ALEXANDER III OPPOSITION Flashcards
Alexander II’s assassination marked a turning point. Security was stepped up and the new Tsar retired to the fortified castle of Gatchina lest some ‘madmen’ try to kill him too. This effectively ended the
Populist movement, as it had been known, although some of its supporters managed to meet in secret and commit acts of terrorism.
Self-education’ circles, which translated and reproduced the writings of foreign socialists, continued underground, and contact with radicals in exile and in the West was maintained. From Switzerland, Plekhanov established the
‘Emancipation of Labour’ group in 1883, which not only translated and arranged for Marxist tracts to be smuggled into Russia but also sought tdemonstrate that Marxism was fully applicable to Russia. Emancipation of Labour had a limited impact at the time, and the group received a setback when its German contact, Deich, responsible for the smuggling of materials into Russia, was arrested by the German police (advised by tsarist agents) in 1884. However, Plekhanov’s development of the two-stage revolutionary strategy’ was vital in advancing Marxism in Russia.
Plekhanov argued that Russian revolutionaries had to accept the inevitability of Marx’s stages of development. He stressed that Russia had to pass through the capitalist phase of development and that this was clearly underway. Revolutionaries, he believed,
should concentrate their activities among the Russian workers in the cities, rather than wasting their energy on the peasantry, for it was from the Russian proletariat that the dynamism to drive a socialist revolution would emerge.
Since the proletariat of Russia was still small and backward, phlekanov
wanted revolutionary leaders to organise the workers so as to be ready for Marxism, but, he warned, their first task was to cooperate with the bourgeoisie to fight autocracy, in order to accelerate the capitalist stage.
In 1886, students in St Petersburg tried to reform The People’s Will and in March 1887 a group, who
made bombs with the intention of assassinating Alexander III, were arrested. Two months later, five of these, including Aleksandr Ulyanov, Lenin’s elder brother, were hanged.
The experience of the 1891-92 famine, when the inaction of the over-bureaucratic tsarist government left the zemtsva largely responsible for relief work, both
increased convictions that the tsarist system had to change and provided the confidence needed to demand this. By the mid-1890s there were renewed zemtsva-led calls for a national body to advise the government.
SUMMARY
By the 1890s, opposition movements appeared to stand little chance of success in the face of tsarist repression. However, as industrialisation speeded up,
a number of workers’ organisations, illegal trade unions, Marxist discussion circles and other groups developed, spreading radical Marxist ideas more widely. It was from these small beginnings that changes in thinking that were to have massive long-term importance began to take root.
