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Russian Revolution, Political Thought of the
Concepts of revolution in Russia became very diverse very rapidly in the 1860s among a small group of intellectuals who were disappointed by the limited nature of the reforms of the period, the most important of which was the abolition of serfdom in 1861. The main motivation was a moral one, going back to the works of earlier intellectuals, notably Alexander Radishchev, who wrote one of the earliest critiques of Russian society in A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790), which chronicled the hardships of the peasantry. Radishchev’s statement, that he could not be indifferent while others suffered, stands as the founding statement of Russian revolutionary thought. From the 1860s, the term narodnichestvo (populism), derived from the word narod (the people), was applied to ...
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