Opposition to Tsarism: Ideas, Ideologies and the Intelligentsia (AQA A Level History: Component 1: Breadth study): Revision Note

Summary

• The intelligentsia was a small, educated minority that challenged tsarist authority from the 1840s onwards

  • It was drawn mainly from the nobility and professional classes

• The Slavophile/Westerniser debate of the 1840s shaped later opposition

  • Slavophiles argued Russia should follow its own traditions

  • Westernisers wanted Russia to adopt the liberal model of Western Europe

• More radical ideas developed in the mid-19th century

  • Nihilism rejected existing authority

  • Anarchism, associated with Mikhail Bakunin, rejected the state itself

• Populism tried to awaken revolution among the peasantry

  • The failure of Going to the People in 1874 pushed some radicals towards terrorism

• The People’s Will turned to targeted assassination

  • It killed Alexander II in March 1881 but produced a conservative backlash rather than revolution

• Marxism arrived in Russia in the 1880s

  • It focused on the growing urban working class rather than the conservative peasantry

The intelligentsia & the origins of opposition in Russia

Who were the intelligentsia?

• The intelligentsia was a cultural identity, not a social class

  • Members included writers, lawyers, journalists, students and professors

  • They were unified by outlook, not occupation

  • What united them was the belief that Russia's political order was wrong

• Most members came from the nobility or professional classes

  • The intelligentsia had no independent mass base among ordinary Russians

  • It challenged a system that depended on people like itself to function

How Alexander II's reforms shaped the intelligentsia

• Alexander II's reforms in the 1860s gave the intelligentsia new platforms

  • The zemstvo (1864) gave educated professionals a space to debate and campaign

  • The relaxation of censorship allowed radical ideas to circulate more freely

  • University expansion produced a new generation of independently minded students

• But the reforms also created the frustrations that radicalised many

  • Emancipation left the peasantry debt-ridden and land-poor

  • The zemstvo had no power over the central government's decisions

  • Many people who had welcomed Alexander's early reforms were disappointed when they fell short of the changes they hoped for

What the intelligentsia wanted

• What the intelligentsia wanted ranged from cautious reform to outright revolution

  • Liberals wanted a constitution and representative government through legal means

  • Radicals rejected gradualism as too slow and too willing to work with the existing order

  • The historian Figes shows that many zemstvo professionals had shifted towards Marxist ideas after the 1891 famine

Slavophiles vs Westernisers: the great debate

Illustration - new comparison

• The Slavophile/Westerniser debate was a philosophical argument within the intelligentsia, not a political movement

  • There were no party structures, programmes or mass membership

  • The debates took place in salons, journals and lecture rooms in the 1840s and 1850s

The Slavophile position

• Slavophiles believed Russia had its own path, separate from the West

  • They saw Orthodox Christianity and the mir as Russia's authentic foundations

  • They criticised Peter the Great for imposing an artificial Western identity on Russia

  • Many were not simply pro-autocracy: they wanted a more spiritual bond between tsar and people

  • Key thinkers included:

    • Aleksey Khomyakov

    • Ivan Kireevsky

    • Konstantin Aksakov

The Westerniser position

• Westernisers simply believed that Russia was behind Western Europe and needed to catch up

  • They called for constitutional law, rational governance and liberal institutions

  • Alexander Herzen later developed his own agrarian socialism, which fed directly into Populism

  • The Westerniser tradition eventually fed into Russian Marxism through Georgi Plekhanov

  • Key thinkers included:

    • Vissarion Belinsky

    • Alexander Herzen

• The debate shaped every major opposition that followed

  • Each later group had to answer the same question: Russia's own path, or the Western model?

  • Slavophile ideas fed into Pan-Slavism and Populist belief in the commune

  • Westerniser ideas fed into liberalism and, through Plekhanov, into Marxism

Liberal opposition: the Westerniser tradition & zemstvo constitutionalism

The liberal tradition

• Liberal opposition was the most moderate strand of anti-tsarist dissent

  • Liberals drew on the Westerniser tradition: they wanted constitutional law and representative government, not revolution

  • They believed change should come through legal means and gradual public pressure

  • This set them apart from the nihilists and populists who came from the same educated class but rejected gradualism entirely

• Boris Chicherin was one of the clearest examples of moderate Russian liberalism

  • He supported constitutional law, individual rights and legal reform

  • However, he rejected revolution and believed change should come gradually through the state

The zemstvo as a platform for liberal pressure

• The zemstvo (established 1864) became the main institutional base for liberal opposition

  • Elected local councils gave professionals a legitimate space to debate policy and push for change

  • By the 1870s and 1880s, zemstvo assemblies were passing resolutions calling for a national consultative assembly

  • The zemstvo liberal tradition would grow significantly after 1894 and eventually form the basis of the Kadet party

• Liberal pressure remained legal and cautious throughout the period from 1855 to 1894

  • Liberals had no mass base among the peasantry, who were conservative and loyal to the Tsar

  • The conservative backlash under Alexander III restricted zemstvo activities and pushed liberal voices to the margins

Why liberals stayed separate from radicals

• The liberal and radical traditions shared a social origin but disagreed completely on strategy

  • Liberals believed the existing legal and institutional framework could be improved from within

  • Radicals believed the whole system needed to be destroyed before anything new could be built

  • Events like the assassination of Alexander II appalled liberal opinion

    • Terrorism gave the regime the excuse to crack down on everyone, including moderate reformers

Nihilism & anarchism: Bakunin & revolutionary violence

Nihilism

• Nihilism emerged in the 1860s as a rejection of all existing authority and values

• Nihilists argued that the existing order must be destroyed before anything new could be built

  • The term was popularised by Turgenev's character Bazarov in Fathers and Sons (1862)

  • Nihilists rejected religion, the family and established conventions as tools of social control

• Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? (1863) became the key text of the radical intelligentsia

  • It presented the 'new people': devoted revolutionaries who lived austerely and gave everything to the cause

  • The novel circulated secretly and shaped a whole generation of radicals

  • Lenin later borrowed the title for his own 1902 political pamphlet

Bakunin and anarchism

• Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) was the central figure of Russian anarchism

  • He believed all states were inherently oppressive, not just the tsarist one

  • He rejected Marx's 'dictatorship of the proletariat': any revolutionary state would just create a new ruling class

  • He called for the immediate abolition of all state authority

• Bakunin's conflict with Marx at the First International (1864 – 1872) produced a lasting split in European revolutionary thought

  • Marx believed the working class must seize state power to achieve socialism

  • Bakunin believed this would simply replace one form of oppression with another

  • Bakunin was expelled from the International in 1872

  • The split anticipated the lasting divide between Marxist and anarchist traditions across Europe

Nechaev and revolutionary violence

• Sergei Nechaev's Revolutionary Catechism (1869) pushed nihilist logic to its extreme

  • It argued that the revolutionary must be ruthless, amoral and entirely devoted to the cause

    • Nechaev himself murdered a fellow revolutionary whom he suspected of disloyalty

  • His ideas still influenced the development of the underground revolutionary organisation in Russia

Populism (Narodniks): ‘Going to the People’

The Narodnik movement

• The Narodniks believed the peasantry would lead Russia's revolution

• The name comes from narod, Russian for 'the people', the Narondiks:

  • Drew on Herzen's idea of agrarian socialism

  • Saw the peasant commune as a ready-made proto-socialist institution

  • Rejected the Marxist idea that Russia must first pass through a capitalist stage

• Pyotr Lavrov and Nikolai Mikhailovsky were the leading Narodnik theorists

  • Lavrov argued that the intelligentsia owed a moral debt to the peasants

    • The peasants' labour had funded their education

  • Mikhailovsky argued the commune had a natural capacity for collective organisation

'Going to the people' (1873 – 74)

• 'Going to the People' was the defining moment of Populism and its greatest failure

  • Thousands of young intellectuals left the cities to live and work among the peasants

    • They expected to awaken a revolutionary consciousness

    • The peasantry was conservative, loyal to the Tsar and suspicious of educated outsiders

  • Many peasants reported the agitators to the police

• Mass arrests followed; the Trial of the 193 (1877 to 1878) produced martyrs but no revolution

  • Around 90 out of 193 defendants were acquitted; the open courtroom spread Populist ideas to a national audience

  • The regime moved political cases to closed courts after the embarrassing verdicts

The failure of 'Going to the People' and the split

Illustration – Land and Liberty split (new)

• The failure forced a fundamental split in the Populist movement in 1879

  • Sixsmith identifies the decisive lesson the Narodniks drew from the experience

    • If the peasants would not drive a revolution, professional revolutionaries would have to impose it

    • This logic directly anticipated Lenin's later theory of the Vanguard party

• Land and Liberty split into two organisations with opposite strategies

  • Black Repartition (Cherny Peredel) continued trying to organise the peasantry; it dissolved quickly and its leaders moved toward Marxism

  • People's Will turned to targeted assassination

• Sixsmith identifies the crucial ideological conclusion the Narodniks drew from the failure of 1874: if the people would not make revolution spontaneously, a professional elite would have to do it for them. This is exactly the theory Lenin later applied in building the Bolshevik party.

People's Will: from populism to political terrorism

The formation and strategy of People's Will

• People's Will (Narodnaya Volya) was formed in 1879 from the split within Land and Liberty

  • Its founders concluded that killing the tsar and senior officials would cause the regime to collapse

  • They formed a small Executive Committee with tight discipline and a willingness to sacrifice members

  • Key figures included:

    • Andrei Zhelyabov

    • Sofia Perovskaya

• People's Will believed terrorism could succeed where mass organisation had failed

  • A small, disciplined cell could act where the peasantry would not

  • The regime, they argued, was only held together by its leaders; remove the leaders and it would fall

The assassination campaign, 1879-1881

• People's Will mounted a systematic assassination campaign against Alexander II

  • In November 1879, they mined the tsar's railway line

  • In February 1880, they bombed the Winter Palace dining room, killing eleven guards

  • Each failed attempt increased their determination and strengthened their reputation among radical circles

• On 1 March 1881, two bombs were thrown at Alexander's carriage on the Catherine Canal in St Petersburg

  • The first bomb missed the tsar but wounded bystanders; Alexander left his carriage to check on the wounded

  • The second bomb was thrown at close range and fatally wounded him; he died within hours

The consequences for People's Will

• The assassination produced the opposite of what People's Will intended: not revolution, but a conservative backlash

  • The peasantry did not rise

  • The working class remained quiet

  • The regime did not collapse

• People's Will was destroyed as an organisation

  • Within a month of the assassination, its leaders were arrested and executed

• The Loris-Melikov proposals for moderate reform were shelved immediately

• The assassination demonstrated two contradictory things at once

  • A small, disciplined cell could reach the tsar despite the full resources of tsarist security

  • But terrorism alone, without mass support, could not produce revolution

Marxism in Russia: the origins of Russian socialism

Why Marxism appealed to Russian radicals

• Marx's ideas reached Russia in the 1870s and 1880s, filling the gap left by Populism's failure

  • The failure of 'Going to the People' had created an opening for new ideas about how revolution could work

  • Marx argued that capitalism would produce a working class that would eventually overthrow it

  • Russia's rapid industrialisation was beginning to create exactly the urban working class Marx described

• Marxism offered answers that Populism could not

  • It explained poverty not as a moral failure but as the product of a specific economic system

  • It provided a scientific framework: revolution was not just desirable but historically inevitable

  • The 1891 famine deepened Marxism's appeal

    • Historian Orlando Figes shows how zemstvo professionals turned to Marxist explanations of peasant poverty

Key figures in early Russian Marxism

Illustration - key figures (new)

• Georgi Plekhanov is often called the 'father of Russian Marxism'

  • He broke from Populism after the failure of 'Going to the People' and founded the Emancipation of Labour group in Geneva in 1883

  • He translated Marxist texts into Russian for the first time

  • He argued that Russia must pass through a capitalist stage before a socialist revolution was possible

• Plekhanov created the intellectual framework that Lenin later inherited and transformed

  • Without Plekhanov, there was no Russian Marxist movement for Lenin to join in the 1890s

  • The two would later split bitterly over the organisation and direction of the revolutionary party

The central problem in Russian Marxism

• Russian Marxism faced a fundamental problem from the start: Marx wrote about industrialised Western Europe, but Russia was still overwhelmingly agrarian

  • Over 80 per cent of Russians were peasants, not industrial workers

  • Plekhanov's answer was to wait for capitalism to develop first before expecting revolution

  • This meant Russian Marxists were theoretically supporting the capitalist stage that they ultimately wanted to overthrow

• Despite this tension, Russian Marxism grew steadily in the 1880s and 1890s

  • The 1891 famine significantly widened its appeal among university students and zemstvo professionals

  • By 1895, Lenin and Martov had formed the League of Struggle in St Petersburg, the direct predecessor of the Bolshevik Party