Land and Freedom Party

LAND AND FREEDOM PARTY

There were two revolutionary groups named "Land and Freedom" (Zemlya i Volya). The first was a phenomenon of the early 1860s, with a membership largely of intellectuals in Moscow and the Russian provinces. It maintained contacts with émigrés living abroad (most notably Alexander Herzen) and was supported in Russia by the anarchists Prince Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin. Repressed by the government, it ceased to exist by 1863 or 1864.

The second and better-known Land and Freedom group emerged after the failure of the "Going to the People" experiments in the early 1870s. Forced to review their strategy and activities, Russian populists realized that the peasants were hostile to intellectuals and that the state would not change of its own accord. In 1876, in St. Petersburg, they organized a new Land and Freedom group as a secret political organization. The leaders of the group, whose members included Mark Natanson, Alexander Mikhailov, and Lev Tikomirov, reasoned that revolutionaries would have to go among and work through the Russian people (narod ). They were well aware, however, that many Russian activists had idealized the peasants and overestimated their willingness to revolt. Thus, if Land and Freedom was to achieve its goals of giving peasants collective ownership of the land through the obshchina, promoting freedom of the individual so that the peasants would be able to regulate their own affairs, and bringing about the abolition of private property, it would have to be better organized (through a more centralized structure) and, above all, would have to use agitprop (agitation and propaganda) in both word and deed to win the people over.

To this end, members of Land and Freedom went out in the Russian countryside, concentrating on the Volga region, where there had been peasant uprisings in the past. They also agitated among rebellious students in the winter of 1877 to 1878. In the late 1870s, Land and Freedom decided to disrupt the Russian state by carrying out terrorist acts targeting landowners, the police, and government officials. When the state responded by restricting its activities and arresting many of its members, Land and Freedom split into two other groups, Narodnaia Volya (People's Will) and Chernyi Peredel (Black Petition), both of which left a mark on Russian history when Alexander II was assassinated in 1881.

See also: agitprop; anarchism; peasantry; peasant uprisings; terrorism

bibliography

Hardy, Deborah. (1987). Land and Freedom: The Origins of Russian Terrorism, 1876–1879. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Kelly, Aileen. (1982). Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Psychology and Politics of Utopianism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Offord, Derek. (1987). The Russian Revolutionary Movement in the 1880s. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Christopher Williams