Narodnaya Volya (organization)
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Narodnaya Volya
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| Founded | 1879 |
| Dissolved | 1884 |
| Headquarters | Russian Empire |
| Ideology |
Revolutionary socialism Agrarian socialism |
Narodnaya Volya (Russian: Наро́дная во́ля, "People Freedom" or "People's Will") was a nineteenth-century revolutionary political organization in the Russian Empire which advocated an indigenous socialism based upon the massive Russian peasantry, a movement known as "Populism" (Russian: Нарoдничество). Composed primarily of young revolutionary socialist intellectuals believing in the efficacy of terrorism, Narodnaya Volya emerged in the fall of 1879 from a split of an earlier revolutionary organization called Zemlya i Volya ("Land and Liberty").
Based upon an underground apparatus of local cells. Narodnaya Volya continued to espouse acts of revolutionary violence in an attempt to spur mass revolt against Tsarism, culminating in the successful assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March 1881 — the event for which the group is best remembered.
The group was the inspiration and forerunner for other revolutionary socialist and anarchist organizations that followed, including in particular the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR).
The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 did not suddenly end the state of grim rural poverty in Russia, and the headed by the Tsar of Russia and the nobles around him, as well as the privileged state bureaucracy, remained in firm control of the nation's economy from which it extracted pecuniary benefits. By the beginning of decade of the 1870s, dissent regarding the established political and economic order had begun to take concrete form among many members of the intelligentsia, which sought to foster a modern and democratic society in Russia in place of the economic backwardness and political repression which marked the old regime.
A set of "Populist" values became commonplace among these radical intellectuals seeking change of the Russian economic and political form. The Russian peasantry, based as it was upon its historic village governing structure, the peasant commune (obshchina or mir), and its collective holding and periodic redistribution of farmland, was held to be inherently socialistic, or at least fundamentally amenable to socialist organization. It was further believed that this fact made possible a unique path for the modernization of Russia which bypassed the industrial poverty that was a feature of early capitalism in Western Europe — the region to which Russian intellectuals looked for inspiration and by which they measured the comparatively backwards state of their own polity.
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