Date: Sat, 4 Feb 95 00:17:25 CST
From: Rebecca Hill <hillx018-AT-maroon.tc.umn.edu>
Subject: Re: populism


  While I am not expert on the Russian populists, as Alex Trotter has 
clearly indicated, I believe that this particular pamphlet, distributed by 
Narodnaya Volya speaks for itself:

Good people, Honest Ukrainian people! Life has become hard in the Ukraine, 
and it keeps getting harder. The damned police beat you, the landowners 
devour you, the kikes, the dirty Judases rob you. People in the Ukraine 
suffer most of all fromthe kikes. Who has seized the land, the woodlands, 
the taverns? The kikes. Whom does the peasant beg with tears in his eyes to 
let him near his own land? the kikes. Wherever you look, whatever you 
touch, everywhere the kikes. The kike curses the peasant, cheats him, 
drinks his blood. The kikes make life unbearable.

 According to Lucy Dawidowicz, this pamphlet represented the official 
position of Narodnaya in 1881.

  As for Marx - who was not, contrary to popular opinion, a Jew - he is not 
immune to criticism in this regard. 
Moreover, while some Jews were populists, this does not mean that the 
populists are immune from criticism. Many radical Jews of this period 
adopted a consciously "cosmopolitan" stance, rejecting Jewish 
identification and favoring universalist assimilationism instead. In light 
of all this, I am always troubled by celebrations of Russian populism. 
    Speaking of populism, I live in Minnesota, the capital of U.S. 
anti-semitism and you guessed it - good ol' Mid-western populism.
  Oversimplified or not, I remain suspicious when I am 
confronted by any movement based not on a theory of social relations, but 
instead in an abstracted idea of the "true people." to defend such a 
movement, as the Narodniks did when they refused to "respond hostiley or 
even indifferently to a truly popular movement" in 1881, simply because it 
is popular, is certainly an overly simplistic response - is it not?
-Rebecca Hill

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