Populism

Also known as “Narodnism” or “Narodism” (“Narodnichestvo”). A current that emerged in Russia in the 1860s–1870s reflecting the political demands and social ideals of small producers. Its theoretical origin can be traced back to the village socialist ideas of the Russian democrats such as A.I. Herzen and N.G. Chernyshevsky. Its chief representatives are M.A. Bakunin, P.N. Tkachev, P.L. Lavrov, N.K. Mikhailovsky, S.N. Yuzhakov among others.

The early populists lived in an era when capitalism was developing in Western Europe, the bourgeoisie was growing and the proletarian movement was flourishing, while the Tsarist Empire was still stuck in the era of desolate serfdom and the development of capitalism was very slow. On the one hand, the Tsarist Empire harshly suppressed serf uprisings throughout the country, and on the other hand, cruelly persecuted patriotic intellectuals with democratic revolutionary ideas in order to stifle the revolution and safeguard the existing feudal serfdom system which was rapidly declining. With the promulgation of Alexander II’s decree of “Abolition of Serfdom” in 1861, serfdom in Tsarist Russia began to perish, as the proportion of industrial economy was increasing and the rural economy and life was disintegrating constantly, Tsarist Russia was experiencing a period of great change. The early populists mainly struggled against the decadent and declining feudalistic Tsarist Russia, and at the same time, they were worried about the development of capitalism in Russia and began to seek for a new way out for the Tsarist Russia. In the summer of 1873, they put forth the slogan “To the People” in an attempt to mobilize peasants to carry out the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the Tsarist system and to build socialism by relying on the liberated peasants through peasant village communities, called “Narodniks” (according to the original Russian meaning of populists, at that time, when the peasants had an absolute dominance in the total number of the population, the people usually referred to the peasants). Its ideological system was called “populism” or “popular socialism”.

The populists did not understand the objective laws of social development and were unable to recognize the tendency of capitalism to develop in Russia and its historical inevitability to replace feudalism. The populists held that Russia had its own historical peculiarities and that the peasant village communities in Russia were the “embryos of socialism” and that the Russian peasants had “communist instincts”, and that, therefore, by means of the peasant village communities with their common ownership of the land, it was possible to skip the “historical scourge” of the bourgeoisie in Russia and the “historical misfortune” of the proletariat in Russia and enter socialist society straight away.

The populist conception of history is an idealist conception of history. The populists held that history is made by outstanding heroes, and that “the people” are merely appendages of a minority group who blindly follow the acts of heroes. Populism opposed long-term political struggle and advocated relying on the tactic of individual terrorism to achieve the goal of revolution. Essentially, early populism belonged to peasant democracy, representing the interests of Russian peasants and small producers, and reflected the mood and the demands of the peasants to overthrow the Tsar’s absolutism and the rule of the landlord class. Therefore, from the perspective of anti-feudalism, the early revolutionary popular socialism had a certain degree of progressive nature. But the populist tactic of individual terrorism has been continually defeated because of the detachment of populist propositions from the masses and from the realities of the proletarian revolutionary movement. From the 1880s–1890s onward, most populists have abandoned the struggle against the Tsar’s absolutism and begun to advocate relying on the State to improve the situation of peasants and gradually degenerated into a liberal Narodniks representing the interests of a few rich peasants, thus the current lost its progressive significance in its early stage. Liberal populism hindered the spread of Marxism and undermined the development of the workers’ movement in Russia.