Russia, populism, narodnichestvo, post-Soviet political development, Putin
Russia has a long history of populism. The nineteenth century populist movement are often seen as one of the founding moments of modern populism, and the movement and its successors was one of the main revolutionary forces against Tsarism. More recently parties like the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation have been labelled populist and President Vladimir Putin has been called a populist. This article looks at these different strands of Russian populism. It reviews the development of nineteenth century populism – narodnichestvo – and how it developed ideas about the possibility of constructing a Russian socialism based on peasant communes. It examines how narodnichestvo veered between propaganda work and terrorist activity, and how this set the pattern for the revolutionary activity of the first populists’ successors, the Social Revolutionary Party that was formed in the early twentieth century. The article then looks at the different forms that post-Soviet populizm (as populism is labelled in modern Russian) has taken. It looks at the ideas of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and then looks at why Putin has been called a populist, focussing on the ideas that Putin put forward from 2011 onwards about Russia as a particular form of civilization and state. These ideas, it is argued, formed the core of an ‘official’ populism that whilst effective as a means of arguing for Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 are politically sterile.