For The People
Russian Socialists came from the intellectual classes. They were well educated, at least middle class, and rarely interacted with the peasantry which formed the massive majority and base of Russian society. But like the elites of previous generations, they believed that the Russian peasantry was the pure and moral embodiment of the Russian spirit. The socialists wanted to create a utopia in Russia, drawing their plans from the simple communal life which the peasants already enacted and believed in but which had been squashed by Tsarist autocracy. In the summer of 1874, thousands of radical students went into the countryside to begin the Revolution, to learn the true ways from the peasants and empower them to enact the utopia they all wanted. But the peasants didn’t want any such things. The Tsar was their beloved sovereign.
During the Great War, Nicholas II struggled to hold onto power as the aristocracy and the liberal Duma demanded reforms. They demanded these reforms because the war was going horribly and Nicholas’s absolute control of the state was an obvious cause of the trouble. But the elites had been saying as such for years, and Nicholas held strong to his duty and commitment to the people. Beyond the immediate confines of the capital, Nicholas knew that the peasants all loved him, and that any surrender of power would be met with outrage and so he clung to autocracy for years. He was finally forced to abdicate in February of 1917, ending centuries of Romanov rule. The peasants barely reacted. They wanted bread and peace.
Political ideologies are based on visions of how society should be. Intellectual elites, the consistent author of modern political ideologies, often like to ground their vision not just in the future but in some near-utopian present embattled by the forces they oppose. These are The People, the great masses of moral and pure individuals on behalf of whom the elites struggle. But just as consistently, The People are themselves a vision based on the imagined needs of the elite. The vision rarely survives contact with actual people, and in some cases when the people fail to live up to vision, it is the vision which holds fast and the people who are forced to change.
Examples are easy to find in all the standard 20th century ideologies. The German Volk were imagined, the good peasants of China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Reagan’s moral majority, the ultra-leftist coalition or poor BIPOC people who are ready to vote for Bernie Sanders in masses but didn’t actually vote for him1. These populations are tools of rhetoric in interelite and interideological competition, imagined for this purpose alone.
The People are not only a source of and exemplar of moral goodness, but are also usually posited as in some way the true people of the country. Any talk of the heartland, whether in Kansas or Anatolia, posits a population of simple people who have long occupied their land and belong there. This only makes sense in opposition to the other people, who don’t deserve to be in the country and are less deserving of care. It becomes a morally acceptable move to make general policies benefit only the true People (whose preferences are imagined anyway). This protects the interests of real Americans, real French, true communists. Advocating for policies based on the preferences and lifestyle of some fossilized population from the past is nearly definitional of modern conservative nationalism, whether the ideal is Hindu or Hungarian. Many Israeli conservatives claim their authority from the moral population of religious Jews even though they themselves are not religious. Religious Jews in other countries have almost never counted as really belonging to The People, the tragic consequences of which are well known.
Arguments about The People for the sake of political ideology are best understood as part of the much longer tradition of idealizations of commoners for the sake of interelite social competition. Classical Mediterranean poets wrote their pastoral poetry about the pure life of farmers without any thought of political revolution – they were simply advocating for the life of the villa over the life of the city. Idealization of the life of the poor has been present in nearly every major literary tradition, always used to oppose the excess of the other side of court life which preferred ostentatious finery and despised commoners. One who can abandon the court for a rural idyll can claim to be more sophisticated and fashionable than one addicted to luxury. Japanese Emperors writing about the struggles of rural farmers were consciously cultivating an aesthetic ideal of poverty which they never would have thought of experiencing themselves, condescending sympathy was a legitimating political move. Marie Antoinette had a peasant village that she could stroll in set up outside of Versailles as a part of her participation in aristocratic fashion (peasant spaces are more intimate), not a rejection of wealth. Advocating for the people’s ways is usually morally preferable to despising them, at least in public, but has no necessary connection to actually caring.
in an autumn field | a straw hut | gaps in the thatch my sleeves | are damp with the dew Emperor Tenji, 7th century
What are the people actually like, the totality of persons who live in the space controlled by a government? It is hard to say. It may be impossible to aggregate the interests, desires, and passions of millions of people into something easily understandable. Statistical opinion polling, only invented and refined relatively recently, is probably our best tool though still highly imperfect. For any ideologue who wants to see the world change, the results are often disappointing. People mostly like it when things stay the same. People want their own material advancement more than they want the material advancement of others. People are actually not very different from the ideology-making elites who claim alternately to be high above or far below their moral quality. And that doesn’t change the fact that any moral politics should be done on behalf of the people.
The other strand in Russian Socialism, that believed in elite leadership and distrusted the peasantry, was the one that ultimately won out. This was its own tragedy, wrong in its own ways. But Marx and his followers were correct that the actual welfare of the future outweighs the perceived interests of the present. When exposed to more information, the peasantry correctly perceived that the Tsar absolutely did not care for them and was preventing the advancement of their welfare. And the people correctly perceived that the Communist state didn’t either when it fell 75 years later. The people, the real people, are still our best guide, but to shed millennia of cultural projection and status games will be a challenge that none have yet managed.
The wide variance in these examples and their consequences is to demonstrate the generality of the phenomenon, not to imply an equivalence between the movements or their results.