in closing the divide between rural and urban Russia, this newly created class would be supportive of the regime and allow a tighter control over the rural zemstvos . 126 Stolypin’s reforms failed, largely due to a lack of support from the peasants themselves, as such in the eventual revolution of 1917, “without a stake in the old ruling system, the peasants in 1917 had no hesitation in sweeping away the entire state … Tsarism in this sense had undermined itself; but it also created the basic conditions for the triumph of the Bolsheviks”. 127 Rieber argues that this was perhaps because the sedimentary layers within peasant society were thinner, in the result of the revolution the peasants receded back into archaic and more pragmatic socio-economic responses: they seized and redistributed land. 128 The peasantry remained a volatile class that factions sought to control from their Emancipation in 1861 to the outbreak of civil war in 1917, as political roads closed off to these factions violence prevailed, and the attempted militarisation of the peasantry and of politics perhaps caused the 1917 Revolution to erupt into war. There were two sources, and two groups, that instilled this violent culture on Russian politics on the years leading up to 1917: the Populists and the Bolsheviks. The various Russian intelligentsia members including students, artists, writers, and journalists led the first of these groups. The Populist movement idealised the peasant mir and commune, seeing it as the purest form of socialism; Populists saw the rise of industrialised capitalism as the destruction of traditional rural communities. 129 Wishing to ‘save’ and educate the peasantry on the Populists’ own attempts at political revolution against autocracy, a mass-movement to 126 Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy , (2014), p. 54. 127 idem. p. 54-55. 128 Alfred J. Rieber, The Sedimentary Society , (1991), pp. 365-366. 129 Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution , (2008), p. 24.
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