I am sure the conservative people who have introduced capitalism into Russia, will be one day terribly astonished at the consequences of their doings.—ENGELS, 1897
JOSEPH STALIN the revolutionary and the newly-developing working-class of Russia were fortunate in the time of their appearance in history. The conditions associated with that appearance were such as obtained in no other country. Capitalism in Russia, slowly developing in a vast arena of feudalism, received, in the second half of the nineteenth century, a terrific impulse from Europe. Moreover, it started at a higher technological level than in the countries of the West. The Russians did not have to invent the steam-engine and pass through all the stages which marked the growth of our factory system, beginning with the small factory and developing towards the large. Capital was much more concentrated. Already in 1885, at the Morozov mill of Orekovo-Zuyevo, near Moscow, there were employed no fewer than 8,000 workers. Between 1890 and 1900 the number of workers engaged in Russian industry rose to 7,500,000, with a much greater proportion engaged in large factories than in any country of Western Europe or America.
During this time the unchecked exploitation of the new industrial workers knew no bounds—long hours of labour averaging twelve to fourteen hours a day; wages of seven to eight roubles a month[1]; metal workers and foundry men receiving not more than thirty-five roubles a month; no factory legislation; trade unionism prohibited and each attempt to form trade unions brutally repressed; a foul insanitary barrack system of accommodation for the workers existed at the large factories; all the excesses which characterised the early years of capitalism everywhere, here classically exemplified.
Parallel with this development of the industrial working-class, the capitalist revolution in agriculture proceeded equally rapidly. The law for the abolition of serfdom, promulgated in 1861, failed to emancipate the peasants. They had to face a “redemption price” of 2,000,000,000 roubles, pay rent in kind, and cultivate the landlords’ lands with their own implements and animals. The so-called liberation from serfdom was really only an exchange of serfdom for a new kind of slavery in the name of freedom, driving many off the land altogether to seek new employment in the mills and factories. It also differentiated the peasants widely, dividing them, into rich (the kulaks or capitalist farmers), middle, and poor, according to their ability to meet the impact of their “emancipation,” i.e., to pay their redemption price and the poll tax, to render services to the landlords, and to exploit one another in the process. This was the evolution of rural capitalism.
These vast economic and industrial changes were not inaugurated by a far-seeing government and a ruling class that wanted them. The Czars were absolute monarchs and the czarist governments, throughout the nineteenth century, were grotesquely antiquated affairs expressing the interests and the outlook of the serf-owners and the ex-serf-owners. Russia was vast. It covered more than 8,000,000 square miles, stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific Ocean and from the Arctic to the semitropical frontiers of Persia. It was an empire in which the Russian autocracy governed 160,000,000 people, sixty millions of whom were non-Russian. The absolutism of the Czars was supremely conservative. They desired purely and simply an Asiatic despotism. They were proud of a Russia’s backwardness, and buttressed their autocratic centralised bureaucracy with a Church system which was never anything but a spiritual slave to the autocracy. Two hundred thousand priests and monks were as much a part of the mechanism of government as the police, the army, and other state officials. Russia had had no Reformation, nor any period marked by the craft guilds and manufacturers that had characterised Western European countries, including our own, during the centuries of transition from feudalism. What craftsmanship that had appeared was based upon agriculture and the peasants. Agriculture itself grew by the expansion of the cultivated area rather than by improved cultivation.
All these features of Russian life account for the slowness of Russian development until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, for the reputed “laziness” of the Russian people and their so-called “fatalism.” The fact is that the millions of peasants scattered over Russia’s vast territory were backward, brutalised, ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, and kept so by a despotism uninterested in the development of the means of production. It was comparatively easy for centralised armed forces, equally ignorant and brutal, to crush whatever peasant revolts arose, especially since these could only be local or regional, and equally easy to crush nationalist revolts of the subject peoples of the Empire—Poles, Georgians, Armenians, and so on.
These familiar facts have frequently given rise to the interpretation of the Russian Revolution as a revolt of goaded, ignorant millions against a stupidly reactionary ruling class. Of course these were factors in the revolution, but the explanation is too superficial. It ignores a most important phenomenon in the social and political history of Russia, without which I think it not too extravagant to say there would have been no November Revolution in 1917. I refer to the existence of the Russian Revolutionary intelligentsia. They were revolutionary because the régime made them so, and in this respect the development of Russia in the nineteenth century differs from that of all the countries of Western Europe.
In these states capitalism had superseded feudalism long before the industrial working-class had become conscious of its independent rôle or Socialism had become a science. The intelligentsia which had grown up with the triumphant capitalism of the nineteenth century was thus not a revolutionary element in society. Here and there were a few individuals who could be so classified, Marx and Engels being out-standing examples; but few others could be included. The majority were conservative, capitalist-minded, and at best liberal capitalist. Capitalism in Western Europe (including Britain) and America did not repress the intelligentsia. Everywhere industry was growing with rapidity. Improved lines of communication broke down the isolation populations. Railways, cheap and rapid postal services, cheap telegraphy, newspapers with mass circulations, popular education, the extension of the franchise, all contributed their opportunities for the intelligentsia to lead a liberal life, and for the working-class and its organisation to grow.
When the intelligentsia became interested in this latter development, their interest was not revolutionary. They did not come to the working-class to revolutionise, but to liberalise. True, they compounded a little with Socialism, occasionally wore red ties and adorned the brow of the working-class movement with the reddish halo of a far, far distant Socialism; but nowhere in any of these countries did they pursue a revolutionary course. Even in Germany where the Social Democratic Labour Movement began under the banner of Marxism, and subscribed to its general tenets under the direct influence of Marx and Engels, the intelligentsia were “revising Marxism.” In place of “the revolutionary conquest of power” the German Social Democratic Labour Party was steadily evolving as a Parliamentary Party of reform.
In the same period the British working-class was gathering its forces under the banner of Trade Unionism. Although Marx and Engels had for many years lived and worked in England, there were not many people in this country who knew anything of Marxism. Only a few of the writings of Marx had been translated into English. The revolutionary years had long since gone and the Chartist Movement was almost forgotten when the Socialist organisations began to re-form. The Labour Party was not yet born. Only small Socialist organisations such as the Social Democratic Federation, the Fabian Society, and the Independent Labour Party expressed the growth of Socialist opinion, and none of these groups was Marxist. The Fabians rejected Marxism out and out. Socialism, according to their view, would come from the permeation of the bureaucracy of capitalism with Socialist ideas and the gradual evolution of capitalism into Socialism. Efficiency, adult education, reform, the conversion of the capitalists through reason and the general improvement of the conditions of the people would effect the transformation. The Independent Labour Party was a more or less Christian Socialist Party seeking Socialism through the conversion of the people and a parliamentary majority of Socialists. The Social Democratic Federation wanted the emancipation of the workers through a Socialist Parliamentary majority. It propagated the economic teachings of Marx but it would have nothing to do with his notion of a revolutionary struggle for power. When this Federation split into two parties and the Socialist Labour Party was formed, the latter regarded itself as the propagandist of Socialism and the industrial organisations as the means whereby the workers would achieve power. Hence in this period there was thus no fusion of the working-class with scientific Socialism, but rather with Fabianism, which denied the historic rôle of the working-class as defined by the Marxists.
In the Latin countries of Europe, where capitalism was not so advanced as in Britain and Germany, the workers’ movements were nevertheless following a similar course, led by a similar intelligentsia. In America where capitalism was developing with great speed, there was only a small Socialist party similar in outlook to that of the Social Democratic Federation of Britain, and the revolutionary syndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World which visualised a revolution with the General Strike as its principal weapon.
But in Russia there existed in this period a revolutionary intelligentsia familiar with the language of revolution though little acquainted with Marxism. This class had a long and remarkable history dating back to the reign of Peter the Great, who opened the windows of Russia to let in the light of Europe. His work was carried forward during the eighteenth century by Catherine II, a German princess and an intellectual of no mean standing. She was a disciple of Montesquieu and corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot, the great writers and thinkers who were busily preparing the French Revolution. That revolution and the armies of Napoleon spread the liberal ideas of the rising capitalism. It was out of the Napoleonic wars that a group of Russian officers of the Guards, impregnated with liberal ideas and thrilled with the notion of bringing a constitution to Russia, and liberating the peasants from serfdom, prepared a palace revolt. Some plotted the assassination of the Czar Nicholas I. These became known as the Decembrists, because of the date on which they had planned their rising. Five were hanged and the rest sent to Siberia. Thus the first revolutionaries among the intellectuals met their fate by the only weapons the Czars of the nineteenth century knew for the suppression of ideas. But ideas, once spread, are not killed by killing those who do the spreading, especially ideas which have behind them the driving force of human emancipation.
The great period of Russian writers ushered in the next stage. Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol and Tolstoy, Chekhov and Turgeniev, set the pace to Russian culture among the educated people. Then came Dostievsky and Khosiakov, Alexander Herzen, Belinsky and the famous anarchist Bakunin. Pushkin was killed in a duel. So was Lermontov. Herzen was exiled. Dostievsky was sentenced to death and reprieved as he and others stood before the firing squad, only to spend long years ini prison. Belinsky was expelled from the university. Bakunin was imprisoned and exiled.
Among the great intellectuals too was N. S. Chernyshevsky, the nearest to the Marxists of all the Russian Socialists of the middle of the nineteenth century. From these writers spread the liberal, Socialist and humanist ideas, and it was their work which inspired the growth of the Narodnik (Peoples’) Movement, the Nihilists, who denied all authority, the anarchists, and later the Socialist Revolutionaries. Whether their views were extreme or moderate, they were always met with repression; and it was this fact, persisting through the century and beyond, which called forth the policy of terrorism directed against the autocracy.
There was a fundamental weakness in the intellectual policy. It had no mass support, not because the masses disapproved of the policy of violence—to that their daily life had long been accustomed—but they knew nothing of what the intellectuals were doing or why. The revolutionaries sought to stir the people by the glory of the sacrificial act of the individual, to make the revolution for the people instead of with the people. No country was richer in the number of its idealists of this kind who, reflecting on the inequalities and injustices of their generation, dared to give their all that things might be changed.
There were two main trends of opinion among them. One was akin to the Liberalism and utopian Socialism of the West, and the other expressed a distinctly Russian or Slavophil idea based on the overwhelmingly agrarian life of Russia with its primitive organisation of the Mir or Village Commune. The former wanted a Constituent Assembly and representative government of the Western type, the latter wanted the communes to be the basis of a Socialist society that would have nothing to do with the Western industrialism. The anarchists among them wanted a community of voluntary co-operative societies and village communes without any state authority whatever. All were against the autocratic régime and regarded it as the principal enemy of the people. All fought for their ideas, and throughout the century there is a long trail of young men and women of this stratum of society going into the prisons of Russia and Siberia and to the firing squad.
From this generation of middle-class intelligentsia—university students, writers, school teachers, inspectors, journalists—came the Plekhanovs, the Gorkis and Chitcherins, Litvinovs and a host of others. There were many families like that, for example, of Ilya Nikolayevitch Ulyanov. This man was an inspector of primary schools of the province of Simbirsk, a liberal civil servant. His wife, Maria Aleksandrovna, was born of a family of small gentry with an estate in the province of Kazan. They had six children—Alexander, Vladimir, Dimitri, Anna, Olga and Maria. All grew up as revolutionaries. The eldest of the six, Alexander, was foremost of a group of young men who planned to assassinate Czar Alexander III. They were arrested, tried, and hanged in 1887. They had belonged to a group of Narodniks—Socialists whose movement made no distinction between the working-class of the town and the peasants. The Ulyanov family was not unique in producing a household of revolutionaries: rather was it typical of its kind. It stands out from the rest only because Vladimir Ilyitch Ulyanov became known to the world as Lenin.
When Plekhanov introduced Marxism to Russia in 1884, it did not follow that the whole body of intellectuals was waiting ready to swallow it whole. But it did mean that there existed a large number spiritually prepared to revalue their ideas in the light of the new teaching. This fact was all-important for the development of the modern revolutionary class—the rising industrial working-class. For Socialist theory is not the product of the proletarian class. Neither Marx nor Engels nor Lenin were of this class. Nor were Sir Thomas More, nor Godwin, nor Owen nor a whole host of thinkers of many countries. Ironic and contradictory as it may be, Socialism as a theory was derived from the intelligentsia—a social group born of the middle classes. It is they who have developed Socialist theories for society, and it is they who are responsible for scientific Socialism or Marxism.
And yet how natural was this development! The doors of the kingdom of knowledge were open to them when they were closed to the proletarians, who remained illiterate until the increasing intricacy of industrial technique made compulsory elementary education a necessity. Again, the intellectuals were not tied to the mechanism of industry for long hours every day in order to secure the physical means of life; their brains could function unfettered by the exhausting drain of energy which every proletarian’s toil imposed on him.
The situation of Russia was thus unique among the powers. Capitalism was rapidly producing a modern industrial working-class and giving it no means of social and political development other than through revolution. Indeed, capitalism itself was revolutionary. It had needed a “1789” to relieve it of the impedimenta of Czarism and feudalism: now the intelligentsia, made revolutionary by the despotism of the régime, began to assimilate Marxism and link up “1789” and November 1917. Thus the Russian Social Democratic Labour Movement was soon to rescue the revolutionary teachings of Marx from the swamp of Revisionism which was engulfing them in the West, and in doing so it was to pave the way for the creation of the first Socialist state in history.
Within a very short time three principal political schools crystallised among the intelligentsia as a result of the impact of Marxism. There were those who supported Plekhanov and the Emancipation of Labour groups and accepted the new doctrine completely. Another group, led by P. Struve, who became known as “legal” Marxists, held that capitalism must precede Socialism and drew the conclusion that the capitalist class must therefore come to power and establish political democracy as in the Western countries. A third group, while holding to the view that Russia must have a revolution, rejected Marxism and placed all its hopes on the peasantry. This dependence on the peasantry became the cardinal point of the policy of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.
It was in the midst of this preparatory work that Lenin became acquainted with the works of Marx. He first began to study Capital in 1888, when he was eighteen years of age, and already a first-class scholar steeped in the history of Russia and widely acquainted with European history and revolutionary doctrine. Although convinced of the necessity of revolution, he at no time subscribed to the terrorist policy which had brought his brother to an untimely end. He went to St. Petersburg in 1893, and by that time he held fully-formed opinions. He had found in the works of Marx and Engels that for which he had been searching. His arrival in St. Petersburg created a tremendous stir in revolutionary circles, for it quickly became clear that here was a leader and creative thinker of outstanding qualities.
From this moment a new development began among the Marxists and in the working-class. Lenin supported Plekhanov and his colleagues in their propaganda and joined in the battle against the Narodniks and the “legal Marxists,” but passed from the stage of forming educational circles to organise political agitation with the workers. He formed in St. Petersburg a League for the Emancipation of the Working-class, led strikes, and showed how to combine the struggle for economic and political reforms with the struggle against Czarism. It was at this decisive moment in the history of Russia when the industrial working-class was appearing on the scene with a new type of leader, that Joseph Stalin at eighteen years of age turned his back on the Theological College and plunged headlong into the new revolutionary stream. Geographically, Lenin and Stalin were far apart, the one in northern St. Petersburg, the other in the Caucasian South. Neither so much as knew of the existence of the other, and years were still to elapse before they could meet. But already they were developing as part of the same forward movement.
1. 1 rouble = 2 shillings
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