The Kazan Square Demonstration and the Conflict Between Russian Workers and Intelligenty

The Kazan Square demonstration of December 6, 1876 was one of a number of attempts by revolutionary intelligenty to forge an alliance with the common people. Two striking features of this demonstration have often been noted. First, participants in the demonstration included not only members of the radical intelligentsia but also urban workers, an unusual feature for the first socialist street demonstration in Russia. Second, fewer workers took part than the radical intelligentsia had hoped, given their active propagandizing among factory workers. Some critics have found fault with the “abstract” nature of the propaganda, to use Georgii Plekhanov's later term. He and others blamed the limited worker participation on the failure of the populists to express concretely the real, immediate interests of the workers. Plekhanov later wrote that the workers of St. Petersburg could only have been drawn to the demonstration because it was a “new spectacle, not seen before.” The workers had no tangible reason for active participation in it. “For this reason they did not go to it.”