Lenin and the Jacobin identity in Russia

By what process was the Jacobin identity transplanted into nineteenth-centu ry Russian radical culture? According to the conventional account, the Jaco bin label was coined by proponents like Zaicnevskij and Tkacev. Lenin, in t urn, is said to have derived his Jacobin identity from them, thus revealing the non-Marxian source of his political ideas. This article contests that interpretation through a study of the origin and spread of the Jacobin term inology in post-emancipation Russia. I show that the Jacobin identity in Ru ssia was invented by anti-Jacobin populists and that there were scarcely an y self-proclaimed Jacobins prior to Lenin. I also reconstruct the path by w hich Lenin came to identify with French Jacobinism. That path remained with in the territory of Marxist theory from beginning to end.