Narodniks

For example, Mikhail Bakunin founded modern collectivist anarchism in Russia in the mid-19th century, which theorized the complete dismantling of centralized state authority in response to the autocratic Tsarist regime.

Other groups such as the Emancipation of Labour Party and the Narodniks argued for socialism in Russia in the 1870s and 1880s, following the political ideas of the German political theorist Karl Marx.

Their ideas began to find increasing support in Russia from 1891 onwards, following a catastrophic famine that year which claimed the lives of approximately half a million Russians.

Such was the unrest created by the famine that Orlando Fages, the leading English-speaking historian of revolutionary Russia, has argued that the roots of the Russian Revolution of 1917 can ultimately be traced back to 1891 and the death of half a million people at that time owing to food shortages.

and the struggles engendered by the famine led to the rising popularity of the Russian socialist movement in the 1890s.

The disparate socialist groups eventually coalesced in 1898 to form the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, a revolutionary socialist party formed to unite Russian socialists in the cause of advancing the lot of Russian industrial workers.

The teenage Trotsky was soon involved in these revolutionary political movements, and by 1896, he had relocated to the Black Sea town of Nikolaev, where he joined the Narodniks.

A year later, he helped organize the South Russian Workers' Union in the town.

The Russian

peasantry were suspicious of these activists, and a lot of the Narodniks were turned over to the police.

With the failure of this approach to activism, the organization split.

One side formed People's Will, which waged a campaign of assassination of state officials to promote popular insurgency.

Having become a village nurse, he announced socialism to the peasants through the gospel.

To be clear, it's also interesting that he's writing this from the point of view of the Narodnik, of the People's Will organization.

This is, at a minimum, what they were telling themselves, or at least what they were telling the public.

Of course, a lot of this isn't true, but he's putting their position first before anything.

His younger brother, Vladimir, would later take a different name, Lenin.

By the turn of the century, Marxist groups had begun to form in the cities, drawing on the anger that had fueled the assassins and the Narodniks before them.

Leaders like the mercurial Julius Martov and the intense Lenin founded the Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class in eighteen ninety-five.

A schism in nineteen oh three split them into two factions over what seemed like a trivial dispute about party membership conditions.

Muda is a great writer because his writing is conceptually sophisticated without being linguistically too elaborate.

The same can be said about the British scholar Paul Taggart and his seminal text called Populism, which helped me understand the origins of populism, how it all started in the late 19th century U.S. with the People's Party and at the same time in Russia with the Narodniks.

both very early manifestations of populism.

So very interesting.