Narodniks
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The late nineteenth-century Russian populist movement that treated the peasant commune and a peasant revolution as the basis of a road to socialism. It produced currents including the “going to the people” campaign, Land and Liberty and the People's Will; Russian Marxism formed in polemic against its peasant socialism.
In depth
The Narodnik movement emerged among Russian intellectuals in the 1860s and expanded in the 1870s. Its adherents viewed the peasant commune, or mir, as a basis for socialism and believed Russia could bypass capitalist development.
Intellectuals went into the countryside to encourage peasant political action, encountering repression and arrests. Peasant responses often disappointed them; some peasants reported activists to the police.
In 1879, Land and Liberty split into People’s Will and Black Repartition. People’s Will assassinated Alexander II in 1881. Narodnik ideas later influenced the Socialist Revolutionary Party.
Sources
- britannica.com origins, peasant orientation and the going-to-the-people movement
- Marxists Internet Archive contemporary Marxist polemic against Narodnik social theory
- britannica.com