In 1878, Vera Zasulich, a radical young student of minor noble background, draws a revolver from her pocket and seriously wounds Fyodor Trepov, chief of the St Petersburg police, a man loathed by intellectuals and activists for ordering the flogging of a discourteous prisoner. In a sensational rebuke to the regime, Zasulich’s jury acquits her. She flees to Switzerland.
The next year, from a split in Zemlya i Volya, a new group, Narodnaya Volya – People’s Will – is born. It is more militant. Its cells believe in the necessity of revolutionary violence, and they are ready to act on their conviction. In 1881, after several failed attempts, they take their most coveted prize.
The first Sunday in March, Tsar Alexander II travels to St Petersburg’s grand riding academy. From the crowd the young Narodnaya Volya activist Nikolai Ryasov hurls a handkerchief-wrapped bomb at the bulletproof carriage. An explosion scorches the air. Amid the screams of wounded onlookers, the vehicle shudders to a halt. Alexander staggers out into the chaos. As he sways, Ryasov’s comrade Ignacy Hryniewiecki comes forward. He throws a second bomb. ‘It’s too early to thank God!’ he shouts.
There is another almighty blast. ‘Through the snow, debris and blood’, one of the tsar’s entourage will recall, ‘you could see fragments of clothing, epaulets, sabres and bloody chunks of human flesh.’ The ‘Tsar Liberator’ is ripped apart.
For the radicals, this is a pyrrhic victory. The new tsar, Alexander III, more conservative and no less authoritarian than his father, unleashes ferocious repression. He decimates People’s Will with a wave of executions. He reorganises the political police, the fierce and notorious Okhrana. In this climate of reaction comes a slew of the murderous organised riots known as pogroms against the Jews, a cruelly oppressed minority in Russia. They face heavy legal restrictions; are allowed residence only in the region known as the Pale of Settlement, in Ukraine, Poland, Russia’s west and elsewhere (though exemptions mean there are Jewish populations beyond that stretch); and they have long been the traditional scapegoats at times of national crisis (and indeed whenever). Now, many who are eager to blame them for something blame them for the death of the tsar.
The embattled narodniks plan more attacks. In March 1887, St Petersburg police break up a plot against the new tsar’s life. They hang five student ringleaders, including the son of a school inspector in the Volga region, a bright, committed young man called Alexander Ulyanov.
In 1901, seven years after the brutal and bullying Alexander III dies – of natural causes – and his dutiful son Nicholas II takes the throne, several narodnik groups merge, under a non-Marxist agrarian socialist programme (though some of its members consider themselves Marxists) focusing on those particularities of Russia’s development, and its peasantry. They anoint themselves the Socialist Revolutionary Party, henceforth better known as the SRs. They still hold with violent resistance: for a while yet, the SRs’ military wing, its ‘Combat Organisation’, does not flinch from a campaign of what even its advocates call ‘terrorism’, the assassination of government figures.
Given such commitment, there is irony to come. One of the party’s leaders, the extraordinary Evno Azef, leader of the Combat Organisation itself for some years, will within a decade be unmasked as a faithful Okhrana agent, in a hammer blow to the organisation. And a few years later, in the pivotal moments of the revolutionary year of 1917 itself, two more, Catherine Breshko-Breshkovskaya and its main theoretician Victor Chernov, will be high-profile and anxious partisans of order.
In the final years of the nineteenth century, the state pours resources into its infrastructure and industry, including an immense programme of railway building. Great crews drag iron rails across the country, hammering them down, stitching the limits of the empire together. The Trans-Siberian Railway. ‘Since the Great Wall of China the world has seen no one material undertaking of equal magnitude,’ breathes Sir Henry Norman, a British observer. For Nicholas, the building of this transit route between Europe and East Asia is a ‘sacred duty’.
Russia’s urban population soars. Foreign capital flows in. Huge industries arise around St Petersburg, Moscow, the Donbass region in Ukraine. As thousands of new workers struggle to eke out livings in cavernous plants under desperate conditions, subject to the contemptuous paternalism of their bosses, the labour movement takes unsteady steps forward. In 1882, the young Grigory Plekhanov, later to be Russia’s leading socialist theorist, joins the legendary Vera Zasulich herself, the failed assassin of Trepov, to found Osvobozhdenie truda, Liberation of Labour – the first Russian Marxist group.
In its wake come more reading circles, cells of agitators, gatherings of the variously like-minded, aghast at a world of ruthless, exploitative capital and the subordination of need to profit. The future for which the Marxists yearn, communism, is as absurd to their detractors as any peasant’s Belovode. It is rarely distinctly outlined, but they know it beckons beyond private property and its violence, beyond exploitation and alienation, to a world where technology reduces labour, the better for humanity to flourish. ‘The true realm of freedom’, in Marx’s words: ‘the development of human powers as an end in itself’. This is what they want.
The Marxists are a gaggle of émigrés, reprobates, scholars and workers, in a close weave of family, friendship and intellectual connections, political endeavour and polemic. They tangle in a fractious snarl. Everyone knows everyone.
In 1895, a Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class is formed in Moscow, Kiev, Ekaterinoslav, Ivanovo-Vosnessensk and St Petersburg. In the capital, the founders of the Union are two fervent young activists: Yuli Tsederbaum and his friend Vladimir Ulyanov, brother of Alexander Ulyanov, the narodnik student executed eight years before. Noms de politique are the norm: Tsederbaum, the younger of the two, a scrawny figure peering through pince-nez over a thin beard, calls himself Martov. Vladimir Ulyanov, a striking, prematurely balding man with distinctive narrow eyes, is known as Lenin.