rural Russia was sparked in 1873-74. The Populist movement failed to integrate themselves with the peasantry; the peasants were suspicious and often handed their would-be teachers over to Tsarist police. Out of their failure, the Populists began to see their role as sacrificial, to serve the people in order to topple autocracy, they sought to avenge their arrested associates by turning to radical terrorism, with the group The People’s Will succeeding in assassinating Tsar Alexander II in 1881. 130 As previously mentioned, the peasant political consciousness revolved around archaic and subsistence goals, and part of the failure of the Populists was perhaps due to the difficulty of the peasants too see themselves as a vessel of change in regards to toppling the autocracy of imperial Russia. As one British diplomat observed in 1917: Were one to ask the average peasant in the Ukraine his nationality, he would answer that he is Greek Orthodox; if pressed to say whether he is a Great Russian, a Pole, or an Ukrainian, he would probably reply he is a peasant; and if one insisted on knowing what language he spoke, he would say that he talked ‘the local tongue’. 131 Despite the Populist mass-movement, four decades later the peasantry clearly still failed to place themselves socially or politically within the scene of a wider Russia. Furthermore, out of the failure of the Populist movement in the late nineteenth century, the seeds for radical and militant Bolshevism were sown. In Richard Pipes’ Russian Marxism and Its Populist Background: The Late Nineteenth Century, the transition from dogmatic Marxism to violent Populism is 130 idem. p. 25. 131 R. Suny, “Nationality and Class in the Revolutions of 1917: A Re-examination of Categories” in Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath ed. by N. Lampert and G. Rittersporn, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992), p. 232.
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