Graham Gamblin - Infoshop.org

epresentatives. Thus the issue of revolutionary violence has to be divided between
social violence, connected to a broad popular social-revolutionary movement, and
political violence, or terrorism, connected to a clandestine movement of professional
revolutionaries seeking political change.
Other comparisons can also be made; for example the similarities between the
call of the Spanish FRE in 1874 for reprisals against capitalists and oppressors and the
policy of economic terror advocated by some of the populists of Southern Russia.
Both advocated violence, but the violence was to be carried out by the workers and
peasants, not by professional revolutionaries, and against economic rather than
political targets, and looked to traditional popular methods such as arson, riot, food
seizures and so on. Kropotkin was enthusiastic about this policy in Russia, of which
the leading exponents were M. Shchedrin and E. Koval'skaya of the South Russian
Workers' Union. This sprang from his interpretation of propaganda by deed; genuine
acts of revolt by peasants or workers could inspire others in equally desperate
situations to do the same. A more political interpretation of the term led others to
believe that assassinations and bomb attacks by individuals and small groups against
political figures, heads of state and others could inspire the populace to revolution.
Important differences also stand out. In terms of organisation, while the trend in
anarchism was from federalism to "amorphousness", the populist movement was
becoming ever more centralised and hierarchical. In both cases this was born of, and
resulted in, isolation from the masses in whose name they claimed to act. However,
for the purposes of comparison, this actual difference may be less important than the
fact that, as we have seen, many anarchists saw themselves reflected in Narodnaya
volya, mistakenly thinking that it was an agglomeration of autonomous cells.
Anarchists on the whole also seem to have been unaware (or deliberately ignored) the
Russians’ focus on using violence to achieve political change, as opposed to social
and economic change which was the raison d’etre of anarchism. Those anarchists
who took up terrorism hoped to inspire popular revolt, while Narodnaya volya hoped
for more modest, political results from their campaign. Moreover it was perceived
that the Narodovol'tsy were the most active and successful revolutionary group of the
time, and their tactics were to be emulated. The growing isolation and persecution
faced by the anarchist movement at the end of the 1870s had diverse effects; some
defected to legal socialism (Costa, Brousse); others stubbornly persisted in trying to
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