THE ORIGINS OF RADICALISM

Members of the intelligentsia had been criticizing patriarchy and autocracy since the reign of Nicholas I. Indeed, many well‑educated people believed that intellectuals were morally obligated to criticize social injustice. Alexander II raised their hopes when he committed himself to freeing the serfs, but by the mid‑1860s, disillusionment with the Tsar Reformer had set in. Emancipation had not given the peasants as much land as many had hoped it would, and Alexander had brutally repressed an uprising in Polish territories in 1863–64. A few educated people decided that Russia would only be a just society when autocracy itself was overthrown. For them, reformism turned into radicalism.

The first radicals of the 1860s were the nihilists, so named by Turgenev because some of them professed to believe in “nothing” (nihil is the Latin word for “nothing”). The nihilists actually had quite a few beliefs, most of which involved rejection of the status quo. This collection of several thousand privileged young people, most of them living in St. Petersburg, declared that the first step toward progressive social change was self‑transformation. The individual must reject the parasitical, indolent lifestyle of the nobility and become honest and socially responsible. This meant dedicating oneself to work benefiting poor people, such as medicine or teaching. It also meant that men and women should live together as equals, which required men to treat women as comrades rather than sexual objects. A few nihilists acted on these principles by organizing communes in the cities; the one founded by writer Vasili Sleptsov in 1863 included women. The nihilist movement in general and the communes in particular were the inspiration for Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done?

Sleptsov’s commune was tiny, only seven people, and notorious, for Russians considered it scandalous for unrelated, unmarried women and men to live together. The nihilists were quite happy shocking people; they wanted to be publicly outrageous. Like the hippies and stoners of twentieth‑century America, the nihilists, particularly the female ones, paraded their rejection of the establishment through the streets. The women cut their hair short, wore blue‑tinted spectacles, and smoked cigarettes. They proclaimed their devotion to reason and science and scorned tradition, sentimentality, and religion. Romantics in their public display, rationalists in their pronouncements, the nihilists achieved their main objective, which was to challenge the complacency of the comfortable.

Their rebellion was short‑lived. By 1865 nihilism had become a fad among elite young people, many of whom adopted the dress code but not the commitment to reform. Serious nihilists were embarrassed and annoyed by their own disciples. They were also frustrated by the fact that their self‑transformations had had no effect on Russia’s great injustices. Nihilism was already losing popularity in 1866, therefore, when a radical student attempted to assassinate the tsar. Thereafter the police cracked down, driving most nihilists into quiescence and a few into revolutionary socialism.

These revolutionaries–often referred to as “the Populists” in English‑language histories–were young people from the middle and upper ranks of Russian society who dreamed of a popular revolution in Russia that would abolish the old order and establish in its stead an egalitarian society. Vera Zasulich, one of the medical students in Zurich in the early 1870s, remembered her friend Sophia Bardina telling her, “We should direct all our resources not toward ameliorating the plight of isolated individuals, not toward doctoring individual cases, but rather toward the struggle to subvert the social institutions that are the source of all evil. We must struggle against man’s exploitation of man, against private property, against inheritance rights. All of these must be abolished.”¹⁴

In this quotation we see both a key difference between Russian feminism and radicalism and the ease with which an impassioned young woman might move from one to the other. Feminists and revolutionaries had a lot in common: most were well‑educated people from the nobility and many favored sweeping political and economic change. Russia’s first feminists sought to improve women’s situation through mobilizing the support of government officials and propertied people. Populists such as Bardina and Zasulich sought to remedy the problems of all of Russia’s people by rousing those people to overthrow the monarchy and replace it with democratic institutions modeled on the village commune. These were the ideas of utopian socialism, first formulated in France, now shaped by the Populists into a prescription for peasant revolution.

Having formulated their socialist credo, the Populists attempted to teach it to the poor. Members of the Chaikovskii Circle in St. Petersburg proselytized workers. In 1874, several thousand Populists spent the summer in the countryside spreading their ideas among the peasants. These campaigns roused little popular support, for villagers and workers scoffed at vague appeals from privileged young people. The police were better listeners. They began rounding up Populists in large numbers, and in the late 1870s put several dozen of them on trial.

Suppression discouraged many Populists and drove on a hardened few. In the late 1870s a group called People’s Will began planning the assassination of Alexander II. Among the leaders of this group was Sophia Perovskaia, the daughter of a general. She and her comrades argued that a direct strike at the heart of imperial power would show the Russian people that the tsar was an ordinary mortal, not, as they had been taught, a demigod. When the people saw that he was as killable as anybody else, they would rise up against the repressive regime. On March 1, 1881, Perovskaia and her comrades succeeded in killing the emperor, but no great revolt followed. Instead, most people reacted with horror and the police quickly caught the assassins. Perovskaia became the first female revolutionary executed in Russia.

To any student of the “Victorian Age” in Europe–a time when most privileged women lived highly sheltered and conventional lives–it must come as a surprise to learn that women were highly visible members of the Populist movement throughout the 1870s: fully 20 percent of those arrested for “going to the people” in 1874 were women, and women made up as much as one‑third of the leadership of Land and Liberty, the organization from which People’s Will sprang.¹⁵ This was a prime indicator of the Russian intelligentsia’s receptivity to women’s emancipation; radical groups in the rest of Europe had far fewer female members.

Still more surprisingly, many Russian liberals, that is, those who favored incremental reform achieved by non‑violent means, saw the female Populists as heroic martyrs. They did so because the line between reformers and revolutionaries was a fine one, easily crossed, Russia’s injustices being so great and its government so recalcitrant. That government inadvertently promoted sympathy for Populist women by putting some of them on trial in 1877 and 1878. Surrounded by police and prosecutors, the women seemed frail, yet defiant. Perhaps the most eloquent was Sophia Bardina, who declared that she had become a revolutionary to help the poor and who warned, prophetically, that one day “even our sleepy and lazy society” would avenge itself on its oppressors.¹⁶ Her testimony was published abroad and circulated in manuscript throughout Russia. Poets later celebrated the female revolutionaries and art dealers sold portraits of the executed Perovskaia.

This admiration was rooted in traditional notions about noblewomen sacrificing themselves for the unfortunate. Barbara Alpern Engel has shown that many female Populists felt a religious obligation to fight for social justice, even if it cost them their lives. “There are times,” wrote Vera Zasulich, “there are entire ages, when there is nothing more beautiful and desirable than a crown of thorns.” Zasulich also professed a more modern, more feminist motivation. “And then the distant specter of revolution appeared, making me equal to a boy,” she wrote. “I, too, could dream of ‘action,’ of ‘exploits,’ and of the ‘great struggle.’”¹⁷ Chernyshevskii’s Vera had made the same connection between improving Russia and emancipating herself. Future generations of women would do so as well.

The formulation of the woman question in the reign of Alexander II and the projects launched to change patriarchal institutions set the pattern for the rest of the imperial period. Feminists would struggle for reforms while socialists would seek to inspire the poor to revolt. Individual women would move back and forth between the two perspectives or keep a foot in each camp. Traditionalists would excoriate everyone seeking to alter woman’s God‑given roles as wife and mother. Meanwhile the government would pursue policies that destabilized traditional gender ideas and practices.