Narodniks

The Populists (Russian Populists, friends of the people; singular narodnik ) was a social revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire, which came into existence 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 ordinary workers. They clarified the common people on social ills. The renewal of Russia by a peasant movement to a socialism, in its theoretical center of the village community was propagated ( obshchina ) stood, which was still supported by the emancipation statute of 1861. A farmer had no right of ownership within the community, but only a right of use, the extent laid down the community; his right to withdraw from the community, was limited; a system of state paternalism was not least to recover the tax system to efficiently obtained.

The Populists saw now in the village commune, which contains the most important elements of a socialist society, a way to avoid the development of capitalism and provides direct links to socialism. Despite the important progress of capitalism in Russian agriculture after the peasant reform of 1861 the new structures for they were an artificial product, which had no connection with the Russian history. Rather than go through the long and painful process of capitalist development, could the Russian revolutionaries, according to the Populists, use the special historical conditions of Russia in the interest of farmers to establish socialism.

In the spring of 1874 was a spontaneous and unorganized insurrection, which was however defeated.

The best known representatives of this revolutionary direction were Alexander Ivanovich heart, Nikolai Chernyshevsky Gawrilowitsch and Pyotr Lavrov Lawrowitsch.

The range of her ideas ranged from bourgeois- democratic education, philanthropy to social-revolutionary terrorism.

Intellectuals representatives also sought contact with Karl Marx (eg Wera Zasulitch ); the failure of their Cultural Revolution as their terrorism led by name Plekhanov to reject the Populists and the view that the Russian social problems could be solved only by Marxism and social democracy.

Part of the Populists formed in 1879 secret society Narodnaya Volya ( People's Will ), which organized the assassination (1881 ) of Tsar Alexander II.