ABSTRACT
The revolutionary movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries played a dual role in the history of freedom in Russia. The revolutionary movement in Russia during the nineteenth century encompassed an extraordinary variety of ideologies, political views, tactics and participants. Although Russia according to Colonel Pavel I. Pestel was supposed to become a democratic republic, all private societies were to be forbidden. Radical land reform was supposed to be carried out by a temporary government with dictatorial powers, and not by an assembly of popular representatives. The founder of Russian populism, with its idealization of the peasant mir and revulsion at western bourgeois culture, was the revolutionary romantic and moderate socialist Alexander Herzen. The Revolution of 1905–1906 revealed that all classes of the Russian people and all the non-Russian peoples of the Russian Empire were dissatisfied with the Pobedonostsev government, and that they demanded constitutional reforms and political freedom.
