Untitled - OUDL Home

or apathy by the peasants, and the movement failedalmost completely among them. But it made a deepimpression on all thinking Russia, not least on thegovernment, which was frightened into mass arrestsand mass trials. These yet further stirred opinion andaccentuated the divorce between the bureaucracy and thebulk of educated opinion, not then itself revolutionarybut dangerously infected with indifFerentism towards thegovernment and sympathy towards its opponents.The failure of ' the going to the people' caused a splitin the ranks of the populists (narodniki). One smallsection formed a conspiratorial organization, 'The People'sWill,' which conducted a terrorist campaign against thegovernment ending in the assassination of Alexander IIin 1881. The rest of the narodniki sought to constructrevised versions of their agrarian socialism, whicheventually (1901) took a more or less organized form inthe Social-Revolutionary party. This was both in 1905and 1917 in closer touch with the peasantry than anyother party and was consequently the most dangerousrival of the Bolsheviks.All parties, all groups of opinion in Russia felt that,at least ultimately, the deciding factor in revolution,reform, or the maintenance of autocracy was the hundredmillion-headedpeasantry, still even by 1917 in the mainilliterate. One of the deepest students of Russia haswritten of " the inevitable spell exercised by the immensityof Russia's peasant population with characteristics asdefinite as those of the ocean. It is almost impossiblenot to connect a specific meaning with a phenomenon sogreat and unique." The contrasts between 'the darkpeople' and the few for whom European culture wasavailable remained glaring. Even though in the courseof the century between 1815 and 1917 the few had ceasedto be drawn almost entirely from the landed gentry andhad multiplied many times over, the recurrent notes persistedof divorce between two worlds, divorce also withinthe educated minority, and of impending revolution. Thescale of Russia and the feeling of the abyss help to explainboth the maximalism and the catastrophic and apocalypticstrains that are so prominent in Russian thought.324