Meanwhile the Will of the People party has continued its activity. We
still hear occasionally of murders, and demonstrations, and arrests, and
discoveries of nihilist plots on the life of the Czar or of high
servants of the Crown, and of alarming discoveries of the hold the
movement was taking in the army. But, according to one of the most
recent writers on the subject, the author of "Socialismus und
Anarchismus, 1883-1886," who admits, however, that it is very difficult
to obtain authentic information about it under the rigorous system of
repression at present practised by the Russian authorities, a small
section of this party, whom he calls the followers of Peter Lavroff,
have been developing more in line with German Social Democracy, and have
organized themselves into a society called the Labour Emancipation
League, which prefers peaceful means of agitation, and in March, 1885,
published its programme, demanding (1) a constitution, (2) the
nationalization of land, (3) the handing over of factories to the
possession of societies of productive labourers, (4) free education, (5)
abolition of a standing army, and (6) full liberty of association and
meeting. The same writer states, however, that this socialist group are
not numerous, and that the various robberies, murders, plots against the
Czar's life, incitements of peasant disturbances, seizures of weapons
and printing presses that keep on occurring, show that the nihilists, as
the others still appear to be called, are much the most active and the
most important section of the revolutionary party. He mentions also that
in 1884 considerable sensation was produced by the discovery of an
anarchist secret society in Warsaw, with several magistrates at its
head, which aimed at creating a revolution in Poland,--Prussian and
Austrian Poland, as well as Russian,--and rebuilding the Polish nation
on a socialist basis. On the apprehension of its leaders it dissolved,
but sprang to life again almost immediately in two separate
organizations--one directly allied with the Russian Terrorists, and the
other, under the influence of a Jew named Mendelssohn, suppressing its
Polish nationalism for the present, and linking itself with the Russian
socialists--presumably the followers of Lavroff just mentioned.
CHAPTER X.
SOCIALISM AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION.
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