ABSTRACT
Populism is a highly polysemous concept, which is prone to many descriptions and is highly ambiguous. Its conceptual definition is the main epistemological difficulty, as trying to restrict it into a rigorous and univocal semantic limitation is not an easy task. It is exactly for these reasons that, in the field of social and political studies, many researchers are still deeply sceptical of the phenomenon's very own existence. As Margaret Canovan stressed many times, a deep correlation exists between populist phenomena and popular sovereignty; therefore, populism can be seen as a shadow of democracy. Russian populism developed in the Tsarist authoritarian context, where there was no democratic institutional reference framework, and was able to elaborate a prospect of overturning the authoritarian sovereignty, the same prospect that was reinterpreted in a Marxist vein by the Bolshevik revolutionary movement. When a populist phenomenon manifests itself in a non-authoritarian republican and democratic context, it can be defined as fully fledged political populism.
