PREFIGURING A FUTURE PASSED: POLITICS OF NARODNICHESTVO

Abstract

The historiography of narodnichestvo has since its inception had to contend with the matter of defining its subject, with approaches ranging from a narrowly semantic prescriptivism ordaining the appellation’s use exclusively in reference to the 1876-79 revolutionary party, to the broadly cultural understanding of narodnichestvo as a popular social sentiment of affinity for the Russian peasant which found its expression not only in politics, but also arts and literature. As a result - and despite their tremendous salience and peculiarity to the broader Russian Imperial history - the historical continuity of the narodnik movement, and in particular the evolution (and revolution) of its politics and ideology, have been somewhat unduly sidelined in the discourse and scholarship of narodnichestvo as a historical phenomenon. While the radical organizations that comprise the focus of this paper cannot account for the sheer breadth of Russian Populism, they have nevertheless most explicitly found within their daily life and functioning the crystallized articulation of the narodnik zeitgeist that captured the imaginations of their contemporaries. Arising as it did at a time and in the context of romantic nationalist awakening all over Europe, narodnichestvo was indeed a broadly popular phenomenon - but it is its vanguard, often strictly organized and always practically oriented, that truly captured the needs of popular life. More pertinently to the trajectory of its political development it took on seriously the perennial cursed question: what is to be done? This paper attempts a longitudinal study of the history of narodnichestvo not as a singular group or historical phenomenon, but a continuity of organizational forms that simultaneously expressed and iteratively shaped a political ideology of its own. This historical agency I term the narodnik body of politics; its growth and evolution over time are captured in the memoirs and recollections of the narodniks, which constitute the material base of this work.