The socio-political movements in Russia in the 19th century were distinguished by the breadth of content and the variety of methods of action. This largely determined the fate of the country in the future.
At the beginning of the century, as a socio-political current, conservatism was formed. Karamzin (his theoretician) said that the monarchy at that time most fully corresponded to the existing level in the development of human enlightenment and morality.
In the period from the 1830s to the 1840s, heated debates about the uniqueness of the Russian historical path capture social circles. Thus, the socio-political movements of the “Westerners” and “Slavophiles” are formed.
The main figures among the Westerners were groups of professors, writers, publicists of St. Petersburg (Cavelin, Botkin, Granovsky). They declared development according to a general pattern in all civilized countries. They saw the originality of Russia only in its backwardness from other countries, both in the political and in the economic sphere. Westerners considered the perception of ready-made advanced forms of social and economic life as the most important task facing society and the authorities. By this, they primarily meant the abolition of serfdom, class distinctions at the legal level, ensuring entrepreneurial freedom, the development of local government, and the democratization of the judiciary.
The Westernizers opposed the Slavophiles. Among the leading figures in this movement, the Aksakov brothers , Khomyakov, and the Kireevsky brothers should be mentioned . They believed that the historical movement of Russia is fundamentally different from the way in Western European countries. Along with this, they rejected the theory of political and economic backwardness of the fatherland, saying that the state was characterized by a dissimilarity to European standards.
The social and political movements of the 1840s consisted mainly of officers and students. Butashevich-Petrashevsky united them around him . Participants in the current were engaged in active educational activities, organizing the publication of an encyclopedic dictionary of democratic and social content.
Socio-political movements of the 1860s contributed to the formation of such an independent movement as liberalism. Its basis is new magazines, newspapers, zemstvo bodies, university professions. Liberalism was multifaceted. Its left wing was associated with the revolutionary underground, and the right with the camp of guards.
In the early 1860s, the movement “Earth and Freedom”, formed by Sleptsov, Chernyshevsky and other figures, was strong enough to grow into an all-Russian organization. However, later it split into two camps. So formed the socio-political movements, which were called the "Black Redistribution" and "People's Will". The second, in fact, became the successor to the “Earth and Will”.
Russian socio-political movements of the 19th century in the 1870s gradually switched to new activities. So, since 1874, a rather massive exit to the people began, in which thousands of young men and women participated.
Between the 1870s and 1880s, the Russian workers' movement intensified. The first organizations of the proletariat that arose in Odessa and Petersburg, despite their small numbers, contributed to the revision of their positions by the revolutionaries.
The activities of the Emancipation of Labor formation, under the leadership of Plekhanov, began with the translation and distribution in Russia of the publications of Engels and Marx. The first Marxists argued that capitalism had already begun in the country, and that the working class would have to lead the national struggle against tsarism, for socialism and social justice.
In 1895 Plekhanov and his comrades-in-arms created a fairly large organization, which actively took part in individual workers' strikes.