isaac-deutscher-the-prophet-armed-trotsky-1879-1921

4 THE PROPHET ARMED
the courts sentenced them to long terms of imprisonment, hard
labour, or deportation.
The idea of a revolution through the people was gradually
replaced by that of a conspiracy to be planned and carried out
by a small and determined minority from the intelligentsia.
The forms of the movement changed accordingly. The exodus
of the intelligentsia to the countryside had been spontaneous; it
had not been guided from any centre. The new conspiracy
required a strictly clandestine, closely knit, strongly led, and
rigidly disciplined organization. Its leaders-Zhclyabov, Kibalchich,
Sofia Perovskaya, Vera Figner, and others-were not
at first inclined to terroristic action; but the logic of their position
and the events drove them that way. In January 1878 a
young woman, Vera Zasulich-one day she was to influence
the chief character of this book-shot General Trepov, head of
the gendarmerie in Petersburg, in protest against his maltreatment
and humiliation of a political prisoner. At her trial horrible
abuses of which the police had been guilty were revealed. The
jury were so shocked by the revelations and so moved by the
sincere idealism of the defendant that they acquitted her. When
the police attempted to seize her outside the court, a sympathetic
crowd rescued her and enabled her to escape. The Tsar ordered
that henceforth military tribunals, not juries, should try political
offenders.
Zasulich's unpremeditated deed and the response it evoked
pointed the way for the conspirators. In 1879, the year in which
, this narrative begins, the party of Land and Freedom split. One
group of members, bent on pursuing terroristic attempts until
the overthrow of autocracy, formed themselves into a new body,
the Narodnaya Vo!Ja, the Freedom of the People.' Their new programme
placed far greater emphasis on civil liberties than on
land reform. Another and less influential group, setting no store
by the terroristic conspiracy, broke away to advocate Black
Partition (Chornyi Peredel)-an egalitarian distribution of the
land. (From this group, headed by Plekhanov, who presently
emigrated to Switzerland, was to come the first Marxist and
Social Democratic message to the revolutionaries in Russia.)
The year 1879 brought a rapid succession of spectacular
1
Narodnaya Vorya is often translated as the Will ef the People. Vo(ya means in fact
both 'will' and 'freedom' and can be translated either way.