CC contrasts the Narodnik and Russian Marxist views of society, arguing that the former movement developed a more dynamic theory capable of identifying the autonomy of certain aspects of Russian social life.
Introduction
History proceeds through the progressive development of the forces of production. This development gives rise to the state and, in time and under certain conditions, to a complex market economy. Subsequent interaction between the state, the economy, and what we may more broadly term society- the cultural groups, churches, fraternal and mutual aid societies, community kitchens, charities and foodbanks, consumer co-ops, agricultural collectives, worker’s syndicates, tenants’ unions, adult education facilities, community centers, parish councils and residents’ committees, that arise in concert with the extraction of greater and greater surplus from nature- determines the further development of those productive forces. Complex society is therefore an interaction between three spheres, or historical categories. A great amount of Marxism, particularly its Russian variant, puts an enormous emphasis on the ability of blind economic trends to determine historical outcomes. There is, however, a case for reevaluating the other two categories, to study how state power works to consciously, coercively enforce economic doctrine, and how society at large forms communities of resistance to marketization.1
This essay will contrast the Narodnik (Russian Populist) view of the social category (here we are referring to the definition of society given above) with that of the Russian Marxist tradition, especially of Plekhanov and Lenin. For these latter writers, the historical process is monolithic, utterly subjected to the dynamic of one sociological sphere over the others. In Plekhanov’s book on The Monist Conception of History, it is the economic sphere which predominates. The activity of the whole of civilization for him is the exclusive effect of economic laws, which rule over everything else. In Lenin’s State and Revolution, though a brilliant piece of Marxist analysis, we see an equally over-sighted preference for political causality. By drawing his line between Orthodox and Revisionist Marxism on the basis of his definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat, an idea which he ranked higher than all others, Lenin and subsequent Bolshevists were driven to produce a theory of organized social life which sees the political domination of one class over another as the final cause and prime mover of all historical development.2 This is an understandable view for a revolutionary organization to take, but, like Plekhanov’s theory, necessarily reduced the Marxist analysis of human history to the analysis of one specific category of human life. History, in the hands of both these men, becomes a monad, a single line of progress driven forward by a single and universal, mechanically immutable law of development.
For the Narodniks, who preceded the appearance of Marxism in Russia, the development of productive forces occurred differently across countries and climates, driven forward by dynamic interaction between state, society, and economy. As we will see below, the structure of nineteenth century Russia, especially the isolation and relative autonomy of the peasant commune, allowed them to develop a social philosophy that saw social organization below the level of high politics and market economics as, potentially, an independent, self-directed historical phenomenon. They understood that the social dynamic in Russia could unfold along very different lines from the political and economic trajectory of Europe, often drawing on Marx himself to bolster their arguments. In evaluating their ideas, we will be drawing primarily on Walicki’s History of Russian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Marxism, and the fourth volume of Plekhanov’s Selected Philosophical Works, but will have recourse to many other scholars besides. I will aim to show the powerful contribution made to Marxism by the Populists, especially to the study of pre-capitalist economics and the commune structure. Most importantly, I will be attempting to sketch out the alternative path of Russian development that might have saved the nation from the disastrous bureaucratization which so hampered the Bolsheviks during the Civil War.
Historical Background
The anthropologist Karl Polanyi said that capitalism is the only system under which the whole of society is subject to the laws of the market.3 He did not mean by this that every preceding culture was socialist- he was arguing instead that under all previous social systems, exchange and accumulation of goods played a subservient role to the wider interests of the community. Whether we take as an example the Trobriander islanders, who traded goods between each other according to religious custom, without amassing profit, or the European feudal system, which structured all of its productive forces to preserve the politico-military power of the monarch and his barons, we can draw the same conclusion. In each of these, as with all, precapitalist systems, economic life is regulated in such a way as to enforce and reproduce a certain socio-political arrangement, a certain system of cultural standards. The accumulation of profit and property, though they may exist, are not considered goals in themselves, but are instead subjugated to the higher purpose of maintaining the community. The highest goal of pre-capitalist production is thus the maintenance of the conditions necessary for humanity’s social existence. The human being is not considered a purely economical animal; rather, its economic activity is everywhere and always regulated, so as to serve the wider interests of the community, its customs, and its traditions. Pre-capitalist Economy, in Polanyi’s terms, is “embedded” within Society. Consistent with Marx’s observation in the Grundrisse,4 Polanyi sees pre-capitalist humanity as identifying the conditions of its social existence with a particular economic arrangement. This arrangement is maintained, therefore, in the interest of conserving the fabric of pre-capitalist society. At the capitalist stage of development, the market is separated (“dis-embedded”) from its social constraints, and begins to subjugate the whole of the social, political and religious machinery to its needs. Accumulation is considered an end in itself, and all other functions of public life must be rearranged to facilitate the unlimited demand to expand, acquire, and to profit.
The situation in Russia during the nineteenth century stood somewhere between stages. Reforms under the reign of Peter the Great from 1682 until 1721, and Catherine II from 1762 to 1799 had opened the country up to Westernization, importing Enlightenment ideas and industrial production, but leaving large parts of the countryside unchanged. Serfdom remained the dominant mode of agrarian existence, the vast majority of peasants being shackled to the land and completely at the whim of their landlords. Rural aristocrats could sell and purchase landless farmworkers at their discretion, as portrayed in Gogol’s 1842 novel Dead Souls. As W.E. Mosse has shown, the relationship between peasants and landlords, “the two basic classes of Russian society,” remained on very primitive footing, serfs being treated “always in a completely arbitrary manner” by their masters.5 Economically, development of trade and agriculture had long been hampered by extreme ecological barriers, whilst the legacy of the Tartar Khanate, which had introduced the absolutism of the grand prince and suppressed the independence of the baronage, continued to have a stagnating influence on politics.6 Without a mediating baronial power between state and society, the personal, politico-military machinery of the monarch became the one truly complex institution within the Russian state. The hinterland remained semi-governable at best and the low capacity for class struggle within the nobility bred a static society. By the time Western Europe was mastering capitalism, Russia had still yet to escape a very undeveloped form of feudalism.
The most important institution in rural Russia was the obshchina, or “commune.”7 Believed to be of pre-feudal origins, the commune was the focal point of the self-organized elements within the rural economy.8 Based upon strip farming, the land under each commune’s control was divided in plots and portioned out to each household for personal use. In most cases, plots were redistributed on a regular basis, ensuring a baseline equity throughout the community. The peasantry held a deep faith in communal ownership, believing that the “right to the land” was universal, and conceiving the property of each peasant household as a “permanent collective unit.”9 Land, therefore, was public property. Tillage, harvest, and the ownership of tools and produce, however, remained private affairs, nor was political power a collective possession. Authority was held by a small council of village elders, who enforced a strict, collectivist patriarchalism, a model not entirely distinct from the very earliest agrarian societies.
This medley of primitive communism and semi-feudalism, ancient agrarianism and nascent capitalism, would seem a strange starting point for any model society. Yet it was the communalism of the obshchina that became the animating principle for entire generations of Russian socialists, and the communal ideal remained a driving force in Russian politics long after the tragic degeneration of the October Revolution.
The Political Context
As we have seen, rural Russia lay somewhere between epochs, having advanced out of primitive communism but not yet fully feudalized, this interstage agrarianism being maintained primarily by the peasant commune. These peculiarities generated a feeling of Russian uniqueness amongst the intelligentsia, who saw in these conditions the potential for a Russia-specific path of development. During the reign of Catherine the Great, this trend was exemplified by the conservative opposition movement, especially by Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov (1733-90). As an aristocrat, his material interests lay with the ancient feudal structure that Petrine reforms had devitalized; his philosophical impetus was a deep-seated feeling that emergent capitalism would either be reined in, or else wreak havoc on the Russian people.
Regarding his sociology, Shcherbatov followed a common trend within semi-feudal literature, in his desire to contrast what he saw as the laxity, egoism and “voluptuousness” of civilized life with the more vital existence of the pre-feudal tribes.10 He saw in the Russian trend toward European enlightenment the arrival of new luxuries, philosophies, flights of bourgeois fancy, arguing this would have an enervating effect on the old aristocracy. He argued instead for a return to the “natural freedom” of primitive Russia, bound together by a tight, tribal cohesion, (Ibn Khaldun developed a term for this- asabiya, literally “group feeling”). The apparent disdain for material comforts among the nomad nations, the de-individualizing strictness of the clan structure, and capacity for the comprehensive regulation of the private sphere by means of ancient custom, all seemed antidotes to egoistic liberalism.
His railings against “individualism,” “careerism,” and “profligacy” amount in toto to a faltering attempt to understand the dynamic of Capital as it expanded eastwards from Europe, and to block its entry into the Russian Empire.11 With no large proletariat on which to base a theory of socialism, Shcherbatov turned instead to the ancient traditions of Russian politics, the tribal confederation and the Boyar Duma. This had been the advisory council of the grand prince and later the tsar, and its place in Shcherbatov’s thinking serves to demonstrate the aristocratic nature of his oppositional stance.12 In place of capitalism, he advocated a restoration of the feudal structures predating reforms under Peter the Great. In the Duma, conservative opposition saw an ancient Russian liberty under which everyone from the monarch to the nobles and down to the peasantry, had a place in society defined by custom and tradition.13 The balance of forces between monarch and noble, the bonds of customary responsibility binding nobles to their peasants, and the paternal duty of care of masters to their inferiors, it was argued, ensured a social harmony that would be destroyed by the introduction of market capitalism.
Shcherbatov was keenly aware of the unique individuality of the social, political, and economic spheres. He was equally aware of the threat capitalism and political despotism posed to autonomous, pre-industrial social existence. By reviving the Duma system, the tsar’s power to decree sweeping market reform from above could be curtailed. The embeddedness of political and economic activity within social convention, he argued, had created a floodgate against the arbitrary rule of both monarch and market alike. With this idea, Shcherbatov had set the stage for Russian Populism.
Whilst unquestionably a reactionary figure, Shcherbatov nonetheless provided incitement to subsequent generations of socialists. His essay A Discourse on the Corruption of Morals in Russia was distributed abroad in 1858 by Alexander Herzen, whilst his stance toward the Boyar Duma was carried forward by the revolutionary Decembrist movement.14 He also promoted the primitive egalitarianism of the ancient Russian tribes, praising their communal ownership of property.11 In this sense, he was no doubt a predecessor to the Narodniks, who viewed the obshchina as the potential embryo of a future socialism.
Populism: The Introspective Stage
Pushkin’s Scene from Faust begins with the phrase “Demon, I am bored.” The demon Mephistopheles replies, “What is to be done?” In the period between the writing and eventual publishing of Shcherbatov’s Discourse (nearly forty years in all) this was a question that transfixed the Russian intelligentsia. What Is to Be Done? was the title of Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel; likewise, Lenin’s political tract of 1905. Preceding both, Alexander Herzen’s “Who is to Blame?” alongside his journalistic and political writings, gave voice to a jilted generation struggling to answer Pushkin’s query.
University education and the partial Westernization of culture had led to growing dissatisfaction amongst the Russian young noblemen and raznochintsy (the “professional class” consisting of miscellaneous civil servants, bureaucrats and gentry). Educated progressives in this milieu were not of the people, yet felt hopelessly isolated from the stifling intellectual conservatism of the Russian courts. They felt that Westernization had not gone far enough in supplanting backward feudalism and superstition, though many feared the possible effects of capitalism on Russian society. They had become “superfluous men” without clearly defined social standing, belonging neither to the patriarchal-collectivist peasantry nor to the aristocracy, looking Westward for inspiration but highly skeptical of Europe’s bourgeoisie. If, in Shaw’s terms, Pushkin’s Faust experienced boredom as a monumental blackhole,15 then the young raznochintsky felt their political alienation in much the same way, Herzen being among the first to propose socialism as the solution.
“The father of Russian socialism” and predecessor of the Populists, Herzen attempted to base a theory of Russian development on the obshchina. Believing that the European bourgeoisie had become far too entrenched to be removed in the near-future, he argued that the ambiguous state of Russian society would allow for a rapid development towards socialism, even bypassing the capitalist stage all together.16
Following the philosopher Petr Chaadayev, Herzen took the view of Russia as a “country without a history.” Waves of invasions, from Mongol Khans and emperors, and periods of reform and reaction alike, had made very little change to the social base of Russia, which had remained intact and autonomous since its pre-feudal inception. Rosa Luxemburg makes very similar observations on the history of the peasant commune in India, which also survived many thousands of years of regime changes, only entering its decline with the introduction of market economics under British colonialism.17 For Herzen, then, the most important task facing socialists was the blockading of the country against capitalist advance – it, above all other social systems, represented the greatest threat to a free and autonomous civil society developing in Russia.
Herzen also extended this analysis to the intelligentsia. They, he argued, had been educated and immersed in European culture. Since the reign of Peter, therefore, there was no one amongst the intellectual classes, and few amongst the young nobles, who had any stake in Russia’s past. The material forces that in Europe had put bourgeois interests in line with the interests of the state, did not exist in Russia. Russia would have “everything to gain and nothing to lose in a social upheaval.”18 He further reasoned that the autocratic-tsarists powers could be put to progressive ends. The reasoning for this becomes clearer when we consider that all the great liberalizing reforms in recent Russian history had been “revolutions from above” spurred by, and perhaps at the time requiring, the exercise of monarchical coercion.19 Therefore, the Russian state, it was argued, did not have vested interests in one economic form over another, being concerned instead with maintaining its power at any cost and through any necessary reform.
Regarding Russian society, proto-socialist aspects had been embodied for generations in the traditional forms of village life. Unlike in Europe, where socialism had to be introduced by force, and against the wishes of an entrenched, bourgeois state, popular barriers to socialism – the opinions and prejudices of the common people – could more easily be overcome in Russia, where a form of socialism was already a lived experience. Herzen’s philosophy, in its immature phase, was therefore a philosophy of reconciliation between state and society.
What is valuable in this philosophy is the autonomy Herzen gives to civil society. His writings show how the free association of peoples working for a shared goal can overcome the narrow and egoistical demands of market society. This is the subjective element of his philosophy, his assessment of the human will and its capacity to transcend narrow self-interest. His weakness, however, derives from his assessment of the objective material conditions in Russia. This assessment severely hampered his ability to produce a strategy for socialist action, as the following paragraphs will show.
Although he praised the peasant commune as an “embryo” of the future society, Herzen doubted the capacity of the peasants for independent political action.20 He therefore looked to the other classes as a vehicle for development. If only, he reasoned, a group of enlightened individuals could bring the science, philosophy and literature of modern Europe (especially its socialist literature) to the peasants, then the inevitable raising of peasant consciousness could transform the obshchina into a full-fledged socialist organization.
The history of the tsars led Herzen to believe they could play a progressive role in Russian history, and the abolition of serfdom by Alexander II only strengthened this view. However, the gradually declining pace of reform in the later years of his reign, coupled with the continuous repression of the press, lead Herzen and his contemporaries to appeal more and more to the educated raznochintsy.21 The possibility of reconciliation between state and society seemed further and further away, and the antagonism between the two was more fully recognized in Herzen’s later writings. As Plekhanov wrote:
According to this philosophy, our development in the direction of socialism would be the result of interaction between two “embryos”: the peasant commune and the circles of educated young men (noblemen and, later, raznochintsy.) The circles of educated young men were to play an entirely active role. They were to end the somnolence of the other “embryo” and lend it an impetus which would be the starting point of its further development.22
Herzen saw two roles for the socialist intelligentsia. One was the dissemination of socialist propaganda amongst the peasants, without which he saw no chance of them rising politically. The other aspect was the negative one. It would fall to the raznochintsy to remove the obstacles to socialism that existed in feudal Russia, sweeping away the dead wood, so to speak, and allowing for the unhindered development of the commune.
Both of these ideas would be carried forward by the Populist Movement. The two “Go to the People” campaigns would lead the initiative on propaganda, whilst a wave of assassinations carried out by Populists would facilitate the negation of the existing order. Both of these campaigns will be discussed below. The Populists who led these crusades were inspired by Herzen’s views, but in modified form. The overwhelmingly cold reception that Herzen’s writings received from the raznochintsy, especially in the last years of his life when his socialist views were most strident, indicated that the middle and upper classes could not play the revolutionary role Herzen had hoped. They were too wedded to the feudal model of land ownership, on which many of them depended for their livelihoods. As such, the educated classes saw in Herzen’s socialism a prophecy of their own death, and his predominantly liberal audience began to reject him almost as soon as his socialism reached the height of its maturity.23 In fact, even as he began to publish the fruits of his intellectual development, Russian radicals had already started to peel away from Herzen, drawn instead to the writings of NG Chernyshevsky. Chernyshevsky continued Herzen’s project, but he would also advance a critique that made clear the flaws and contradictions in his thinking. Most importantly, though, he initiated Populism’s transition from primarily literary activity to activist political philosophy.
The Active Stage
As we have seen, Herzen’s socialism revolved around the educated upper classes. It was an intellectual socialism, founded on the idea that the masters could be convinced to give up their power and transition peacefully into the socialist way of living. For Chernyshevsky, socialism was an active project, demanding action from its adherents. Like Herzen, he valued the primitive egalitarianism of the obshchina, but understood that development was necessary to move the commune beyond its “embryonic” socialist stage. Most interesting in his thought is the notion that humanity must liberate itself from “the power of the land.”24 Through mechanization and industry, though not necessarily through capitalism, humanity has the capacity to fully liberate itself from Darwinian struggle and social competitiveness.25 What was needed, for Chernyshevsky, was a transition from the natural immediacy of the commune to a mediated, planned and democratic communal institution that would provide full freedom to the individual human conscience.
Communal landholding in Russia, Chernyshevsky thought, was a form of ownership corresponding to the first phases of the universal development of mankind; since a direct transition to the third phase- that of postcapitalist collectivism- seemed likely, there was no point in abolishing the village commune and thus destroying the collectivist traditions alive among the Russian people.26
A Hegelian at heart, Chernyshevsky followed the view that the final phase of a developmental process will closely resemble the first.27 This dialectical reading of Russian history confirmed for him that socialism in Russia would have to be built on the indigenous traditions preceding Peter’s Westernizing reforms. The transition, however, would transform indigenous institutions and elevate them to a higher level of development, requiring two fundamental changes. Primarily, the shared ownership of the land would have to be converted into the communal cultivation of land, creating a genuine commonwealth among the peasants.28 Secondly, an intellectual Westernization would have to be introduced into the highly patriarchal-conservative peasant mentality, reconciling material equality with “the emancipation of the human spirit.”29 This was to be achieved by modernizing the commune through industrialization, “to transform it along rational lines into an association similar to the workers associations existing in Western Europe.”26
This idea, that revolutionary structures may exist implicitly in pre-capitalist formations, is analyzed in some depth by the ecologist Murray Bookchin and the philosopher Bertrand Russell in their writings on ancient Greece. An etymological examination of the term “revolution” can reveal why. In a literal sense, it means a “re-volution,” a revolving process whereby a former, suppressed state of development is restored, deriving from the Latin revolvere, to “turn” or to “roll back.”30 As such, the distinction between revolutionism and conservatism has proved difficult to draw in some cases.31 In the process of revolution, however, the contemporary social order is not only overthrown and replaced by the archaic formations preceding it; rather, these institutions are themselves transformed in the process of struggle and take on new forms as the consciousness of the revolutionaries advances in the process of the revolution itself.32 This dialectical process, indispensable to a modern, scientific definition of socialism, was already understood by Chernyshevsky in 1858, outlined in his essay A Critique of Philosophical Prejudices Against the Communal Ownership of the Land.
Marx himself, who had always taken a nuanced view on developments in Russia, studied the article in detail, likely using it as a basis for his own theories on Russia’s future, as Walicki points out:
For instance, in his detailed drafts for a letter to Vera Zasulich dated March 8, 1881, Marx argued that the situation in Russia was exceptionally favourable, since primitive communism has survived to see the day when economic, technical, and intellectual conditions in the West were ripe for modern communism. Russia was not an isolated country but part of the international market economy, and she could thus take advantage of all the achievements of modern civilization and technology, assimilating the fruits of capitalist production but rejecting its modus operandi. In these circumstances, there was no reason why Russia would have to go through the capitalist stage; an argument that could be used against the advocates of capitalism, who alleged that no stage could be bypassed, was that Russian capitalism itself was skipping various phases by adopting the finished products of foreign capitalism in the form of modern machinery, railways, and a banking system. The similarity with Chernyshevsky’s arguments is striking.33
As Ian Angus is keen to observe in his excellent piece on the Russian commune, Marx and Engels insisted that the fate of Russia’s peasantry not be worked out through any “supra-historical” or “historico-philosophical” theory that didn’t take account of actually existing maternal conditions. The peasant commune, though hampered by technological underdevelopment, represented “the finest chance ever offered by history” to avoid the “vicissitudes of the capitalist regime.” For Angus, as for Marx, Engels, and Chernyshevsky, the conclusion to be drawn from Russian proto-socialism was a follows: “if the Russian communes survive, they could provide a direct path to socialism.”34 Another way to phrase this, of course, is that if Russian society came into its own, it could begin to act autonomously of state and economic interests.
From Communalism to Socialist Revolution
The extent of Cheryshevsky’s political activity is hard to gauge. Understandably, he had to be highly secretive in any anti-tsarist engagements, and if he was, as is very likely, active in revolutionary circles, he did an excellent job of concealing it from public view.
What is known, however, is that he maintained close ties to two significant revolutionary organs. One was Zemlia I Volia (Land and Freedom), the center of Narodnik activity in Russia at the time. The other was a Polish revolutionary circle – one of its members, Jaroslaw Dabriowski, along with the Russian emigree Elisabeth Dmitrieff, would go on to play leading roles in the Paris Commune.
Early attempts by the Populists to translate Chernyshevsky’s writings in action failed. The aforementioned “Go to The People” movement, involving around a thousand young intellectuals carrying socialist propaganda into the rural villages, foundered quickly and enthusiasm gradually fizzled out. Nevertheless, “the experience ‘awakened a burning desire to pass from words to action.’”35 Frustrated by government immobility, Populists undertook a prolonged campaign of direct action, with special emphasis given to assassination, with some half-dozen state officials successfully targeted in 1878. When Land and Freedom split in 1879, the more intellectual faction, led by future Marxist theoreticians Zasulich, Plekhanov, and Axelrod, took a stand against the campaign of terror. They also retained the view that socialism required as a prerequisite the gradual transition through a liberal-bourgeois phase of development. The radical faction, now called People’s Will, alleged instead that state repression could only be countered by revolutionary action, and further argued that the direct leap into socialism could still be affected, if only peasant society could be modernized. Marx’s writings at the time demonstrate he was firmly supportive of the later trend in Populism.36 Advancements in the level of political organization lead to developments in theory. In the 1880s, Populist economists Danielson and Vorontsov began to examine the commune in light of Marx’s writings, concluding as Chernyshevsky did that socialism would be impossible without industrialization.37 With circulation of a Russian edition of Marx’s Capital having already begun in the early 1870s, largely through the work of Populist translators and distributors, a more robust fusion of Narodnik and dialectical materialist thought was in sight.38 Populists would now tend toward a radical reassessment of the urban working classes, who became increasingly important to their political strategy. For over three decades, until 1901, when veterans of People’s Will founded the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries (SRs) Populist thought and strategy had come more and more to focus on the proletariat as it emerged out of the peasantry in the course of increasingly rapid marketization.
Crystallized by the new Party, these ideas would lead Populists into coalition with the industrial workers, calling them the advance guard of a working class that also included the peasantry and intelligentsia. The proletarian turn in Narodnik thinking also led to the creation of Russia’s first workers unions, founded by Populists in Odessa in 1872, and St Petersburg in 1878. Militarily, the efficacy of Populist tactics would also take a leap forward, as the establishment of the SR Combat Organization would initiate an even more sweeping bout of assassinations that threatened to cripple the Russian state, at least for a time.29 Informed but not determined by Marxism, the SRs would provide lasting and valuable contributions to the Russian class struggle.39
As we have seen, the Populists identified themselves with the “profound strain of democratic egalitarianism” which had been transferred from the peasant commune to the industrial working class through the migration of peasant workers into the cities, becoming one of the dominant traits of the Russian people’s psyche.40 They saw their purpose as primarily a negative one. Like Herzen, they sought not so much to outline a positive political program, but rather remove obstacles to proto-socialist economic forms that already existed, to allow the base of Russian society to develop independently. Yet they had also learned from Cheryshevsky, who had taught them to be wary of state power and the noblemen. Enthused with a strong libertarian strain, this later generation of Narodniks sought revolution without interference from the state or the market. In other words, they believed in a revolution from below, carried through by the people themselves, and understood their own role as one of mere auxiliaries in the cause. They believed that this strategy was specifically tailored to Russian conditions, and that the negation of state and corporate power by revolutionaries would enable the embryonic commune to fully develop along socialist lines. In their deep skepticism of state power and desire to transform society through the self-activity of the laboring masses directly, they replicated, although in a modified form, the theories and practices of the European Syndicalist movement that was raging at the time. They were, nevertheless, a distinctly Russian phenomenon, defending their practices as the necessary correlates to a uniquely Russian socialism. It was indeed this attention to Russia-specific circumstances that was praised by Marx and Engels.41
The Marxist camp saw their role in a similar yet opposite light. For the likes of Plekhanov and others, the goal of revolutionaries was to remove obstacles not to the commune, but to capitalism.42 Socialism demanded industrialization, but this could only be achieved with the advancement in capitalism in Russia. This, in turn, required the destruction of the commune. Peasant proprietors thrown off the land by agrarian capitalism would then flock to the cities. The resultant urban proletariat would not only spur on industrial development, but would provide soldiers for the class struggle, and the eventual overthrow of capitalism. Plekhanov’s revolution was to be a revolution from without, not below,43 whereas Lenin advocated the formation of a tight-knit cadre to seize state power and carry out a modernizing revolution from above. He hoped, by this, for a “shorter and more rapid” (and, one presumes, more humane) trajectory of capitalist development;44 thus, both men believed some form of capitalism to be necessary for socialist development. Equally, both men saw the basis of these changes outside of Russian society, expressing little faith that Russians themselves could affect the transformation without an external stimulus.
As the following paragraphs will show, the Herzen and Plekhanov traditions would prove irreconcilable in both theory and practice.
“The Third Russian Revolution”
The largely spontaneous 1905 Revolution and its consequences took Russian intellectuals by surprise, and awakened them to the high levels of political consciousness present among the people. Attempts to break up the peasant commune had, for the most part, met communal resistance and ended in failure.45 The growth of peasant parties and an intelligentsia among peasants and workers spoke to the rising political consciousness of the masses, and the growing threat of spontaneous land requisition dispelled widespread beliefs in the apathy of the peasants, who had become an increasingly revolutionary element under SR influence.46 Lenin revised the vanguard theories outlined in What is to be Done?. In general, the masses had shown themselves a force to be reckoned with; although the results of ’05 proved disappointing, it signaled to many that subsequent upheavals would have to build on popular enthusiasm or fizzle out. Intellectuals could no longer be thought of as the sole “active element” in revolution – the social base itself would now have to carry through the transformation of the Russian empire. Future attempts to deepen the revolutionary gains through parliamentary means (via the newly established Duma) would garner little support from an increasingly radical and impatient population.
From 1914 onwards, popular resistance was intensified by a burning urgency to bring an end to the First World War, which devastated Russian trade, industry, and population, exacerbated the collapse of the tsarism and led to the majority of industry falling into the hands of workers’ and peasants’ councils (Soviets) over the course of the February Revolution. The impasse between mass democracy and the parliamentary state proved unmanageable, and the state fell in October to a Bolshevik coup, backed by a minority in the army. Though they never made good their promise to establish a Constituent Assembly as replacement for the pseudo-democratic Provisional Government then ruling in place of the deposed tsar, nor achieved a majority in any election – the SRs far outpaced them in votes, and were unquestionably justified in speaking on behalf of the bulk of workers47 – Lenin’s party was nevertheless able to retain power, centralized the Soviets under state management and, when they saw the impossibility of attaining power electorally, deposed, persecuted, and destroyed the other parties of the Left.
Russia in the final days of its engagement in the First World War presents one of the most difficult moral dilemmas of the twentieth century. There emerged a broad popular support for an immediate end to hostilities, redistribution of land, and peace at all costs, a tendency eventually, though ultimately ineffectually, being represented by Lenin and Trotsky. Immediate peace required repression of the generals and government, however, and the landowners and industrialists would have to be forcibly replaced in order for the only viable alternative to the government, the Soviets, to seize power. Peace demanded, therefore, the conversion of the world war into a civil war, a civil war in which many more could, eventually did, die. The loudest voices in the Provisional Government held the opposite, and equally problematic view, that resulting from the fact that Russia was then, as even Lenin conceded, the freest of the belligerent parties in WWI, its resistance to German imperialism took on renewed importance. Imperialist war had already been converted into people’s war, and the Russians would have to keep fighting.48 With no obvious end to the killing in sight, Russia stood between hostile war parties, with unbridgeable gulfs of opinion between the two.
When the Bolsheviks came to power they did so with the promise of immediate peace, police abolition, prohibition of the death penalty, redistribution of land, and the convening of a Constituent Assembly. All but the first promise were to be shelved, the latter measures dying from the inevitable consequences of the first. The civil war resulting from the Bolshevik seizure of power brought the collapse, equally inevitably, of Bolshevism as a progressive force in Russia. The need for military specialists in the civil war saw generals and bureaucrats from the tsarist regime reenter the administration, under Trotsky’s express instructions. The enormous casualties sustained by the proletariat produced a weakened and demoralized working class which was no longer capable of instituting Soviet democracy. Perhaps most damagingly, the need for the total militarization of Russian society utterly suppressed the independent political consciousness of the masses, leading eventually to a state not distinct from the one inherited by Russia’s grand princes centuries before. Just as the Russian state emerged as a military outgrowth of the Tartar’s imperial delegates, so too would the Soviet Union become, with time, a vast and highly militarized bureaucracy answering to one man management, at first under the reign of Lenin and, later and more disastrously, Stalin. Kautsky, it seems, was not entirely wrong to describe as “Tartar socialism” the political conditions of Soviet Russia. An abortive SR uprising, Populist insurrection in the Tambov region, and the heroic, if futile, resistance of the Kronstadt sailors failed to instigate the “Third Russian Revolution” which would have preserved Soviet democracy without the influence either of the capitalist economy or the autocratic state. With the enormous creative potential of the masses burnt out by the end of the civil war, Russia more-or-less settled into the Stalinist model that would predominate for the best part of the twentieth century.
Could it have been otherwise? Might the Provisional Government have negotiated a satisfactory peace with the Central Powers? Its nationalist makeup at the time makes this unlikely. Could some form of “revolutionary pluralism” as Volkogonov calls it, comprised of a Bolshevik-Menshevik-SR and liberal coalition have instituted the necessary changes to the advantage, and not the detriment, of Social Democracy?49 It is possible. What is clear, however, is that the deepest travesty of twentieth-century Russia was the crushing, by immense force, of the autonomous institutions and political consciousness of the Russian people. The spontaneous action and collective will of the people themselves had made the revolution, the first successful worker’s revolution in history, and the revolution, in turn, devoured them.
Marxism and Populism
The Populists, in Volkogonov’s assessment, represented “the mainstream” of the Russian socialist movement. Capitalism, for them, “came to Russia as an alien, unwanted force which threatened to press Russian life into a lethal straight jacket.”50 Throughout their history, they consistently took the position of “subjective” non-determinism with regards to Russian capitalism, arguing even as late as the 1920s that a peasant-proletarian coalition could institute a socialist state in the country without the necessity of passing through the capitalist phase. They identified their interests with, and expressed the interests of, the Russian peasantry and the semi-proletarian classes that, though working in the industrial centers, maintained close familial and cultural ties to the commune. Their organization and strategy, consequently, depended upon the broadest possible mass of Russian people, demanding the people themselves play a leading and active role in the struggle for socialism. They laid emphasis on the social basis of revolution, on the need for civil society at large to participate in the struggle against the commanding heights of politics and economics.
The Orthodox Marxist camp, represented at first by Plekhanov’s Emancipation of Labor Group and later by the Plekhanov-lead Menshevik faction, spoke instead to the determinist trend in socialist thought. Though Plekhanov himself had never argued that capitalism was a necessary stage for all societies, that it couldn’t ever be bypassed, he did nonetheless conclude that, by the time of the publication of Danielson’s and Vorontsov’s major works, it was already too late to arrest the development of a market economy in Russia.51 What remained to be done, therefore, was not to smash the state, but to enter a coalition with the emergent bourgeoisie, hastening the development of capitalism while mitigating its most harmful consequences.
Lenin inherited much from both tendencies – from Plekhanov the primacy of material forces in determining the course of historical development, from the Populists the subjectivist and anti-determinist notion that socialist revolution need not come after the full development of capitalist forces. For Lenin, the most important expression of the economic arrangement of a given country was the dictatorship of one class over another. The establishment of proletarian dictatorship, therefore, was seen as the fastest, most direct route through the capitalist phase and into the socialist one. Emphasis was therefore laid upon political measures, in contradistinction to the Orthodoxy, which stressed the role of economics in history, and Populists, whose primary interest was civil society at large.
What can be learned from Narodnik history? Having staked their entire political future on the future of the Russian peasantry, it is highly unlikely that anything resembling Populism could emerge in the twenty-first century. Decades of turmoil following the 1917 revolution suppressed any possibility of an autonomous peasant political culture re-emerging. Vacillation between forced requisition under War Communism, followed by appeasement in the form of the state capitalist New Economic Policy, and finally mass collectivization under Stalin, achieving the militarization of peasant labor that Trotsky instituted in industry, suppressed the self-determination of rural society and made the possibility of a Narodnik revival almost impossible.52
What does remain, however, as a lasting contribution of Narodnik thought, is their willingness to deeply examine the particulars of Russian society and seek alternatives to the forward march of capitalism. To accept the inevitability of the market economy was, for the Narodniks, neither sociologically sound nor morally permissible.
Although Engels distanced himself from this idea in his later life, both he and Marx retained close contacts with, and expressed strong sympathy for, the early generation of Narodniks, precisely because of their readiness to apply and adapt the science of Marxism to uniquely Russian conditions.53 In making their case against the inevitability of Russian capitalism, Narodnism stumbled upon a second, largely unappreciated Marxist discovery. The autonomy of the social sphere from the coercive powers of state, industry, and high finance, was central to Populist strategy. In both their writings and campaigning, they attempted to articulate the ways in which direct action from below could change the course of what appeared to many to be the predetermined outcomes of world history. This notion of community resistance is today expressed in anti-eviction actions and tenants unions, in the politics of municipalism and in all contemporary movements attempting to hollow out the state and create an environment in which society at large and the people themselves can lay hold of the material forces structuring their lives, reorganizing and administering these things for themselves. In opposition to economic and political determinism, the sociological theories of the Narodniks remind us of one of Marx’s most important discoveries – that though humanity’s material circumstances are already “given and transmitted from the past” we nevertheless retain as a species the capacity to make our own history.
- See Meiksins-Wood, Ellen. “The Origin of Capitalism, A Longer View.” Verso (2017) and Kropotkin, Petr. “The State: Its Historic Role.” Anarchist Library (2009) https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-state-its-historic-role; Bonfert, Bernd. “‘The real power must be in the base’ – Decentralised collective intellectual leadership in the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and to the City.” Capital and Class Volume 45 Number 4 (2021) p. 523-543.
- Volkogonov, Dmitri. “Lenin: Life and Legacy” Harper Collins Publishers (1995) p. 146.
- Polanyi, Karl. “The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.” Beacon Press (2001) p. 45.
- Marx, Karl. “Grundrisse.” Penguin Classics (1993) p. 471-72.
- Mosse, W.E. “An Economic History of Russia 1856-1914” I.B. Tauris Publishers (1996) p. 41, 17.
- Ibid, p. 5, 8.
- Rogger, Hans “Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution 1881-1917” Longman (1992) p. 80.
- “Obshchina.” Marxist Internet Archive: Glossary of Terms https://www.marxists.org/encyclopedia/terms/o/b.htm#obshchina.
- Cyril Zaitsev, and Bernard Pares. “The Russian Agrarian Revolution.” The Slavonic and East European Review 9, no. 27 (1931): 547–66. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4202560, p. 551.
- Walicki, Andrzej “A History of Russian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Marxism.” Stanford University Press (1979) p. 29.
- Ibid.
- “Boyar.” Britannica (2011) https://www.britannica.com/topic/boyar.
- Walicki, p. 58.
- Ibid, p. 28.
- Shaw, Alan “Alexander Pushkin’s “Scene from Faust.”” (New Criterion, Volume 28, Number 8 (April 2010).
- Walicki, p. 168.
- Luxembourg, Rosa “The Accumulation of Capital.” Routledge and Kegan Paul (2004) p. 352.
- Walicki, p. 167.
- Mosse, p. 271.
- Plekhanov, Georgi “Selected Philosophical Works, Volume IV” University Press of the Pacific, (2004) p. 631.
- Ibid, p. 605.
- Ibid, p. 631.
- Ibid, p. 619.
- Ibid, p. 153.
- Ibid, p. 212-13
- Walicki, p. 199.
- Plekhanov, p. 127
- Ibid, p. 218.
- Ibid, p. 151.
- Bookchin, Murray (1992) “Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship.” Black Rose Books (1992) p. 287.
- Russell, Bertrand “History of Western Philosophy.” Routledge (2004) p. 80-81.
- Luxembourg, Rosa “Reform or revolution and other writings” Dover Publications (2006) p. 138.
- Walicki, p. 199-200.
- Angus, Ian “Marx and Engels and Russia’s Peasant Communes” Monthly Review Vol. 74, No. 5 (October 2022) 12-23, p. 16.
- Ibid, p. 18.
- Ibid, p. 18-19.
- Eaton, Henry. “Marx and the Russians.” Journal of the History of Ideas 41, no. 1 (1980): 89–112. https://doi.org/10.2307/2709104. p. 110-11; Rogger, p. 140.
- Resis, Albert. “Das Kapital Comes to Russia.” Slavic Review 29, no. 2 (1970): 219–37. https://doi.org/10.2307/2493377, 221-23.
- Ibid, p. 155.
- Mosse, xi.
- Angus, p. 21.
- Rogger, p. 144.
- Ibid, p. 147.
- Ibid, p. 250.
- Mosse; Rogger, p. 245.
- Cyril Zaitsev, and Bernard Pares, p. 553.
- Roger, p. 273.
- Ibid, p. 278.
- Volkogonov, Dmitri (1991) “Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy.” Weidenfeld and Nicolson (1991) p. 29.
- Laue, Theodore H. von. “The Fate of Capitalism in Russia: The Narodnik Version.” American Slavic and East European Review 13, no. 1 (1954): 11–28. https://doi.org/10.2307/2492162. P. 17.
- Plekhanov, Georgi “The Development of the Monist View of History.” Progress Publishers (1972) p. 236-41.
- Cyril Zaitsev, and Bernard Pares, p. 565-66.
- Deutscher, Isaac. “Marx and Russia.” Marxist Internet Archive https://www.marxists.org/archive/deutscher/1948/marx-russia.htm.