Abstract
Socialism in Russia began with Alexander Herzen, who escaped from Russia in 1847 to seek revolution in the west but in exile discovered the socialist potential of the country he had left behind. Herzen had all the makings, it might have seemed, of a liberal. Nearly all his friends were from the liberal cultural elite. He himself had strongly libertarian convictions. It was to be free and to fight for freedom for others that he had left Russia and would suffer the miseries of permanent exile. For all that, Alexander Herzen emerged not as a liberal but as a socialist who fiercely assailed liberalism and the bourgeois civilization it upheld. And yet his socialist beliefs were significantly different from those of his great contemporary, Karl Marx. They were to be the source of the distinctively Russian socialism which became known as ‘populism’.
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© 2002 John Gooding
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Gooding, J. (2002). Before Lenin. In: Socialism in Russia. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403913876_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403913876_2
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