The Question of Revolutionary Organization in the Career of Petr Grigor' evich Zaichnevskii

Abstract

In the history of the Russian revolutionary movement Petr Grigor'evich Zaichnevskii (1842-1896) is principally known as the cofounder, along with Perikles Emmanuilovich Argiropulo, of a small group of Moscow University students which became involved in the printing and distribution of socialist literature during the first half of 1861. Although this group was broken up by the police during July of that year, prison conditions were lax enough for Zaichnevskii to write, with the aid of frequent visitors, the notorious political pamphlet Young Russia, which was smuggled out of his cell and printed in May 1862. During the 1920s in the Soviet Union Zaichnevskii and Young Russia became part of an historiographical debate on the relationship of the older, pre-Marxist Populist phase of the revolutionary movement to Bolshevism. What was there-or was there anything at all-of the Populist movement that could be considered part of the heritage of Bolshevism?' Zaichnevskii became an important part of the answer to this question because he was considered to be the first figure in the movement openly to advocate what came to be called Russian Jacobinism. Similarly, Young Russia was considered to be the first expression of a Jacobin program in the literature of the movement itself. Russian Jacobinism, although inspired by the French example, embraced three ideas which were characteristically Russian: (1) the formation of an elite, conspiratorial, rigidly centralized political party which, (2) at the proper time, would seize power with the support, but not under the direction, of the masses. This party would then (3) stay in power for some time after the revolution in order to prevent forces supporting the old order from regaining control of the state, and to