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Land and Liberty (Russia)

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For other uses, see Land and liberty (disambiguation).
Land and Liberty
Земля и воля
Founded1860 (1860) (first)
1876 (1876) (second)
Dissolved1864 (1864) (first)
1879 (1879) (second)
Succeeded byPeople's Will
Black Repartition
NewspaperLand and Liberty
IdeologyPopulism
Agrarian socialism
Collectivist anarchism
Political positionFar-left
MovementNarodniks

Land and Liberty (Template:Lang-ru; also sometimes translated Land and Freedom) was a Russian clandestine revolutionary organization in the period 1861–1864, and was re-established as a political party in the period 1876–1879. It was a central organ of the Narodnik movement.[1][2]

Land and Liberty received its name in the late 1878 with the creation of the printing shop with the same name. Its former names were Severnaya revolyutsionno-narodnicheskaya gruppa (Северная революционно-народническая группа, or The Northern Revolutionary Group of Narodniki) and Obschestvo narodnikov (Общество народников, or The Society of Narodniki).

Predecessors

At the turn of the 1850s and 1860s, a number of student circles operated in the largest cities of Russia. They were under the ideological influence of Alexander Herzen and Nikolay Ogarev's Kolokol newspaper and were engaged in the propaganda of libertarian ideas. Some societies were disclosed by the authorities, therefore, information about them has been preserved: the Kharkov-Kiev secret society, the Perm-Kazan secret society, the Library of Kazan students, which stood out from the last circle of Argiropulo-Zaichnevsky.

The first composition (1861-1864)

The inspirers of the society were Alexander Herzen and Nikolay Chernyshevsky. The participants set as their goal the preparation of a peasant revolution. The policy documents were created under the influence of the ideas of Herzen and Ogarev. One of the most important demands put forward by the members of the organization was the convocation of a non-class popular assembly.

The first Executive Committee of the organization included 6 of its organizers (Nikolai Obruchev, Sergey Rymarenko, the brothers Nikolai and Alexander Serno-Solovyevich, Alexander Sleptsov, Vasily Kurochkin). Land and Liberty was a union of circles located in 13-14 cities. The largest circles were Moscow (Yuri Mosolov, Nikolai Shatilov) and St. Petersburg (Nikolai Utin). The militant organization Land and Liberty was represented by the "Committee of Russian Officers in Poland" under the leadership of Second Lieutenant Andrei Potebnya. According to the data available to Alexander Sleptsov, Land and Liberty counted 3,000 people as members (the Moscow branch alone consisted of 400 members).

In the summer of 1862, the tsarist authorities dealt a serious blow to the organization, arresting its leaders - Chernyshevsky and Serno-Solovyovich, as well as the radical journalist Dmitry Pisarev, who was associated with the revolutionaries. In 1863, due to the expiration of the Charter of the landlord and peasants, the members of the organization expected a powerful peasant uprising, which they wanted to organize in cooperation with the Polish revolutionaries. However, the Polish underground members were forced to organize an uprising ahead of the promised date, and hopes for a peasant revolt in Russia did not materialize. In addition, the liberals for the most part refused to support the revolutionary camp, believing in the progressiveness of the reforms that had begun in the country. Under the influence of all these factors, Land and Liberty was forced to dissolve itself in early 1864.

The second composition (1876-1879)

The second composition of Land and Liberty, which was restored in 1876 as a populist organization,[3] included such figures as Alexander Mikhailov, Georgi Plekhanov, Mark Natanson, Dmitry Lizogub, later Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, Nikolai Morozov, Sophia Perovskaya, Lev Tikhomirov and Nikolai Tyutchev.[4] In total, the organization consisted of about 200 people. In its activities, Land and Liberty relied on a wide range of sympathizers. The name Land and Liberty was given to the Populist Society at the end of 1878, with the appearance of the organ of the same name.

The organization consisted of the main circle (subdivided into seven special groups according to the type of activity) and local groups located in many large cities of the empire. Land and Liberty had its own organ with the same name. An agent of Land and Liberty, Nikolai Kletochnikov, was introduced into the Third Section.[5] Members of Land and Liberty organized village settlements as a transition to "sedentary" propaganda. Nevertheless, this action, as well as “going to the people”, ended in failure. After that, the Narodniks concentrated all their forces on political terror.

The revolutionaries chose to "settle" in the provinces of Saratov, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Astrakhan, Tambov, Pskov, Voronezh, the Don region and others. They also attempted to spread their revolutionary activities in the Northern Caucasus and the Urals. Land and Liberty organized clandestine publishing and distribution of the revolutionary literature, conducted propaganda among workers and took part in several strikes in Saint Petersburg in 1878-1879. It also influenced the development of the student movement by organizing or supporting demonstrations in Petersburg and other cities, including the so-called Kazan demonstration of 1876, where they would openly admit the organization’s existence for the first time.[6]

The Kazan demonstration was the first political demonstration in Russia with the participation of advanced workers. The demonstration was organized and conducted by the Zemstvoi Narodniks and associated members of workers' circles on Kazanskaya Square in St. Petersburg. About 400 people gathered in the square, where Georgi Plekhanov delivered a passionate revolutionary speech to the audience.[7] The young worker Yakov Potapov unfurled a red banner with the words "Land and Liberty". The demonstrators resisted the police. 31 demonstrators were arrested, of whom 5 were sentenced to 10-15 years of hard labor, 10 were sentenced to exile in Siberia and three workers, including Potapov, to imprisonment for 5 years in a monastery. The Kazan demonstration marked the beginning of the conscious participation of the Russian working class in the social movement.

Land and Liberty’s disappointment with the revolutionary activity in the countryside, intensification of the governmental repressions and political discontent during the Russo-Turkish War and ripening of the revolutionary situation favored the conception and development of new sentiments in the organization itself.[8] By spring of 1879, a faction of political terrorists was formed in Land and Liberty. In this atmosphere of sharpening disagreements among the revolutionary populists, a Congress was convened by Land and Liberty to discuss the further direction of the organization's activities.

Memorial plaque installed at the site of the last congress of Land and Liberty in Voronezh.

The Lipetsk Congress was held in June 1879 in Lipetsk. Members of Land and Liberty that gathered at the congress included Alexander Mikhailov, Aleksandr Kvyatkovsky, Lev Tikhomirov, Nikolai Morozov and Andrei Zhelyabov, among others. The congress decided to include in the organization's program the recognition of the need for a political struggle against the Tsarist autocracy as a primary and independent task. The participants in the Lipetsk Congress declared themselves the Executive Committee of the Social Revolutionary Party and adopted a charter based on centralism, discipline and conspiracy. The Executive Committee, if the general congress of "land volunteers" in Voronezh agreed with the new program, was to take upon itself the implementation of the terror.[9]

Disagreements between the supporters of the former strategy of inciting the countryside called derevenschiki, or "villagers" (Georgi Plekhanov, Mikhail Popov, Osip Aptekman etc.) and defenders of transition towards political struggle by means of systematic terrorist methods called politicians (Aleksandr Mikhailov, Aleksandr Kvyatkovsky, Nikolai Morozov, Lev Tikhomirov etc.) led to the convocation of the Voronezh Congress of Land and Liberty in June 1879, where the two rival groups would reach a short-term compromise.[10] About 20 people took part, including Georgi Plekhanov, Alexander Mikhailov, Andrei Zhelyabov, Vera Figner, Sophia Perovskaya, Nikolai Morozov, Mikhail Frolenko and Osip Aptekman. Supporters of political struggle and terror (Zhelyabov, Mikhailov, Morozov, and others) attended the congress as a close-knit group, which was organized at the Lipetsk Congress. The resolutions of the Congress were of a compromise: along with activities among the people, the need for political terror was also recognized. Plekhanov, who argued the danger of being carried away by terror for the prospects of working among the people, formally split from Land and Liberty and left the congress.[11]

By 15 August 1879, Land and Liberty had dissolved,[12] breaking up into two independent organizations: the terrorist wing forming People's Will and the political wing forming the Black Repartition.[1][4]

Program

The formation of Land and Liberty, in Saint Petersburg in 1876, was preceded by the analysis of the "Going to the People" campaign (Хождение в народ, or Khozhdeniye v narod) of 1873-1875. As a result, the members of Land and Liberty defined the basics of the political platform, which would be called narodnicheskaya (народническая, or "close to the people", populist). They admitted a possibility of a special, non-capitalist way of development of Russia with the peasantry as its basis. The members of Land and Liberty considered it necessary to adapt the purposes and slogans of the movement to independent revolutionary aspirations that had already existed among the peasants, as they believed. The program proclaimed the ideal of "anarchy and collectivism" and its requirements, generalized in the slogan "Land and Liberty!", were designed to allow for the even distribution of all the lands "into the hands of the rural working strata", "full communal self-management" and division of the Russian Empire into parts "in accordance with the desires of the locals".[13] Land and Liberty stood for the creation of permanent "revolutionary settlements" in the countryside for the purpose of preparing a people’s revolution.[citation needed]

The Program of Land and Liberty also envisioned a course of actions, aimed at "disorganization of the state", in its members opinion. In particular, it allowed for physical elimination of "the most harmful or prominent members of the government". The most famous terrorist act of Land and Liberty was the assassination of the Chief of the Gendarmes Nikolai Mezentsov in 1878.[14] However, Land and Liberty didn’t yet consider terror a means of political struggle against the existing regime, perceiving it as revolutionary self-defense and their revenge against the government.[citation needed]

The members of Land and Liberty saw the peasantry as the principal revolutionary force, as opposed to the working class, which would have to play a part of the "second fiddle". Proceeding from the inevitability of a "forced coup d'état", the revolutionaries considered agitation and organization of revolts, demonstrations and strikes to be very important. Land and Liberty represented a "rebellious" current of the revolutionary movement of the 1870s. Vladimir Lenin said that Land and Liberty’s "striving to enlist all the discontented in the organisation and to direct this organisation to resolute struggle against the autocracy … that was its great historical merit."[15] Discipline, mutual comradely control, centralism and conspiracy became this organization’s principles.[citation needed]

Members

Land and Liberty’s most prominent members from the times of its inception were Mark Natanson, Alexander Mikhailov, Aleksei Oboleshev, Georgi Plekhanov, Aleksandr Kvyatkovsky, Dmitry Lizogub, Valerian Osinsky, Osip Aptekman, Nikolai Rusanov and others. Later, Sergey Kravchinsky, Dmitry Klements, Nikolai Morozov, Sophia Perovskaya, Lev Tikhomirov, Mikhail Frolenko (all of them - Chaikovtsi) would later join Land and Liberty. The club of Vera Figner shared the views of and cooperated with Land and Liberty. The organization had close ties with the revolutionaries in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odessa.[citation needed]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b "Zemlya i Volya". Encyclopædia Britannica.
  2. ^ Edie, James M.; Scanlan, James; Zeldin, Mary-Barbara (1994). Russian Philosophy Volume II: the Nihilists, The Populists, Critics of Religion and Culture. University of Tennessee Press. p. 116.
  3. ^ Yarmolinsky 2014, pp. 210–211.
  4. ^ a b Trapeznik 2007, p. 10.
  5. ^ Yarmolinsky 2014, pp. 215.
  6. ^ Yarmolinsky 2014, pp. 215–216.
  7. ^ Yarmolinsky 2014, p. 216.
  8. ^ Yarmolinsky 2014, pp. 223–224.
  9. ^ Yarmolinsky 2014, pp. 227–228.
  10. ^ Yarmolinsky 2014, pp. 225–226.
  11. ^ Yarmolinsky 2014, p. 228.
  12. ^ Yarmolinsky 2014, p. 229.
  13. ^ Yarmolinsky 2014, p. 211.
  14. ^ Yarmolinsky 2014, p. 221.
  15. ^ "Lenin's What Is To Be Done?: The Primitiveness of the Economists and the Organization of the Revolutionaries". www.marxists.org. p. Chapter 4E. Retrieved 2021-08-12.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)

Bibliography

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