Jewish Radicals in the Narod: Nationality and Antisemitism in the Going to the People Movement of 1874

• In Event: Left-Wing Responses to the “Jewish Question” and Anti-Semitism in Russia (1870s-1920s)

Abstract

When groups of Russian radical socialists travelled en masse to the countryside in the mid-1870s in order to spread revolutionary propaganda to the peasants, they attempted to take on a new and unfamiliar identity. These educated urban dwellers put on peasant clothes, trained themselves in peasant trades, and attempted to pass themselves off as members of the common people, the better to gain their trust and spread a message of insurrection. Jewish radicals faced an additional problem: passing themselves off as Russian and Orthodox. This paper explores the ways in which Jewishness could lead to tensions in the Going to the People movement, and how radicals dealt with these tensions. National and religious difference was an important factor in an enterprise in which trust built through interpersonal ties was seen as essential to the future of Russia.

Author

• Eric McCurdy Johnson, UC Berkeley