Narodnik, member of a 19th-century socialist movement in Russia who believed that political propaganda among the peasantry would lead to the awakening of the masses and, through their influence, to the liberalization of the tsarist regime. Because Russia was a predominantly agricultural country, the peasants represented the majority of the people (narod): hence the name of the movement, narodnichestvo, or “populism.”
The movement arose among the Russian intelligentsia in the 1860s and gained momentum in the 1870s. It was enhanced by dissatisfaction with Alexander II’s Emancipation Manifesto of 1861, which, though liberating the peasants from serfdom, created unsatisfactory economic conditions for peasant agriculture by favouring the landowners in the redistribution of land and by imposing an involved system of collective compensation on the villages. The Narodniki embodied in their teachings a considerable amount of communist ideology gathered from Karl Marx’s works, accepting, for instance, his ideas of communal ownership and production and his dislike for private enterprise. However, they modified two of Marx’s fundamental principles. First, they believed in agrarian communism and disregarded the industrial proletariat, which at that time represented only a small minority of the population of Russia. Second, they adapted to their needs Marx’s theory of historical development, according to which human society must progress inevitably from primitive communism to industrial capitalism and thence to the dictatorship of the proletariat. That, the Narodniki argued, would not apply to Russia, where peasant life was based on the traditional institution of communal land tenure, the mir. A successful change of regime would, in their view, allow Russia to skip the intermediate stage of capitalism and pass straight from primitive communism to modern socialism. The mir and the artel (a primitive village productive cooperative), the Narodniki asserted, would then naturally evolve a system of production and distribution beneficial to the community.
The activities of the Narodniki developed in the late 1860s and early 1870s in a diffuse movement known as khozhdenie v narod (“going to the people”) in the course of which hundreds of young intellectuals, dressed in peasant clothes, canvased rural regions and incited the peasantry to rise against the system. This led to police persecution, arrests, and political trials of the Narodniki, the most famous mass trial of which was the “trial of the 193” (1878). Furthermore, the illiterate peasantry did not always respond to propaganda in the expected way and sometimes betrayed the dedicated intellectuals to the police.
The combination of peasant indifference and government persecution drove the Narodniki in the mid-1870s to a more radical program and to tighter methods of organization. The first truly Narodnik organization to emerge from this situation was the revolutionary group Zemlya i Volya (q.v.; “Land and Freedom”). Zemlya i Volya initially continued to work among the peasantry, but continued police persecution soon drove its members to terrorism. In 1879 Zemlya i Volya split into two groups: Narodnaya Volya (q.v.; “People’s Will”), a terrorist party that disintegrated after it assassinated Tsar Alexander II (1881), and Chorny Peredel (“Black Repartition”), a party that continued to emphasize work among the peasantry until its members shifted their attention to the urban proletariat in the 1880s. The populist ideology of the Narodnik movement was revived by its 20th-century ideological descendant, the Socialist Revolutionary Party (q.v.).