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By Root 859 0

his incriminatory pamphlets. Not for the first or last time, elite alienation from what they regarded as a reactionary government meant that well-to-do liberal folk made the most grotesque apologists for murderers, blissfully unaware that when half a century later the Nechaevs came to power, their property would be looted while they disappeared into exile or Arctic concentration camps. Middle-aged and elderly dupes saw in Nechaev the wayward idealism of youth, rather than a psychopathic conman. The public gallery was filled with students, impressionable young ladies and artillery officers who lapped up the theatre unfolding before them, vicariously thrilled by the frisson of animal violence that Nechaev brought with him. The prosecutor was predictably inept, while the defence lawyers acted like activist demagogues, a recurrent pattern in the history of terrorism. The liberal-minded chief judge indulged the accused, allowing them to read newspapers and wave to their admiring audience. A squalid little gang of murderers were emboldened by whispers of ‘brave boys and girls, they do not lose heart’. In these circumstances, four of the accused received mild sentences of between seven and fifteen years’ hard labour. Twenty-nine others were given prison terms. The rest were acquitted. The chief demon was given twenty years. The authorities even botched this. Instead of sending Nechaev to a remote mine in Siberia, the tsar personally intervened to consign him to solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul fortress, thereby seeming to betray the terms of Nechaev’s extradition as a common felon. The murderer became a myth. Inevitably, a man of Nechaev’s indomitable will was able to suborn long-serving guards who identified more with their charges than with the world beyond. This enabled Nechaev to establish contacts with each new generation of revolutionaries, who, as his crimes faded into rosy memory, more keenly admired his ferocious energy and will. This endured long after Nechaev had expired in jail from dropsy, on the thirteenth anniversary of his murder of Ivanov.

Although the spirit of Nechaev lingered, the main thrust of Russian radicalism in the 1870s took the form of a redemptive Populist crusade, in which members of the liberal and radical intelligentsia descended among the people to serve and guide. There was something distastefully anthropological about this venture, as if the Populists were going among remote tribes, which in a profound sense they were. A rift quickly opened between the people as abstraction and the multifarious people themselves.

The service part of the agenda was entirely acceptable to the peasantry. From 1873 until the end of the decade, countless numbers of young idealists went on a ‘Pilgrimage to the People’. Vera Figner and her sister went to dwell in remote villages, where Vera worked as a peripatetic physician. This was challenging since ‘I had no idea how to approach a common person.’ Given that her knowledge of the common people was entirely derived from books, Figner coped pretty well at overcoming her distaste for the squalor and rampant syphilis, and such novelties as dossing down on a bed of louse-riddled straw. The muzhiks or peasants seem to have regarded the miracle-working ‘she-healer’ with affection and gratitude, even if they confused medicine with magic charms. They eagerly took up her offer of teaching their children how to read in her spare time. Only one thing spoiled this idyll, the malign counter-moves of landlords and priests which prevented the further revolutionary message from getting through.

Much of this crusade was harmless in a utopian well-meaning way: teaching illiterates to read, providing medical services or acting as midwives. Young radicalised Jews threw themselves into working among the Orthodox people, some of them going as far as converting to Christianity, in the hope that here at least they would find acceptance by sloughing off historic deformations that widespread anti-Semitism had forced upon them. Some educated professionals abandoned their own skills