* The hopes of the zemstvo liberals were never realized. After the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, the powers of the zemstvos were severely curtailed by the government of the new Tsar, Alexander III, who looked upon the zemstvos as dangerous breeding grounds for radicals. Many of the students who had taken part in the 'going to the people' ended up as zemstvo employees - teachers, doctors, statisticians and agronomists whose democratic politics attracted the police. Police raids were carried out on zemstvo offices - including even hospitals and lunatic asylums - in the search for such 'revolutionaries'. They even arrested noblewomen for teaching peasant children how to read. (A. Tyrkogo-Williams, To, chego bol'she ne budet (Paris, n.d.), p. 153).

(whose writings had inspired the student radicals) so that he could publish his journal Forwards! in Europe.²⁰ In his novel Virgin Soil (1877), Turgenev gave a portrait of the types who answered Lavrov's call. Though he saw through the illusions of the Populists, he managed to convey his admiration, too. These 'young people are mostly good and honest', he wrote to a friend on finishing the novel in 1876, 'but their course is so false and impractical that it cannot fail to lead them to complete fiasco'.²¹

Which is just how it turned out. Most of the students were met by a cautious suspicion or hostility on the part of the peasants, who listened humbly to their revolutionary sermons without really understanding anything they said. The peasants were wary of the students' learning and their urban ways, and in many places they reported them to the authorities. Ekaterina Breshkovskaya, later one of Russia's leading socialists, found herself in jail after the peasant woman with whom she was staying in the Kiev region 'took fright at the sight of all my books and denounced me to the constable'.²² The socialist ideas of the Populists were strange and foreign to the peasantry, or at least they could not understand them in the terms in which they were explained to them. One propagandist gave the peasants a beautiful account of the future socialist society in which all the land would belong to the toilers and nobody would exploit anybody else. Suddenly a peasant triumphantly exclaimed: 'Won't it be just lovely when we divide up the land? I'll hire two labourers and what a life I'll have!'²³ As for the idea of turning out the Tsar, this met with complete incomprehension and even angry cries from the villagers, who looked upon the Tsar as a human god. 'How can we live without a Tsar?' they said.²⁴

Rounded up by the police, forced into exile or underground, the Populists returned from their defeat in deep despair. They had invested so much of their own personalities in their idealized conception of the peasantry, they had hung so much of their personal salvation on the 'people's cause', that to see them both collapse was a catastrophic blow to their identity. The writer Gleb Uspensky, to cite an extreme and tragic example, eventually became insane after many years of trying to reconcile himself to the stark reality of peasant life; and many of the Populists were driven to the bottle by this rude awakening. It was suddenly made clear that the idea of the peasantry they had in

their minds did not in fact exist - it was no more than a theory and a myth - and that they were cut off from the actual peasants by a cultural, social and intellectual abyss that they could not hope to bridge. Like an unsolved riddle, the peasant remained unknown and perhaps unknowable.

2

In the summer of 1870 Ilia Repin left St Petersburg for 'an undiscovered land'.²⁵ Together with his brother and a fellow student painter called Fedor Vasilev, he travelled by steamer down the Volga river as far as the town of Stavropol, about 700 kilometres east of Moscow. The young artist's aim was to make a study of the peasants for a painting he had planned of the Volga barge haulers. The idea of the picture had first come to him in the summer of 1868, when he had observed a team of haulers trudging wearily along a river bank near St Petersburg. Repin had originally thought to contrast these sad figures with a well-groomed group of happy picnickers. It would have been a typical example of the sort of expository genre painting favoured by most Russian realists at the time. But he was dissuaded from this propagandist picture by his friend Vasilev, a gifted landscape painter from the Wanderers' school, who persuaded him to depict the haulers on their own.