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design textiles and rugs and in 1917 worked
with Vladimir Tatlin in designing the Café Pit-
toresque in Moscow. After the Russian Revolu-
tion she abandoned painting and turned to more
utilitarian concerns, continuing her textile
designs, now for the First State Textile Printing
Factory in Moscow, and designing theater sets
and costumes. Two of her best-known sets were
for Vsevolod
MEYERHOLD
's
The Magnanimous
Cuckold
(1922) and
Earth on End
(1923). Stark
and functional, the sets were designed so that
actors could use them at any time and for any
performance. With Aleksandr
RODCHENKO
she
was one of the leading forces of constructivism.
Before her untimely death, she was working on
avant-garde dress designs that emphasized light-
ness, efficiency and hygiene.
these populists were influenced by
BAKUNIN
's
view that the peasants were inherently revolu-
tionary and were ready to rise against their land-
lords and the state, needing only a spark. Others,
notably the Chaikovsky Circle, followed
LAVROV
in believing that it was first necessary to educate
and train peasant leaders. In 1876 a predomi-
nantly Bakuninist underground organization,
Land and Freedom, was founded, but it had little
success and in 1879 split into two factions:
PEO
-
PLE
'
SWILL
(Narodnaya Volya) and Black Reparti-
tion (Chernyi Peredel). People's Will accepted the
“Jacobin” ideas of a seizure of power by a revolu-
tionary minority, recently advocated by Petr
TKACHEV
, and advocated the use of terror to
achieve revolutionary goals. Black Repartition,
named after the millenarian peasant goal of uni-
versal redistribution of land, rejected terrorism
and remained committed to the idea of building
a revolutionary movement through education
and propaganda. Members of People's Will assas-
sinated Alexander II in 1881, while leaders of
Black Repartition, like Georgii
PLEKHANOV
, emi-
grated. The assassination of the czar, the heavy
repression that followed, and the dispersal of
many of the original populists theorists and
activists marked the end of what is sometimes
known as the classical stage of revolutionary
populism.
populism
Known in Russian as
narodnichestvo,
populism is
an ideological and intellectual movement that
dominated radical thought from the 1860s to the
1880s. Although populism's tenets are often
fluid, at the core of its ideology is a firm belief in
the uniqueness of Russia in comparison with the
West and in the viability of agrarian or peasant
socialism as a path for future development. Its
forerunners were Alexander
HERZEN
and Nikolai
CHERNYSHEVSKY
, who articulated the basic posi-
tion that, drawing from its inherently socialist
peasant communes, Russia could attain socialism
by means of a peasant revolution, thus avoiding
the capitalist stage that Marxists were arguing
was an inevitable part of historical development.
Its core support came from the young people
who attended universities in the 1860s at a
heady time when the
GREAT REFORMS
initiated by
ALEXANDER II
opened up a world of possibilities to
intellectuals. Revolutionary populism was espe-
cially strong in the 1870s, although much of its
emotional capital was spent in the naive and
spectacularly unsuccessful campaign of going “to
the people” (1874), when more than a thousand
students descended upon the countryside only to
find how wide the gap was between themselves
and the peasantry they had idolized. Most of
Potemkin, Grigorii Aleksandrovich
(1739-1791)
statesman
An able statesman who was romantically
involved with
CATHERINE II
the Great, Potemkin
remained her most trusted adviser until his
death. He was born in Smolensk province and
educated at the recently established Moscow
University. Potemkin first came to the attention
of Catherine as one of the participants in the
1762 palace revolt that overthrew her husband,
PETER III
, and placed her on the throne. For his
efforts he was rewarded in 1763 with an
appointment as assistant procurator of the Holy
Synod. He distinguished himself during the
Russo-Turkish War of 1768-74, after which he
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