Kablits, Iosif Ivanovich

Kablits, Iosif Ivanovich 

(literary pseudonym, Iuzov). Born June 30 (July 12), 1848, in Trebiskis, in present-day Radvi-liskis Raion, Lithuanian SSR; died Oct. 4 (16), 1893, in St. Petersburg. Russian publicist; Narodnik (Populist). Descended from the dvorianstvo (nobility).

In the first half of the 1870’s, Kablits was active in populistcircles and participated in the movement “to the people.” In St. Petersburg in 1874 he organized a circle of vspyshkopuskateli (incendiaries), whose goal it was to stir up local peasant uprisings in order to revolutionize the masses. Beginning in the late 1870’s he contributed to the journals Nedelia, Slovo, and Mysl’. In the 1880’s he renounced his revolutionary past. Kablits’ main works were The Principles of Populism (1882; 2nd ed., 1888) and The Intelligentsia and the People in the Social Life of Russia (1885; 2nd ed., expanded and revised, published in 1883 as the second volume of the first work). Joining ranks with outright reactionaries in a number of his conclusions, Kablits held an extreme right-wing position in the Populist movement that was not shared by the movement’s majority.