ABSTRACT
Economic development had set in motion forces that threatened social and political stability, forces the autocracy could neither accommodate nor neutralize. Economic change also contributed greatly to social ferment and, after the relative quiet of the 1880s, to the revival of political debate and of the revolutionary movement in the 1890s. Populism was from its very origins in the 1860s more an amalgam of emotions and the diverse, even conflicting, ideas of many minds than a complete, unified body of political or social doctrine. The strong anarchist strand in populism filled its adherents with an abhorrence of politics and liberal reforms, with a distrust of merely political or institutional changes, and a disinterest in political power. To countenance the possibility of a qualified and, it was hoped, temporary participation in the fight for a libe1ialized political order was for populists more than a change of strategy.
