Trace the evolution of the People's Will

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

• Three groups in Russia after 1850 felt that they could reform and modernize the Russian
• state, but they disagreed about the ways to do it.
o One group, whose views Czar Alexander shared, wanted to modernize Russia from the top down.
o Another group, the intellectuals, wanted Russia to become a liberal Western democracy. Violent anarchists took another path. They believed that Russian problems could be settled through revolution.

• Narodnaya Voyla (the People's Will) advocated violent socialist revolution.

• When it launched a campaign of revolutionary terrorism in the 1870s, it faced confrontation with conservative elements such as the church, police, and military.

• Members of the People's Will came to believe that it was necessary to terrorize
• these conservative organizations into submission.

• The motivations behind the People's Will evolved from Russian revolutionary
• thought. According to Laqueur (1999, pp. 15–16), the philosophy of anarchist terrorism
• in Russia was embodied by Mikhail Bakunin and Sergey Nechaev.
o Their revolutionary thought developed separately before they met each other in the 1860s, when they formed an intellectual union.
o Both spoke of revolt against the czar, and both endorsed violence as the means.
o Yet, even in the nation that would experience a violent anarchist campaign and eventually a communist revolution, Bakunin and Nechaev basically stuck to rhetoric.

• Although they were ideologically linked to anarchism in Western Europe, they
• were distinct from their Western supporters.

• Russian anarchists were writing for a general population in the hope of sparking a democratic revolution. Laqueur says that their significance lies in their influence on later revolutionaries and the violence and assassinations those later revolutionaries committed.

• They were not radical revolutionaries in Laqueur's view.