Abstract
The Russian Populist movement which emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century was an intellectual, radical movement directed to the destruction of the existing Russian political and social system which, in the words of Sir Isaiah Berlin, it condemned as ‘a moral and political monstrosity — obsolete, barbarous, stupid and odious’.1 The founder of Russian Populism was Alexander Herzen, who left Russia for Paris in 1847. Herzen’s experience of the rise and fall of the 1848 revolution in France, while it confirmed his conviction that only a socialist revolution could save Europe, raised in his mind doubts as to whether Europe’s energies and will-power were sufficient to achieve this end. Might it not be possible, Herzen argued, that Russia though the most backward country in Europe, might succeed where others have failed? The long-established Russian peasant communities (the obshchina or mir) which played a central role in village economic and social life, might, under the guidance of dedicated revolutionaries, become the foundation for a Russian agrarian socialist society.
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Notes and References
Isaiah Berlin, ‘Russian Populism’, in Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers ( London: The Hogarth Press, 1978 ), p. 210.
See Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974), Ch. 6.
F. Engels, ‘On Social Relations in Russia’, published in Volksstraat, April 1875, and in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II ( Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958 ), pp. 49–61.
Letter from Karl Marx to Vera Zasulich, 8 March 1881, in David McLellan, Karl Marx: Selected Writings ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977 ), pp. 576–7.
Quoted in Lazar Volin, A Century of Russian Agriculture: From Alexander II to Khrushchev ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970 ), p. 85.
Samuel H. Baron, Plekhanov: The Father of Russian Marxism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963), pp.100 and 96.
Lenin, Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, August 1905, in The Essentials of Lenin, Volume I ( London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1947 ), p. 381.
See Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), pp.751–8 and 775–80.
See Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union ( Andover: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1960 ), pp. 191–2.
Stalin, ‘The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists’, Preface to On the Road to October, December 1924, in J. Stalin Problem of Leninism ( Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1947 ), p. 107.
Quoted by E.H. Carr, Socialism in One Country Vol. I, 1924–1926 (London: Macmillan, 1958; Penguin edn 1970 ), p. 201.
Quoted by Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, edited and translated by George Shriver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989 ), p. 225.
Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine ( London: Arrow, 1986 ), pp. 220–2.
Medvedev, op. cit., pp.250–3; Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR 1917–1991 ( London: Pelican Books, 1992 ), pp. 194–200.
See Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives ( London: HarperCollins, 1991 ), pp. 1001–3.
Beatrice Heuser, Western Containment Policies in the Cold War. The Yugoslav Case 1948–53 ( London: Routledge, 1989 ), p. 22.
See Jerry Hough and Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union Is Governed ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979 ), pp. 222–6.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956 (3), translated by H.T. Willetts (London: 1978 Collins and Harvill Press), p.494.
Nicholas Bethell, Gomulka, His Poland and His Communism (London: Longman, 1969 ), Ch. XIV, ‘October’.
See L.J. Macfarlane, Human Rights: Realities and Possibilities (London: Macmillan, 1990), Ch. 4, ‘Human Rights in Hungary’, pp.170–4.
Quoted by Archie Brown and Gordon Wightman, ‘Czechoslovakia: Revival and Retreat’ in Archie Brown and Jack Gray (eds), Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States, 2nd edn ( London: Macmillan, 1979 ), p. 174.
See Archie Brown, ‘The Power of the General Secretary of the CPSU’, in T.H. Rigby et al. (eds), Authority, Power and Policy in the USSR ( London: Macmillan, 1980 ), pp. 147–8.
Timothy Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (Harmondsworth: Granta books in association with Penguin Books, 1991), pp.80 and 181.
Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996 ), p. 134.
Alec Nove, ‘Glasnost’ in Action: Cultural Renaissance in Russia ( London: Unwin Hyman, 1989 ), pp. 196–7.
Quoted in Stephen White, After Gorbachev ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 ), p. 133.
Stephen White et al. (eds), The Politics of Transition: Shaping a Post-Soviet Future, adapted from the Times-Mirror survey, Washington, DC ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 ), p. 16.
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© 1998 Leslie J. Macfarlane
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Macfarlane, L.J. (1998). From Russian Socialism to Soviet Communism. In: Socialism, Social Ownership and Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26987-7_9
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