Young People and Revolution (A Sketch to the Political Portrait)
The paper analyses the stages of the Russian history of the 19th century from the perspective of young people’s role at the key moments when new social ideas were born. The historiosophical review makes it easier to understand the situation in which Russia found itself in the early 20th century, the reasons for the three Russian revolutions, which represent a phenomenon indivisible by nature. Young people’s unique role first became clearly evident during the reforms initiated by Peter the Great, when a conflict between generations broke out. New generations of young people of the 18th century supported the new lifestyle. They passed the spiritual relay on to their children. The Decembrists movement appeared in the 1820s under the influence of the enlightenment work and West-European political ideas. The Decembrists organizations can be considered the first youth organizations according to their members’ ages. In the early and mid-19th century, noble youth was the driving force of socio-political movements. From the 1860s, this initiative passed to young intellectuals not of gentle birth. By the end of the century, the revolutionary mass mainly comprised young workmen and intellectual workmen. In the early 20th century, peasant young people began to emerge in the revolutionary environment. Young people headed various revolutionary circles and organizations, they were spiritual leaders and ideologists of various social and revolutionary trends, formed nearly the whole of the revolutionary movement. The youth social movement, cultural and educational in its specific and short-term tasks at first, was eventually revolutionary and political in its essence, for one way or another it led to the change or overthrow of the existing regime. The conditions of young people’s life and the foreign international situation were the main causes of the excitement and continuous growth (with some slumps at critical moments) of the revolutionary movement. Among various moods, circles, and groups in the revolutionary movement, the socialist trend was the most evident and powerful. Socialism best complied with the mentality and psychological state in which Russian society found itself after the reforms of the early 1860s.