Russian socialism
Socialism simply may be seen as a social and economic theory of social organization advocating state ownership and control over means of production, distribution, and exchange. Russian socialism has a particular significance because, according to some, it actually succeeded (well at least the Bolsheviks thought they were establishing a socialist state). There were certain factors which made conditions in Russia more susceptible to the establishment of the first communist regime such as the lack of an outlet for expression absence of representative assemblies which made anyone who thought of changing a system a revolutionary. Where parliamentary and universal suffrage were unknown as in Russia extreme revolutionary communism could strike roots, the parliamentary leaders instinctively think in terms of voters and majorities instead of classes. On founding the Russian Social-Democratic Workers, Party (1898) declared: “The farther east we go in Europe the weaker, more abject and more cowardly becomes the bourgeoisie, and the more its cultural and political tasks fall to the lot of the proletariat.” But inevitability of communism in Russia should not be stretched beyond this. Socialism in Russia had a long history.
The debate on socialism is placed in the larger context of a cultural debate on the identity of the Russian nation. In 1939, Winston Churchill had remarked: “it [Russia] is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. With such a simple statement Churchill had managed to brilliantly captivate the great riddle that Russia has been throughout her existence for her people, rulers and for politicians and historians that have had to deal with her from the world over. This riddle has sometimes been referred to as the ‘crisis’
in Russian identity; sometimes as the Russian ‘problem’, ‘dilemma’ or ‘ambiguity’. A powerful and enduring debate has existed in Russia between the “Westerners”, who wanted to draw the country closer to Europe and “Slavophiles”, who insisted that Russia
had its own distinct identity. This debate had been central to Russian cultural development and every thought in Russia thus, had these two perspectives. The period between the late 1830s and 1850s, was when the existing divisions within the ‘intelligentsia’ came to be reconfigured along arguments that were polemically known as
‘Slavophile’ and ‘Westernizing’. Each of these two camps was constituted as much by the polemical refusals of its positions by its rival as by its own agency.
Russian Intelligentsia is usually denoted to that section of educated elite who became critical of the existing order. A radical minority among them broke away from the conventional ties and made a conscious commitment to revolutionary overthrow of the czarist order. Emerging significantly in 1860s, these revolutionary elite established a tradition of revolutionary thought, organization, propaganda, and agitation. It was they who introduced the revolutionary vocabulary and founded socialist parties. These revoltes, as Isaiah Berlin calls them, set the moral tone for the kind of talk and action which continued throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, until the final climax of 1917.
Members of the intelligentsia, despite their mutual divergences in ideological location, did inhabit a common discursive terrain. They were – and this defined them – engaged intellectuals in the understood sense of the term, concerned with the analysis and solution of the problems that faced Russian society. They were also completely divorced from the exercise of power. This was what made the intelligentsia a recognizable, discrete intellectual body, clearly distinct from the official ideologues and thinkers of Tsarist Russia. The range of positions available to the intelligentsia was wide, as it was in Europe: there were conservatives, reactionaries, liberals, monarchists, republicans and socialists. However, the context in which these positions came to be articulated is of central importance. In themselves, most of these ideas weren’t new; they were drawn
from the established intellectual traditions in Western Europe, and appealed to the same sources of legitimacy. The separation of the intelligentsia from political power refigured the European traditions their ideas were drawn from, and ideas that were drawn from European conservatism could be used in the service of extremely radical causes. Translated into another context, the thought-patterns of the Enlightenment, of revolution, of liberal constitutionalism, of conservative reaction, of romanticism, and of egalitarian utopia were all sketched into the contours of ideologies and practices that may have been anathema to them in Europe. The apparent asymmetry of the trajectories of European (which meant, essentially, Western European) and Russian development led to intense speculation about Russia’s present and future.
All this is not to suggest that ideas were valued purely instrumentally and not for their own sake: the abstract fascinations of the thought of Hegel, Schelling and Feuerbach were great, and much of Russian intellectual practice was steeped in abstraction. Of the Hegelian wave of the 1840s Herzen wrote: “People who loved each other avoided each
other for weeks at a time because they disagreed on the definition of “all-embracing spirit”, or had taken as personal insult an opinion on “the absolute personality and its existence in itself.”
The Slavophiles and the Westernizers developed radically different positions on the issues that their predecessors had chalked out. Their debates were carried out in the intellectual ferment of the 1830s and 1840s, dominated by the influence of German
Idealism on the philosophical circles of the time. Schellingianism and, later and much more powerfully, Hegelianism, refigured the philosophical preoccupations of the intelligentsia. In the Slavophile imagination, the mir emerged as the body that enshrined and protected the principle of communal property. The emphasis on commonality was central to the Slavophiles, who abjured the notion that the individual could fashion his own morality and his own ways of living; these must be subjected to the jurisdiction of common moral norms. To put it in very simple terms, the Westernizers started from the
acceptance of Russian backwardness and European superiority. This did not make them either less patriotic or more universalistic than the Slavophiles, for the problems they addressed and analyzed were basically the same, and the regeneration of Russia was as central to them as their opponents. However, in general their ideas were informed by a far more positive appreciation of the meaning of Western ‘progress’, an appreciation triggered in part by their great fascination with the grand currents in Western philosophy, and in particular the thought of Hegel. Given these starting points, the Westernizers moved off in very different directions, and by the end of the 1840s there were clearly discernible differences between the liberal and the more left-wing and socialist variants of Westernism.
Before 1850s, utopian socialism (French socialists were formulating extremely vague principles, labeled `utopian’ in a largely – though not entirely – derogatory sense by Marx and Engels) enjoyed special popularity. The Petrashevtsky who wrote Pocket Dictionary of Foreign Terms, were executed in 1849 on charge of conspiracy, were influenced by French and British thinkers such as Fourier, Proudhon and Blanc. What was original in the Petrashevtsy movement was its adoption of socialist ideas with democratic rights. Their social philosophy of enlightenment view of human nature and natural social relations paved way for the “enlighteners” of the 1860s.
The Russian intelligentsia grappled with Hegel in a complex manner. For Hegel, the modern state (he was evidently speaking of the Prussian state) had achieved the final negation of all negations, it was absolute and final. The real was the rational, and this was an achieved result, not a radical project waiting to be made and renewed. The rational was not simply potentially real, but actually real. The Russian Hegelians – among them Stankevich, Belinsky, Bakunin and Konstantin Aksakov in his pre-Slavophile days, were tormented by the ‘reconciliation with reality’ that this seemed to present, not least
because they were, in the apparent political hopelessness of these years, deeply enchanted by it. Herzen’s Memoirs contain a vivid description of his shock when, returning to Moscow from a three-year exile in 1840, he found Belinsky and Bakunin preaching the gospel of reconciliation with reality. Significantly, Herzen was the only major Westernizing intellectual of his time not to succumb to the conservative interpretation of Hegel. Belinsky took over and refigured the Slavophile notion of the contrast between ancient and modern Russia and that between Russia and Europe, reinterpreting the dichotomies in the light of Hegelian dialectics. Three great dialectical moments or stages defined Russian history for Belinsky. The stage of ‘natural immediacy’, of a people enclosed within themselves, unaware of the outside world and living as one with nature, pre-reflectively, almost primitively, in a highly integrated and highly unselfconscious
state, was the first of these. The focus on the near-primitiveness of the narod (people) was
deliberate, counterposed to the volkish idealizations the Slavophiles invested so heavily in. This stage was negated by that of ‘reflection’, as, in the process of reflection about this condition, people differentiated into ruler and ruled, into social strata, and a political life emerged. ‘Consciousness’ came to demarcate people from one another. This negation was in its turn negated, in classic Hegelian form, as the dialectic moved into the stage of synthesis and the previous stages were ‘sublated’. European universalism in this age comes to acquire a Russian dimension, just as everything that was authentically ‘Russian’ comes to be Europeanized. The historical agent for this change, according to Belinsky, is not the state but the intelligentsia. It is here that he affirms the radical moral responsibility to the future that drove Slavophiles and Westernizers alike (but especially the latter).
The attack on Gogol for his Selected Passages From A Correspondence With Friends, which had defended serfdom and autocracy, made Belinsky the most devastating literary critic (Berlin sees him as the founder of ‘social criticism’) and the most revered moral intelligence of his times. His engagement with ideas of a more radical stripe seems
evident here, as he condemns the Russian clergy, characterized by ‘fat bellies, scholastic
pedantry and savage ignorance’. His understanding of the Russian people, as contained
here, is utterly different from the exaltations of the Slavophiles: here the people are celebrated for their lucidity and common sense, and ‘therein, perhaps, lies the vastness of its historical destinies in the future’. Belinsky’s roots in Russia (he knew no foreign languages, unlike his peers) are constantly reaffirmed and celebrated. This confirms
the inadequacy of an equation of the Westernizer/Slavophile divide with a nationalist/internationalist divide. By the end of his life, Belinsky was beginning to come to terms with the problem of capitalism, and to profess socialist convictions. These were still confused convictions while a vague ideal of ‘socialism’ was seen as desirable as an end in itself, Belinsky tended to believe that this needed to be achieved through the historical path of capitalism and bourgeois democracy. Walicki argues, though, that Belinskii always remained essentially within the bourgeois democratic tradition, with which a certain anger with, and even contempt of, the bourgeoisie was not entirely incompatible. Not being prepared to embrace Fourier and utopian socialism as unambiguously as the Petrashevtsy did, Belinsky could see no path other than the bourgeois one towards the accomplishment of the immediate goal: Western modernity. At the same time, his experiences abroad demonstrated the palpable suffering and pauperization that were a direct consequence of this very accomplishment. Belinskii was the most public and vigorous critic of the Slavophiles, and the epithet ‘Westernizer’ came to be primarily associated with those who were influenced by him and formed part of the intellectual circles he was part of.
The person who continued to profess a political and social radicalism long after Westernism was no longer a tenable transformative ideology was, of course, Alexander Herzen (1812-70), often seen as the greatest figure in the history of nineteenth-century Russian thought(the father of Russian socialism). For Isaiah Berlin, Herzen is significant above all for his commitment to individual liberty, which he sees as a source of tension for his socialism. Herzen as a complex and many-sided thinker, steeped in the intellectual traditions of the West, committed to a radical egalitarianism and the central figure in the
shift from liberalism to socialism as the radical alternative for the Russian intelligentsia. Herzen, unlike Belinsky, avoided the attractions of the ‘reconciliation with reality’ propounded by Belinsky and Bakunin. Herzen engaged fruitfully with Schelling, Saint-Simonian socialism, Hegel and Feuerbach, but it was a more critical engagement than some of the other Westernizers could manage. As Berlin points out, Herzen’s appreciation of Hegel was tempered by his concern for the particular and the contingent, and his suspicion of grand world-historical schemes. Berlin’s interpretation, though, is possibly a little static, since – with a range of qualifications – Herzen was for a long time a committed Hegelian, though, as Walicki points out, he distinguished between the purely cognitive logic (purged of contingency and circumstance) of Hegelianism and the actual process of historical movement. Like most of his radical contemporaries, Herzen made a point of thinking in dialectical terms.
Before 1848, Herzen had accepted the basic tenets of Westernism with respect to the contrast between Russia and Europe. However, the suppression of the revolutions on the Continent in that year (which marked as significant a historical break for Russian as for Western European thought) made him turn his back on Europe, and turn to an unexpected, radical idealization of the Russian obshchina (commune) as the possible repository of an emancipated future. He wrote, “The stream of history has found another bed-that is where I am going.” Europe had evolved into its finished form but Russia’s
evolution was still incomplete. There were apparently incongruous echoes in Herzen’s claim that a ‘young’ Russia could rejuvenate Europe. In his vision of a socialism founded on the commune, whom he popularized rather than invented, was a new and higher form. His conviction was that collectivism was a feature of native Russia and believed in the notion that Slavic nations were the “men of the future” and even drew an analogy between Slavic commune and socialist conceptions. Moreover, Russia would find it easy to break with the old world. The motto of Russian socialism –”preserving the community while liberating the individual” was essentially a restatement of Herzen’s long standing concern with the problem of achieving individual liberty without alienation. As Walicki
points, Herzen’s Russian socialism was not merely an anti thesis of Europe but a synthesis of preserving everything that was best in Europe. Herzen believed only enterprises that were in harmony with the internal rhythm of historical evolution were to
succeed. “After you have blown up the bourgeois society…what will emerge-with a certain modification-is just another form of bourgeois society.” He concluded that social relations should ripe slowly. The practical implication was that Herzen came to favor gradual reform rather than revolution. As a political leader he represented a link between the Decembrists (a radical republican uprising in 1820s) and the “superfluous men” (gentry revolutionaries and liberals), on one hand, and the radical democrats of the sixties, on the other. As a theorist he stood between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles of the forties and the ideologist of populism. 1853 founded a Free Russian Press in London which launched a tradition of radical journals and in 1862 he along with others founded the first socialist (populist) organization “land and freedom” (Zemlya-i-Volya). This was based on the belief that what the people need is Land (organic) and freedom (Will).It was disbanded but the name was taken up latter again.
As the revolutionary mood grew in Russia, Nikolai Chernyshevsy’s role as the intellectual leader of the radical camp gained importance. He was at home with conspiratorial methods and an expert at covering his tracks. Unlike Herzen he did not believe in the unique mission of Russia nor in the gospel of progress. While in prison he wrote his most
influential work, “What is to be done?” A novel which paints an idealized portrait of the generation of “new men” of the sixties, who not only represented a new morality but a new rationalist and materialist outlook. The novel’s heroes identified their interest with that of the society and the revolution. Rekhmetov who is a scion of the wealthy gentry while he is familiar with the lot of the people, trains his will power to carry on the revolution. Before the censors realize what was happening it was too late and, in the words of Lenin, “under his influence hundreds of young people became revolutionaries…” Plekhanov measures his impact correctly when he declared that since the invention of the printing press no other work had been such a great success in Russia. Populist elements in Chernyshevsy were his defense of the village commune which he thought should be modernized since the direct transition to socialism was possible.
He believed that the greatest evil in Russia was Autocracy and political freedom was essential for normal social development. Since he never idealized the archaic social structures he could be appropriated by both Populist (Narodnichestvo) and Marxist.
Literally, the word, Nihil, means nothing. The Nihilists believed that the whole of the old regime including the Czar and the Orthodox Church must be destroyed before a new society could be created. In the 1860’s, most of the young educated intellectuals were Nihilists. Lichtheim argues that Cheryshevsky was the patron saint of nihilism. This intellectual trend was represented in the writings of Dmitry Pisarev. Walicki points that nihilism in the 60s was never a revolutionary movement and even though it radicalized
public opinion its methods did not automatically lead to revolutionary goals. Nihilism was always a secondary strand in the revolutionary circles. They took to methods of terrorism and propaganda to overthrow Czardom and his society. They made many
attempts on the Czar’s life. They also wrote many articles in the newspapers to discredit Czardom. After 1866, the Czar adopted repressive methods to deal with the Nihilists. Editors who did not disclose the names of the anti-government contributors were dismissed and imprisoned. Nihilists were expelled from the universities. Soon Nihilism lost its influence in Russia. Before it died out, Nihilism as a philosophical and literary movement emancipated many of the educated young men from any allegiance to the established order. Gradually in the 1860’s and 1870’s Nihilism was in part replaced and in part combined with Populism which possessed a political, social and economic programme.
From 1860s cultural revolt became overlaid by concerns for broader social problems. They drew upon the press and upon the steady flow of western social, political and economic and scientific works. They drew also upon the illegal literature put out by candlestine presses within Russia and upon legally published works of the social critics who skillfully circumvented the censor, the most influential being the journalist. The dominating theme of this literature was of course the well being of the peasantry and termed as populist ideology. At the center of their vision of Russia’s revolutionary transformation stood the peasant commune which, they argued, had preserved the peasantry from the corruption of private property. With its egalitarian tradition and periodic distribution of land it seemed to them to provide a basis on which Russia could
bypass capitalism and make a direct transition to socialism. During the late 1860’s a series of revolutionary organizations were formed. Populism climaxed in the 1870s and 1880s as a response to Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs, which was one of his Great Reforms. The unity of these decades was not one of ideology, but rather a psychological unity of the intelligenty. The youth who attended Russian universities made up the intelligenty. It was expressed as a common emotional bond among the populace which at times grew into a glorification of the peasant. Wortman said: The
absorption with the peasantry became apparent at the end of the fifties. It persisted into the sixties, and dominated the intelligentsia’s psychology during the seventies. The populism of the late seventies represents not merely a particular political strategy, but the culmination of a psychological dynamic at work since the beginning of the reform era. Interestingly, the populist were termed as such by the Marxist who called them norodnik (people freak) as they sought superiority over all other forms of socialism, being “Scientific socialism”.
Populism was inspired by the European socialist movement (e.g. the Paris Commune of 1870 as well as the ideas of the First Socialist International) but it was essentially Russian in character, a Russian perspective of socialism. In the broadest sense of the word populism is the name given to all Russian democratic ideologies- revolutionaries as well as reformist-that expressed the interests of the peasants. In the narrow historical meaning it refers to the Russian Revolutionaries of the 1870s-the term is applied to a trend that talked of a peasant revolution to bring about socialism directly without going through the capitalist development. They were oppose to “abstract intellectualism” and had a dynamic ideological structure within which many positions were possible. Lenin describes populism as a Janus “looking with one face to the past and the other to the future.” He stressed that populists’ socialist theories were essentially petty bourgeois, reactionary and influenced by “economic romanticism”.
The movement was born during the great social and intellectual ferment which followed the death of Czar Nicholas I and the defeat in Crimean war, grew to influence during the reform period and culminated with the assassination of Czar Alexander II, after which it
swiftly declined. The essence of Populism was that the Russian peasantry would make a socialist revolution. Berlin highlights that their central goals were social justice and social equality. They envisioned a native route to socialism in which the tragic consequences of
capitalism could be bypassed. Following Herzen they were convinced that the essence of a just and equal society was the peasant commune-the obshchina organized in the form of the mir, a collective unit. The Mir was a free association of peasants which periodically redistributes the land and its decision bound all its members. Mir was the cornerstone on
which a federation of socialized self-governing units could be erected. Walicki sees populism as a reaction to western socialist and by extension to Marxism. Populist regarded themselves as apolitical as they thought that overthrow of czarism without social change would lead to government of bourgeoisie which would worsen the economic lot of the masses. However the rejection of apolitical struggle became pronounced in early 70s mainly because of the influence of Bakunin. If Herzen represented the civilized side of populism the Bakunin reflected its destructive forces
(Lichtheim).He launched a movement of almost class intellectuals, of terror and elitism, whose doctrines were at least in part be derived from slavophilism. He believed that man is essentially good and once state crumbles socialism would come about. He was an anarchist. The populist were also influenced my Nikolai Mikhailovsky (what is progress?) who argues that “Everything that impedes progress is immoral and unjust. He saw socialism and peasant communes as different levels of the same type. Marx whose first volume of Capital was widely known among them also influence them and it was because of the ambiguities in his writing that populist saw no contradiction between what they were saying and what Marx meant. They admired him for his theory of surplus value and saw him chiefly as an economist.
I.Berlin points to the difference between the Slavophiles, who believed in the unique destiny of Russia and the populist, who saw Russia as a backward nation which had not reached the capitalist stage and so could avoid the catastrophic consequences of the
west while benefiting from the advances in technology and science. The populist were all for modernity but not results of industrial revolution. The vital question for the populist was whether to teach or to learn from the peasant. The first enthusiastic adherents of radical populism were those who responded to Bakunin’s call to “go to the people” in the summer of 1874.Large numbers of educated young men and women in the towns threw aside their jobs, careers and privileged past, and went to the villages to become rural teachers, doctors, veterinarians and nurses in order to teach the peasants socialist creeds. Among the participants a distinction is usually made between the Lavrovites and Bakunist. The former were known as “propagandist” and the hoped that the peasants would make the revolution if the Populist intellectuals taught and educated them in the doctrine of socialism.(Lavrov always stressed on morals and ethical meaning of socialism.)The later were called the “rebels” for they went to the village not to teach but to stir peasants for an immediate revolt. The results of the populist crusade were very
disappointing. They were met with indifference, resentment, suspicion and sometimes even hatred and resistance. Many a times the peasants handed these young revolutionaries to the police. Mass trials marked the end of the ‘going to the people’ (khozhdenic v narod). And the movement turned to terrorist tactics.
Another radical strand was anarchism, which often overlapped with populism. Its leading theorist was Mikhail Bakunin. The difference between the two was that for populist the chief enemy was capitalism whereas for the anarchist it was the state. The influence of this strand was important when it came to the question of the aftermath of the revolution: should the state be retained or abolished? Bakunin in fact saw that Marxism could lead to authoritarianism and was the only one to argue that peasants were ready for a revolution now all that was required was a spark which a highly committed group of idealist could
ignite. However he was no partisan of libertarianism. He probably didn’t realize that this group of idealist elites could in fact lead to dictatorship.
The “land and Freedom” organization formed in 1876 learned from the lessons of this episode and concentrated on goals that could be “realized in the immediate future”, i.e., goals that harmonized with the peasants’ immediate interests. They started a revolutionary crusade which was much better organized, at the same time held tight to the conviction that revolutionaries should act only among and through the people. But this was not feasible with the militant centralized organization which it latter developed into. Ideologically, the populist group called Land and Freedom was true to the romantic belief that ”truth” lay in ”the will of the people” and that Russia’s future lay in the survival of the commune not with the western ideals of capitalism and individualism. They held tight to this belief throughout the populist era, even after they had taken their truth to the people,
attempted to instigate a revolution, and failed.
In 1878, Aleksandr Nikolaevich Engel’gardt founded an artel farm called the ”practical academy” at Batishchevo to train the youth in rural life. His goal was to transform them into not only true peasants but superior peasants, so that the peasants could then emulate the youth. Others attempted to form similar communes. However, these experiments turned out to be unmitigated failures. The intelligenty proved unable to overcome their shortcomings to create a model of harmonious life for the peasants to emulate. The intelligenty in the city felt Engel’gardt had gone against the populist goal, ”choosing efficiency over justice, thus betraying the image of the peasant that underlay all their hopes.”
Petr Tkachev, the Jacobin populist thinker, emphasized the role of the revolutionary elite in bringing about a revolution. The masses he contended were incapable of liberating themselves and the decisive role would be that of a revolutionary elite. The support of masses was necessary for the victory of the revolution but their role was a negative one, that of a destructive force. As long as capitalism was in its early stage it was possible to map out another future for Russia. As capitalism would develop it would give a breathing space to the ruling class to develop a stronger social and economic base, it would provide new opportunities to the radical intellectuals and the new bourgeois masters would give certain privileges and liberties to bring down the insecurity and unrest. This would weaken the revolutionary spirit in general. He thus saw capitalism as a real and present danger. His theory incited the element of urgency. He wanted the revolutionary elite party to capture state power immediately and should replace for the people the authority of its “mythical Czar”.
Members of land and freedom were opposed to Tkachev’s ideas. But the partial success and overall failure of the “go to the people” movement made them come to terms with reality, that they could not continue their work in the existing conditions. Their original belief in the peasant remained. However, they revised their programme and changed the means of reaching their goals. Thus there was a shift to terrorism. In early 1878, Vera Zasulich shot and wounded the military governor of St. Petersburg, General Theodore Trepov, who had ordered a political prisoner to be flogged. The orthodox populist, led by Plekhanov, deplored the terrorist activities. The gradualist emphasized that Jacobin means bring about Jacobin ends. In 1879 Land and Freedom split into two camps over this issue. The ”Black Reparation” (Chernyi Peredal) was anti-terrorist and emphasized gradualism and the use of propaganda to achieve populist goals. The “Will of the People” (Narodnaya Volia) mounted an all out terrorist attack upon the government with the Czar as their primary target. Members of the ”Will of the People” believed that, because of the
highly centralized nature of the Russian state, a few assassinations could do tremendous damage to the regime, as well as provide the requisite political instruction for the educated society and the masses. They selected the emperor, Alexander II, as their chief target. What followed has been described as an ”emperor hunt”. Three of these attempts on the life of the Czar have become famous. One was the attempt to blow up the Imperial train near Moscow on 19 November 1879. They succeeded in blowing up a train but not the train that the Czar was riding on. Another attempt was made on 5 February 1880, a bombing at the Winter Palace. Alexander escaped unharmed because he hadn’t yet reached the dining room when the bomb went off. The final attempt on the life of Alexander II was successful. On 1 March 1881, the Czar was returning by carriage to
the Winter Palace. When he reached Catherine Quay, two bombs were thrown. The first bomb was unsuccessful, but the second bomb satisfied the populists’ objective. The ”Will of the People” had finally succeeded in killing the Czar who had freed the serfs but the results were disappointing as it followed not a revolution but a reaction, the ”White Terror” began that very day, shattering the revolutionary movement in Russia In the suppression of populism due to the assassination the czar was supported by public
opinion. This shows the place of the Czar in for the Russian consciousness who saw still saw the Czar as a father figure and the head of the holy Russian empire. Czar Aleaxander III still held high the banner of ‘Orthodoxy–Autocracy–Nationality’.
Populist leaders were exiled or executed and many drifted to Marxism. Populism as a movement was dying out but it had left its mark. In I. Berlin’s words “Communist practice owed much, as Lenin admitted, to the populist movement; for it borrowed the technique of its rival and adapted it with conspicuous success to serve the purpose which it had been invented to resist.” Populism was written off as utopian and anarchic by the Marxists. Marxism was unconsciously aided by the Czarist regime. The censors did not realize the revolutionary message of Marxism as thought that it could not be applied to
Russia. Thus the flow and spread of Marxist literature was easier. It seems that Marx had actually conceded to the populist view that Russia could by pass the stage of capitalism. Engel’s latter justified it on the grounds that Marx did not want to dampen the spirit of Russian revolutionaries. By 1890’s the Russian Marxist has started talking of the inevitability of the capitalist phase. Marxist views began to make headway in Russia as disillusionment set in among the Russian revolutionaries.
1890 marked off the great breakthrough in Russian industrialization. The state took the leading role in building up, financing and managing nearly all the new industries. As a result, big industrial towns sprang up rapidly and the proletariat (the factory workers) became an important social class in Russian society. By 1914, their number probably reached about two and a quarter million. By 1917, Russia had about three million workers, though they were still a minority considering the total size of Russian population. To express their grievances, the workers organized strikes, even though they were illegal. In the 1890’s the first organized mass strikes took place. The main aim of the strikes was betterment of the livelihood of the workers. As the 19th century came to a close, the main aims of many of the strikes were not only economic improvement but political as well.
As early as the end of 1878, large scale workers’ strikes and disturbances broke out in
the centers of Russian industry, and Plekhanov, at the time a Populist, was forced to recognize that the working class born of this developing capitalism would play a part in the coming Russian revolution. He exemplifies the shift from populism to Marxism. In a
leading article in a Narodnik paper, Zemilia i Volio in February, 1879, he candidly wrote: “The agitation of the factory workers which has continuously grown in strength and now occupies everybody’s attention, compels us to deal earlier than we had calculated with the role which the town worker should play in this organization. Plekhanov still believed that the revolution would be brought about by the peasants, but thought that the workers would help them by initiating revolts in the towns and agitating in the villages In Socialism and the Political Struggle (1883) he exposed the main fallacies of the Populists and counterpoised to their ideas the principles of Marxism. The importance of its new ideas prompted Lenin to compare this pamphlet with the Communist Manifesto for its effect on the Russian working class movement. The next year, in replying to the attack of the Populists, Plekhanov published another essay, entitled Our Differences, which Engels
called a turning point in the development of the revolutionary movement in Russia. Plekhanov “Russified” Marxism and Lenin wrote: “It is impossible to become a real Communist without studying-really studying-all that Plekhanov has written on philosophy, as this is the best of the whole international literature of Marxism …” He was the father of Russian socialism. Plekhanov said at the foundation Congress of the Socialist International (1889): “The proletariat created through the disintegration of the village community will overthrow the autocracy … The Russian Revolution can only conquer as a working man’s revolution – there is no other possibility, nor can there be any.” Breaking with the Populists, Plekhanov did not have any of their illusions about
the revolutionary nature of the peasant. He knew that the peasant was a small capitalist attached to private property and individual production. He wrote in 1891: “The proletariat and the ‘muzhik’ (peasant) are political antipodes. The historic role of the proletariat is as revolutionary as the historic role of the ‘muzhik’ is conservative. The muzhiks have been the support of oriental despotism for thousands of years. In a comparatively short space
of time, the proletariat has shaken the ‘foundations’ of West European society.” Considering the youthfulness and small size of the Russian working class, and the
backwardness of the country’s productive forces, Plekhanov time and again warned that the revolution might lead to a seizure of power by Socialists, who wanted to suppress economic inequality, before the material conditions necessary for social equality-wealth and abundance were present. Where the productive forces are meager, economic and cultural progress is not possible except trough the exploitation of the majority by a minority: equality would be equality of poverty and ignorance. Thus Plekhanov clearly saw the dilemma of a Socialist government in a backward country: either stagnation based on equality, or a new division of society into an exploiting and an exploited class. He realized that Marxist propaganda was much likely to appeal to the urban proletariat than the peasants. He reasoned that sufficient time should lapse between the political
revolution and the socialist revolution. He was against the trade union mentality of the working class and Jacobinism. The socialization of labor would come in agriculture with advance of technology and machinery. Interestingly he saw Belinsky as precursor to Russian Marxism. To sum up, Plekhanov developed in its most finished form a “two-stage” theory of revolution. First, the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the consolidation of capitalist rule. Second, after a more or less prolonged period of
economic and political development, the working class—having completed the necessarily protracted period of political apprenticeship—would carry through the second, socialist stage of the revolution. He thought it was necessary for capitalism to develop to wipe out the “Asiatic” elements of Russian civilization.
Plekhanov’s was not the only authority on interpretation of Marxism.1880s onwards many secret revolutionary societies evolved towards Marxism. An interesting character here was Aleksander Ulianov, Lenin’s elder brother, who was a member of the “will of the people” and a populist. In his Program of the Terrorist Faction of the People’s Will, he had referred to his followers as socialists and called the urban working class the main revolutionary force. His execution in 1887 bought Lenin in the realm of revolutionary politics. The controversy over capitalism reached its climax in 1890s and an important trend in this debate was “legal Marxism.” the leading representative of this current was Petr Struve. For the average Russian, Marxism began not with Plekhanov but Struve. The legal Marxist stressed legal methods of struggle and saw Marxism as a theory emphasized the necessity of capitalist industrialization and political liberty. They believed in the March of reason, progress in the stages of development. At the first congress of Russian Social Democrats (the first real Marxist party) in Minsk in 1898, it was Struve who wrote the party manifesto on which both legal and revolutionary Marxist agreed on.
Meanwhile, revolutionary populism had also become politically oriented. This trend labeled legal populism (also called neo or liberal populism), opposed revolution and hoped for social reforms from above. The characteristic representative of this was Mikailovsky although he sympathized and collaborated with the revolutionaries as well. Legal populism became a separate movement in 1880s with its own ideology. The leading figure at this time was V.Vorontsov who proposed industrialization initiated and managed by state, as the state required industrialization and if this was allowed socialism
might just be achieved through the state. This aroused the indignation of the Marxist. Their significance is that they stressed on the role of the peasants and realized that late industrialization could not develop along the lines of Western Europe. But they had
undermined the capitalist growth in Russia and placed illusionary hopes on the state.
Several local groups came together to form the SR (social revolutionary) party, and were joined the following year by the Agrarian socialist league. The party addressed much of its effort to workers and enrolled few peasant members, yet peasant question was central to its programme during the revolution of 1905 it exerted considerable influence in the all Russian peasants’ union. The SRs were divided over tactics. The older generation tended to disapprove of the wave of terrorism mounted on by the younger members between 1901 and 1907. While the Social Democratic Party appealed to the workers for support, the S.R. party appealed to the peasants for support but they also saw the workers as essentially peasants. Like the Social Democratic Party, the Social Revolutionaries believed in an imminent bourgeois revolution and the subsequent overthrow of the
bourgeois government by a socialist revolution. But the Social Revolutionaries differed from the Social Democrats in three ways: first they gave to the peasantry a greater and more independent role in the revolutionary process; secondly, they thought that all land should be the property of the State and the State should parcel out land to all peasants on the basis of their labour ownership (In other words, those peasants who had greater labour force would be given more land); thirdly, they concentrated on assassination and
other terrorist methods to achieve their goals. The repression of Stoypin years took a heavy toll on the SRs and party suffered a huge blow in terms of morale and organization when E.F.Azef, the leader of its “fighting organization”, was exposed as a double agent working for Okhrana. And their activity declined sharply as they refuse to take advantage of duma era and was committed to terror. Despite all this, in 1917, the S.R party was in fact the most popular party and continued to enjoy the support of the peasants and workers both. It was represented by V.M.Chernov and they sounded the note which runs through the whole populist tradition that the purpose of social action is not the power of state but the welfare of the people (Berlin).
But the man who changed the course of history was V.I Lenin. Emotionally committed to the “will of the people” program (narodnaia volia), he was first exposed to revolutionary agrarian literature. So from the beginning he was a Jacobin populist and on his conversion to Marxist he instinctively became a Jacobin Marxist. For Lenin history was a battle ground with human actors whose participation implies there identification with a class and certain values. Original and unexpected position of Lenin on capitalism was that capitalism had not only entered Russia but was “definitely established”. This went not only against the populist but most of the Russian Marxist as well. Walicki believes that Lenin was not talking of the extent of capitalist development, but with the nature and intensity of fundamental class antagonism. He laid particular stress on the divisions between the peasantry. For him the heart of Marxism was class struggle and not stages of economic development. This was the core of his ideas which remained unchanged. In his early writing Walicki argues that Lenin saw the peasantry as backward and “Asiatic”, but unlike Plekhanov he stressed that they were the main force in the coming bourgeois-democratic revolution. He refuses to treat the peasants as a reactionary mass. His political tactics were based on an alliance not with liberals but the democratic sections of the petty
bourgeoisie and the peasantry. On his conversion to Marxism he agreed with Plekhanov that the workers would play a greater role in the 1st stage of the revolution but would have ally (smychha – alliance) with the peasantry in order to save the day. He was a flexible and pragmatic leader, his views on strategy and tactics changed constantly and his only dedication was to the capture of power.
Being a Jacobin Lenin strategy required a small, tightly knit, disciplined and highly committed party organization. He justified this on the basis of Marx’s early writings( written in the age of Metternich).He argued that intellectuals would have to take the lead in bring about “true revolutionary consciousness in the worker, as left to themselves the workers would never develop one. In 1900, he (along with Plekhanov) founded the journal Iskra (spark) as a step in this direction. In 1902 in his famous pamphlet “What is to be Done?” Lenin argued for a disciplined elitist revolutionary party dedicated to raising the conscious ness of the workers. He argued that the conditions in the czarist empire, a police state made it necessary for a revolutionary party to succeed be a small knit organization. Further this would go along with the Jacobin program and split the hard from the soft.
The two stage theory of Plekhnov meant that Marxist could do nothing but wait. This was not accepted by the Jacobin wing of SDs led by Lenin. The political implication of his argument that capitalism was the dominant mode of production was that the collapse of
czarism was close and the socialist revolution was not far.
The only path leading out of this blind alley was pointed to Lenin, by Trotsky (who took the idea from Petr Struve), the idea of Permanent revolution- solution through the spreading of the revolution to more advanced countries. Since capitalism had come to
Russia without creating a strong bourgeoisie, the workers would have to take the lead role even in the first stage of the revolution and in this would be supported by the peasantry. Once the workers had captured power the revolution would be pushed forward
into its second stage. But at this time the other classes (peasantry and old order within and outside Russia) would turn against the worker’s state. The only way to save the revolution from a counter revolution would be promoting revolution in other countries as well which would then come to Russia’s aid. But Lenin did not accept Trotsky’s position till October 1917. He wrote: “We always staked our play upon an international revolution and this was unconditionally right … we always emphasized … the fact that in one country it is impossible to accomplish such a work as a socialist revolution.”
The first true congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party was the Second. Convened in Brussels in the summer of 1903, it was the occasion for bitter wrangling among the Representatives of various Russian Marxist Factions, and ended in a deep split that was mainly caused by Lenin — his personality, his drive for power in the movement, and his “hard” philosophy of the disciplined party organization. At the close of the congress Lenin commanded a temporary majority for his faction and seized upon the label “Bolshevik” (Russian for Majority), while his opponents who inclined to the “soft” or more democratic position became known as the “Mensheviks” or minority. It must be noted that on party organization he never got a majority. The Mensheviks right up to September 1917 had the majority. Lenin changed his strategy now in order to win support. He leaves out the core program and endorses the spontaneous actions of the peasants (land to the peasants) and workers (factories to the workers).but even now the Bolsheviks don’t have the majority and peasants and workers had no illusions about them. Even within the Bolshevik party there were differences such as with the Bogdanov group
and the Ultimatists.
Though born only in 1879, Trotsky had gained a leading place among the Russian Social-Democrats by the time of the Second party Congress in 1903. He represented ultra-radical sentiment that could not reconcile itself to Lenin’s stress on the party organization.
Trotsky stayed with the Menshevik faction until he joined Lenin in 1917. From that point on, he accommodated himself in large measure to Lenin’s philosophy of party dictatorship, but his reservations came to the surface again in the years after his fall from power.
A point to conclude would be that Bolshevik Coup was not supported by majority of Russian socialist. Bolshevism had taken Marxism into a new Russian direction. After the revolution the attitude of “no enemies on the left” adopted by most socialist as the common enemy was the counter revolution. They failed to realize that Lenin was not ready to share power and many who opposed the Bolshevik dictatorship were simply branded counter revolutionary. While Plekhanov was a social democrat in the gradualist Marxist tradition and thought in terms of swimming along with the current of history. Lenin basically revived the populist belief in Marxism that to make a revolution in Russia they would have to swim against the current of history. Interestingly, Lenin, the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution were obsessed with the preoccupations and terminology – `Bonapartism’, `Thermidorian negation’, and so on – of the French experience. Another aspect of Russian socialism was the fact that liberalism or liberties were never really the central question or even a secondary question. Again this could be explained by the fact that Russia never was the “land of liberty” and perhaps the socialist concentrated too much on the revolution and capitalism in the country, dismissing the thought that one of them might just endanger the liberties of the nation.(In the west the debate central to socialism was how far is it ok to sacrifice the individual interests to the collective interests) Thus, socialism, in the form(s) in which it is recognizable today, did not burst upon the stage of world ideology and politics in the nineteenth century fully formed and molded. Between the emergence of socialist ideas and the growth of conscious and organized socialist movements, it is possible to trace a long period of evolution, growth and internal ruptures. What did link them was something at once vaguer and wider: a common humanitarianism, a revulsion from the spectacle of a capitalism that produced poverty as visibly and , and a belief that one had to go further than mere piecemeal reform in order to bring about substantive change. Through these common concerns, however, diverse socialist theories, imaginaries and practices were to emerge, filtered often through vast, ambitious and generalized interpretations of ‘society’, ‘human nature’ and the Russian experience.
Bibliography
1. Andrzej Walicki: A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism
- Isaiah Berlin: Russian Thinkers
- D.Thomson: Europe since Napoleon
- M.Miller(ed.): Russian Revolution
- G.Lichtheim: A Short History of Socialism
- Class notes and internet