Underground Petersburg: Radical Populism, Urban Space, and the Tactics of Subversion in Reform-Era Russia

by Christopher Ely

Although the radical populist movement that arose in Russia during the reign of Tsar Alexander II has been well documented, this important study opens with questions that haven't yet been How did Russian radical populists manage to carry out a three-year campaign of revolutionary violence, killing or wounding scores of people, including top government officials, and eventually taking the life of the tsar himself? And how did this all occur under the noses of the tsar's political police, who deployed vast resources and huge numbers of officials in an exhaustive effort to stop the killing? In Underground Petersburg , Christopher Ely argues that the most powerful weapon of populist terrorism was the revolutionary underground it created. Attempts to convey populist ideals in the public sphere met with resistance at every turn. When methods such as propaganda campaigns and street demonstrations failed, populists created a sophisticated urban underground. Linked to the newly discovered weapon of terrorist violence, this base of operations allowed them to live undetected in the midst of the city, produce their own weaponry, and attempt to ignite an insurrection through violent attacks―putting terrorism on the map as a technique of political rebellion. Accessible to non-specialists, this insightful study reinterprets radical populism, clarifying its crucial place in Russian history and elucidating its contribution to the history of terrorism. Underground Petersburg will appeal to scholars and students of Russia, as well as those interested in terrorism and insurrectionary movements, urban studies, and the sociology of subcultures.  

324 pages, Paperback

Published October 30, 2016

Reviews

[Inna · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this excellent book the author utilized well-known documents of the Russian 19th century populism in order to reflect on the dynamics of establishment, development, and failures of terrorist groups. The questions the author asks are all familiar from memoirs of former militants, but are usually de-emphasized within scholarly literature. The author wondered about the practicalities of joining and operating within a revolutionary group and of the affects of these on its adoption of terrorist tactics. He points out that Russian populism is a specifically urban phenomenon, affected by proximity of various populations, anonymity, bureaucratization, emergence of the educated classes, and also the highly urban romanticization of the countryside. The author points out that the populists took pride in their modern techniques of organization and, while adopting terrorism, in their highly modern weapons. He also points out that militancy was often an expression of dissatisfaction with absence of political rights, which could not be expressed legally, as well as of youthful adventurism, which developed into serious commitment only after the new militant encountered a disproportional reaction by the state.
The other point the author debates at length is the adoption of terrorist tactics by Russian populists as a reaction to government's preventing any legal ways to work for a political chance side by side with a disproportional reaction of the government to any political militancy, which convinced people of its strength and of the government's weakness. The author claims that the populists ended up adopting terrorism, though, only after their disappointment in their ability to revolutionize the peasantry.
This disappointment changed both the tactics and the worldview of Russian populism, or at least of its dominant trend. Populist militants, all urban residents, were much more comfortable working within the large cities, with their substantial middle-class educated population, also resenting absence of political rights and thus willing to support the militants, even while these adopted terrorism as their main tactic. On the other hand, these were a tiny minority within Russia as a whole and the populists soon understood that violence is the only way they might engage in a battle with the government under conditions which for a while, due to secrecy under which The People's Will, the populist terrorist organization, operated, seemed almost equal.
On the other hand this meant that the populists had to forgo their initial radicalism and consider constitutionalism as their main goal. It also meant that populists as a group were depoliticized and concentrated on action rather than on reflecting on revolutionary theory.
The end result was that a militant was expected to be a person of action rather than of reflection. This meant that while the police caught up with the new organizational ideas of the populists and managed to destroy The People's Will through arrests, there were no ideas to sustain populism as a worldview or as an organizational framework. The image of a populist hero struggling heroically against the mighty state remained within the Russian culture, but it was later adopted by various, very different, political trends and organizations.
Overall, this is an important work on dynamics of revolutionary militancy.