In the 1993 conflict between Yeltsin and the delegates, Rutskoi sided with the latter and landed in prison after the attack on the White House. After his amnesty in May 1994, the party changed its name again, this time to the Russian Social-Democratic People’s Party (RSDNP). Its main goals were the creation of conditions for free and thorough development of the citizens of Russia; elevation of their welfare; guarantee of citizens’ rights and freedoms; and establishment of a civic society, a social-market economy, and a lawful government. Leaders had different ideas for the party’s development: Rutskoi called upon the delegates to participate in the creation of the social-patriotic movement Power, whereas Lipitsky supported the idea of transforming the RSDNP into a social- democratic party of the Western European variety. In March 1995, the split became fact in congress, after which both sides essentially ceased existing. Rutskoi’s group began working in the social-patriotic movement Power, and Lipitsky’s in the Russian Social-Democratic Union.
In the 1995 elections, Lipitsky’s supporters participated in the bloc Social-Democrats (0.13% of the vote), and Power pushed forward its federal list, on account of which a new split occurred in the leadership of the movement, and a number of politicians left it. The new list of Power with Rut-skoi at the head received 1.8 million votes (2.6%), while in Rutskoi’s homeland, Kursk, it received more than 30 percent. In 1996, Power was unable to collect the required number of signatures for its presidential candidate Rutskoi, and it joined with the bloc of popular-patriotic forces headed by Gen-nady Zyuganov. Soon afterward, Rutskoi was elected first as cochair of the Popular-Patriotic Union of Russia, and then, with its support, governor of Kursk Oblast. He resigned as chair of Power and fell into conflict with the NPSR and Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF). In 1998, Power, under the chairmanship of Konstan-tin Zatulin, entered the movement Fatherland of Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, and on the very eve of elections it split yet again and disappeared from the political scene.
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See also: COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; DEMOCRATIC PARTY; RUTSKOI, ALEXANDER VLADIMIRO-VICH; ZYUGANOV, GENNADY ANDREYEVICH.
McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. McFaul, Michael, and Markov, Sergei. (1993). The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press.
The People’s Will was the most famous illegal revolutionary organization in late nineteenth-century Russia. This “party,” as it was termed, represented the culmination of the rapidly evolving revolutionary movement of the 1870s, the decade when radical members of the intelligentsia first made contact on a significant scale with Russian peasants and workers, the narod, or common people. The ideology of this movement was a peasant-oriented socialism known as narodnichestvo (populism). The umbrella group Land and Freedom (Zemlya i Volya), which linked most of the radical circles at the time, split in 1879 over frustration at government repression and the lack of effective peasant response to the group’s propaganda initiatives. Those radicals who were determined to incorporate the new tactic of terrorism into their activity formed a party called the People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya). By terrorism they meant primarily the targeting of hated government officials for assassination. This extreme measure was variously justified as a means of exerting pressure on the government for reform, as the spark that would ignite a vast peasant uprising, and as the inevitable response to the regime’s use of violence against the revolutionaries.
The People’s Will was headed by an Executive Committee, including such famous figures as Andrei Zhelyabov and Sofia Perovskaya. Day-to-day activities were supervised by special subgroups in charge of propaganda and organization of three critical groups-workers, students, and military officers-and included underground printing operations; keeping an eye on police infiltration efforts; and planning and carrying out assassinations. In addition to well-organized groups in St. Petersburg and Moscow, there was a growing number of provincial organizations, mostly circles of students and workers. The participation of a small number of women represented a noteworthy development. While historians have tended to identify the People’s Will with its small but well-defined Executive Committee, the organization in fact encompassed a broad range of members and supporters, numbering in the thousands, as well as many sympathizers. More peaceful activities, however, were overshadowed by the aura of drama and violence surrounding the party’s daring struggle against the tsarist regime, culminating in the assassination of the tsar, Alexander II, on March 1, 1881. In the predictable aftermath, five members of the People’s Will were hanged and many more imprisoned.
Contrary to the standard historiographical treatment, the People’s Will did not disappear from the scene following March 1, but rather continued to exist in a more widespread and decentralized form. Radicals calling themselves narodovoltsy (supporters of the People’s Will) continued to engage in propaganda and organizing activities among students and workers in provincial towns and industrial centers, as well as in St. Petersburg and Moscow, throughout the 1880s and into the 1890s. By this time, narodovoltsy were taking second place in the revolutionary movement to radicals who identified themselves as social democrats (Marxists). The populist tradition experienced a revival with the formation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party during the early twentieth century. In a sense, however, both revolutionary parties of the period leading up to the 1917 revolution, the Social Democrats as well as the Socialist Revolutionaries, can be considered the heirs of the People’s Will, whose banner, at a crucial stage, symbolized the revolutionary movement in Russia. See also: LAND AND FREEDOM PARTY; POPULISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Naimark, Norman M. (1983). Terrorists and Social Democrats: The Russian Revolutionary Movement Under Alexander III. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Offord, Derek. (1986). The Russian Revolutionary Movement in the 1880s. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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Pearl, Deborah. (1996). “From Worker to Revolutionary: The Making of Worker Narodovol’tsy.” Russian History 23(1-4):11-26. Venturi, Franco. (1966). Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia, tr. Francis Haskell. New York: Universal Library.
Perestroika was the term given to the reform process launched in the Soviet Union under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. Meaning “reconstruction” or “restructuring,” perestroika was a concept that was both ambiguous and malleable. Its ambiguity lay in the fact that it might convey no more than a reorganization of existing Soviet institutions and thus be a synonym for reform of a modest kind or, alternatively, it could signify reconstruction of the system from the foundations up, thus amounting to transformative change. The vagueness and ambiguity were initially an advantage, for even the term reform had become taboo during the conservative Leonid Brezhnev years after the Soviet leadership had been frightened by the Prague Spring reforms of 1968.
Perestroika had the advantage of coming without political and ideological baggage. Everyone could-in the first two years, at least, of the Mikhail Gorbachev era-be in favor of it. Its malleability meant that under this rubric some urged modest change that in their view was enough to get the economy moving again while others who wished to transform the way the entire system worked were able to advance more daring arguments, taking cover under the umbrella of perestroika. Within Gorbachev’s own top leadership team, both Yegor Ligachev and Alexander Yakovlev expressed their commitment to perestroika, but for the latter this meant much more far-reaching political reform than for the former. Once political pluralism had by 1989 become an accepted norm, perestroika as a concept had largely outlived its political utility.
For Gorbachev himself the term “perestroika” meant different things at different times. Initially, it was a euphemism for “reform,” but later it came to signify systemic change. Gorbachev’s views underwent a major evolution during the period he held the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU and that included the meaning he imparted to perestroika. In an important December 1984 speech before he became Soviet
