or 1864.
The second and better-known Land and Freedom group emerged after the failure of the “Going to the People” experiments in the early 1870s.
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Forced to review their strategy and activities, Russian populists realized that the peasants were hostile to intellectuals and that the state would not change of its own accord. In 1876, in St. Petersburg, they organized a new Land and Freedom group as a secret political organization. The leaders of the group, whose members included Mark Natanson, Alexander Mikhailov, and Lev Tikomirov, reasoned that revolutionaries would have to go among and work through the Russian people (narod). They were well aware, however, that many Russian activists had idealized the peasants and overestimated their willingness to revolt. Thus, if Land and Freedom was to achieve its goals of giving peasants collective ownership of the land through the obshchina, promoting freedom of the individual so that the peasants would be able to regulate their own affairs, and bringing about the abolition of private property, it would have to be better organized (through a more centralized structure) and, above all, would have to use agitprop (agitation and propaganda) in both word and deed to win the people over.
To this end, members of Land and Freedom went out in the Russian countryside, concentrating on the Volga region, where there had been peasant uprisings in the past. They also agitated among rebellious students in the winter of 1877 to 1878. In the late 1870s, Land and Freedom decided to disrupt the Russian state by carrying out terrorist acts targeting landowners, the police, and government officials. When the state responded by restricting its activities and arresting many of its members, Land and Freedom split into two other groups, Nar-odnaia Volya (People’s Will) and Chernyi Peredel (Black Petition), both of which left a mark on Russian history when Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. See also: AGITPROP; ANARCHISM; PEASANTRY; PEASANT UPRISINGS; TERRORISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hardy, Deborah. (1987). Land and Freedom: The Origins of Russian Terrorism, 1876-1879. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Kelly, Aileen. (1982). Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Psychology and Politics of Utopianism. New York: Oxford University Press. Offord, Derek. (1987). The Russian Revolutionary Movement in the 1880s. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Land captains were representatives of the administrative and judicial authority in Russian villages from 1889 to 1917.
The Statute Concerning Land Captains was passed on July 12, 1889, and was one of the counter-reforms made during the rule of Emperor Alexander III. The purpose of this law was the partial restoration of the control of provincial nobility over the peasants. In 40 provinces, 2,200 land districts, headed by land captains, were formed. Land captains were appointed by the Minister of Interior, usually from local hereditary nobles at the recommendation of governors and provincial marshals of nobility. They had extensive administrative and judicial power, controlled the activity of peasant communities, and formed the primary judicial authority for peasants and other taxpayers. A land captain had to have a higher education and three years of experience in serving as a peace mediator (mirovoy posrednik), a mirian (mir-peasant commune) judge, or member of a provincial council of peasant affairs. Moreover, he had to possess at least 200 desiatinas (approximately 540 acres of land) or real estate worth at least 7.5 thousand rubles. When candidates with records sufficient for the position were unavailable, local hereditary nobles with primary and secondary education were eligible. In special cases any local noble could be appointed. A land captain had the right to cancel any decision made by the village or the volost gathering (skhod) of the district, order the physical punishment of a taxpayer for minor misdemeanors, and order a three-day arrest or a six-ruble fine. The land captain appointed volost courts, which had been previously elected by the peasants, from a number of candidates selected by village communities (the volost was the smallest administrative unit in tsarist Russia). He could cancel any decision of a volost court, remove a judge, arrest, fine, or order physical punishment. The decisions of a land captain were considered final and did not allow for revision or complaints. In accordance with the reform of 1889, District (Uyezd) Bureaus of Peasant Affairs and mir (communal) courts were cancelled. The mir courts were reinstalled in 1912. The post of a land captain was cancelled by a decision of the Provisional Government on October 14, 1917.
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CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS See also: AUTOCRACY; PEASANTRY
Zaionchkovskii, Petr Andreevich. (1976). The Russian Autocracy under Alexander III. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.
(b. 1932), Lithuanian musicologist and political leader.
Vytautas Landsbergis, a musicologist by training, emerged as a political leader in Lithuania in the fall of 1988. One of the founding members of the Movement for Perestroika in Lithuania, better known as Sajudis, he quickly became one of the Sajudis Initiative Group’s most prominent public spokespersons. In the fall of 1988 he became Sajudis’s President when the organization began openly to advocate political goals and to demand the restitution of the independent Lithuanian state. In 1989 he won note throughout the Soviet Union as a deputy in the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies, where he led the campaign to force the Soviet government to recognize the existence of the Secret Protocols to the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 23, 1939, and to renounce them as having been immoral. As an uncompromising Lithuanian leader, he became one of Mikhail Gorbachev’s best- known political opponents, and for a time he found common cause with Gorbachev’s major Russian opponent, Boris Yeltsin.
In March 1990, after Sajudis had won an overwhelming majority in the elections to the Lithuanian parliament, Landsbergis was elected President of the Supreme Council’s Presidium, and as such became the Lithuanian chief of state. On March 11, 1990, the Supreme Council proclaimed Lithuania’s reestablishment as an independent state, and Lands-bergis focused on Lithuania’s drive to win international recognition of its independence. Toward this goal he followed a policy of harsh confrontation with the Soviet government, and he traveled widely abroad seeking support. Posing the question of Lithuanian independence as a moral more than a political issue, he appealed to world public opinion over the heads of what he saw as unresponsive foreign governments. In January 1991, when Soviet troops seized key buildings in Vilnius, Landsbergis remained at his office in the parliament and became the prime symbol of Lithuanian resistance to Soviet rule. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the fall of 1991, Landsbergis’s political fortunes began to wane, although he continued to be a popular figure among Lithuanian ? migr?s in the United States, from whom he received considerable moral and financial support. A referendum aimed at strengthening his authority failed in the spring of 1992, and in the fall he was forced out of office by the overwhelming victory of the Lithuanian Democratic Labor Party (the former Communist Party) in the elections to the new parliament, now called the Seimas. For the next four years, Landsbergis held the post of Leader of the Opposition. In 1996, after the victory of his political party, the Homeland Union, in parliamentary elections, he became President of the Presidium of the Seimas, a post he held until new elections in 2000. In 1997 he failed in his bid to become President of the Republic. See also: LITHUANIA AND LITHUANIANS; NATIONALISM IN THE SOVIET UNION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Landsbergis, Vytautas. (2000). Lithuania Independent Again. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Lieven, Anatole. (1993). The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Path to Independence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Senn, Alfred Erich. (1995). Gorbachev’s Failure in Lithuania. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
