The conservatives and the government were most of all afraid of the revolutionary movement, which they correctly perceived as a political, social, and cultural threat. Indeed the communes of radical students inspired by Chernyshevsky’s novel were very far from the privileged world of the court or the liberal journalists and their readers. The students operated by strict equality, including that of men and women. Their communes were broader than the revolutionary movement, including many members with only vague political views, but they formed an ideal recruiting ground. The expansion of the universities meant that many of the students were much more plebeian than their predecessors – the children of priests, minor officials, and noblemen whose incomes, to say the least, did not match their status. After 1859 women gradually entered universities, and their presence, entirely in accord with radical ideology, led to a major role for women in the revolutionary movement and gave it a distinctive style.
The young revolutionaries operated entirely underground. The reform of Russian society had not led to the appearance of legal public politics, for the state retained all power in its hands and political parties were not permitted. Not only liberals and radicals, but even conservatives were prevented from forming any sort of political associations, even in support of the state. Among the principal victims of the censorship was the Slavophile leader Ivan Aksakov, who supported the autocracy and was highly conservative and openly anti-Semitic. Aksakov nevertheless believed that he should have the right to criticize the autocracy in the press. The government saw things differently, and Aksakov’s publications eventually came to an end. The liberals enjoyed broad support among the intelligentsia, especially its core of professionals, and controlled a number of key newspapers and periodicals, but they had no organization. The closest to a liberal (or conservative) forum was the zemstvo, whose meetings sometimes took on a political air, but the police and administration made sure that these attempts came to nothing. The only political actors outside the government were the revolutionaries.
In the early years, the 1860s, the main radical groups were small, only a few dozen members at the most, and were short-lived. They were also conspiratorial and dominated by a few charismatic leaders, some of them young men of very questionable character and motives, the most famous being Sergei Nechaev. Nechaev convinced his followers that he represented a revolutionary “central committee” under whose orders he worked. In fact it existed only in his imagination. In late 1869 he told his small group that one of their number was an informer for the police and that they should murder him, which they did. The result was that the police, while investigating the murder, uncovered the organization. Nechaev fled abroad, leaving his followers to their fate – exile in Siberia. Even the anarchist Bakunin, who at first thought that Nechaev represented some sort of new wave in Russia, finally realized that he was mentally unbalanced and morally depraved.
The few small groups like Nechaev’s were doomed to failure, but events also kept the incipient radical movement from taking off in the first decade of its existence. The occasion was the attempt to assassinate the tsar on April 4, 1866. The would-be assassin was one Dmitrii Karakozov, a minor nobleman from the Volga region who had been involved in various radical groups, mostly composed of students, for several years. His comrades, who were more serious personalities than the like of Nechaev, actually opposed the idea and tried hard to dissuade him. They failed, and Karakozov shot at Tsar Alexander as he was leaving the Summer Garden but he missed. He was immediately captured and the tsar spoke to him, asking him if he was a Pole. Karakozov replied that he was pure Russian, and the police now knew that they were dealing with terrorism, a new phenomenon in the Russian revolutionary movement. Karakozov believed that killing the tsar would inspire a popular revolt, or at worst weaken the government and thus force further reform. The opposite happened, for it produced a government shakeup and the appointment of several less liberal ministers and the reactionary count Petr Shuvalov to head the Third Section. The pace of reform notably slowed.
By 1870 enough experience had accumulated among the radicals to suggest that the conspiratorial methods were unsavory and ineffective. The issue in any case was to spread radical ideas among the people, primarily among the peasantry. The result was the formation of new organizations whose members decided that the young radicals should “go to the people.” Thus in 1874 thousands of young men and women began to learn practical skills and move to rural areas to try to fit into peasant society. Concrete political goals were placed far in the future, and the radicals concentrated on spreading their ideas. The effort lasted for several years, and was a complete failure. The peasants were at best unreceptive, suspicious of outsiders, especially from higher social levels (no matter how plebeian the students were, they were still not peasants). Many of them turned the radicals (or “populists”) over to the police.
By the summer of 1876 it was clear that going to the people had failed and the remains of the group in St. Petersburg created a formal organization called Zemlia i Volia (“Land and Freedom”). The authorities noticed the actions of the new group and arrested many of them, holding mass public trials in 1877 that featured the veterans of “going to the people” as well as newer detainees. The trials were a disaster for the government as prisoner after prisoner presented impassioned and well-reasoned explanations for the misery of Russia’s people and their plans for the future. The government struggled against the movement with inadequate forces and antiquated methods, but it could not break its spirit. The conditions and practices of the Russian prisons were primitive and caused much suffering, something widely known in society as well as in revolutionary circles, and it gave the rebels a halo of martyrdom. Then in early 1878 one of the prisoners in St. Petersburg was ordered to be flogged by general Trepov, the governor-general. A few weeks later a young woman walked into his office during the period reserved for petitioners, and in revenge shot him several times with a revolver. The general survived his wounds, but the young woman, Vera Zasulich, became the object of yet another public trial. The jury failed to convict her, and she escaped abroad. From then on the government avoided the civilian court system and tried revolutionaries in military field courts.
Zasulich’s act inaugurated three-and-a-half years of a fantastic duel between the revolutionaries and the police. Most of the populists were now convinced that the social revolution could not occur without the destruction of the Russian autocracy. Unless Russia became a federal and democratic republic, the radicals would never have the freedom of action to preach social renewal. Therefore they shifted their effort from preaching radical social ideas to propaganda for political revolution, and most important, for a program of terror against the state. They did not target random populations: the objects of terror were only the officials of the state, and among those, mainly the ones responsible for political control and repression, that is policemen, governors of provinces, the Minister of the Interior, and the tsar himself. The terror campaign produced a split in the movement, with the majority in favor of terror forming a new organization, Narodnaia Volia (“People’s Will”) and the minority, which wanted to stick to the old policy of agitation and propaganda, keeping the old name, Land and Freedom. Most of the latter soon emigrated.
The People’s Will then began a coordinated campaign of terror that came increasingly to focus on the tsar himself. Alexander responded slowly to the campaign, believing that his fate was in God’s hands and in any case the traditions of the court made strict security very difficult. As before, the tsar frequently rode about St. Petersburg with only a squad of Cossacks and resisted any greater measures for his protection. His attention was focused on government and his private life, for the death of the empress in 1880 allowed him to finally marry his longtime mistress, Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaia, which legitimized their children. The attempts on his life continued and after several failures terror came even to the Winter Palace. Stepan Khalturin, one of the few revolutionaries actually of peasant origin, managed to disguise himself as a carpenter and get access to the palace, where he exploded a bomb early in 1880, killing many soldiers of the guards but missing the tsar. A small band of revolutionaries had caused a crisis in the state, too old-fashioned even after the reforms to operate effectively against the terrorists and too autocratic to command or even solicit universal support. This time, however, the government responded immediately. Alexander replaced the Third Section with a Department of Police under the Ministry of the Interior and established a Supreme Executive Commission under general Count Michael Loris-Melikov. Loris-Melikov, an Armenian who knew numerous European and Caucasian languages, had an excellent military record from the Caucasian wars, the Russo-Turkish War, and a recently successful administrative career. His plan was to fight the revolutionaries both by repression and a return to the reform process that had been stalled for nearly a decade. Thus liberal journalists dubbed his program “the dictatorship of the heart.” Soon Loris-Melikov moved up to head the Ministry of the Interior, and began to circulate plans for greater reform. By February 1881, he had constructed a plan for a consultative legislature based on the zemstvos to be called together to provide support for the state and to show society that the government was truly committed to reform. Perhaps Russia would change, but fate determined otherwise.