NARODNIKI. - A species of pre-Marxist socialism in Russia; it spread especially between 1870 and 1880.
The N. believed they could discern in the rural communes (občina) the germ of an agrarian socialism that would allow, in Russia, an immediate transition to a socialist order, avoiding a prior capitalist epoch. The movement assumed a revolutionary character with the founding of the organization Zemlya i Volja ("Land and Freedom"; 1876), which later split into a more radical faction, Narodnaja Volja ("People's Will"), and a more moderate one, Černyj peredel ("Black Repartition"). Narodnaja Volja organized a series of assassinations of political figures, until in 1881 Tsar Alexander II became one of its victims. Marxism entered public life in Russia, especially through its public polemic against the N., centering the controversy particularly on the "subjective method in history and sociology" (P. L. Lavrov, N. K. Mikhailovsky), to which the Marxists opposed (v. MATERIALISMO STORICO) an absolute economic determinism; regarding the role of the individual in history and the question of Russia's peculiar path of development, the Marxists upheld the thesis of the necessity of a capitalist evolution even in Russia.