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Narodnya Volya

Narodnaya Volya
Founded 1879
Dissolved 1884
Headquarters Russian Empire
Ideology Agrarian socialism
Left-wing terrorism
Revolutionary socialism
Political position Far-left

Narodnaya Volya (Russian: Наро́дная во́ля, IPA: [nɐˈrodnəjə ˈvolʲə], lit. People's ) was a 19th-century revolutionary political organization in the Russian Empire which conducted targeted killing of government officials in attempt to promote reforms in the country. The organization declared itself to be a populist movement that succeeded Narodniks. Composed primarily of young revolutionary socialist intellectuals believing in the efficacy of terrorism, Narodnaya Volya emerged in Autumn 1879 from the split of an earlier revolutionary organization called Zemlya i Volya ("Land and Liberty").

Based upon an underground apparatus of local, semi-independent cells co-ordinated by an self-selecting Executive Committee, 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.

It favored the use of secret society-led terrorism as an attempt to violently destabilize the Russian Empire and provide a focus for popular discontent against it for an insurrection, justified “as a means of exerting pressure on the government for reform, as the spark that would ignite a vast peasant uprising, and as the inevitable response to the regime's use of violence against the revolutionaries”. The group developed ideas—such as targeted killing of the 'leaders of oppression'—that were to become the hallmark of subsequent violence by small non-state groups, and they were convinced that the developing technologies of the age—such as the invention of dynamite, which they were the first anarchist group to make widespread use of—enabled them to strike directly and with discrimination.


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