Nikolay Mikhaylovsky

Nikolay Mikhaylovsky (1842 to 1904) was a Russian literary critic, sociologist and writer on public affairs, and one of the theoreticians of the Narodniki movement, whose thinkers were known in the 1870s and 1880s as exponents of political and economic reform. He wrote for Otechestvennye Zapiski until its suppression in 1884, co-edited Severny Vestnik from 1873 and from 1890 until his death co-edited Russkoye Bogatstvo with Vladimir Korolenko. In essays such as Heroes and Crowd of 1882 he argued that the individual who leads a crowd need not be exceptional, since mass perception reinforces an individual placed by chance at its head. He read social progress as the growth of individuality, which he thought the environment must adapt to, and he held that peasant Russia, with its traditional obshchina, surpassed the capitalist West in its type of social organization even while lagging in its stage of development.