A radio script by ISAAC DEUTSCHER for the BBC Third Programme (1949)
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels are the recognised forerunners of the Russian revolution and the Soviet State. What did they themselves think about revolution in Russia? Did they have any premonition of it? How did they view the relationship between Russia and the West? We shall let Marx, Engels and their Russian friends speak for themselves. Over nearly half a century Marx and, after his death, Engels kept up a regular correspondence with Russian revolutionaries. Much of that correspondence has been published by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow. It is from this material that we have reconstructed the exchange of views between the founders of Marxism and their Russian contemporaries. The words attributed to them here are literal quotations from their letters.
The story starts in the middle Forties of the 19th Century. In those years already we see several Russians among the admirers of the young Marx. These first contacts with Russians were not particularly happy. One of Marx's 'admirers' was a certain Count Yakov Tolstoy, a former friend of Pushkin. In the circles of radicals in Paris Count Tolstoy posed as a revolutionary, but in fact he was one of the Tsar's chief political agents in Europe. Another Russian admirer of the young Marx was Annenkov, a radical nobleman, who expressed his enthusiasm for Marx in exalted lyrical epistles, and to whom Marx wrote a few long letters, in which he explained the main points of his controversy with Proudhon. There were a few more early Russian 'Marxists'; but, on the whole, these first contacts with the Russians did not inspire Marx with much respect for Russian radicalism. No revolutionary movement inside Russia existed as yet. The Tsar acted as the 'gendarme of European reaction', helping to suppress liberal and radical movements outside his own Empire. As young leaders of the most radical wing of German liberalism, Marx and Engels saw the greatest hope for Europe in a European war against Russia. They feared Slavophilism, and in the course of many years they repeatedly pilloried the governments of Western Europe, who were reluctant to start a crusade against Russia, as the accomplices or the agents of the Russian Tsar. This is how D. Ryazanov, the Russian biographer of Marx and one-time Director of the Institute of Marx and Engels in Moscow, characterises the young Marx's attitude towards Russia:
'Marx was bitterly hostile to official Russia. But for a very long time, till the close of the Sixties, he also remained highly sceptical if not hostile vis-a-vis the opposition elements inside Russia. Undoubtedly Marx was not quite free from something like an anti-Slavonic prejudice, just as Herzen, the great Russian revolutionary, was not free of an anti-Germanic prejudice. But altogether apart from this he saw that in Russia society was completely dominated by the State. No political protest against Tsardom came from inside Russia and this accounted for the fact that in Marx's current revolutionary calculations Russia as yet played no role at all.'
Ryazanov is undoubtedly right. And this fact that Marx saw no hint of any revolutionary movement inside Russia accounted for his warm sympathy for the Polish struggle for independence from Russia, even though the leaders of that struggle were most often conservative Polish noblemen. The Poles dealt blows on the gendarme of European reaction and this to Marx was more important than anything else, especially in the period of the 1848 revolution. It was in that period, too, that Marx was in fairly close touch with Bakunin, the future founder of anarchism. But after the defeat of the revolution, Bakunin's meteor-like activity in Western Europe was interrupted for many years. Arrested by the Prussians for his part in the Dresden fighting in 1848, Bakunin was extradited to Russia. There, in his cell in the Peter-Paul fortress, he wrote in 1851 his pathetic confession to Tsar Nicholas I. That confession, in some ways the prototype of many puzzling political confessions to be heard from Russia later, was unknown to the world. It was to be discovered in the Tsar's archives and published only after the Bolshevik revolution. Many years after he had written that confession, Bakunin was to reappear in Europe, to get in touch with Marx once again, first as his friend and then as his rival and opponent. Bakunin, like Marx, sympathised with the Poles fighting for their independence from Russia, and this was one of the political links between the two. Engels, on the other hand, did not quite share Marx's enthusiasm for the Polish cause, and saw, perhaps earlier than Marx, the auguries that foreshadowed revolution in Russia. On 23 May 1851 he wrote from Manchester to Marx, already settled in London:
'...The more I think over the business, the clearer it becomes to me that the Poles as a nation are done for and can only be made use of as an instrument until Russia herself is swept into the agrarian revolution. From that moment onwards Poland will have absolutely no more reason for existence. The Poles have never done anything in history, except play at brave, quarrelsome stupidity. And one cannot point to a single instance in which Poland represented progress successfully, even if only in relation to Russia, or did anything at all of historic importance.
Russia, on the other hand, is really progressive in relation to the East. For all its baseness and Slavonic dirt, Russian domination is a civilising element on the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and Central Asia and among the Bashkirs and Tartars, and Russia has absorbed far more civilising and especially industrial elements than the Poles, whose whole nature is that of the idle cavalier. The mere fact that the Russian aristocracy — from the Tsar and Prince Demidov down to the lousiest fourteenth class boyar who is only blahorodno (well-born) — manufactures, bargains, cheats, allows itself to be corrupted and carries on every possible kind of Christian and Jewish business, is in itself an advantage. Poland has never been able to assimilate foreign elements. The Germans there in the towns are and remain Germans. Every German-Russian of the second generation is a telling example of Russia's faculty for Russianising Germans and Jews. Even the Jews develop Slavonic cheekbones there... Fortunately, in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung we never undertook any positive obligations towards the Poles, except the unavoidable one of their restoration with suitable frontiers — and that, too, only on the condition that they accomplish an agrarian revolution. I am certain that this revolution will come about completely in Russia before it does in Poland, owing to the national character and to Russia's more developed bourgeois elements. What are Warsaw and Cracow in comparison with Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa and so on?'
We shall see later that after many years, when the Russian revolution was much more clearly casting its shadow ahead, Engels took a more charitable view of Poland. But in 1851 he probably deliberately overstated his argument in order to damp down Marx's enthusiasm for the Poles and contempt for the Russians. A few years later, in 1859, Marx seemed to accept Engels' prognostication. In a letter to Engels, dated London, 13 December, he wrote:
'In Russia the movement is advancing faster than in all the rest of Europe. You see there the struggle for a Constitution, the struggle of the nobles against the Tsar and of the peasants against the nobles. Tsar Alexander has at last discovered that the Poles will not allow themselves to be assimilated into a Slav-Russian nationality... All this more than offsets the extraordinary successes of Russian diplomacy during the last fifteen years, and especially since 1849. When the next revolution comes, Russia will be so kind as to revolutionise herself as well.'
A month later, on 11 January 1860, Marx added the following remark also in a letter to Engels:
'In my opinion the biggest events that are taking place in the world today are, on the one hand, the movement of the slaves in America, started by the death of John Brown, and on the other, the movement of the serfs in Russia. You will have seen that the Russian aristocracy have thrown themselves into direct propaganda for a Constitution, and that two or three members of the most prominent families have already found their way to Siberia...'
This was on the eve of the civil war in the United States and of the emancipation of the serfs in Russia. Yet, even now, no revolutionary party had formed itself in Russia, and so when a new Polish rising against Russia broke out in January 1863, Marx welcomed it. In a letter to Engels of 13 February 1863 he wrote:
'What do you think of the Polish affair? This much is certain — the era of revolution has now opened again in Europe. The general situation is good. But the comfortable delusions and the almost childish enthusiasm with which we hailed the era of revolution before February 1848 have all gone to hell. Old comrades have gone, others have dropped out or become demoralised, and we have gained no fresh blood, at any rate as yet. We know now in addition the role that stupidity plays in revolutions, and how revolutions are exploited by scoundrels... Let us hope that this time the lava will flow from East to West and not the other way round, so that we may be spared the 'honour' of French initiative.'
Thus fifteen years after the revolution of 1848 Marx expressed his disappointment with its result, for its result was the Empire of Louis Bonaparte, and so he now hoped that the European revolution would gain by spreading from East to West. But the eruption of European revolution which Marx, once again somewhat more sanguine than his friend Engels, expected in connection with the Polish rising did not come. The one notable event in Western Europe to which the Polish rising gave the stimulus was the foundation of the First International in London. In a letter to Engels of 4 November 1864, Marx left us a highly informal account of this historic event which began with a public meeting convened to St. Martin's Hall in London by the Chairman of the London Trade Union Council with the purpose of expressing sympathy with the Polish insurrection. In the same letter, Marx recorded his meeting with Bakunin, who had reappeared in Europe:
'Bakunin sends you his greetings... Yesterday I saw him again for the first time after sixteen years. I must say I liked him very much and better than formerly. About the Polish movement he says that the Russian government has used the movement to keep Russia itself quiet, but never reckoned that the struggle would go on for eighteen months... Poland came to grief for two reasons... One of them is the hesitation of the Polish aristocracy in proclaiming peasant socialism openly and unambiguously from the very beginning. In future, after this failure of the Polish insurrection, Bakunin will take part in the socialist movement only. On the whole he is one of the few people whom after sixteen years I find to have gone forward rather than backward.'
Note the phrase about peasant socialism underlined by Marx in the original letter. We shall soon hear more about that. Suffice it to say here that Marx apparently quotes sympathetically Bakunin's phrase about peasant socialism, although for Western Europe he, Marx, expounded a strictly proletarian brand of socialism. Incidentally, Bakunin did not yet join the First International. This was to happen only several years later. Meanwhile both Engels and Marx repeatedly remark in their letters, not without a sense of unpleasant surprise, on the absence of any symptoms of revolutionary activity inside Russia.
A curious turn in the story of Marx's relations with the Russians occurs in the late Sixties. In 1867 he at last published the first volume of Das Kapital. The great work made almost no impression on the Western public. Authoritative economists and respectable reviewers in Britain, France and Germany hardly noticed it. It is therefore easy to imagine Marx's astonishment when one autumn day of 1868 he received a most deferential letter from Petersburg signed N. Danielson in which the writer 'most humbly' asked Marx's permission to translate into Russian and to publish in Russia Das Kapital. A well-known Russian publisher, a Polyakov, was very eager to bring out the book and was enquiring through Danielson whether he would be able to bring out the second volume of the work simultaneously with the first. At the same time Marx learned that his previous books and pamphlets had aroused an intense interest among the intelligentsia of St. Petersburg. He would not have been human if he had not felt somewhat flattered by all that. Here is his own reaction expressed in a letter to his German friend Dr. Kugelmann:
'A few days ago I was surprised by a Petersburg bookseller who let me know that a Russian translation of Das Kapital is to be published... It is the irony of fate that the Russians whom I have for 25 years ceaselessly attacked, and not only in German but in French and English as well, that they have always been my ''benefactors''. In 1843-44 in Paris the Russian aristocrats there overflowed with admiration for me. My writings... have nowhere been in greater demand than in Russia. And the Russians are the first foreign nation to translate Das Kapital. No great significance should, of course, be attached to this. Russian aristocrats in their young years study at German universities and in Paris. They throw themselves avidly at the most extreme things that the West can supply. With them this is pure gourmandise similar to that which the French aristocracy displayed in the 18th Century, Ce n'est pas pour les tailleurs et les bottiers, Voltaire then said about his own work of enlightenment. All this does not prevent these same Russians from becoming scoundrels when they enter governmental service.'
Marx's disparaging remark was in part justified, especially when we remember Count Yakov Tolstoy, his supposed friend in Paris and Russian arch-spy. Nevertheless, the sociologist Marx seemed to miss here the sociological implications of the response which his work had evoked in Russia. This was certainly more than sheer intellectual gourmandise on the part of a few aristocrats. Two years later, in March 1870, Marx received the following significant letter from a group of Russian revolutionary emigrés in Geneva. The letter was signed by a man called N. Utin and two others.
Dear and Highly Esteemed Citizen, On behalf of a group of Russians we address to you the request that you should do us the honour and represent us on the General Council of the International Association in London. This group of Russians has just formed a section of the International. The great idea of the international movement of the proletariat is penetrating into Russia also... Our first objective is to assist most energetically in spreading the principles of the International among Russian workingmen... But we have set ourselves another task as well: we wish to unmask pan-Slavism. We wish to draw the youth of the Slav countries into the struggle against those old ideas which have served only the Tsarist Empire, an Empire which must collapse and give place to a free federation of rural and industrial associations, united with the workers of the whole world by common interests and identical views. Our persistent desire to have you as our representative is due to the fact that your name is deservedly honoured by Russian student youth... That youth... does not have and does not wish to have anything in common with the drones of the privileged classes... Brought up in the spirit of the ideals of our teacher Chernyshevsky, who in 1864 was for his writings condemned to forced labour in Siberia, we have welcomed with joy your exposition of socialist principles and your critique of the system of industrial feudalism... You have ceaselessly unmasked the false Russian patriotism and the sly lies of our Demostheneses who prophesy the glorious mission which the Slav peoples are allegedly predestined to perform, when in actual fact it has been their lot to be crushed by Tsarist barbarity and to serve as tools for the subjection of neighbouring peoples... We consider it also our duty to tell you in advance that we have absolutely nothing in common with Mr. Bakunin and his few supporters.'
By this time the struggle between Marx and Bakunin had flared up. The main issues at stake were anarchism versus socialism, federalism versus centralism. Slavophilism was a subsidiary point. Marx's hostility towards Slavophilism in all its varieties, official and revolutionary, was relentless. Note also that Marx's new Russian adherents described themselves as Chernyshevsky's pupils. Marx had already learned enough Russian to acquaint himself with the works of that great Russian writer, revolutionary and martyr, and his admiration for Chernyshevsky was very warm indeed. On 24 March 1870 Marx wrote to the Russians in Geneva:
'Citizens... It is with great pleasure that I accept the honourable duty... to act as your representative on the General Council of the International...'
On the same day Marx made the following less solemn comment in a letter to Engels:
'I enclose a letter from the Russian group in Geneva... I have accepted their commission to be their representative on the General Council. I have also sent them a short official reply and a private letter which I have permitted them to publish in their paper. A funny position for me to be functioning as the representative of young Russia! A man never knows what he may come to, or what strange fellowship he may have to submit to. In the official reply I emphasised the fact that the chief task of the Russian section is to work in favour of Poland and thereby to free Europe from the Russian neighbourhood. I thought it safer to say nothing about Bakunin, either in the official or in the private letter. But what I will never forgive these fellows is that they turn me into a 'venerable'. They obviously think I am between 80 and 100 years old.'
Marx was then 52. The Russians indeed did treat him as a 'venerable'. They usually addressed him as 'Esteemed Teacher' or 'Dear and Deeply Respected Teacher'. This tone of a peculiarly Russian exalted veneration strikes one as one follows this correspondence over half a century. It was equally characteristic of Annenkov's letters to Marx in the Forties as of Plekhanov's letters to Engels in the Nineties. Every now and then Marx or Engels vented a mild irritation at this until on one occasion Engels frankly wrote to Plekhanov:
'Dear Plekhanov, Please do stop calling me your 'teacher' in this exalted manner. I am simply called Engels.'
However, behind these outward and somewhat comic signs of adulation, there was the fact of Marx's profound impact on the Russian mind freshly evidenced by the great success of Das Kapital in Russia. One might have thought that a camel would have passed easier through the eye of a needle than Das Kapital through the severe Russian censorship of those days. Yet by some freak the censorship did pass Marx's work and this is how its Russian translator Danielson reported the event to Marx in March 1872:
'The printing of the Russian translation is at last at an end... We wanted to publish the author's portrait in the book... but the censorship has not allowed us to do this.'
What a silly censor! Allowing Marx's ideas to reach the public he was afraid of the subversive effect which his photograph might have. And here is Marx's reply to Danielson:
'First of all many thanks for the extremely well bound volume. The translation is masterly. I would very much like to receive one unbound copy more for the British Museum.'
On 4 June Danielson was able to report:
'You are surely interested to know what has happened to the Russian translation of Das Kapital: Well, according to the law we submitted this book at the office of the censor for three days. Two censors went through it and put their conclusion about the book before a committee of censors. Even before the book was looked through, it had been decided as a matter of principle that the author's name was not a sufficient reason for confiscating it. It was decided to scrutinise the book in the most meticulous manner and to find out whether it did not contain passages which might threaten the foundations of the economic order.'
Danielson then quotes the following verdict of the committee of censors:
'Although the author is by his convictions a complete socialist and his whole work bears a very definite socialist character, as is evidenced by the following pages... nevertheless, in view of the fact that his argument cannot be regarded as being accessible to the general public, and since on the other hand his method of exposition is everywhere couched in a strictly mathematical, scientific form, the committee does not find it possible to open legal proceedings against this book, and it has decided to allow the book to appear.'
Danielson continues in his letter to Marx:
'One might have thought that the committee of censors was so satisfied with your evidence that it has altogether become converted into a socialist club. Allowing this book to appear, the committee reckoned that nobody would read it. But here are the figures: the book appeared on 27 March. Up to 15 May 900 copies have been sold — altogether 3,000 have been printed. Most journals and newspapers have published reviews. All, without any exception, have praised it very highly.'
About this time, in 1873, begins the famous Narodnik movement 'Into the People'. Men and women of the Russian radical intelligentsia give up their social standing, and go to live among peasants in the hope that they would thus arouse the peasantry to revolt against Tsardom. This was the heyday of that peasant socialism which Bakunin had mentioned to Marx. The Narodniks, or Populists, as these socialists called themselves, had a highly original programme which was to become the object of a passionate controversy lasting nearly three decades, a controversy into which Marx and Engels were soon to be drawn and which was to be concluded after their death by Lenin. The Narodniks argued that Russia had no need to go through capitalist industrialisation and then to develop from capitalism to socialism. This, they thought, was the fate of Western Europe. But Russia, and perhaps other Slavonic nations as well, had their own peculiar road to socialism. Russia could, so the Narodniks argued, pass to socialism straight from feudalism. The Narodniks pointed to one feature in Russia's social structure which really was peculiarly her own and unknown to other European nations. Alongside with feudalism there had existed in the Russian countryside the obshchina, the primeval rural commune, in a sense the forerunner of the modern kolkhoz. In 1861, we remember, Tsar Alexander II abolished serfdom. But the obshchina, the rural commune, still existed. The Narodniks argued that this rural commune was the basis of the Russian peasant socialism. All that was needed to turn Russia into a free socialist society was the overthrow of the Tsarist autocracy.
Marx and Engels sympathised with this Narodnik trend, though not without reservation. Many of the Narodniks were Slavophiles and we already know how abhorrent Slavophilism was to Marx. One of the Narodniks' spokesmen in Western European exile was Lavrov, a close friend of Marx and Engels. Connected with the Narodniks was also another close friend of Marx, Lopatin, in many ways perhaps the most remarkable Russian personality in Marx's entourage.
Lopatin's story was most remarkable. It was he who mainly helped Marx to learn the Russian language and acquaint himself with Russian problems. He was nearly 30 years younger than Marx, for he was in his early twenties when he met Marx in 1868 or thereabouts. This young Russian was one of Marx's very few friends who felt confident enough to criticise various passages in Das Kapital while the work was still in manuscript. Moreover Marx himself acknowledged the validity of Lopatin's criticism and was persuaded by him to re-write some parts of his work. As a rule Marx was not easily impressed by much older and much more authoritative critics. But for the intellectual faculties of this young Russian he had a genuine respect. But Lopatin was primarily a man of action, not an intellectual. When urged to take to the pen Lopatin said of himself:
'No, I shall never be a writer. Just as there are grafomaniacs in the world, so there must also be a few grafophobes, people who abhor writing. I, at any rate, am a grafophobe.'
Lopatin was a very frequent guest at Marx's home at Maitland Park Road, near Chalk Farm in London. He was one of those political exiles who used to accompany Marx's family on their famous Sunday ramblings on Hampstead Heath during which Marx expounded his economic ideas, argued about philosophy, recited Shakespeare or Goethe, and enlightened himself from his companions about the affairs of their countries. During one of Lopatin's visits, Marx once again spoke about the fate of Chernyshevsky whom, as we know, he valued so highly. This time he remarked with some bitterness that it was a shame that Russia allowed her greatest thinker to perish in slavery. The words sank into Lopatin's mind. The young man conceived a plan: he would go to Russia to organise Chernyshevsky's escape from his Siberian forced labour camp. He said nothing about his plan to Marx or any member of his family. Towards the end of 1870 Marx received a letter from St. Petersburg. It was Lopatin who wrote:
'From the postmark on this letter you will see that in spite of all your friendly warnings I have gone to Russia. But if you knew what impelled me to make this journey, I am sure you would find my motives to be important enough... Although, as you can easily imagine, the job I am to perform does not threaten the peace of Europe or the existence of our national government, it nevertheless seemed to me to be attractive enough... and so I made up my mind not to shrink from it... My task compels me to leave Petersburg soon and to travel into the interior of the country, where I shall spend three or four months. That is why I cannot avail myself of Mrs. Marx's kind invitation and I cannot come to your birthday dinner... The other day I sent you a communication to the effect that the Archive of Forensic Medicine and Hygiene has published an article on the conditions of the working class in Western Europe. The material for the essay was drawn mainly from your book, and the essay had the misfortune of arousing the wrath of the government. It was confiscated and an order was issued that it should be burnt. As the journal is up to a point an official organ, its editor has been dismissed. The second volume of Lassalle's works in a Russian translation has also been confiscated... A fortnight ago the editors of the leading Russian papers were summoned by the chief censor and were strictly and severely warned to publish no word against Prussia. One of the editors, Zagulyayev, published this order in the Golos. He was immediately arrested and deported into one of the remotest provinces. Even his wife does not know his whereabouts. Generally speaking, new arrests occur here every day... and the situation at large is such that I am beginning sincerely to share your view and the view of the General Staff about the necessity of war against the Russian government.'
The 'General Staff' to which Lopatin referred was, of course, the General Council of the First International. Marx, uneasy about the fate of his young friend, tried to make him return to London. On 13 June 1871 Marx wrote to Danielson:
'Our friend must return to London from his commercial journey. The correspondents of the firm for which he has been travelling have written to me from Switzerland and other places. The whole business will tumble down if he postpones his return; and he himself may forever lose the opportunity of rendering further services to his firm. The firm's competitors are informed about him, they look out for him everywhere and they may yet trap him.'
This was the all too transparent code style in which Marx couched his letters, which he, incidentally, signed not as Karl Marx, but as an English businessman, A. William, Esq., of 1 Maitland Park Road, London NW. Lopatin's 'firm' stood, of course, for the First International. Its 'competitors' were the Tsarist police. But Marx's urgings came too late. Lopatin, as Marx feared, had already been trapped in the Siberian town of Irkutsk. At the Irkutsk prison he wrote the following statement on the purpose of his journey:
'At the time of my stay in London I met there a certain Karl Marx, one of the most remarkable writers on political economy and one of the best educated men in the whole of Europe. Five years ago that man decided to learn the Russian language. Having learned it he by chance came across Chernyshevsky's commentaries on the work of John Stuart Mill and other essays by Chernyshevsky. Marx acquired a profound respect for Chernyshevsky. More than once he told me that among all the contemporary economists, Chernyshevsky was the only truly original thinker... He said that Chernyshevsky's writings... represented the only contemporary works in that field which deserve to be read and studied; that the Russians should be ashamed that none of them had so far taken the trouble to acquaint Europe with so outstanding a thinker; that the political death of Chernyshevsky was a loss not only to Russia but to all European science... I did not confide my plan (to rescue Chernyshevsky) even to Marx, in spite of my love and respect for him. I was sure that Marx would have considered it crazy and would have tried to dissuade me from it, and I did not like giving up a task I had set myself.'
Lopatin's surprising frankness is explained by the fact that he addressed this statement to a liberal Governor Sincinikov, who was doing his utmost to help Lopatin. Eventually Lopatin managed to escape from Russia, but then followed a whole series of heroic secret escapades into and out of Russia, a series which ended with his imprisonment for twenty years in the dreaded fortress of Schlusselburg. Meanwhile Marx himself intended to do something to mitigate Chernyshevsky's lot. He thought of organising a campaign in Western Europe and asked his Russian friends for biographical material about the Russian writer. In reply to this Danielson wrote:
'The trustee of Chernyshevsky's children who wanted to publish Chernyshevsky's critical, bibliographical and literary essays was warned that if only one of these essays appeared in print, the publisher would at once be deported from Petersburg... The other day I received a letter from Lopatin saying that it was rumoured that Chernyshevsky had become insane. This is quite possible. Chernyshevsky has recently been deprived of all the necessities of life, food, linen, and so on, and all this in a sub-polar climate... In order to receive information about Chernyshevsky I have approached his friends. One of them who was closely connected with Chernyshevsky from early youth and knew him intimately is now afraid of uttering his name. In 1866 Chernyshevsky sent him the manuscript of a new novel in which he treated his hero in exactly the same way in which Thackeray treated Pendennis, a novel describing the social movement of the Forties, the impression that the Crimean war made on society, the emancipation of the peasants, and so on. And this friend of Chernyshevsky's found nothing better to do than to burn the manuscript... Another friend of Chernyshevsky's has promised me to collect all the desired information.'
Some time later Danielson wrote again to Marx:
'I am sorry that I have not yet been able to send you the promised biographical materials on Chernyshevsky. Although I myself would think it useful to publish a possibly complete biography, those who are in possession of the necessary materials hold a different view. They are definitely convinced that such a publication could only do harm to Chernyshevsky.'
Such was the oppressive atmosphere in the Russia of the Seventies. The Narodniks failed to achieve their objective. The peasants did not revolt against the Tsar. Peasant socialism was in the throes of a crisis. This was aggravated by the repercussions of the Russo-Turkish war of 1878 when it seemed that Britain, too, would go to war against Russia. In November 1878 Lopatin wrote to Engels:
'Socialist propaganda among the peasants has almost ceased. The most vigorous among the revolutionaries have instinctively passed over to a purely political struggle... That struggle is still of an extremely narrow character. They are content with acts of revenge on some official personalities and with attempts to free individual comrades. Society as a whole is losing the last remnants of any respect for the government and often watches with sympathy the activities of the extreme party. But, since peace has not yet been concluded, our society cannot yet look after its own affairs. The remainder of patriotism, or if you like, of chauvinism prevents our people from staging 'internal trouble' to the 'joy of our enemies'. Many even think that the intrigues of perfidious Albion are the real cause of our misfortunes.'
During this same crisis Marx was anxious to see 'perfidious Albion' moving against Russia. Thus he wrote to Lavrov:
'An Irish MP intends to put a question in the House of Commons next week with the object that the English government should ask the Russian government to carry out in Russia those reforms which the Russian government considers to be necessary in Turkey. He wants to use the opportunity in order to say something about atrocities committed in Russia. I have told him a few details about the measures taken by the Russian government against... Poles. Could you not prepare a short memorandum in French about... repressive measures introduced in Russia in the last few years... I think this would bring some benefit to your unfortunate compatriots.'
Shortly after the conclusion of the Russo-Turkish war in 1879 a significant split occurred in the ranks of the Russian Narodniks. Some of the Narodniks, losing their hope in a peasant revolt that would overthrow Tsardom, concentrated their energy on terroristic attempts. They began to prepare an attempt on the life of the Tsar himself. Others dissociated themselves from the terroristic wing of the party. Among those opposed to revolutionary terrorism were two men and one woman, Plekhanov, Axelrod and Vera Zasulich, who were to become the founders of a strictly Marxist, Social Democratic movement in Russia. Vera Zasulich herself had carried out an attempt on the life of the Governor of St. Petersburg, General Trepov; but she now became convinced of the futility of such attempts. Most of the orthodox Narodniks still believed in Russia's mission to achieve a peasant socialism. They still set their hopes on the rural commune and were opposed to the infiltration of industrial capitalism into Russia. Plekhanov, Axelrod and Zasulich gradually came to the conclusion that the rural commune was disintegrating, that peasant socialism was unreal, that Russia must go through the phase of industrial capitalism and democratic self-government before she could approach socialism. This was eventually to become the attitude of all Russian Marxists.
Marx and Engels were drawn into the dispute. But, curiously enough, they did not lend their support to the Russian Marxists, who preached proletarian socialism for Russia. They continued to sympathise with the peasant socialism of the Narodniks and also with their terroristic attempts. On 6 November 1880, Marx received the following message signed by the Executive Committee of the Social Revolutionary Party in Russia:
'Citizen, the class of the advanced intelligentsia of Russia, always attentively watching the spiritual development of Europe and sensitively reacting to it, has met with enthusiasm the publication of your scientific works. The best trends of Russian life have found a scientific justification in these works. Das Kapital has become the inseparable companion of educated people. But in this empire of Byzantine darkness and Asiatic despotism any progress of social ideas is branded as a revolutionary movement. Your name could not but become inseparably connected with the internal struggle in Russia, arousing profound respect and lively sympathy on the part of some people, and serving as the object of baiting by others... As to us, Esteemed Citizen, knowing with what interest you have followed the struggle of Russian revolutionaries in all its phases, we are happy to be able to tell you that the worst time in that struggle is over. The revolutionary attempts, having hardened the fighters, have led not only to the elaboration of the principles of revolutionary theory. They have also directed the practical business of the revolution to the right road towards realisation. The revolutionary groups... progressively come together, merge and make the common attempt to join in the popular protest which is as old with us as slavery itself. All these circumstances bring the moment of victory nearer. Our task would be much easier if the firm sympathies of the free peoples were on our side... We send our comrade, Lev Hartman, abroad in order that he should acquaint England and America with the current events in our social life. And we beg you, Esteemed Citizen, to help Hartman in this... We firmly believe that the hour is not far when our unfortunate country will take the place in Europe which is due to a free nation. We are happy to express to you, Esteemed Citizen, the feeling of profound respect on behalf of the whole Social Revolutionary Party in Russia.'
The emphasis with which the authors of this message spoke about the nearness of Russia's liberation was due to the fact that their preparations for the assassination of the Tsar were in the final stage, a circumstance of which Marx did not know. Four months later, on 13 March 1881, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by the revolutionaries. A few days after the event Marx and Engels sent the following message to a meeting of Slav revolutionaries which was convened to mark the tenth anniversary of the Commune of Paris:
'We greatly regret that we cannot attend your meeting personally... When the Commune of Paris fell, after a savage slaughter organised by the defenders of 'order', the victors in no way anticipated that before ten years an event would occur in the remote Petersburg which in the end must lead to the creation of the Commune of Russia...'
Marx and Engels regarded such terroristic attempts as a peculiarly Russian method of revolutionary action, justified by peculiar Russian conditions. They had no use for such methods in Western Europe. In a letter to his daughter Jenny, Marx wrote shortly afterwards:
'Have you been following the trial of the (Tsar's) assassins in Petersburg? They are sterling people through and through, sans pose melodramatique, simple, business-like, heroic. Loud words and deeds are irreconcilable opposites. The Petersburg Executive Committee, which acts so energetically, issues manifestoes of refined 'moderation'. It is far removed from the schoolboy manner in which... other childish whimperers preach tyrannicide as a 'theory' and 'panacea' (that was done by such innocent Englishmen as Disraeli, Savage Landor, Macaulay and Stanfield, the friend of Mazzini). The Russians, on the contrary, try to teach Europe that their modus operandi is a specifically Russian and historically inevitable method about which there is no more reason to moralise — for or against — than there is about the earthquake in Chios.'
... 'Specifically Russian...' Well, this was precisely what the Marxists in Russia, Plekhanov and his friends, objected to. They did not want any specifically Russian socialism based on a rural commune, or any specifically Russian terrorism. They were Westerners, in this case more Western than Marx himself, who was so proud of the heritage of German philosophy, English political economy, and French socialism, all united in his own theory. In February 1881 Vera Zasulich wrote to Marx:
'Esteemed Citizen, it will be known to you that your Kapital enjoys the greatest popularity in Russia... But what is probably unknown to you is the role which Das Kapital plays in our controversies over the land problem in Russia and over our rural commune. You know better than anybody else how topical this problem is in Russia. You know what Chernyshevsky thought of it. Our progressive literature... continues to develop his ideas... This is an issue of life and death, especially for our socialist party. Even the personal fate of our revolutionary socialists depends on the view they take about this matter.
'Either or. Either this rural commune, freed from excessive taxation and feudal dues and from arbitrary police rule, is capable of developing in a socialist direction... In this case it is the duty of the revolutionary socialist to devote all his energy to the liberation and development of the rural commune.
'Or else, the rural commune is doomed, and then the socialist can only try and find out after how many decades the land of the Russian peasants is likely to pass into the hands of the bourgeoisie, after how many centuries perhaps capitalism in Russia can attain the level it has attained in Western Europe. In this case the socialist should make propaganda only among the urban workers...
'Recently we have often heard the view that the rural commune is an archaic institution, doomed by history and scientific socialism... People who expound this view call themselves your genuine pupils, Marxists. Their strongest argument is often: 'This is what Marx has said'...
'You, Citizen, will understand to what an extent we are interested to know your view, what a great service you would render us by expressing your opinion on the possible fortunes of our rural commune and on the theory that all countries of the world must inevitably go through all the phases of capitalist production, Citizen, on behalf of my comrades, I take it upon myself to ask you to render us this service...'
Marx answered:
'Chère Citoyenne, a nervous ailment recurring periodically in the last ten years has prevented me from answering your letter... earlier. I regret that I cannot give you a short answer to the question addressed to me that would be fit for publication. A few months ago I already promised to give an essay on this subject to the Petersburg Committee. But I hope that a few lines will be enough to dispel any of your doubts about the misunderstanding connected with my so-called theory.
'Analysing the origin of capitalist production I said (in Das Kapital): At the basis of the capitalist system there is the complete dissociation of the producer from the means of production''...'
What Marx means here is that the modern industrial worker, unlike the artisan, does not own the tools with which he works.
'The expropriation of the rural producer forms the essence of the whole process. Radically this has so far been accomplished only in England''...'
Marx refers here to the 'enclosures', by which the English yeomanry was deprived of the land and then largely transformed into an urban working class.
'But all other countries of Western Europe proceed along the same path.' Consequently 'the historic inevitability' of this process is here precisely limited to the countries of Western Europe. I have given the reason for this in the following passage in Das Kapital: 'Private property based on personal labour is eliminated by private capitalist property based on the exploitation of the labour of other men, on wage labour.' In this process taking place in the West we are thus concerned with the transformation of one form of private property into another form of private property. With Russian peasants, however, it would be, on the contrary, a question of transforming their common property into private property.
'The analysis contained in Das Kapital does not provide any argument for or against the viability of the Russian rural commune. But special research which I have been carrying out on the basis of first hand materials has convinced me that this rural commune forms the base for Russia's social renaissance. However, in order that it should be able to function as such, it is necessary to remove first of all the destructive influences to which that commune is now being subjected from all sides, and then to secure the normal conditions for its free development.'
Thus, the Russian Marxists who argued that the rural commune must be destroyed by capitalism, and that only after that can Russia begin to move towards socialism, were cold-shouldered by Marx himself. But this controversy had only begun when on 15 March 1883 Marx died. Two days later Lavrov, the Narodnik, wrote to Marx's daughter:
'Chère Mademoiselle Eleanor, Thank you for having remembered me in your great sorrow. Yes, you have been right, quite right in counting on my sympathy. Altogether apart from my friendship for your father, so exceptionally outstanding a personality, and for yourself, I have known from experience what it means to feel lonely in a crowd of more or less pleasant acquaintances and in the hurly-burly of everyday work and struggle, which absorb your thoughts and weary your nerves but do not fill the emptiness of your private life. You work, you do your duty, but the place by your side is empty. All that used to make the work pleasant and the duty easy... all that is no more and never will be. Only one consolation remains... the awareness that there are so many people even more unfortunate, people who have never known what it means to be surrounded by loved and respected beings... Very few have been so happy as to have had a family like yours and as to be able to retain in their memories the picture of people so worthy... as were those whom you have just lost. This, of course, is no consolation, but, Chère Mademoiselle Eleanor, I do not believe in consolation. I think it is silly to try and console anybody in a great misfortune. Only time, indifferent to all grief... closes the living wound, leaving a scar for ever. Having learned about the heavy loss suffered by science and the socialist party of the whole world, I succeeded before Lafargue's departure only to jot down hurriedly a few words on behalf of my socialist compatriots to be read at the grave of the great deceased...'
After Marx's death, Engels continued the correspondence with the Russian revolutionaries. In some ways his exchange of views with the Russians was perhaps more interesting than Marx's, in part because Engels was a more regular letter writer than his deceased friend, and in part because it was only now that the Russian revolution more distinctly cast its shadow ahead. In the year of Marx's death Engels expounded to Lopatin his view on Russia's future, and Lopatin recorded this in a letter to the Executive of the Narodnik Party in Petersburg:
'Everything, so Engels says, depends now on what happens in Petersburg, for it is on Petersburg that the eyes of more thoughtful and farsighted men in Europe are now turned. Russia is the France of this age. To her belongs legitimately the revolutionary initiative of a new social transformation... With the doom of Tsardom the last rampart of continental monarchism will be destroyed. Russia's ''aggressiveness'' will be eliminated. So will Poland's hatred of Russia and many other things besides. This will lead to a new combination of powers and result in the destruction of the Austrian Empire. Many other countries will receive from the downfall of Tsardom a powerful impulse towards their own internal transformation.'
Engels apparently held that the downfall of Tsardom was very near and that it might be brought about by terrorist attempts in the Narodnik style. In this he was wrong; and the Russian Marxists very tactfully tried to disillusion him. Three years after the assassination of Alexander II, Zasulich wrote to Engels:
'You say in your letter that the political situation in Russia is so tense that one could await the beginning of a crisis any day. You must have been thinking about the financial situation only? For in other respects the situation, so it seems to me, is now less tense than it was two or three years ago.'
Zasulich was voicing here the common belief of the Russian Marxists that the terroristic attempts were weakening the revolutionaries much more than Tsardom, and that the overthrow of Tsarist autocracy could not be achieved by the killing of one autocrat. They set all their hopes on the growth of a labour movement which would act en masse against the Tsarist regime. But Engels still disagreed with Zasulich and her friends:
'Speaking about the situation in Russia I had, of course, in mind the financial situation in particular, but not only this. The general situation of a government which, like the St. Petersburg administration, is at the end of its tether..... cannot but become more and more critical. The nobles and the peasants are ruined. The army is hurt in its chauvinistic feelings and disturbed by the conduct of an Emperor who constantly hides himself. The government is impelled to wage war in order to provide an outlet for the 'silly passions'' and the general discontent: at the same time it cannot undertake anything because of the lack of money and of the unfavourable political circumstances. There is a strong national intelligentsia, burning with the desire to break the chains that fetter it. On top of all this, the complete lack of money.... It seems to me that every month now ought to accentuate the difficulties.... If a constitutionally minded and courageous Grand Duke were now to step forward, even Russian society would realise that a palace revolution would be the best way out of this impasse.'
It is easy to imagine with what embarrassed or perhaps ironical comment the Russian Marxists must have received Engels' prognostication. It was in the same year, 1884, that Plekhanov published his epoch-making book Our Disagreements, which was entirely devoted to the repudiation of the Narodnik hopes and illusions and which established the case for a Russian proletarian socialism. Engels read or at least scanned Plekhanov's book soon after its appearance and commented on it:
'I repeat that I am proud that there exists among young Russian people a party which has sincerely and without reservation adopted the great economic and historic theories of Marx, and has definitely broken with anarchist and Slavophile traditions.... Marx himself would have been proud of this had he lived to see it. But as far as I am concerned I know too little the present situation in Russia to presume myself competent to judge on the specific tactical problems.... The inner and intimate story of the Russian revolutionary party.... is almost completely unknown to me.... What I know, or what I think I know about the situation in Russia makes me inclined to take the view that the Russians approach their 1789. The revolution should break out within some definite time, but it may break out any day. The country is like a charged mine which only needs a fuse to be laid to it. This has been so especially since the assassination of Alexander II. This is one of those exceptional cases in which a handful of people can make a revolution. They can by a small push make the whole system crumble.... and release.... such explosive forces as it will be impossible to subdue.
'If Blanqui's fantasy, that it is possible to shake the whole society by means of a small conspiracy, has ever had any foundation then this has been in Petersburg. Once a spark has been put to the powder, once the explosive forces have been released and popular energy transformed from potential into kinetic (to use Plekhanov's favourite and very good metaphor), the people who have fired the fuse will be carried away by the explosion.... Suppose that those people imagine that they can seize and hold the power — well, what does it matter? Provided they make the breach which destroys the dyke, the flood itself will soon put an end to their illusions. But if it so happens that these illusions magnify their will to action — is it worth while to complain about this? People who boast that they have made a revolution always find on the next day that they knew not what they did, that the accomplished revolution is not at all similar to that which they had wished to accomplish. This is what Hegel calls the irony of history.... Whether this action or that gives the signal, whether this is done under this or that flag matters little to me. Let it be a palace conspiracy for the beginning, it will be swept away the next day.... And now good-bye, chère citoyenne, it is half past two after midnight, and I shall not manage to add anything before to-morrow's mail. If this is more convenient to you, write to me in Russian. But do not forget, I beg you, that I do not read Russian handwriting every day.'
It was only in the Nineties, towards the end of his life, that Engels admitted that the Russian Marxists were right against the Narodniks, although even then he himself refused to engage in any public polemics against his old Narodnik friends. But even in the Nineties Engels still viewed Tsarist Russia, as he and Marx had done in 1848, as the chief gendarme of European reaction, whose overthrow in one way or another, by Marxists or non-Marxist method, was the most important thing. When his Russian friends objected to some of his pro-Polish and anti-Russian remarks, Engels wrote to Zasulich:
'I admit that the dismemberment of Poland looks quite differently from the Russian viewpoint than from the Polish one, which has become the viewpoint of the West. But, after all, I must bear in mind the Polish case as well. If the Poles wish to obtain territories which the Russians at large think that they have acquired for ever, which are ethnically Russian, then it is not for me to solve this problem.... In my view the interested peoples themselves should determine their own fate, in the same way in which the Alsatians themselves should choose between Germany and France.... I hope that my article (on Russian diplomacy) will make some impression when it is published in English. The faith of the English liberals in the Tsar's zeal for freedom is now strongly shaken by the news from Siberia, by Kennan's book (on Russian slave labour camps), and by the recent unrest in the Russian universities. That is why I have hurried to publish this article. It is necessary to strike the iron while it is hot. The diplomacy of Petersburg hoped that they would be helped in their new drive in the East by the fact that the Tsarophile Gladstone... is back in office... In view of France's servility towards the Tsar and England's benevolent connivance, it might be possible for the Tsar to risk a new step forward and even to conquer Constantinople.... That is why the present renewal of the anti-Tsarist movement among the English liberals seems to me to be so extraordinarily important for our cause.... From the time that a revolutionary movement emerged inside Russia, the once invincible Russian diplomacy succeeds in nothing any longer. And it is very good that this should be so, because this diplomacy is your as well as our most dangerous enemy.'
Incidentally, 45 years after Engels wrote these words, he was criticised by Stalin, who pointed out that Engels one-sidedly emphasised the reactionary role of the Tsarist diplomacy, overlooking the reactionary features of the diplomacy of the Western powers. But let us now return to Engels' final conclusions on the controversy between peasant and proletarian socialism in Russia. These he set out in a letter to Danielson in 1893. He now argued that if socialism had won in Western Europe, the Russian socialism could have developed from the rural commune. But as the victory of socialism in Western Europe was delayed, as capitalism reigned supreme in Western Europe, Russia, too, must go through the capitalist phase:
'No doubt, the commune.... contained germs which under certain conditions might have developed and saved Russia the necessity of passing through the torments of the capitalistic regime... But the first condition for this was the impulse from without, the change of the economic system in Western Europe, the destruction of capitalism in the countries where it had originated... If we in the West had been quicker in our economic development, if we had been able to upset the capitalistic regime some ten or twenty years ago, there might have been time yet for Russia to cut short the tendency of her own evolution towards capitalism. Unfortunately, we have been too slow. The economic consequences of capitalism which must drive capitalism into a crisis are only just now developing: England is fast losing her industrial monopoly, France and Germany are approaching the industrial level of England, and America bids fair to drive them all out of the world markets.... The introduction of a... free trade policy in America is sure to complete the ruin of England's industrial monopoly, and to destroy the industrial export trade of Germany and France. Then the crisis must come.... But in the meantime your Russian rural commune fades away.... For the rest I grant you that Russia being the last country invaded by large scale capitalist industry and at the same time possessing the largest peasant population will experience this upheaval in a more acute and painful form than any other country.... But history is the most cruel of all goddesses and she drives her triumphal chariot over heaps of corpses... And we, men and women, are unfortunately so stupid that we never can pluck up courage for a real advance unless we are compelled to do so by sufferings that seem almost out of proportion (to the objective desired).'
[illegible] years old, enters the political stage. Mark also the tone of disillusionment in which Engels speaks about the delays in the advance of revolutionary socialism in Western Europe. This tone creeps more and more frequently into his letters. In 1894 he writes to Plekhanov about the condition of socialism in Great Britain:
'Here things move ahead, but they do so only slowly and in zig-zags.... One can really be driven to despair by such people as these English trade unionists with their sense of their imaginary national superiority, with their highly bourgeois ideas and opinions, with their 'practical' narrow-mindedness, with their chieftains thoroughly infected with the disease of parliamentary corruption. And yet things do move forward. Only that the ''practical'' Englishmen will be the last to come (to us), but when they come they will throw a very solid weight on to the scales.'
The more remote the prospects of revolution in Western Europe appeared to Engels, the clearer did they become in Russia. On his death-bed in 1895 Engels still watched the first moves made by the new and the last Tsar Nicholas II. In a letter to Plekhanov, Engels made the following almost prophetic remark:
'If the devil of revolution has taken anybody by the scruff of his neck then it is Tsar Nicholas II.'
To this Plekhanov, referring to a rather maladroit speech by the young Tsar, replied:
'The young idiot from the Winter Palace has by his speech rendered a great service to the party of the revolution.'
In 1895 Engels died. In an obituary on this founding father of the Marxist school the young Lenin wrote:
'Marx and Engels... sympathetically followed the Russian revolutionary movement.... They both became socialists from democrats, and the democratic hatred of political arbitrariness was extremely strong in them. This directly political feeling and their profound theoretical understanding of the connection between arbitrary political rule and economic oppression.... made Marx and Engels uncommonly responsive politically.
'... Apart from this Marx and Engels clearly saw that a political revolution in Russia would be of the greatest importance also for the Western European labour movement. An autocratic Russia has always been the stronghold of all European reaction. The unusually comfortable international situation in which Russia has found herself since the 1870 war, which had for long turned France and Germany against each other, has, of course, also increased the importance of autocratic Russia as a reactionary force. [illegible] no need to oppress Poles, Finns, [illegible] and other small nations, nor to incite [illegible] to set France and Germany against one other, will allow contemporary Europe to recover freely from the burdens of [illegible] others in the interest of the labour movement in the [illegible].'