Pyotr Nikitch Tkachev (1844–1886)

Russian Narodnik thinker, publicist and literary critic.

Tkachev was born on June 29, 1844, in Pskov province of Russia, into a non-rich “small territorial nobility” family. After the death of his father in 1851, Tkachev moved to Petersburg to earn his own living. In August of 1861, Tkachev entered the Faculty of Law of the University of Petersburg. He participated in a series of protests against the government and was once arrested for participating in the student movement of the University of Petersburg against the Tsar’s absolutism. He was an ardent member of revolutionary groups engaged in conspiratorial activities. From 1862 to 1869, he mainly participated successively in the secret activities of the Orishevsky, Karakosov, and Nechayev group. In 1873, Tkachev was exiled to Switzerland and joined the Vpered! (Forward!). In 1874 he published the pamphlet entitled The Aims of Revolutionary Propaganda in Russia, and in 1875 he broke with the Narodniks and founded his own political magazine Nabat (Storm Bell) in Geneva, in which he published articles to spread his revolutionary views. In 1879, he went to Paris, where he was closely associated with the French Blanquists and joined their central committee. Tkachev died on January 4, 1886.

In his youth, Tkachev was deeply influenced by Chernyshevsky, the founder of revolutionary populism, and D.I. Pisarev, the representative of Russian nihilism. Later, he became the representative of the “Jacobins” in the radical revolutionary populism. Tkachev’s thoughts and theories inherited the general propositions of Russian revolutionary populism, such as adherence to the values of commoners, idealization of the Russian peasant communes, and a natural fear of and resistance to capitalism, hoping for a direct transition to socialism through the Russian rural commune. On the other hand, Tkachev’s thought had its own characteristics. As a response to the failure of the “To the People” movement in the 1870s, he advocated immediate and direct violent revolution by means of terrorist plots in order to seize power, transform the old society with the power of the state power grasped by a revolutionary minority, thus realize the ideal of peasant socialism by the enforcement of state power upon the people. To this end, he advocated the establishment of a small revolutionary organization with strict discipline and absolute secrecy, believing that the interests of the revolution were above all else and that revolutionaries should have the spirit of self-sacrifice, etc. The thoughts of radical revolutionary populism had a great influence on the later course of the Russian revolution.