Narodniki
The Narodniki ( Russian народники , [ nɐˈrɔdʲnʲɪkʲɪ ], folk folk , folk friends ; singular Narodnik ) were a social revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire that appeared in the second half of the 19th century .
In the foreground of this movement were revolutionary intellectuals who left their familiar surroundings and lived as simple workers. They educated the common people about social grievances. The renewal of Russia was propagated by a peasant movement towards a socialism , at the theoretical center of which was the village community ( Obschtschina ), which was supported by the emancipation statute of 1861. A farmer had no right of ownership within the municipality, but only a right of use, the scope of which was determined by the municipality; his right to leave the community was limited; a system of state paternalism ultimately served to keep the system of collecting taxes effective.
The Narodniki now saw in the village commune, which contained the most important elements of a socialist society, a possibility to bypass the development towards capitalism and to achieve socialism directly. Despite the important advances made by capitalism in Russian agriculture after the peasant reform of 1861, for them the new structures were an artificial product that had no connection with Russian history. Instead of going through the long and torturous process of capitalist development, the Russian revolutionaries, according to the Narodniki, could use the special historical conditions of Russia in the interest of the peasants to establish socialism.
In the spring of 1874 there was a spontaneous and unorganized uprising, but it was suppressed.
The best-known representatives of this revolutionary direction were Alexander Ivanovich Herzen , Nikolai Gavrilowitsch Chernyshevsky and Pyotr Lavrovich Lavrov .
The spectrum of their views ranged from bourgeois democratic enlightenment to philanthropy and social revolutionary terrorism.
Intellectual representatives also sought contact with Karl Marx (e.g. Wera Ivanovna Sassulitsch ); The failure of their cultural revolution and their terrorism led Plekhanov in particular to reject the Narodniki and to the view that the Russian social problems could only be solved by Marxism and social democracy .
Part of the Narodniki was formed in 1879 by the Narodnaya Volya ( People's Will ) secret society , which organized the murder (1881) of Tsar Alexander II .
The heterogeneous and enthusiastic thinking of the populists influenced the writer Lev Tolstoy and was also the driving force behind the Russian Social Revolutionary Party, which was founded in late 1901 / early 1902 . After the February Revolution in 1917 , this party split: its right wing became part of the coalition that formed the Provisional Government from May 1917 and from July 1917 provided the head of government with Alexander Kerensky, who had moved to it , while the left wing together with the after the October Revolution Bolsheviks ruled from December 8, 1917 to March 1918, but subsequently turned against the policies of the Bolsheviks, which culminated in assassinations of the German ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach-Harff and Lenin , and the separate peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk to break.
The term and the spirit of the Narodniki emerged for the last time in September 1918, when the Narodnik Communist party was founded as a splinter group of the Left Social Revolutionaries , but which only two months later became part of the Bolshevik Party.
Individual evidence
- ^ Leonard Schapiro: The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 9-23 Thousand. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1962, p. 15 (English: The Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Eyre & Spottiswoode, London 1960).
- ^ Richard Lorenz: Georgi Walentinowitsch Plechanow. In: Walter Euchner (Ed.): Classics of Socialism. CH Beck, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-406-35089-5 , pp. 251-263.