Free The Red Flag: A History of Communism by David Priestland Page A

immediate interaction with the people and the workers where you can receive the knowledge useful to the revolutionary cause. 21
    Chernyshevskii had favoured the first argument, but he was imprisoned and exiled for his political views between 1862 and 1883, and it was his heir, the agrarian socialist Petr Lavrov, who became its main proponent. Students, the Westernizing Lavrov urged, had to master science to prepare for the new order, not engage in destructive revolution. As has been seen, Lavrov, whilst not a Marxist himself, was the Russian socialist who maintained most contact with West European Marxists, and was on Engels’ Christmas pudding list. Mikhail Bakunin defended the second view: Western culture was bourgeois and philistine, and students had tomerge with the peasantry, absorbing their inherently collectivist culture – embodied in the traditional peasant ‘commune’. 22 Ultimately, in Bakunin’s view, peasant revolution, with its roots in Russian brigandage, would destroy the fundamentally alien, ‘German’ Russian state:
    The brigand is always the hero, the defender, the avenger of the people, the irreconcilable enemy of the entire state regime, both in its civil and social aspects, the life and death fighter against our statist-aristocratic, officialclerical civilization. 23
    The debate between Lavrov and Bakunin carried distinct echoes of the conflict between Modernist and Radical Marxism. But unlike Marx, both believed in the revolutionary potential of the peasantry – happily so, as there was not yet much of a proletariat in Russia. Yet neither Lavrov’s nor Bakunin’s strategies altered the fundamental conservatism of the regime, and official repression encouraged a turn towards revolutionary violence. Crucial was the failure of the Lavrovite ‘Going to the People’ movement of 1874, when over a thousand young people abandoned their lives in the towns and went to live with the peasantry. Dressing as peasants, the men in red shirts and baggy trousers, and women in white blouses and skirts, they hoped to educate them, enlighten them and encourage them to rise up and demand a redistribution of land. The youths and the peasantry did not always have much in common, but it was official repression, not peasant hostility, that led to the movement’s failure. Large numbers of the youthful idealists were arrested and sentenced in large open trials in 1877–8. 24
    The lessons seemed clear: the radical movement had to become more organized, secretive and conspiratorial. In 1879 one wing of the Russian socialist movement, the ‘People’s Will’ (
Narodnaia Volia
), created the model for all terrorist organizations in the modern world: it was pyramidal in structure, and was made up of discrete cells, which, for reasons of security, were supposed to be ignorant of the activities of the others. The People’s Will was also the first organization to use the innovative explosive technology recently developed by the businessman Alfred Nobel. That year it passed a death sentence on Alexander II, which was enacted in 1881 when two hand-held bombs were thrown at the Tsar’s carriage.
    The harsh repression that followed the assassination only strengthened the terrorists and their most prominent theorist, Petr Tkachev. Theson of a petty nobleman, he argued that only action by a small ‘revolutionary minority’ would bring socialism to the country. It was in the 1880s that Rakhmetov eclipsed Vera and Kirsanov as the role model of choice for Russian youth. Osipanov, one of the members of the terrorist organization that made an assassination attempt on Alexander III in 1887, the ‘Group of March 1’, emulated his hero by sleeping on nails.
What is to be Done?
was also the favourite book of another member of the Group of March 1, Aleksandr Ulianov, and, after his execution, that of his brother, Vladimir – later known as ‘Lenin’.
    Russian socialist terrorists continued to operate throughout the 1890s, killing