The French Revolution in the Russian Revolutionary Movement

Abstract

The focus of Chapter 2 is exclusively on the Russian revolutionary movement, with special attention devoted to what revolutionaries in Russia understood to be the essence of ‘Jacobinism’. Mistaking the Jacobins in the French Revolution for advocates of the conspiratorial methods they deemed necessary in Russia, many found solace and confirmation of their own revolutionary virtue in the personal qualities they believed the Jacobins possessed. But on what these qualities actually were there was no consensus. In fact, some revolutionaries, such as Kropotkin, abhorred the Jacobins and considered their penchant for centralizing political authority morally abhorrent and tactically foolish; others, such as the terrorists of Narodnaia Volia (who assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881), disagreed. Because the Bolsheviks considered themselves the rightful heirs of the intelligentsia (from which the revolutionary movement emerged), they were acutely conscious of the revolutionaries who preceded them chronologically, and found it necessary to adjudicate their divergent opinions on the French Revolution.