Narodnaya Volya: The Self-Defense of Society
The partisan movement United Resistance Front published a reflection on its website regarding a statement by the revolutionary movement Narodnaya Volya, which carried out a successful assassination of Tsar Alexander II on March 1, 1881. Six months later, the same movement condemned the assassination of the American president, providing an interesting justification for such a seemingly paradoxical step.
It suits the Putin regime to lump all resistance together and label it as “senseless and ruthless terrorism.” However, actual Russian history preserves documents that stand out for their extraordinary intellectual and moral strength. One such document was published exactly 145 years ago – on September 10, 1881.
It was a statement by the Executive Committee of the Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) organization regarding the assassination of the American president James Garfield.
The context of this document is tragic. Barely six months had passed since that April morning when the empire had five members of the “March 1st” group executed by hanging. The underground movement was decimated; its best members were executed or sent to forced labor and exile. Yet, at that very moment, the surviving core of the Executive Committee found the strength and courage to declare to the world: we condemn political assassination in America.
“In a country where the personal freedom of the citizen allows for an honest clash of ideas, where the free will of the people determines not only the laws but also who shall rule—in such a country, political assassination is a manifestation of that very spirit of despotism whose destruction we have set as our goal in Russia,” the Executive Committee wrote with cold deliberation.
These lines are the key to understanding the psychology of the revolutionary underground. The members of Narodnaya Volya were not terrorists by nature. They did not like bombs or bloodshed. Perovskaya, Zhelyabov, Hryniewiecki, Figner—these were the brilliant, thinking elite of their time. And they began their activities in a completely peaceful manner. They “went to the people”—to heal, teach, and educate the peasants and to attempt to engage in dialogue.
The Romanov Empire, however, responded to peaceful enlightenment with imprisonment, exile, forced labor, and show trials. The regime itself slammed all the doors shut. It did not leave society a single legal tool to defend its dignity. It was impossible to remove the Tsar from office by voting. His courts were a farce, his gendarmes were executioners. It was the state-sanctioned violence of the power vertical that forced peaceful students to take up dynamite. The terror of the Narodnaya Volya organization was not a mere whim; it was a grim, existential reaction to state terror. It was an act of self-defense by a society that had been deprived of its voice.
This historical lesson falls with brutal force upon our own September of 2026.
Peaceful methods of struggle—individual protests, rallies, petitions, “Smart Voting”—are normal, legitimate, and applicable tools. However, they only work under normal conditions: conditions where the law actually means something and power can be changed.
Attempting to overthrow Putin’s dictatorship today through peaceful protest is equivalent to trying to convince Nikolai Putilov to voluntarily hand over his factories to the workers, or trying to beg for a constitution from Alexander II. It is not just futile; it is criminal. It is a betrayal of those who placed their trust in you. It is a squandering of genuine protest.
Those “internet leaders” who, from the comfort of their lives in emigration, continue to call for “peaceful transformation” and “Smart Voting” in the midst of a total military-repressive concentration camp, are actively aiding the regime. They serve as lightning rods. They take the legitimate anger of society and turn it into a ritual that poses no threat to Lubyanka.
Tsarism did not yield to petitions; it had to be broken by force—by the dynamite of the Executive Committee and the bombs of the SRs. The current dictatorship will not yield to lanterns and white ribbons either. When the authorities burn the legal landscape to ashes, society is left with only one right: the right to rebellion and to the asymmetrical destruction of the repressive machinery.
When the authorities destroy legal politics, when every sincere word is suppressed, and when teenagers are labeled “terrorists” for their comments, methods inevitably change. They begin to resemble the methods of Narodnaya Volya.
When Bashkir partisans set fire to a police car in Oktyabrsky, when partisans from the URF destroy a substation in Rybinsk, and when a war criminal falls under a volley of bullets in the city of Engels—it is not a manifestation of “innate cruelty.” It is a logical consequence. The rules of the game are set by the dictatorship itself. And if the system only understands the language of force and the destruction of infrastructure, society must learn this language. Perovskaya did not wave the white handkerchief because she wanted to kill, but because the empire gave her no other way to be heard. And this movement of the hand still rises before the eyes of every dictatorship as a reminder of the inevitable end.
Source: United Resistance Front
Translated from Russian by Pavel Veselský.
Translation without additions or edits. The text does not express the position of the editorial staff.
