During 1868–69 Nechayev participated in the student revolutionary movement in St. Petersburg and composed his “Catechism of a Revolutionary,” which embodied his militant philosophy and a morality under which any means was justified that served the revolutionary end. In March 1869 he went to Geneva, where he met the exiled Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich). A close collaboration between the two developed.
In September 1869 Nechayev returned to Moscow, where he founded a small secret revolutionary group, the People's Retribution (Russian: Narodnaya Rasprava), also called the Society of the Axe, based on the principles of the Catechism and requiring its members to submit unquestioningly to the will of the leader. When I.I. Ivanov, a student member of the group, protested Nechayev's methods, Nechayev organized his execution. The murder, committed in November 1869, was Nechayev's work, although other members of the group were present. When the crime was discovered, Nechayev escaped to Switzerland, but 67 members of his organization were brought to trial. Nechayev resumed contact with Bakunin and participated in revolutionary intrigues until his unprincipled behaviour discredited him in the eyes of Bakunin and other Russian émigrés. At the request of the Russian government, Nechayev was arrested by the Swiss police in 1872 and extradited to Russia. He was tried and sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment in the Peter-Paul Fortress, where he died of undetermined causes. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Dostoyevsky, Fyodor) used Nechayev as a model for the character Pyotr Verkhovensky in The Possessed.
pogrom
▪ mob attack
(Russian: “devastation,” or “riot”), a mob attack, either approved or condoned by authorities, against the persons and property of a religious, racial, or national minority. The term is usually applied to attacks on Jews (Jew) in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The first extensive pogroms followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Although the assassin was not a Jew, and only one Jew was associated with him, false rumours aroused Russian mobs in more than 200 cities and towns to attack Jews and destroy their property. In the two decades following, pogroms gradually became less prevalent; but from 1903 to 1906 they were common throughout the country. Thereafter, to the end of the Russian monarchy, mob action against the Jews was intermittent and less widespread.
The pogrom in Kishinev (now Chisinau) in Russian-ruled Moldavia in April 1903, although more severe than most, was typical in many respects. For two days mobs, inspired by local leaders acting with official support, killed, looted, and destroyed without hindrance from police or soldiers. When troops were finally called out and the mob dispersed, 45 Jews had been killed, nearly 600 had been wounded, and 1,500 Jewish homes had been pillaged. Those responsible for inciting the outrages were not punished.
The Russian central government did not organize pogroms, as was widely believed; but the anti-Semitic policy that it carried out from 1881 to 1917 made them possible. Official persecution and harassment of Jews led the numerous anti-Semites to believe that their violence was legitimate, and their belief was strengthened by the active participation of a few high and many minor officials in fomenting attacks and by the reluctance of the government either to stop pogroms or to punish those responsible for them.
Pogroms have also occurred in other countries, notably in Poland and in Germany during the Hitler regime. See also anti-Semitism; Kristallnacht.
Kadet
▪ Russian political party
member of the Constitutional Democratic Party , also called Party of People's Freedom , Russian Konstitutsionno-Demokraticheskaya Partiya , or Partiya Narodnoy Svobody
a Russian political party advocating a radical change in Russian government toward a constitutional monarchy like Great Britain's. It was founded in October 1905 by the Union of Liberation and other liberals associated with the zemstvos, local councils that often were centres of liberal opinion and agitation.
The Kadets dominated the first Duma in 1906, but the tradition of despotic rule, the dislocations caused by World War I (1914–18), and the growth of revolutionary fervour and agitation during the war caused other groups to claim the nation's attention. Succeeding Dumas saw a weakening of Kadet strength. Four of the members of the Provisional Government's first cabinet were Kadets, but the Bolsheviks (Bolshevik), seizing power, declared the Kadet organization illegal late in 1917, and the party's activities ceased within Russia.
Stolypin land reform
▪ Russian agricultural history
(1906–17), measures undertaken by the Russian government to allow peasants to own land individually. Its aim was to encourage industrious peasants to acquire their own land, and ultimately to create a class of prosperous, conservative, small farmers that would be a stabilizing influence in the countryside and would support the autocracy. After the government emancipated the serfs in 1861 it allotted land to each peasant household, but the land was collectively owned by the village communes. The communes traditionally divided the land into strips, which were distributed among the households for cultivation.
The lack of economic success in agriculture following emancipation, as well as the violent peasant uprisings that occurred during the Revolution of 1905 (Russian Revolution of 1905), suggested the need to abandon communal land tenure and to replace it with individual land ownership. On Nov. 22 (Nov. 9, old style), 1906, while the Duma (the formal legislative body) was not in session, the prime minister Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin issued a decree that enabled each peasant household to claim individual ownership of its land allotment and to withdraw from the commune. The household could also demand that the commune provide it with a consolidated plot equivalent to the scattered strips it had been cultivating. Furthermore, the decree abolished joint household ownership and made the head of each household the sole property owner. In 1910 the decree was finally confirmed by the Duma, which passed laws expanding it in 1910 and 1911.
The reform was only a moderate success. By the end of 1916 no more than 20 percent of the peasant households had title to their land, although fewer (some 10 percent) had received consolidated plots. The reform did not transform the peasantry into the bulwark of support that the autocracy needed; and during 1917 peasants everywhere participated in the revolutions, seizing properties belonging to the Stolypin farmers.
Octobrist
▪ political party, Russia
Russian Oktyabrist , also called Union of October 17
member of a conservative-liberal Russian political party whose program of moderate constitutionalism called for the fulfillment of the emperor Nicholas II's October Manifesto. Founded in November 1905, the party was led by the industrialist Aleksandr Ivanovich Guchkov and drew support from liberal gentry, businessmen, and some bureaucrats. As the majority party in the third and fourth Dumas (1907–17), the Octobrists favoured a legislature with real power but insisted that the executive be responsible to the emperor only. The Octobrists, increasingly alienated from the government, finally joined the Kadets (Constitutional Democrats) in the Progressive Bloc of 1915, which called for more representative leadership and new reforms
mir
▪ Russian community
in Russian history, a self-governing community of peasant households that elected its own officials and controlled local forests, fisheries, hunting grounds, and vacant lands. To make taxes imposed on its members more equitable, the mir assumed communal control of the community's arable land and periodically redistributed it among the households, according to their sizes (from 1720).
After serfdom was abolished (1861), the mir was retained as a system of communal land tenure and an organ of local administration. It was economically inefficient; but the central government, having made members of the commune collectively responsible for the payment of state taxes and the fulfillment of local obligations, favoured it. The system was also favoured by Slavophiles and political conservatives, who regarded it as a guardian of old national values, as well as by revolutionary Narodniki (“Populists”), who viewed the mir as the germ of a future socialist society. Despite the efforts of Prime Minister Pyotr A. Stolypin (Stolypin, Pyotr Arkadyevich), who initiated a series of agricultural reforms encouraging peasants to assume private ownership, the peasantry universally reverted to communal landholding after the 1917 Revolution.