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By Root 1013 0

to practise carpentry or joinery, a lifestyle choice that struck the peasants as eccentric at best. The political part of the Populist crusade led to mutual animosities and resentments, or at best a dialogue of the deaf. Deeply religious peasants who were in awe of the tsar were profoundly offended by the Populists’ disdain for Orthodoxy, or worse, by their crude attempts to amalgamate Christianity with socialism by clothing the latter in the idioms of the former. In 1873, two folksily attired Populist artillery officers tried to engage a peasant on his sled: ‘We started to tell him that one should not pay taxes, that officials are robbers, and that the Bible preaches the need for a revolution. The peasant urged on his horse, we hastened our step. He put it into a trot, but we kept running, shouting about taxes and revolution … until we could not breathe.’ In peasant eyes, the remote tsar was a force for good. Only deceitful nobles and officials were preventing the realisation of his will.

While many peasants proved immune to Populist attempts to subvert their faith or reverence for authority, others were all too keen to affect the accoutrements of modern society that the primitivist Populists despised. These mutual incomprehensions bred frustration and resentment, especially as carefully crafted tracts and pamphlets were torn up and used as cigarette paper or to wipe an arse. Those who tried to shed their elitism came to loathe the obdurate mass to whom they preached, like some recalcitrant beast that would not move. Had the authorities left the Populists alone, disillusionment with the objects of their enthusiasms would have caused the movement to peter out. With characteristic ineptness, however, some of the more militant Populists were tried for sedition and given harsh sentences. Wider society thought their rights had been infringed when they were subsequently held imprisoned in limbo rather than despatched to the relative liberty of Siberia where remoteness was the only prison wall. This was a largely false perception. In fact, the authorities simply equivocated. They did not want to turn these agitators loose on the villagers of Siberia, and were also reluctant to inflict on young Russian idealists the sort of fate that had befallen Poles and ordinary criminals. Hence convicted Populists languished in tsarist jails, in circumstances that were far from onerous. The food was so good they could not get enough of it, while interrogations were more like avuncular admonitions to mend one’s juvenile errors than sessions with a chair leg or iron bar in the basement of Stalin’s Lubyanka.

Despite these realities of the age, the minds of some Populists turned to terrorist violence, as a way of circumventing the bovine immobility of the peasants and of striking back at an allegedly repressive regime whose jails were actually breeding grounds for terrorism. Vera Figner was disingenuous about this mutation. The balance of forces between the authorities and the landowners was so loaded against the peasants that she thought a campaign of rural terrorism was inevitable. But this relied upon a constant flow of Populist idealists going into the countryside. The failure of their crusade meant that the flow had all but dried up. So she became sympathetic to the idea of one cataclysmic strike - against the person of the tsar. As she admitted, ‘we saw clearly that our work among the people was of no avail’, although the Populist ideal remained morally good. This was an early example of how a refusal to acknowledge the failure of one revolutionary delusion was superseded by the adoption of another of a more radical kind.

In 1876 a northern revolutionary group which borrowed the name Land and Freedom managed to deliver prince Peter Kropotkin from a military hospital; in the south, a more radical branch based in Kiev purchased weapons with a view to assassinating the government’s more stridently reactionary supporters. Although both groups continued to pay lip-service to the idea that slow agitation would raise peasant consciousness to