In 1861 Alexander Herzen issued his famous call: ‘To the people.’ It was a summons to his fellow Russian radicals in the intelligentsia to bring the gospel of socialism to the peasant masses of their country. In Russia and the Slav world, according to Herzen and his followers, the peasantry, the people, had preserved their communal institutions intact. These would make the creation of a new social order possible without going through the stage of capitalist industrialism. A loosely federated commonwealth of free peasant communities would be Russia’s contribution to a better world. Such ideas, through the writings of Herzen...

In the uprising against the Russians which broke out in November 1830 in Warsaw, the capital of the so-called Congress Kingdom established in 1815, the Poles were finally defeated after nearly a year’s fighting. To escape the repression which the Russian administration now instituted, many who had taken part in one way or another in the uprising went into exile. The number of émigrés eventually exceeded seven thousand persons. The political régime in the Polish provinces under Austrian and Prussian rule, which had not been involved in the fighting, was less severe than under the Russians. But for over a...

The arrival in Portsmouth of the Polish veterans at the beginning of 1834 had provided a suitable opportunity for propagating socialism. The humiliations of serfdom still rankled in their minds, and their disillusionment with most of their officers, who in captivity had enjoyed comforts and privileges denied the common soldiers, added to their susceptibility to radical slogans. When several of the socialist-mindedémigréintellectuals, then most strongly represented in the Democratic Society’s group on the island of Jersey, had settled among the largely illiterate soldiers they found ready converts. Neither the expulsion of the Jersey socialists from the Democratic Society...

‘In Poland,’ wrote Marx and Engels in theCommunist Manifesto,the communists ‘support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection in Cracow in 1846.’¹ The agrarian revolution advocated by these Polish left-wing nationalists during the years following the failure of the insurrection against the Russians in 1830 was not, however, a communist one.² After a successful uprising against the three partitioning powers, they aimed, at least in the provinces ruled by Austria and Russia, at linking the emancipation of the peasantry to the granting of full property...

The failure of the new insurrection against the Russians, which broke out in January 1863, brought a fresh wave of exiles to join those already in the West. But neither in numbers nor in influence was the new emigration to equal its predecessor, the ‘Great Emigration’ Agrarian socialist ideas, it is true, still found a number of adherents, while the revolutionary populist traditions of the communes of the ‘Polish People’ also remained alive; and Proudhon was particularly influential now, as were the Russians, Herzen, who had worked closely with Worcell in the 1850s, Bakunin, and Chernishevsky. At the same time...