After a period of some historiographical neglect, there has been a resurgence of interest in Russian revolutionary populism, primarily in the form of specific thematic and biographical investigations. Christopher Ely’s sophisticated study nevertheless stands as the first comprehensive Anglophone history of Russian populism in more than thirty years. It is also more than that, however, extending well beyond the heyday of narodnik activity in the 1870s–80s to examine populism’s evolution from its philosophical origins in the first half of the nineteenth century through its transformations in ideology and practice into the early twentieth. This expanded approach is held together admirably by a conceptual core centering the persistent fixation of the educated elite (obshchestvo) on rectifying its perceived alienation from the people (narod), viewed as inherently more authentic than themselves but also in urgent need, in Mikhail Bakunin’s words, of “liberation, elevation, and enlightenment” (5). In its quest for popular authenticity, the urbanized elite looked to the rural masses, untainted by western modernity but suffering from a grinding poverty and benightedness for which intellectuals felt an abiding guilt. This elite reverence for what they imagined the peasantry and the peasant commune to be provides the key connecting thread for the story Ely tells.

This book, then, is above all an impressively thorough history of an interconnected set of ideas and of their evolution for over a century. It is not, however, limited only to the intellectual sphere, with several later chapters devoted to the ways in which revolutionaries (and to a lesser extent reformers) strove to put these ideas into practice. First, it traces the genealogy of populism’s primary ingredients in the early 1800s, as Petr Chaadaev helped shape the growing elite identity crisis and the conservative Slavophiles starkly critiqued the alienation of obshchestvo, with its derivative cosmopolitanism, from the uncorrupted, authentically Russian narod. It was, paradoxically, their veneration of the supposed collective unity of the peasant commune that was adopted and adapted by Aleksandr Herzen in his articulation of a “Russian Socialism.” Herzen, and the populist theorists who followed, famously argued that the commune’s collectivity in fact comprised innately socialist principles, and that through this intellectuals could help propel the country to an agrarian socialism, avoiding the industrial capitalism that troubled the populist radicals no less than it did the Slavophiles. It should be emphasized that Ely takes efforts to include more obscure figures, some of whom he analyzes at length; he also devotes a full chapter to manifestations of populism in art and literature, including among those far from political radical populism.

There is a self-consciousness in justifying the presence of certain people or topics that some already-convinced readers might find not entirely necessary. The author at times spends more time on these figures than those whose inclusion needs no explanation, so that the explication of the work of the pivotal populist theorists Petr Lavrov and Nikolai Mikhailovsky is comparatively brief. There is also, in its utilization of core notional principles to define the parameters of populism, a tendency to dismiss activities that stray from this, even by self-identified populists. For example, it is established that the primary populist archetype for a post-revolutionary political order in the 1870s was a quasi-anarchist network of locally self-sufficient agrarian communities. The fact that the People’s Will, having assassinated the tsar, proposed a mundane parliamentary liberalism is portrayed as a deviation from this rather than a development needing explanation. Their successors during the repressive 1880s are faulted for lacking “organizational discipline” (174), which then explains why thousands were arrested; it could, instead, be asked why many thousands of young people continued to join populist circles despite the obvious risk. Legal populism is relatively narrowly defined and given a short and unhappy trajectory, with little said about the complex relationships between the revolutionary underground and legal actors.

But these are quibbles over coverage for which it is hard to second-guess the author, given the impressive achievement of having presented such a rich and cogent narrative in just over 200 pages, and in the unusual format of this series. It is more important that it concludes with a conscientious examination of the Socialist Revolutionaries, whose neo-populism at a different political moment came tantalizingly close to actually involving peasants as human actors rather than as imagined ideal types. Although the Modern Russia series aims to cover key topics for classroom use and the endnotes are thus limited to direct quotations, the result is still a hybrid textbook/research monograph. While it will be a superb introduction for students unfamiliar with the subject, experts in the field will find it an original and highly welcome scholarly contribution with an innovative and holistic interpretation of Russian populism.