Hello Hivers and Book Clubbers,
After the most recent review, a fiction-book by Tolstoy, I decided to stay in 19th century Russia for my reading. This time, however, we delve into some non-fiction. The book I'm reviewing here is titled 'The Crisis of Russian Populism' by Richard Wortman. I picked up this 1967 copy while on vacation in Budapest; you can see on the title page shown above that it used to belong to a university in Budapest, where I was at the time.
The subject matter is told in about 200 pages. The book mostly centers around three men, Engelgardt, Uspenskii and Zlatovratskii, and how they each dealt with the crisis of populism in Russia. The book tends to dive somewhat into the psychological, which I don't find particularly interesting. In this review, I'll be talking more about the movement of populism itself in broad strokes, because I think that most (like me before delving into Russian history) know little about it. I'll try to do this without diving into a myriad of details.
Populism and the age of Reform
1861 is a very important year in Russian, and thus also European, history. In that year, Czar Alexander II abolished serfdom, a system of body-ownership of peasants to the nobles which was not very far removed from slavery.
Whereas this in itself was a big societal change, more progressive-minded intelligentsia, the learned middle- and upper-class of Russia, wanted more. The abolition of serfdom led them to think about what other institutions were no longer necessary. Perhaps the Church? Perhaps the Czarist autocracy itself? Revolutionary ideas were brewing in the 1860s in Russia.
These ideas and ideologies went in many directions. The most-known in Russia became the Bolsheviks, when they succeeded in 1917 in toppling the Czarist regime and instituting the Soviet Union through the rallying of the urban industrial proletariat. This last part was wholly in line with the writings of the Founding Fathers of communism; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Yet the Russian Revolution would not have succeeded without any sympathy from the rural peasant class, which dominated Russia. Discounted by Marx and Engels as a backward, conservative/reactionary hopeless case, their neutrality (meaning they did not actively support the monarchy anymore) contributed big-time to the success of the Soviets.
Ideals vs. Reality
The populists, or narodniki, had put all their hopes on the peasant class half a century earlier, in the 1860s and 1870s. Yet this clearly did not lead to any success. What were some of the main factors for their hope in the peasants?
Community: one found among the Russian peasantry a form of communal working and living that was completely lost in the cities. The de-emphasis of private property was an attractive quality to the populists (and to socialists as well).
Good work ethic: Many of the intelligentia admired the long days the peasants were able to endure, compared to the cushy jobs of the bureaucracy in the city.
Numbers: an obvious one. In a country overwhelmingly rural, the peasants offer the numbers necessary to force any social change, if they wished so and were able to perform mass action.
The highly idealized peasant did not, however, turn to revolution. In part this was due to the distance between the city and countryside, both literally and figuratively. The intelligentia in the 1860s had very little first-hand experience with the peasants. The three men mentioned, Engelgardt, Uspenskii and Zlatovratskii all went into the countryside to get experience, feel and data for the intelligentsia at home, and to refine their political views/ideology themselves.
The results differed widely per man:
-Engelgardt organized his own peasant commune, but entirely made up of intelligentsia, who had to learn all the tasks of the countryside. They found their ego's to be one of their worst enemies, and this two main communes fell apart within a couple of years.
-Uspenskii basically spiralled into depression and despair when hit by (his) reality of peasant living compared to the idealized version of it. He describes a case of a peasant being hanged by his village for stealing a horse, and can't fathom a community to act that way.
-Zlatovratskii did the reverse of Uspenskii: he kept his idealized vision of the peasants, though he saw in reality that things were not as rose-coloured as he remembered them to be in his youth. Yet he chose to ignore this, to keep his own personal peace-of-mind, one suspects.
A myriad of change
A plethora of factors changed peasant life in late 19th century Russia. One chapter of the book deals with how money became unavoidable in Russian peasant life. It used to be that peasants lived on what they grew, and needed very little else. Yet they now needed money for rent, for certain commodities that entered the countryside, etc.
This changed the make-up of the countryside; many peasants began to work a trade, sometimes not working the land at all anymore, thus destroying the communal ties in the village. The distance between richer and poorer peasants became larger, etc.
Half a chapter is even dedicated to poetry, a remarkable swerve, to illustrate the revolutionary fervour of some of the populist thinkers. This was a long-standing battle; to focus on revolution in the countryside, or to force the issue in the big cities.
Conclusion
Ironically, the success in the latter action would be the undoing of the populist movement, next to their unfounded hope in the peasants. On the 1st of March, 1881, Czar Alexander II would be murdered by revolutionaries. Looking back, it is very remarkable that this relatively reform-minded Czar would be the one to be killed by reformists.
The answer would not be long in coming. His son and successor Alexander III would show no mercy to the revolution, (rightly) supposing that his father's leniency and sympathy had killed him. A crack-down on both socialism and populism followed, which completely wiped any revolutionary movement off the map for years. Populism would be almost forgotten.
I hope you've enjoyed reading about this very niche subject. I'm not sure how easy it is to get a hold on this book, I suspect it isn't in print anymore, though maybe the Internet can work its magic. I'll see you all in a next review,
-Pieter Nijmeijer
(Top image: self-made photo of title page)