Chigirin affair
[1] The struggle was undertaken by the dusheviki, a group of local peasants who wanted land to be allotted to individual men instead of to households.
[2] Members of the dusheviki ceased paying taxes and other dues to pressure local officials to implement their desired version of land allotment.
[10] Various dusheviki groups from several villages in Kyiv district rallied together and issued statements declaring their refusal to submit to the government acts favoring the tenure system based on households.
[10] They also refused to pay taxes and the money they owed the government in order to redeem the lands they hard farmed.
[3] The dusheviki stated that by a recent ukaz, Alexander II had redistributed the land by souls rather than tenure.
In order to make up for the lost taxes and payments, the Russian government forcibly sold moveable property owned by the peasants.
[11] This method proved effective as many of the dusheviki returned to paying taxes and other dues to the government.
[citation needed] Foma Priadko was the most influential leader in the early phase of the Chigirin affair.
Priadko, a retired soldier from the district, was one of the men that the peasants had sent to St. Petersburg to petition the tsar in 1872.
[13] When Priadko returned from the capital, he traveled to the various villages in Chigirin affirming the dusheviki in their insistence of reallocation of land by souls.
The dusheviki gained new momentum under the leadership of Iakov Stefanovich, an educated revolutionary who was the son of a Ukrainian priest.
[17] He met with Lazar Tenenik, an influential peasant from the region, who Stefanovich told he would represent the village and wishes of the dusheviki to the tsar.
[19] Upon returning to Chigirin in November 1876, Stefanovich presented the peasants with documents supposedly from Alexander II.
[20] The documents, created by Stefanovich, alleged that the tsar had ordered the peasants to organize into a secret society to fight for their desires for land.
[21] The society was to be made up of peasants to fight for their freedom as the tsar was surrounded by people who blocked his will.
[21] "Even if the tsar himself was to die, the peasants were to continue to fight, until all the Russian land was equally divided.
[26] Shortly after returning to Chigirin in November, Stefanovich persuaded a few peasants to join his secret society.
[28] The rapid growth of the society soon meant that Stefanovich and Diech had limited control over the large group.
[19] Some peasants were joining the society simply hoping to receive land without understanding the group's purpose and structure.
[19] By May 1877, a rumor was spreading in the district that those who desired land and freedom should enlist in a society based in the village of Shabel’niki.
[5] "Stefanovich, Bokhanovskii, Deich and more than thousand peasants from 20 villages of Chigirin district were arrested by December of 1877.
[34] The Chigirin affair is considered to have sealed the fate of the Narodnik movement and closed a period of peasant upheaval in Russia.
[32] When these individuals were released from prison they "disseminated rumours that “in the future all the land would be distributed equally among all peasants, and that the government and clergy would cease to exist.”"[32] One of these peasants noted that the populists who were imprisoned because of their involvement in the Chigirin affair told him stories of a "country where all the land was distributed equally among all people.
"[32] Both peasants believed that the people who had assassinated Alexander II intended to create this economic equality in Russia.
[32] Local officials urged the case to be reconsidered in light of the significant involvement of both peasants in the Secret Druzhina.
