Graham Gamblin - Infoshop.org

3. Political Terror, Economic Terror and Propaganda
Nevertheless, other tendencies continued to operate. Some colonists, or
derevenshchiki, led by Georgii Plekhanov, insisted on continuing the slow campaign
of infiltrating the peasantry. Others, like Lev Deich, Stefanovich and Vera Zasulich
joined them- but they remained buntari, insisting on economic terrorism by the people
against their immediate enemies, the landlords and the bosses. Their quarrel with the
new trend was not whether to use arms and action but who should use them and
against whom. Both they and the derevenshchiki pitted their federalism and hopes for
a mass movement and social revolution against the Executive Committee's centralism
and political action. Thus a three-way debate on tactics and organisation was taking
place within Russian populism; some favoured federalist organisation and
propagandist tactics; others federalism and tactics of popular violence; and still others
centralist organisation and political violence. A split was inevitable; those around the
Executive Committee , who favoured a campaign of political change through
terrorism became Narodnaya volya, while Plekhanov's followers formed Chernyi
peredel, "Black repartition", reflecting their continuing concentration on the peasants.
Chernyi peredel reflected the views of "orthodox" Populism, envisaging a long,
slow campaign of propaganda among workers and peasants to build a mass
movement. They claimed the isolation from the masses implied by a political terrorist
campaign could only lead to revolutionaries replacing the state rather than destroying
it. They emphasised federalism rather than centralism in their organisation, agrarian
revolution and a redistribution of the land. "If the popular forces are not organised,
then even the most heroic fight put up by the revolutionaries will prove advantageous
only to the upper classes; the liberation of the people must be the work of the people
themselves" wrote Plekhanov. 31
However, the debate was not merely one of propaganda by deed and political
revolution (Narodnaya volya) against propaganda by word and social revolution
(Chernyi peredel). Like Chernyi peredel, the aim of the South Russian Union of
Workers in 1880-81 was to increase the political conscience and organised activity of
workers and peasants, and thus prepare a social and economic revolution carried out
by, not in the name of, the exploited classes. E. Koval'skaya and N. Shchedrin shared
31 Venturi op.cit. p.661
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