People's Rights Party

At the end of the 1870s the Russian agrarian populist underground political party Zemlya i Volya ("Land and Liberty") split over the question of tactics between those who advocated direct education and agitation among the peasantry and urban workers and the maintenance of student study circles and those who advocated the use of terrorism against high officials in the Tsarist regime — up to and including the Tsar himself — in order to create conditions for an instantaneous revolutionary upheaval.

Those pursuing revolutionary terrorism formed their own group, Narodnaya Volya ("People's Will") and managed to realize a primary objective when in March 1881 they successfully assassinated Tsar Alexander II with a bomb.

[1] Even the devastating Famine of 1891-1892 did not stir the peasantry to revolt against the Tsarist regime — although the crisis did play a part in moving urban intellectuals in Russia to resume political activity in an effort to bring about an end to autocratic rule.

[4] These were joined in sympathy, albeit not in formal membership, by agrarian populist Nikolai Mikhailovsky and a group of his associates from the journal Russkoe Bogatstvo (Russian Riches), V. G. Korolenko, N. F. Anensky, and A. V .

[9] Citing the group's program, Galai has asserted that "for the first time in the annals of Russian parties, it declared organized public opinion to be the main weapon in the struggle against autocracy," in contradistinction to peasant revolt, general strike, or terror.

The party proved to be a political failure owing to its inability to conduct its activities in public and small size, combined with its extremely short lifespan.

[13] Nevertheless, the group has been regarded by intellectual historians as influential as a watershed in the process of demythologizing belief in the transformative essence of the peasant masses and in its abnegation of traditional Russian rejection of the norms of western constitutionalism as both a vehicle and a goal for change.