Nihilism has always been an interest of mine, but I never knew there was a period in which so many had organized in a revolutionary manor.
Wow. Someone is actually asking about this. Finally I can share my knowledge about Russian Nihilism. Just for the record, I intend to study this much more comprehensively in the summer, so hopefully I could provide more answers then.
Moral nihilism (also known as ethical nihilism) is the meta-ethical view that nothing is intrinsically moral or immoral. For example, a moral nihilist would say that killing someone, for whatever reason, is neither inherently right nor inherently wrong. Moral nihilists consider morality to be constructed, a complex set of rules and recommendations that may give a psychological, social, or economical advantage to its adherents, but is otherwise without universal or even relative truth in any sense.
So, Nestor Kotlyarevski characterised the movement thusly: “The radicalism of the 60’s was a complete rejection of all the previously dominant views regarding the abstract fundamentals of life and an attempt to replace these views by a new outlook based upon a materialist and utilitarian interpretation of all the problems of life and the spirit.”^1
Nihilist thinking was essentially utopian - while unequivocally and almost fanatically rejecting the status quo, the weakest side of their thinking was the psychological - they believed that mankind was essentially perfect and would blossom - once the evil ideas and wrong social institutions were done away with, essentially believing in humanity's capability to sustain anarchy. Much of Russian thinking in the 19th century followed this tradition, including Bakunin’s anarchism, his belief in the power of creative destruction and his mystique of the primitive, revolutionary peasant. Leo Tolstoy also rejected modern civilisation as unjust, worthless and evil, and this viewpoint while not definitively nihilist, could be considered an offshoot of the Nihilist rebellion against traditional values.
The magnum opus of the Nihilist movement is Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. The protagonist, Bazarov, is a medical student and nihilist, who returns to a provincial way of life and falls in love with Anna Odintsova. He struggles to reconcile his nihilist views with human emotion, and after being rejected, falls into boredom and ennui, and in essence becomes a "superfluous man" (although this is a less prominent example of this literary construct, see below). Bazarov complains to his friend that "...they, that is, my parents, are occupied, and don't worry in the least about their own insignificance; they don't give a damn about it... While I...I feel only boredom and anger."
The superfluous man is an 1840s and 1850s Russian literary concept derived from the Byronic hero. It refers to an individual, perhaps talented and capable, who does not fit into social norms. In most cases, this person is born into wealth and privilege. Typical characteristics are disregard for social values, cynicism, and existential boredom; typical behaviors are gambling, romantic intrigues, and duels. He is often un-empathetic and carelessly distresses others with his actions.
This term was popularised by Ivan Turgenev's novella The Diary of a Superfluous Man (1850). The character type originates in Alexander Pushkin's verse-novel Eugene Onegin. Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time depicts another Superfluous Man – Pechorin – as its protagonist. He can be seen as a nihilist and fatalist. Later examples include Alexander Herzen's Beltov and the titular character of Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov (1859). Russian critics such as Vissarion Belinsky viewed the superfluous man as a by-product of Nicholas I's reactionary reign, when the best educated men would not enter the discredited government service and, lacking other options for self-realisation, doomed themselves to live out their life in passivity.
This movement then combined in part, and gradually was replaced by populism (narodnichestvo). Where the nihilists gloried in their 'emancipation', independence and superiority, the populists felt compelled to return to the masses. They believed in the unique worth and potential of the peasant commune (see Bakunin's theories on peasant mysticism). The movement's climax was the 1873/1874 "going to the people". When the Russian government ordered students to abandon studies in Switzerland (where Russians, especially women could study more easily than at home), the students decided to go to the people. The masses didn't respond, and the only uprising the populists could offer was when they forged a manifesto from the Tsar ordering peasants to attack their landlords. The populists had failed to grasp the peasant's inherent conservatism, and their real desire lay in acquiring land, not overthrowing the Tsar, regarded still by many peasants at this point as their "Little Father", or the establishment. They believed that the corrupt bureaucracy was holding back the Tsar, and if he could only see what was happening, he would answer their plight.^2
The Populist movement split, between "Total Land Repartition", which emphasised gradualism and propaganda, and the "People's Will", which advocated immediate terrorism, believing that it's effectiveness would be expounded because of the highly centralised Russian state. I'm not going to go into detail here, but the People's Will were responsible for the assassination of Alexander II.
One interesting thing to note is that some scholars have drawn parallels between the Bolsheviks and Nihilism. While I can't go into much detail here, as I need to study it further, I will leave you with a quote from Berdyaev: “Lenin… … had the tastes and sympathies [of the people of the 1860s].”
^1 Frederick C. Barghoorn. (1948). D. I. Pisarev: A representative of Russian Nihilism. The Review of Politics. Vol. 10 (2), 190-211.
^2 Referring here to a growing land hunger, as rapid population increase put added pressures on arable land.
Some other sources:
Most of my info here is coming from journal articles, aside from the one mentioned above, check out (you'll need access to JSTOR - should be ok if you're part of a university or institution, if not, I might be able to dig up some other recommendations):