Narodnik
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Narodniks was the name for Russian revolutionaries of the 1860s and 1870s. Their movement was known as "Narodnichestvo" (Narodism). The term derives from the Russian expression Хождение в народ. Or, in English, Going to the people.
Narodism arose in Russia after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, which signaled the coming end of the feudalist age in Russia. Seeing the free serfs being sold into wage slavery, once under landlords, now under the bourgeoisie, Narodism was an expression of political reaction against what had happened. Narodniks held a nostalgia for the past; despising the landlord of the past, but hating even worse the uprooting of the peasants from the ancient obshchina, the Russian commune.
The Narodniks formed in response to the growing conflicts between the peasantry and the kulaks. The groups did not establish a concrete organization, but shared the common general aim of overthrowing the monarchy and kulaks, and distributing land among the peasantry. The Narodniks generally believed that capitalism was not a necessary result of industrial development, and that it was possible to skip capitalism altogether, and enter straight into a kind of socialism.
The Narodniks believed the peasantry was the revolutionary class that would overthrow the monarchy, regarding the village commune as the embryo of socialism. However, they believed that the peasantry would not achieve revolution on their own, but instead that history could only be made by heroes, outstanding personalities, who would lead an otherwise passive peasantry to revolution.
In the spring of 1874, the conflict between the kulaks and peasantry brought turbulence to Russia's urban centers, and the Narodnik intelligentsia left the cities for the villages, going "among the people" (hence their name), attempting to teach the peasantry their moral imperative to revolt. They found almost no support.
Given the Narodniks social background, generally middle and upper-middleclass, they were not well akin to Russian peasants and their culture. They spent much time learning peasant custom, dress and dance. In some cases, they even had to learn Russian as wealthy Russians from the West generally spoke French or German.
On arriving into some villages, dressed appropriately and singing and dancing what they had learned, many Russian peasants, completely removed from the enlightenment of Western Russia, mistook them for witches. Many were hounded by vigilante groups, often being maimed by farm utensils or put through frenzied trials and burned at the stake.
The Tsarist secret police responded to the attempt with extreme repression: revolutionaries and peasant sympathizers were beaten, imprisoned and exiled. In 1877, the Narodniks revolted with the support of thousands of revolutionaries and peasants. However, the movement was again swiftly and brutally crushed.
In response to this repression of open, spontaneous organization, Russia's first organized revolutionary party formed: People's Will (Narodnaia Volia), with a new revolutionary program suited to the extremely repressive conditions: terrorism led by a secret society.
Although this Party did not last for long, the later Socialist-Revolutionaries, Popular Socialists, and Trudoviks all shared similar tactics, with ideas and practices originally set down by the Narodniks. (Source Marxists.org [Glossary of Organisations - Narodniks])
After unsuccessful struggle to unite the peasantry to overthrow the Tsar, due to the peasantry's idolisation of the Tsar as someone "on their side", Narodism developed the practice of terrorism: the peasantry, they believed, must be shown that the Tsar was not supernatural, that he could be killed. This theory, called direct struggle; would show an "uninterrupted demonstration of the possibility of struggling against the government, in this manner lifting the revolutionary spirit of the people and its faith in the success of the cause, and organising those capable of fighting." (from the Programme of the People's Will, 1879) This theory also led to short-term failure, as the peasantry as a whole was horrified with what had happened. These events did, however, help sow the roots of the coming revolution of 1905.
Narodism according to Lenin
Lenin defined Narodism as:
"By Narodism we mean a system of views, which comprises the following three features:
1) Belief that capitalism in Russia represents a deterioration, a retrogression. Hence the urge and desire to "retard"", "halt", "stop the break-up" of the age-old foundations by capitalism, and similar reactionary cries.
2) Belief in the exceptional character of the Russian economic system in general, and of the peasantry, with its village commune, artel, etc. in particular. It is not considered necessary to apply to Russian economic relationships the concepts elaborated by modern science concerning the different social classes and their conflicts. The village-commune peasantry is regarded as something higher and better than capitalism; there is a disposition to idealize the "foundations". The existence among the peasantry of contradictions characteristic of every commodity and capitalist economy is denied or slurred over; it is denied that any connection exists between these contradictions and their more developed form in capitalist industry and capitalist agriculture.
3) Disregard of the connection between the "intelligentsia" and the country's legal and political institutions, on the one hand, and the material interests of definite social classes, on the other. Denial of this connection, lack of a materialist explanation of these social factors, induces the belief that they represent a force capable of "dragging history along another line, of "diversion from the path", and so on.
([The Heritage We Renounce] - 1897)
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