Before Lenin

...and perhaps he should have addressed himself explicitly to the inherent difficulties involved in using the concept of populism (narodnichestvo...

...Thus the influence of the "father of Russian Socialism"—along with that of his intellectual comrade-in-arms, N. P. Ogarev, whose true role in the movement, it seems to me, has still not been fully appreciated—may well have been more seminal than Ulam suggests...

...One must note, first of all, the conspicuous absence here of Mikhail Bakunin, whose influence, particularly on the revolutionaries of the 1860s, I think is underestimated by Ulam...

...At the same time, however, the seven pages Ulam devotes, to nihilism do not seem commensurate with the importance of the phenomenon...

...Ulam discourses at length on the growing disillusionment of the "new men" with Herzen after 1861, but he has little to say about the younger, more radical Herzen of 1848-49, who in effect advocated la politique du pire, eulogized Louis Blanqui as "the only revolutionary of our epooh," called for universal destruction, and even suggested that Nicholas I and his Cossacks could make more complete the holocaust in which Western civilization would eventually destroy itself...

...He also takes us on an intriguing journey through the Ideenwelt of the Russian radicals of that time, probing into the underlying motivations and psychology of these remarkable men and women who, in rebelling against their immediate world, became members of what N. V. Chay-kovsky called the "order of knights...

...What is more, Ulam provides us with a masterful sketch of the larger background Russian radicalism developed against...

...Instead, he correctly observes that "the intellectual baggage" of the "average Populist . . . contained...

...Emphatically rejecting the Lenin-initiated and Soviet-cultivated claim that Chernyshevsky was a "revolutionary democrat," Ulam skillfully exposes the elitism that lurked behind many of these 19th-century rebels...

...little use, if any, is made of Martin Malia's study of the young Aleksandr Herzen...

...Yet when P. G. Zaichnevsky, author of Young Russia, proclaimed in 1862 that his country was "entering the revolutionary period of its existence," that reform was out of the question, that the one alternative left was "a bloody and implacable revolution?a revolution which must radically change all the foundations of existing society and destroy all those who support the existing order," he was merely echoing and pushing to their logical conclusion ideas Herzen had expressed some 15 years earlier...

...For in his latest book he does not simply give us a fascinating account of the Russian revolutionary movement during the crucial decades from 1855-84, and detail the successive conspiracies that shook the foundations of tsarism but in the end failed to bring down the edifice...

...Ulam is equally at home in the writings of the "prophets and conspirators" themselves, in the memoirs and belles-lettres of the period, in the relevant government documents, and in the vast secondary literature now available in many languages...

...Ulam makes a brief reference to the former without discussing their ideas, and fails to mention the latter at all...

...Although the book is meticulously documented (unlike some of Ulam's earlier works), the decision to translate all Russian and Polish titles into English in the footnotes also strikes me as unfortunate, especially in the absence of a bibliography...

...Reviewed by Rolf H.W.Theen Professor of Political Science, Purdue University...

...Yet Venturi incorporated a great deal more background information on the Decembrists and Petrashev-ists...

...And it was the Petrashevists who, in the 1840s, made the idea of social justice one of the paramount concerns of Russian radicals...

...He ignores the fact that by 1825, Pestel, the most important theorist among the Decembrists, had envisaged the wholesale liquidation of the imperial family, developed the idea of a temporary or transitional dictatorship, and shown a remarkable awareness of how Russia's socioeconomic backwardness could be converted into an asset for the cause of revolt...

...Reading In the Name of the People, one hears clearly the music Namier spoke of...

...While the picture that emerges is familiar in its general outlines, some of the details are, at least to the English reader, novel...

...Indeed, when Tkachev developed the idea of the "revolutionary state" in the mid-'70s, he was expressing what had been, was or would be in the minds of most of the leading figures in Russian radicalism...

...The author successfully resists a temptation many historians—Western, pre-Revolutionary Russian and Soviet—have succumbed to: classifying revolutionists into more or less neat categories, such as Jacobin, Lavrovist, Bakuninist, etc...

...Along with the concept of the "professional revolutionary," it is this idea that constitutes the most important legacy of the Russian revolutionary tradition to Lenin and to our day...

...author, "Lenin: Genesis and Development of a Revolutionary" "What matters," Sir Lewis Namier once wrote of political thought, "is the underlying emotions, the music to which the ideas are the mere libretto...

...Most of the sources this study is based on are so esoteric that the translations do not really help the reader...

...Herzen, V. G. Belinsky, Bakunin, Nikolai Shelgunov, Chernyshevsky, Lev Tikhomirov—all were fascinated with the idea of a "progressive autocracy," a revolutionary on the throne of Russia, an "enlightened despot...

...To be sure, at first glance the distance between Herzen the "gentry revolutionary," so deeply committed to a peaceful solution, and the "bilious people" who ended up "calling Russia to the axes," seems stupendous indeed...

...In short, no matter how much Nicholas I, Herzen and Chernyshevsky helped shape the Russian revolutionary tradition, they did not create it...

...and in his characterization of N. G. Cher-nyshevsky the author fails to exploit the revealing diary of this "archbishop of propaganda...

...a veritable mishmash of ideas and emotions rather than a definite ideology: odds and ends of socialism and anarchism of all sorts, held together only by a sense of obligation to 'the people' and hatred of the tsarist regime...

...Such questions of interpretation and omission notwithstanding, Ulam has given us a valuable and penetrating work...

...This observation might well have served as an inspiration to Adam Ulam...

...by carrying his study to the year 1884, Ulam is able to deal with the inherent problems of the terrorist approach to revolution and the real crisis of populism, both of which became fully apparent only after March 1, 1881—the day of the assassination of Alexander II and Venturi's cutoff date...

...Throughout, he shows the tenuous nature of many revolutionaries' belief in the people, in whose name they justified their actions, but for whom they developed increasing contempt—particularly after the Pilgrimage to the People in the 1870s had revealed the true nature of, in Proudhon's words, "the quiet beast...

...It is true that his endpoint works better than Franco Venturi's in Roots of Revolution...

...Nevertheless, there are some curious lapses in this book: One looks in vain for any reference to the four excellent volumes on Pyotr Lavrov and the clandestine quarterly, Vpered, edited by Boris Sapir, or to Leonard Schapiro's Rationalism and Nationalism in Russian Nineteenth-Century Political Thought...

...Ulam begins by focusing on Nicholas I, Herzen and Chernyshev-sky—the three towering figures who "in virtue of what . . . [they] did and thought, and in virtue of the forces they represented and set into motion . . . created the Russian revolutionary tradition...

...By using the lives of those he designates the main actors in the liberation movement as the essential threads of his narrative fabric, Ulam runs into another hazard: The characterizations of Bakunin, Lav-rov, Sergei Nechaev, Pyotr Tkachev, and, most of all, Herzen, occasionally seem too static...

...historians and other specialists, on the other hand, would find transliteration more useful...

...A more general question is raised by the time frame the author has chosen...

...It is from the life histories of major and minor figures in the liberation movement that Ulam fashions a mosaic of the events and issues that agitated Russia during and after the "Era of the Great Reforms...

...For example, Ulam demonstrates the key role of Nicholas Obmchov in the first Zemlya i Volya and, in an insightful discussion, the complex and mutually fateful relationship between the Russian and Polish revolutionary movements...