Revolutionary Strategies in the Russian Countryside: Rural Teachers and the Socialist Revolutionary Party on the Eve of 1905

Abstract

In 1903, Minister of Interior V. K. Plehve warned zemstvo men and marshals of the nobility that the zemstvo teacher posed a major threat to the social order in the Russian countryside.1 Provincial officials reported that the majority of rural teachers was actively opposed to the regime, carried on agitation in the village, or was responsible for the fact that among the younger peasant generation there were few who held to the sober and steady views, which have so long distinguished the Russian peasantry.2 At the same time the revolutionary parties, particularly the Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR), were stepping up efforts to recruit teachers as rural propagandists. What the government feared-the teacher's strategic position in the village and potential as a link between urban and rural Russia-the revolutionary parties welcomed. For the latter, agitation among the peasantry had been a difficult and often dispiriting affair. Would-be activists had found it hard to penetrate the wall of suspicion and misunderstanding separating the educated and privileged sectors of urban society from the peasant masses. The terrain was strewn with the wreckage of earlier attempts by populists to make contact. Aside from specific failures, the sheer magnitude of the task seemed overwhelming.