Narodnaya Volya - Program

Program

Narodnaya Volya’s Program contained the following demands: convocation of the Constituent Assembly (for designing a Constitution); introduction of universal suffrage; permanent people’s representation, freedom of speech, press, and assembly; communal self-government; exchange of the permanent army with a people’s volunteer corps; transfer of land to the people; gradual placement of the factories under the control of the workers; and granting oppressed peoples of the Russian Empire the right to self-determination.

Narodnaya Volya's Program was a mix of democratic and socialist reforms. Narodnaya Volya differed from its parent organization, the narodnik Zemlya i volya, in that its members had come to believe that a social revolution would be impossible in the absence of a political revolution; the peasantry could not take possession of the land as long as the government remained autocratic. Given Zemlya i Volya's failures in its propaganda efforts among the peasants in the movements "to the people" in the early 1870s, Narodnaya Volya turned its energies against the central government. However, unlike Marxists, they continued to believe that Russia could achieve socialism through a peasant revolution, bypassing the stage of capitalism.

The members of Narodnaya Volya were not in complete agreement about the relationship between the social and political revolutions; some believed in the possibility of achieving both simultaneously, relying on the socialist instincts of the Russian peasantry, as demonstrated in the traditional peasant commune. Other members believed that a political revolution would have to take place first and, after the autocracy had been overthrown and democratic liberties established, revolutionaries would prepare people for the socialist revolution. The Liberal faction of Narodnaya Volya (which had no real influence) proposed to limit their demands to getting a Constitution from the tsarist government.

Narodnaya Volya spread its propaganda through all strata of the population. Its newspapers, "Narodnaya Volya" and “The Worker’s Gazette”, attempted to popularize the idea of a political struggle with the autocracy. Their struggle to topple autocracy was crowned by the slogan “Now or never!” Narodnaya Volya did not succeed in enlisting the peasantry in its work, which would later lead Soviet historians to charge it with Blanquism; these historians would argue that Narodnaya Volya understood political struggle only in terms of conspiracy and, therefore, looked more like a sect.