Narodniks

The petty-bourgeois utopian peasant-socialist movement that prevailed in Russia from the 1860s to the early 20th century. It was named as the "Narodniks" because it called itself "the quintessence of the people" and proposed "going to the people".

The Narodniks existed for half a century, and this time period can be roughly divided into three historical stages: The stage from the early 1850s to the end of the 1870s was the stage of formation and development, with Herzen, Ogarev and Chernyshevsky as the main representatives. The 1880s was the period of decline in which some of them, such as Plekhanov, turned to the stand point of Marxism, while most of them, such as Mikhaylovski and Vorontsov, further deepened the mistakes of Narodnism; from the 1890s, the Narodniks became a reactionary movement. On the whole, the Narodniks before the 1880s were revolutionary, and the main target of their struggle was the Tsarism and its autocratic system. After the 1880s and 1890s, the Narodniks gradually abandoned their violent revolutionary struggle against the Tsar regime, compromised with it, turned against Marxism and began to attack it, and degenerated into liberal Narodnik faction which represented the interests of rich peasants. Narodnism based its theory on the possibility of a direct transition from capitalism to socialism in Russia through the peasant village communities (obshchina). The Narodniks denied the historical inevitability of the development of capitalism and the proletariat in Russia; denied the great historical role of the proletariat and regarded the peasantry as the main force of the revolution; regarded the primitive village communities in Russia as the embryo and foundation of socialism and believed that socialism could be achieved by vigorously developing them; opposed class struggle and popular revolution, and took the assassination of the tsars and individual figures in power as the main means of struggle. They adopted the idealist historical view that individual "heroes" create history and regarded the masses as "mob". They had a certain influence in Western Europe and in some countries in the East. During the 1880s and 1890s, Plekhanov and Lenin successively launched in-depth criticisms on them.