Narodniks
The Narodniks (Russian: народники, "populists") were 19th-century Russian revolutionaries who believed socialism would arise from the peasant commune (obshchina) rather than capitalist development — Russia could skip capitalism and leap to socialism on the basis of agrarian collectivism.
History
- 1860s-70s: theorists like Herzen, Chernyshevsky, Lavrov argued the commune made Russia uniquely predisposed to socialism.
- The "Going to the People" movement (1874): thousands of students went to villages to propagandize — largely rebuffed by peasants, many arrested.
- Radicalization produced Zemlya i Volya (Land and Liberty) and its split into Narodnaya Volya (People's Will — terrorist wing, assassinated Alexander II, 1881) and Black Repartition.
- By the 1880s-90s the movement was in crisis: capitalism had taken root. Plekhanov's Socialism and the Political Struggle (1883) founded Russian Marxism against Narodism.
Legacy
Lenin's early work (The Development of Capitalism in Russia, What the "Friends of the People" Are) polemicized against late Narodism while acknowledging its revolutionary sincerity. The debate — can a backward country skip stages? — prefigured later questions of uneven development, the Asiatic mode, and Third World revolutionary theory.