ABSTRACT
Populism had taken a long time to recover from the shock of 1881 and the crushing of The People's Will. It was years before the populists could bring themselves to realize that The People's Will current was dead. The old vagueness of doctrine, the old reliance on 'action' for its own sake, the old hope for a Utopia which would avoid capitalism—all these things were jettisoned by the new generation of populists. The populists, says Mitrany, 'sat humbly at the feet of Marx when it was a matter of theory, but when it came to applying it they clung to the belief that the peculiar conditions prevailing in Russia and the southern-Slav countries placed them in a category of their own'. The two rival socialist groups, Marxist and populist, had fought bitterly in the past and probably would continue to do so.
