revolutionary tried to be outwardly indistinguishable from the
well-to-do, educated city dweller. Yet striking as was the change
that took place in these few short years, it was easy enough, under
both disguises, to recognize the same old ‘nihilist’. Dressed in
a worn-out coat, he had not been one of the people; in the costume of
a gentleman,
he was not a bourgeois.
A social apostate seeking to explode the old society, he was
compelled to adopt the protective coloration now of one and now of
the other of its two poles.
The
revolutionary path of the intelligentsia thus gradually becomes clear
to us. Having begun with a theoretical self-deification under the
name of ‘critical thought’, it then renounced itself in the name
of a merger with the people, in order, after that failed, once more
to arrive at a practical self-deification personified by the
terrorist Executive Committee. Critical thought implanted itself in
bombs, whose mission was to turn over the destinies of the country to
a handful of socialists. So it was written, at least, in the official
programme of the People’s Will. In fact, the renunciation of the
mass struggle converted socialist aims into a subjective illusion.
The only reality remaining was the tactic of frightening the monarchy
by bombs, with the sole prospect of winning constitutional liberties.
In their objective role, yesterday’s anarchist rebels, who would
not hear of bourgeois democracy, had become today’s armed squadron
in the service of liberalism. History has ways of putting the
obstreperous in their place. Her agenda called not for anarchism, but
political liberty.
The
revolutionary struggle turned into a contest between the Executive
Committee and the police. The Land and Freedom group, and after them
the People’s Will, carried out their first actions in isolation
from each other, in the majority of cases unsuccessfully. The police
caught them and hanged them unfailingly. From August 1878 to December
1879 seventeen revolutionaries were hanged for two governmental
victims. There remained nothing to do but give up striking at
individual state dignitaries, and concentrate the entire strength of
the party on the tsar. It is impossible even now, at a half century’s
distance, not to be struck by the energy, courage, and organizational
talent of this handful of fighters. The political leader and orator
Zhelyabov, the scientist and inventor Kibalchich, women such as
Perovskaya and Figner, peerless in their moral fortitude, were the
cream of the intelligentsia, the flower of a generation. They knew
how, and taught others how, to subordinate themselves completely to a
freely chosen goal. Insurmountable obstacles seemed not to exist for
these heroes who had signed a pact with death. Before destroying
them, the terror gave them a superhuman endurance. They would dig
tunnels under a railroad track down which the tsar’s train was to
roll; and then under a street that his carriage was to pass through;
they would climb into the tsar’s palace with a load of dynamite –
as did the worker Khalturin – and set it off. Failure after
failure! ‘The Almighty protects the liberator’, cried the liberal
press. But in the long run the energy of the Executive Committee
proved stronger than the Almighty’s vigilance.
On
1 March 1881, on a street of the capital, after the young man Rysakov
had missed his aim, another young man, Grinevitsky, throwing a second
bomb of the Kibalchich make, killed himself and Alexander II
simultaneously. This time a blow was struck at the very heart of the
regime. But it soon appeared that the People’s Will itself was to
burn up in the fire of that successful terror. The strength of the
party was concentrated almost entirely in its Executive Committee.
Outside this were auxiliary groups only, having no significance of
their own. The terrorist struggle, at least, including the work of
technical preparation, was carried on exclusively by members of the
central staff. How many of these fighters were there? The numbers are
now known beyond a doubt. The first Executive Committee consisted of
twenty-eight persons. Up to 1 March 1881, the general membership,
never all active at once, comprised thirty-seven persons. Completely
illegal – that is, cut off from all social and even family ties –
these people not only kept the whole political police force in a
state of tension, but at one time even converted the new tsar into
the ‘hermit of Gatchina’. The whole world was shaken by the
thunder of this titanic attack on Petersburg despotism. It seemed as
though the mysterious party had legions of fighters at its command.
The Executive Committee carefully cultivated this hypnotic belief in
its omnipotence. But one cannot hold out long on hypnosis alone.
Moreover, the reserves dried up with unexpected swiftness.
According
to the idea of People’s Will, every successful blow at the enemy
was to raise the authority of the party, recruit new fighters, widen
the circle of sympathizers, and, if not immediately arouse the
popular masses, at least encourage the liberal opposition. Not every
element of these hopes was fantastic. Their heroism undoubtedly did
evoke emulation. Very likely there was no shortage of young men and
women ready to blow themselves up along with their bombs. But there
was now no one to unite and guide them. The party was disintegrating.
By its very nature, the terror expended the forces supplied to it
during the propaganda period long before it could create new ones.
‘We are using up our capital’, said the leader of the People’s
Will, Zhelyabov, To be sure, the trial of the assassins of the tsar
evoked a passionate response in the hearts of individual young
people. Although Petersburg was soon swept all too clean by the
police, People’s Will groups continued to spring up in various
provinces until 1885. However, this did not go to the point of a new
wave of terror. Having burned their fingers, the great majority of
the intelligentsia recoiled from the revolutionary fire.
It
was no better with the liberals, to whom the terrorists, after
turning from the peasantry, were looking with more and more hope. To
be sure, owing to the diplomatic failures of the government and
economic disorders, members of the zemstvos
did
attempt a trial mobilization of their forces. It proved to be a
mobilization of impotence. Frightened by the growing bitterness
between the warring camps, the liberals hastened to discover in the
People’s Will not an ally, but the chief obstacle on the road to
constitutional reforms. In the words of the most leftist of the
zemstvo
men, I. I. Petrunkevich, the acts of the terrorists only ‘frightened
society and infuriated the government’.
Thus,
the more deafeningly the dynamite exploded, the more complete became
the vacuum that surrounded the Executive Committee, which had once
arisen out of a relatively broad movement of the intelligentsia. No
guerilla detachment can long hold out amid a hostile population. No
underground group can function without a screen of sympathizers.
Political isolation finally exposed the terrorists to the police, who
with growing success mopped up both the remnants of the old groups
and the germs of the new. The liquidation of People’s Will by a
series of arrests and trials proceeded rapidly, against the
background of the reactionary backlash of the 1880s. We shall make
better acquaintance of that bleak period in connection with the
terrorist attempt of Alexander Ulyanov.