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The Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Institute is a research institution whose aim is to establish a well-equipped research laboratory in which researchers may, under the most favourable conditions, study the genesis, development and spread of the theory and practice of scientific socialism, revolutionary communism, as conceived and formulated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
And the extent to which it was difficult in Russia to properly establish the scientific study of Marxism is best illustrated by the fact that, as early as the beginning of 1919, an institution such as the Socialist Academy did not possess a complete set of the works of Marx and Engels, republished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Admittedly, the entire scientific and technical apparatus for the study of the historical and social sciences was not in a much better state either.
In November 1919, following my report on the organisation of the Socialist Academy’s work in light of changes to its plan and objectives, work began on setting up a number of research departments.
In the course of this work, I came to the conclusion that it was necessary to set up a special department dedicated to the study of the theory, history and practice of Marxism. It was established in a separate building in Moscow (in Vozdvizhenka Street, on the corner of Sheremetev Lane). A trip to London in the summer and autumn of 1920 gave me the opportunity to enrich this room with a number of very valuable and rare publications.
It was precisely at this time (by a resolution of the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party dated 8 December 1920) that I was entrusted with the task of ‘creating the world’s first museum of Marxism’, a task of ‘exceptional international significance’. I declined to organise the Marx Museum and proposed setting up a research institute on a larger scale than I had originally envisaged.
First and foremost, it was necessary to find premises that were even remotely suitable. Unfortunately, this was not achieved until November 1921, when, after a long and arduous process, the former premises of the People’s Commissariat for Maritime Affairs – which had come under the jurisdiction of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs [1] – were vacated. It was not until May 1922, however, that the building was finally cleared of all extraneous elements left over from the old dormitory for employees of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (Narkomindel).
Despite all these obstacles, which hindered the smooth running of operations and were only removed after the May session of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the work of organising the Institute progressed rapidly. The necessary repairs – which the dilapidated building was in dire need of – adapting the new premises to the Institute’s requirements, and equipping the rooms with the necessary equipment – all this work was completed in a relatively short time. By November 1922, the organisation of the Institute could be considered broadly complete. The next step is now to carry out more detailed finishing work on its various parts and to provide more sophisticated equipment, since, for lack of funds, we had to make do with whatever could be obtained and quickly adapted to the Institute’s needs. The form still does not fully correspond to the content.
Meanwhile, even now, in terms of its book collections, the Marx and Engels Institute ranks among the world’s leading specialist libraries, and as a Museum of Marxism it undoubtedly holds first place not only in terms of the number of rare and valuable books, but also in terms of the organisation of the scholarly material it has assembled. The compilation of the card catalogue is nearing completion. The Institute will shortly begin printing a systematic catalogue covering the most important sections.
The Institute’s book collections were assembled in various ways. A significant number of books were transferred to the Institute, as the Socialist Academy, from various nationalised libraries, either directly or via the book collection of the People’s Commissariat for Education. Libraries abandoned by their owners were also utilised and, to a large extent, saved from certain plunder. It should be noted that workers in certain districts, particularly Krasnopresnensky and Zamoskvorechsky (two prominent historical areas located within the Central Administrative Okrug of Moscow), were especially eager to assist in this endeavour to save these scholarly treasures. The Department of Ideology at the Socialist Academy and our Institute owe a great deal to these numerous ‘freelance’ collaborators, who conscientiously pointed out to me all manner of books they considered interesting. I still remember how, after giving a lecture in the Zamoskvorechye district, I returned with a magnificent copy of Louis Moréri’s Le Grand Dictionaire Historique, which had formed a significant part of the library of Jean Meslier, an 18th-century communist priest.
First place amongst the nationalised libraries is held by the library of the late Vladimir Ivanovich Taneyev, part of which – containing a fine collection of books on the history of socialism and a magnificent collection of engravings on the history of the Great French Revolution – now forms an integral department of the Institute.
The second source from which the Institute’s book collections were expanded consisted of books I purchased during my trips abroad in 1920–22 (England, Sweden, Germany, Austria). Among these purchases, two in particular are worth noting. I succeeded in acquiring two of the finest private libraries on the history of socialism and the labour movement. One of them – together with Anton Menger’s library, now owned by the University of Vienna – served as the main source material for the well-known three-volume bibliography of socialism and communism compiled by Stammhammer (Josef Stammhammer’s Bibliographie des Socialismus und Communismus, 3 volumes, Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1893–1909). Its owner, Theodor Mauthner, who died in April 1922, was a passionate collector who began his work as early as 1876 and, with the help of his friend Wilhelm Pappenheim, managed to assemble, before the war of 1914, an exceptionally rich collection on socialism and anarchism. In addition to books and journals, it includes a collection of autographs, engravings and revolutionary medals. A great admirer of Ferdinand Lassalle, the late Mautner collected all of his works in their first editions, as well as many letters, including those Lassalle wrote to his family.
Mautner’s library was soon joined by that the renowned economist and historian of socialism, Professor Carl Grünberg, editor of the Archive on the History of Socialism and the Labour Movement (Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung). This, too, is the result of many years of collecting, from 1886 to 1918, and, whilst significantly inferior to Mauthner’s library in terms of the number of rare and valuable editions – not to mention its fine collection of utopian works – it has the advantage of having enriched the Institute’s library with a number of periodicals and books on the history of socialism and the labour movement in various countries.
The Institute now also possesses Germany’s finest collection
of Fichte’s works and literature on him, formerly belonging to
Prof. Wilhelm Windelband. It also serves as an excellent resource for
the history of German philosophy in general during the late 18th
century and the first third of the 19th.
The internal organisation of any research institute must be geared
towards its primary objective. A researcher working there must have
at their disposal all the necessary materials and tools for their
specific research work. In accordance with the main task of the Marx
and Engels Institute, the first priority was to collect all the works
of Marx and Engels. The central study of the entire Institute serves
this purpose:
Five large fireproof cabinets contain all the first editions of Marx, Engels and Lassalle in a collection more comprehensive than anywhere else in the world, although it is not yet exhaustive. It will take more than a year to achieve this. Our collection includes: the Rheinische Zeitung 1842–43, to which Marx was first a contributor and later editor-in-chief; Vorwärts 1844, published in Paris, to which Heine and Bakunin contributed alongside Marx and Engels; all the journals and anthologies of ‘true socialism’; the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung of 1847, in a more complete form than anywhere else in the world, the first edition of the Communist Manifesto, and the Kommunistische Zeitschrift, published in September 1847 with the motto ‘Workers of the world, unite!’, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung from 1848-1849, and so on and so forth. Among Marx’s early publications is such a rarity as a copy of Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy), which belonged to Lassalle and is covered in his handwritten notes. The study also contains a complete copy of the American Encyclopaedia, to which Marx and Engels contributed.
One of the main tasks set by the Marx and Engels Institute is the preparation of a scholarly edition of all their works. To this end, manuscripts are being collected – a list of which will be published in due course – along with copies of articles by the founders of scientific socialism, which are scattered across numerous journals. [2] Preference is given to photographic reproductions of printed or handwritten originals. The department already holds photographs of letters from Marx and Engels to Nikolai-on (Nikolai Danielson) as well as photographs of the correspondence between Marx and Engels from the 1840s and 1850s, and from the mid-1860s. This work is ongoing, and in the near future the institute will have photographs of all of Marx and Engels’ manuscripts. [3] Anyone who is aware of the invaluable service rendered to Pushkin scholars by the Vengerov collection of photographs of all Pushkin’s manuscripts will readily understand the immense significance for research of a complete collection of photographs of all Marx and Engels’ articles and manuscripts. No amount of meticulous transcription can guarantee the absence of errors and omissions, let alone the arbitrary omissions that abound in both the literary legacy of Marx and Engels, edited by Franz Mehring, and the correspondence of Marx and Engels, edited by Bernstein and Mehring. [4]
The same study also houses the materials I have collected on the history of the First International, including photographs of the General Council’s minutes and a number of extremely rare manuscripts and printed materials. The main categories into which all the material is divided are:
In terms of its international influence and reach, scientific socialism ranks first amongst all theoretical systems. There is no country in which there are even the beginnings of a labour movement where the works of Marx and Engels are not read, just as there is no country in which bourgeois science has not been forced to take scientific socialism into account, refuting and interpreting it in every possible way.
Yet scientific socialism is international by very virtue of its origins. Although its founders were Germans, they would not have been able to produce the Communist Manifesto had they not drawn upon the rich experience of French and English history. Since their views were shaped and conditioned by a particular era, and developed within a specific milieu, that milieu comprised not only German reality, but also French and English reality. Their political and social activities were no less international in scope, taking place chiefly in Germany, France and England. This fact alone compels any researcher of the history and theory of Marxism to focus on the study of the history of Germany, France and England. A separate study is dedicated to each of these countries at the Institute.
We shall begin with
It contains almost all the most significant general works on German history, biographical and bibliographical reference works, a wealth of literature on the agrarian history of the Middle Ages (the history of the German peasant and land relations) and, more generally, on the economic and social history of Germany.
In compiling the literature, particular attention is paid to those periods or issues that most preoccupied Marx and Engels. Thus, the collection contains a large number of works on the Great Peasants’ War, on Müntzer and the Anabaptists, as well as a range of materials and sources on the history of the era of enlightened absolutism, Frederick II, Lessing, the Sturm und Drang period – an era to which numerous digressions in the writings of Marx and Engels are devoted, and to which Merling’s finest historical work is also dedicated.
Yet, however rich the literature prior to 1789 may be – this period accounts for a significant proportion of the three or four thousand dissertations and research papers on the most diverse topics held in the collection – its main collection, and this is where its particular value lies, consists of works relating to the revolutionary and labour movements in Germany and Austria in the nineteenth century (more precisely, from 1789 onwards).
In collecting and organising all these materials, the most significant revolutionary events, figures and issues served as focal points, whilst for the period after 1841, the arrangement of the material is determined by the objectives of studying the lives and work of Marx and Engels.
Thus, the section devoted to the influence of the Great French Revolution on Germany contains a rich collection of sources and works on the Mainz uprising of 1792 and on Georg Forster. There are also extensive collections relating to the revolutionary movements of the second decade of the 19th century, the resulting campaign against the universities, the so-called ‘Demagogenhetze’ (witch-hunt against demagogues), and the activities of the ‘Central Investigative Commission’.
Collections are dedicated to the movements spurred on by the July Revolution, relating to the ‘Hambach Festival’ – one of whose active participants and organisers was the young Johann Philipp Becker, who served as a living link between this era and the First International – to the Frankfurt Uprising, to the trials of Silvestr Jordan and the priest Weidig, who, together with Georg Büchner, was responsible for the first attempts at propaganda among the peasantry. Publication groups such as the ‘case of the seven Göttingen professors’, the constitutional-democratic movement of the 1830s in the South German states and Prussia (Karl von Rotteck, Carl Theodor Welker, Johann Jacobi, Robert Blum), the Cologne Church Controversy and the German Catholic movement, introduce us to the main political and religious issues that preoccupied Germany at the time when Marx and Engels were entering the arena of conscious political life.
A very rich, though still not exhaustive, collection of literature on social issues in the first half of the 19th century (pauperism, the labour question, socialism, communism) leads us to the socialist and labour movements in the narrower sense of the term. Of the 277 works listed in Mombert’s most recent and detailed bibliography [5], the collection contains up to 200, and, in addition, around 200 works not mentioned there at all. There are almost all the works of the first German socialist, Ludwig Hall, a complete set of the journal Geächtete (The Outcast), and an almost complete collection of all Wilhelm Weitling’s pamphlets and writings, as well as literature about him. Separate groups represent the various strands of ‘true socialism’ and German radicalism. Carefully selected are the works of those representatives – (Jakob Venedey, Ruge, the Bauers, and political poets of the 1840s such as Georg Herwegh, Ferdinand Freiligrath and others) – who were in more or less close contact with Marx and Engels. We have already mentioned the collection of journals and anthologies on ‘true socialism’ in connection with its most valuable part, which is kept in the study of Marx and Engels.
Among the materials on the history of the Revolution of 1848–49, it is worth noting, in addition to general literature, the reports of the Frankfurt and Berlin parliaments, a collection of 700 posters, leaflets and proclamations, a collection of sources and literature devoted to the uprisings in Baden, the Palatinate and Saxony, as well as the events in Cologne. We also possess an almost complete run of the newspaper Kölner Arbeiterverein (Cologne Workers’ Union), the significance of which – as a publication that appeared alongside the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and was undoubtedly more closely linked to the Cologne workers – has as yet been very little researched.
As regards the period from 1850 to 1914, the collection contains all the most important works relating to the era of reaction, the ‘liberal era’, the budget conflict and the founding of the empire. There are up to 2,500 issues from the extensive collection of pamphlets. In addition to the complete collection of Reichstag reports, there are also complete sets of the most important political journals.
However, the main focus of this section is literature on the history of the labour movement and Social Democracy in both Germany and Austria. This includes all periodicals dating from the time of Lassalle’s speeches, publications by the party and trade unions, and underground literature from the era of the Anti-Socialist Law. Suffice it to say that all the literature cited in Mehring’s works on the history of German social democracy, in the biographies of Engels and Schweitzer written by Gustav Mayer, and in the biography of Lassalle written by Hermann Oncken, with very few exceptions, is held by the Institute. [6] Furthermore, the collection contains a considerable number of pamphlets and brochures that have not yet been utilised by researchers. Thus, a historian of the German labour movement will find here, in a systematic collection, such a wealth of material that even in Germany he would find it scattered across various libraries and archives.
To conclude the description of this collection, it should be noted
that it contains a special section on the history of the Rhine
Province, given its significance for the biographies of Marx and
Engels. Furthermore, the study contains a collection of literature on
the history of the Austrian and Hungarian labour movements and, more
generally, on the history of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, as
well as literature on the history of Switzerland and the Swiss labour
movement.
is, even more so than the German section, essentially a collection on modern history, beginning in 1789.
Apart from general works on the history of France, for the period prior to the Great French Revolution, the collection comprises only literature on social and economic history, as well as on revolutionary movements – the Commune, the peasant uprising (the Jacquerie), the Fronde, riots, uprisings and strikes up to 1789.
There are seven main sections:
1. The Great Revolution and the Napoleonic Era. This extensive collection of primary sources includes highly valuable collections of memoirs, works by contemporaries and pamphlets on various topics, etc. Periodicals from that period are less well represented. There is a complete collection of the original Le Moniteur universel up to the July Revolution of 1830.
Among the individual collections, the one dedicated to Marat stands out; it contains a collection of all his writings, including the journals he published, amongst which is an almost complete set of L’Ami du Peuple (The Friend of the People). An extensive body of literature on Marat is also gathered here.
There are collections devoted to Robespierre, Danton, Anacharsis Cloots and, in particular, Babeuf. The collection of engravings and portraits of figures from the Revolution, which we have already mentioned at length, is exceptionally extensive.
2. The Restoration and the July Revolution. Particular attention is paid to materials on the history of revolutionary societies and the Republican Party up to 1830. There is a large collection of memoirs devoted to the July Revolution.
3. The July Monarchy. In addition to general works on the history of this period, there is a collection of primary sources and literature on the labour and revolutionary movements of the 1830s and 1840s (the Lyon uprising, Louis-Auguste Blanqui and Armand Barbès, the Babeuf movement, and the materialist communists).
4. The February Revolution. A very substantial collection of primary sources and literature, among which the following are particularly noteworthy: a) a collection of pamphlets from the period; b) a collection of newspapers and journals: around 300 titles, including the newspapers of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Victor Prosper Considerant, Joseph Sobrier, Charles Delécluse, François-Vincent Raspail, Félicité Robert de Lamennais and others; collections devoted to Louis Blanc, Lamartine and Ledru-Rollin are highlighted in particular; c) a collection of posters, engravings and medals.
5. The Second Empire. Of particular note here is the collection of writings and pamphlets against Napoleon III and concerning the coup d’état of 2 December. Among them is a complete set of Henri Rochefort’s La Lanterne.
6. The Paris Commune of 1871. Several hundred volumes, comprising an almost complete collection of all the major newspapers of the time, including the Journal Officiel, Blanqui’s La Patrie en Danger (The Fatherland in Danger), La Commune, and so on. A wealth of illustrative material and a collection of photographs of leading figures of the Commune.
7. The Third Republic and the labour movement after the
Commune. This section is less well-developed, although it
does contain some very rare sets of newspapers from the 1870s and
1880s. Only once direct relations with France have been
re-established will it be possible to bring this section up to the
standard it deserves.
has its own distinctive features. As the classic country of capitalism and the birthplace of the first mass labour movement, England was always the subject of close study by Marx and Engels.
Whilst the process of class struggle, as the principal driving force of history, could best be traced in the history of France – Marx had been studying its modern history without interruption since 1843 – the development of various forms of production, the anatomy of bourgeois society, its division into classes, the origins of the proletariat and the various forms of its protest against the capitalists, and its transformation into a distinct class – all these processes were studied by Marx and Engels chiefly on the basis of English sources.
From this perspective, the social and economic history of England, the development of its state institutions, and the history of social classes and their struggles are of particular interest. In addition to general works and monographs on the history of trade, industry, the agrarian movement, public credit, finance, taxation, transport, legislation, constitutional law, Parliament, local government, the army and the navy, the study contains a copy of Hansard (parliamentary debates) up to the second half of the 19th century, a multi-volume collection of state court cases from 1163 to 1820 by Howell [7], and a number of other sources.
The remaining material is organised by historical period, with each period centred on the popular movements, uprisings and revolutions that feature so prominently in England’s ‘peaceful’ history.
The workers’ movement in the 14th century, their struggle for higher wages, which led to the so-called ‘labour legislation’, Wat Tyler’s rebellion (The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381), the Lollard and Wycliffite movements (14th–15th Century), Kett’s Rebellion (1549) and other protests against the horrors of primitive accumulation and forcible expropriation, and the era reflected in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) – all of this is documented and catalogued in the English section first and foremost.
The collection on the history of the 17th-century English revolutions – the ‘Great Rebellion’, the Puritans, the Independents, the Levellers and the Diggers – is particularly rich. The cabinet contains several dozen pamphlets from that period, including an excellent collection of almost all of John Lilburne’s pamphlets, a pamphlet by Gerrard Winstanley, the author of the first manifesto of agrarian communism, John Bellers, whom Marx, in the first volume of Capital, describes as ‘a veritable phenomenon in the field of political economy’, and a number of pamphlets directed by the ‘Cavaliers’ against the ‘Roundheads’.
In the history of the 18th century, the main focus is on the era of the Industrial Revolution and the revolutionary movement of the masses it sparked, which by the end of the century had grown to even greater proportions due to the influence of the Great French Revolution. In addition to general works and monographs, it is worth noting the collection of the Annual Register from 1758 to 1800, the collection of the journal The Anti-Jacobin from 1798 to 1813, and, in particular, the collection relating to the history of the first revolutionary workers’ societies, the so-called Corresponding Societies (1792–1799).
The general history of the 19th century is represented, in addition to comprehensive works, by a large collection of biographies, of which English historiography is so rich. The main effort, however, was directed towards gathering literature on the history of the labour and social movements. Here, the following periods naturally emerged, which have been very inadequately researched from a Marxist perspective.
Firstly, the period from 1815 to the so-called Great Reform Act of 1832. The Luddite movement, the agitation of William Cobbett and the Spenceans (followers of land reformer Thomas Spence), Robert Owen’s campaign, the struggle for the right to form coalitions, the Manchester (Peterloo) Massacre (August 1819), and the Thistlewood (Cato Street) Conspiracy (February 1820) – all these events were reflected in pamphlets and periodicals. Although considerable effort will still be required to make this collection complete, we already possess a series of extremely rare journals, and Owen’s collection of pamphlets, in terms of its comprehensiveness, is on a par with the finest collections in England.
Secondly, the period from 1832 to 1858: the era of the struggle against the Corn Laws, the era of Chartism and co-operation. This section is exceptionally rich. It suffices to mention the Chartist journals, and amongst them an almost complete run of the Chartists’ central organ, the Northern Star, which belonged to George Julian Garney [Harney – correction by MIA], one of the chief editors and a close friend of Marx, Engels and Wilhelm Liebknecht.
Thirdly, the era of the formation of local trade union councils and the First International (1859–1874).
The last quarter of the 19th century – the struggle between old and new trade unionism, the formation of the first Social Democratic Party, and the emergence of an independent labour party – is represented much less extensively. It must be borne in mind that the trade union publications, which play a leading role in the English labour press, are not even held in the British Museum. For the time being, one has to make do with the painstaking collection of the scant literature on the history of the labour movement, congress minutes and pamphlets.
Special sections are devoted to Ireland, whose historical fortunes were of interest to both Marx and, in particular, Engels; to the East Indies, whose history Marx studied not only as an object of British colonial policy but also as the key to understanding the history of various forms of land tenure; and to Canada, Australia and other British colonies.
The English study, meanwhile, contains literature on the history
of the United States of America. And this not only because, ‘just
as in the 18th century the American War of Independence sounded a
wake-up call for the European middle class, so too did the American
Civil War in the 19th century play exactly the same role in relation
to the European working class’. Also, because Marx and Engels
had direct links with the United States, both as participants in and
leaders of various socialist movements in America from the late 1840s
onwards, and as contributors to the highly influential Anglo-American
newspaper The New York Tribune from 1852 to 1862.
Unfortunately, American Marxists have so far done nothing to
facilitate research in this field, whilst bourgeois American
historical literature completely ignores this entire period. Our
specific task, therefore, is to collect all the materials that will
enable us to shed more light on the history and context of Marx and
Engels’ work for the American labour movement and their
contribution to American literature.
Whilst the centres outlined above set themselves the task of facilitating the researcher’s study of the historical conditions and environment in which Marx and Engels developed and from which they drew their impressions, impulses and stimuli – both as practitioners and as politicians – then another group of research centres aims to create the most favourable conditions for studying all the fundamental ideological elements from the processing and synthesis of which the system of scientific socialism was created and developed.
“We, the German socialists,” writes Engels, “are proud to trace our origins not only to Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, but also to Kant, Fichte and Hegel.” Thus, Engels emphasises – not without a certain degree of exaggeration, given that he is referring to some of the thinkers he names – that scientific socialism is, above all, the product of a philosophy in which the worldview of their era crystallised, and of socialism, in which the contemporary critique of bourgeois society from the standpoint of ‘the most numerous and most suffering class’ found its expression.
But this is precisely what distinguishes scientific socialism from utopian socialism: instead of merely condemning and discussing bourgeois reality, it has substituted a scientific analysis of bourgeois society and, by carefully studying the development of law and legal institutions, seeks the explanation for all these superstructures in the economy of bourgeois society, which is itself just as much a historical product as the social and ideological forms dependent upon it.
Marx and Engels both began, immediately after freeing themselves from the shackles of the traditional worldview, with philosophy, only to later become communists, the sole difference being that Marx had already undergone thorough training in law and history before turning, like Engels, to the study of political economy.
It was precisely these considerations that dictated the organisation of special sections devoted to philosophy, law, political economy and socialism.
We begin our description with
First and foremost, researchers will find here a rich collection of works and monographs on the history of philosophy, organised both by historical period and by individual countries. As in all the study rooms, efforts are focused on compiling a comprehensive collection of the literature used by Marx and Engels (whether quoted by them or mentioned in their bibliographies), or which might have been used by them – in other words, literature up to and including the first half of the 19th century. Naturally, particular attention is paid here to those subjects or philosophers with whom Marx and Engels were concerned.
Consequently, the collection includes works on the history of ancient philosophy in connection with Marx’s work on Epicurus and Democritus, on the history of modern philosophy (Descartes and Spinoza), on the history of English philosophy (Bacon, Hobbes, Locke and the English materialists, with a special collection of Joseph Priestley’s works), on the history of French philosophy with a special collection of 18th-century French materialists and Enlightenment thinkers (the complete works of Voltaire and Diderot, and two editions of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie).
In the German philosophy section, apart from Leibniz’s works and literature about him, there are five main groups: 1) Kant (five hundred and twelve titles), 2) Fichte (the collection we have already mentioned, with a printed catalogue containing 624 titles, to which works on Fichte in Russian and French literature have now been added), 3) Schelling, to whom Engels dedicated several works, 4) Hegel, 5) the Young Hegelian school (Strauss, the Bauer brothers and, in particular, Feuerbach). The latter collection includes a complete set of the Hallische Jahrbücher für deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst and a wealth of pamphlet literature.
The study, which occupies three rooms, also contains the following
sections: 1) – Literature on logic, ethics, aesthetics and
psychology; 2) – History of science by country and by
discipline; 3) – Methodology and philosophy of science, the
natural sciences and the humanities, with a special sub-section on
Historical Materialism, which brings together all literature
both for and against dialectical materialism.
primarily offers a collection of literature on the philosophy of law and the history of the philosophy of law, dating from the late 1830s and early 1840s, when Marx was engaged in the study of jurisprudence. Special collections are devoted to the historical and Hegelian schools. A separate section is dedicated to old civil and criminal law, the theory of the state and international law.
In addition to the section on the history of law, organised by historical period and by country, the Law Cabinet also contains a special section devoted to the history of political thought, which includes a collection of the works of the most eminent political thinkers and literature about them (Niccolò Machiavelli, Jean Bodin, Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, Montesquieu, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Jean-Jacques Rousseau).
However, the Law Library is not limited solely to the literature required by a researcher wishing to trace the genesis and development of Marx and Engels’ views on law and the state. The practice of the labour movement – in particular the Paris Commune and the October Revolution – has brought to the fore a number of issues in the field of public and civil law which had no place in traditional academic scholarship. These are questions concerning the functions of the state, centralism and federalism, bourgeois and workers’ democracy, the main factors in the transformation of the political structure, revolutions, the dictatorship of the proletariat, political parties and the party apparatus, trade union law, the press, the national question and the right to self-determination. Literature is selected for all these groups to facilitate the work of those researchers who, guided by Marx’s method, wish to replace the ideological and metaphysical arguments of bourgeois jurisprudence with an analysis of actual relations and real forces that determine the development of political and legal norms.
In the preface to the first volume of Capital,
Marx writes that he has in mind readers who wish to learn something
new. And this presupposes knowledge of the existing body of work that
had been produced in the field of economic theory and history prior
to the publication of his Capital. That is why
primarily collects literature on the history of political economy. In addition to general works, the collection contains – in first editions or reprints – the works of almost all the economists cited in all four volumes of Capital. Needless to say, the collection brings together the bulk of the literature on Marx as an economist.
The second major section comprises literature on the evolution of capitalism, as outlined in Capital. This includes the general history of economic development from the time of the disintegration of primitive society and the histories of individual sectors of economic life.
The third section is devoted to the main issues addressed in Capital. The literature is grouped according to the following topics: the theory of value, the theory of surplus value and profit, the theory of prices, the theory of money and credit circulation, the theory of the concentration of capital, the theory and history of crises, the world economy, the theory of rent, and the agrarian question.
The fourth major section is devoted to the labour question, as set out by Engels in his The Condition of the Working Class in England and by Marx in the descriptive chapters of Capital. This section brings together old English pamphlets and monographs from the late 18th century, characterising the condition of the working class in England during the Industrial Revolution, as well as works by Engels’ predecessors (Peter Gaskell, Louis-René Villermé, Michel de Bourges) on the condition of the working class in England and France on the eve of 1848, later comprehensive studies on the condition of the working class in various countries and industrial sectors, and literature on the working day, wages, women’s and children’s labour, the housing problem, unemployment, and so on. It also includes theoretical literature on the trade union movement, occupational health and safety, and factory legislation.
The collection also includes, organised into separate groups, literature from the new schools of bourgeois political economy, insofar as they have been subject to the ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ influence of Capital.
The researcher will also find here the principal literature on the theory and history of finance, on the theory and history of statistics, on the methodology of political economy, as well as a large collection of reference works and leading economic journals.
We now turn to
Whilst the history of the social and labour movements up to 1848 has found its place in the cabinets on the history of Germany, France and England, the history of socialist thought and the various systems of socialism and communism constitutes the core collection of the Socialism Cabinet.
In addition to general works and monographs on the history of socialism, organised by historical periods and individual countries – in accordance with the traditional arrangement adopted in Benoît Malon’s history (Histoire du socialisme depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’à nos jours, 1882) and even in the comprehensive work by Kautsky, Mehring, Lafargue and Bernstein – dating back almost to the Stone Age and ancient times – all socialists and communists prior to 1848 are represented by their original works.
In the extensive collection of utopian works, the researcher will find a range of editions of Thomas More’s Utopia – with the exception of the first edition, the earliest edition held by the Institute dating from 1548 – various translations of it, including a Russian translation from 1789, as well as a collection of literature on More. The utopian works of Anton Francesco Doni, Francis Bacon, Johann Valentin Andreae, James Harrington (including the first edition of 1656 of The Commonwealth of Oceana), Denis Vairasse, Gerrard Winstanley and John Bellers form the 16th- and 17th-century section.
The history of socialism in the 18th century begins with the works of Jean Molière, among which is one of the manuscript copies circulated in France in the 1640s and 1650s, before Voltaire first published extracts from Molière’s will.
There are first editions by Étienne-Gabriel Morelly, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Étienne-Gabriel Boissel, François-Noël “Gracchus” Babeuf and other minor 18th-century utopians.
The collection of works by the great utopians is exceptionally rich. Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen are represented in such a comprehensive manner that their works are not gathered in one place anywhere else. First editions of their major works, key journals (Le Globe, Le Producteur, New Moral World, Le Phalanstère, La Phalange), the works of their principal disciples, and literature on Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen – all this awaits young Marxists who wish to trace the influence of the great utopians on the formation of Marx and Engels’ views.
No less extensive is the collection of works by later socialists and communists who were contemporaries of Marx and Engels – Pierre Leroux, Félicité de Lamennais, Étienne Cabet, François Vidal, Constantin Pecqueur, Louis Blanc, Théodore Dézamy, Louis Auguste Blanqui and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
This same room also houses the works of socialists from the second half of the 19th century, including all representatives of the various currents of Marxist thought. Literature is also collected on those currents which are themselves the result of Marxism’s influence on older socialist systems – namely, the literature of revolutionary syndicalism and guild socialism.
It is also necessary to mention a special section containing literature that examines, from a socialist perspective, issues such as education, religion, the church, the national question, and so on; literature on the so-called ‘social question’, which includes representatives of all varieties of ‘bourgeois socialism’ – state socialism, Christian socialism, and so on; – a section containing the most characteristic works of bourgeois thought that refute and ‘destroy’ socialism; and a section on socialist poetry and fiction, with a large subsection devoted to utopian novels.
A special section is dedicated to literature on anarchism. It contains all the works and pamphlets by Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Élisée Reclus, Johann Most, Jean Grave, Sébastien Faure and others. No other library possesses such a collection of anarchist journals and newspapers – including complete runs of Johann Most’s Freiheit (his own copy), French journals – such as the extremely rare Le Libertaire by Joseph Déjacque – and complete runs of Révolté and Temps Nouveaux. This also includes literature on anarchism and its leading figures, including a beautifully preserved copy of a lithographed biography of Bakunin written by Max Nettlau. [8]
Closely associated with this study is a special
dedicated to the history of Russian socialism and Marxism. Its specific aim is to examine the relationships – whether hostile or friendly – that developed between the Russian people of the 1840s, 1860s and 1870s, on the one hand, Marx and Engels, on the other; and to identify the channels and pathways through which Marxist thought seeped into Russian literature, until, together with the Emancipation of Labour group, Russian Marxism became a full member of the international Marxist family. Annenkov, Bakunin, Nikolai Sazonov, Ivan Golovin, Nikolai Utin, German Lopatin, Pyotr Lavrov, Nikolai-on (Nikolai Danielson), all the so-called ‘scholarly friends’ of Marx – Maxim Kovalevsky, Nikolai Kablukov and others, the Narodniks – Leo Hartmann and Nikolai Morozov – this list alone shows just how great the number of those ‘Russian people’ was who were in direct contact – through personal acquaintance or correspondence – with Marx and Engels.
Without setting itself the task of studying the history of the Russian labour movement and the history of the Russian Social-Democratic parties – which is one of the main tasks of the Department of the History of Russian Social and Revolutionary Movements, organised under the Communist Academy – the Plekhanov Department collects literature on all currents of Russian Marxist thought, the struggle between which shaped the development of Marxism in Russia.
In this connection, the Plekhanov Department has set
itself another task, one that follows naturally from the first. In
none of the major Russian libraries – neither the Lenin Library
(formerly the Rumyantsev Library), nor the Leningrad Library
(formerly the Public Library), nor the Academic Library – are
there such favourable conditions for studying the interaction and
influence of Western philosophical and socialist thought on Russia as
there are at the Marx and Engels Institute. The influence of
18th-century English, German and, in particular, French philosophy
(Alexander Radishchev and his circle, Russian Freemasonry), the
influence of Schelling, the influence of Western socialist, political
and philosophical thought on the Decembrists, the influence of Kant
and Fichte – whether direct or via classical German literature,
the influence of Hegel and his school, the influence of Saint-Simon,
Fourier, Pierre Leroux, Théodore Dézamy, Proudhon and
Owen on Herzen, Ogarev, the Petrashevists, Belinsky, Chernyshevsky,
Dobrolyubov and Nikolai Nozhin; the influence of the First
International and Lassallean agitation, from as early as the second
half of the 1860s, on the Karakozovites, Nechayevites, Tchaikovites,
Lavristovites and Jacobins [9] –
all these topics are still awaiting scholarly investigation. To
facilitate the work of future researchers, the Plekhanov Study
is compiling the writings of various representatives of all schools
of political thought, dating back to the 18th century.
So far, we have been dealing with various factors – historical, social and ideological – which shaped the development of scientific socialism and influenced its founders up to 1848, when the Communist Manifesto appeared.
One need only glance at its first chapter to see that the materialist explanation of history was limited to ancient, medieval and capitalist societies. It is true that, as early as in The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx had outlined the main phases of the development of the capitalist economy, but he was not yet familiar with primitive economic systems or classless society. It was only in the early 1850s, when he had to engage closely with the history of British colonial policy, that, whilst studying on land relations in the East Indies, he came across various forms of communal land ownership and reached a conclusion which he had formulated well before Henry Maine’s works, namely, that a detailed study of Asian, and particularly Indian, communal forms of ownership might reveal how various forms of its degeneration arise from the various forms of naturally developed communal ownership.
Marx had already concluded at that time that it was necessary to identify a distinct epoch in the economic formation of society, to which he gave the not entirely apt name of the ‘Asiatic mode of production’. In Capital there are even more passages showing that Marx, entirely independently and often anticipating the results of future comparative-historical research, applied his dialectical method to the analysis of various forms of primitive society. Although, in the final years of his life, he concentrated his greatly diminished energy on working on the subsequent volumes of Capital, he continued to follow closely the development of a new academic discipline: the study of primitive culture and the development of social institutions. Alongside him, and subsequently continuing his work, Engels focused his attention on this range of issues; and under their joint, and at times direct, influence, questions concerning the origin of the state, the family, private property, the disintegration of communal land ownership, and the origin and development of religion, technology and so on were explored by Paul Lafargue, Karl Kautsky, Nikolai Sieber, Georgi Plekhanov, Heinrich Cunow and Maksim Kovalevsky.
For Marxist researchers wishing to study the development of Marx
and Engels’ views on the above-mentioned issues and to explore
them further, the following has been established:
First and foremost, it brings together all the key works on primitive society which, in one way or another, may have influenced the views of Marx and Engels – those by Johann Bachofen, John MacLennan, Henry Maine, Lewis Henry Morgan, etc. – followed by all the works published after their deaths.
This section also includes a vast body of literature on anthropology and ethnography, featuring a collection of the most ethnographically interesting ‘travelogues’ and a collection of ethnological journals – Globus, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie and a number of others – which contain a wealth of specialised studies on various topics.
The department also houses literature on theoretical sociology across all its schools of thought, including ‘Marxist’ sociology. This section complements the ‘historical materialism’ section in the philosophy department.
Although the department, in accordance with its primary remit, groups together only literature on the origins and development of various forms of ideology in the prehistoric period, a special section has been established for the history of religion and Christianity; in particular, literature on the issues addressed by Marx and Engels is collected with great care. The history of the science of religion and theology, insofar as it is linked to the history of philosophy, falls within the remit of the Philosophy Department.
Until 1848, Marx and Engels had only touched upon issues of foreign policy in connection with the Polish question, but had not dealt with them specifically. The revolution of 1848, which immediately took on a European character, compelled them to engage intensively with the study of international politics. The Polish question itself, the role of Russia and Britain as the principal actors in the counter-revolution, the Schleswig-Holstein question, the Hungarian and Italian questions, the Czech question and the role of Pan-Slavism – all these compelled them at that time, in a series of articles, to address the pressing issues of the day. The Crimean War provided Marx and Engels with an opportunity to study the Eastern Question and the history of Russia’s foreign policy. The European crisis of the late 1850s, which found political expression, amongst other things, in a severe complication of the entire foreign-policy situation, compelled both Engels and Marx to address, in a series of articles and pamphlets, all the major events of the military and diplomatic history of that period.
The immense importance Marx attached to the study of foreign policy is also demonstrated by the fact that, in the founding address of the First International, he insistently pointed out to the workers that ‘the time has come for them to penetrate the mysteries of international politics’, and that ‘the time has come for them to observe the diplomatic actions of their governments’.
To facilitate the study of Marx and Engels’ views on foreign
policy issues and to enable researchers to critically examine their
development, a special
in which the above-mentioned issues serve as the guiding principle for the collection of literature. In addition to general works on the history of foreign policy, literature on those issues and topics specifically addressed in the works of Marx and Engels is grouped separately. With regard to literature on the Eastern Question, all of David Urquhart’s works are being meticulously collected to enable researchers to ascertain the extent of the influence of this leading expert on foreign policy on Marx and Engels.
This same office also houses literature on military matters, as these were of interest to Engels, particularly given their close connection to issues of foreign policy. From the time of the 1848 revolution right up to 1895, there was not a single war or significant issue in the field of military organisation to which the ‘General’ of the international proletarian army did not respond, either in a series of articles or in special pamphlets.
The Hungarian campaign of 1848, the campaign in defence of the imperial constitution, in which Engels personally took part as a soldier, the Crimean War, the Indian Rebellion, the volunteer movement in England in the late 1850s, the Austro-French War of 1859, the American Civil War of 1862–65, the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 – Engels devoted dozens of articles to all these events. Alongside these are articles on the history of military art, the internal organisation of the army, the police and the standing army, and so on.
Naturally, in this section too, in addition to general works on the history of military science, there is a carefully compiled collection of contemporary literature on the main issues that interested Engels and which served as source material for him, as well as the writings of those military authors whom he regarded as his teachers (Clausewitz, Wilhelm Rüstow, and others).
A special section is also currently being organised
At its centre will be the collection I have assembled on the history of the First International, consisting of appeals, manifestos, minutes and journals – including photographs of the minutes of the General Council.
One of the main tasks of this room is to study the history of the First International and the international organisations that preceded it, as well as the development of internationalism in the history of social and revolutionary movements.
Whilst the First International, even in those countries – England, France and Germany – whose representatives were its principal organisers, ushered in a new era for the labour movement, for a whole range of other countries it was only with its foundation and activities that the organised labour movement can be said to have begun.
What is more, the direct influence that Marx and Engels exerted on the international labour movement during the era of the First International did not cease with its dissolution. Subsequently – until 1883, chiefly through Marx, and then, almost until the Fourth Congress of the Second International (London 1896), through Engels – this influence not only deepened but also spread to an ever-increasing number of countries. And in connection with the history of the International and the growth of Marxism’s international significance, it is necessary to examine the history of three groups of smaller countries – in comparison with England, France and Germany – namely the Scandinavian group (Sweden, Norway, Denmark), the Romance group (Italy, Spain and Portugal) and the Balkan group (Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece). If we add Belgium, the Netherlands and Poland to these, we obtain, together with England, France and Germany, Russia, Switzerland, the United States of America and Australia, the entire sphere of influence of the First International.
Some of these countries interested Marx and Engels quite apart from the labour movement. For instance, in connection with the Crimean War, Marx turned his attention to the history of the Spanish revolutions and the history of Sweden. The result of these studies was a series of articles which are of particular interest to the Russian reader.
The history of Belgium in the 1840s is also significant when studying the biographies of Marx and Engels, who lived in Belgium and took part in its political and social life. When studying the history of Italy – which is particularly important for understanding the fate of the Bakuninist International – one cannot fail to dwell on the struggle waged by both Marxists and Bakuninists against Mazzini and his followers. With this in mind, in addition to specialist literature on the history of the social movement in each of these countries, attention has been focused on collecting literature on those specific issues and themes that interested Marx and Engels. So far, this has been achieved only in the case of Spain, for which there is a collection of works on the revolutions of the first half of the 19th century, including the minutes of the Cortes from that period, and in the case of Italy, for which there is a collection of works on Mazzini and his era.
The Institute has at its disposal a vast collection of engravings, portraits, illustrations and autographs of various socialists and revolutionaries, now distributed amongst the various rooms.
To conclude this brief overview of the individual rooms, it should
also be mentioned that a special reference library has been set up in
the reading room, containing all the necessary reference materials
for studies in the history of socialism and the labour movement,
including complete sets of almost all socialist and Marxist journals
(Die neue Zeit, Sozialistische Monatshefte,
Revue Socialiste, Critica Sociale,
Il Divenire Sociale, La Devenir Social,
La Vie Ouvrière, Le Mouvement
Socialiste, Der Kampf, and the English
journals Social Democrat and Socialist
Review), all general encyclopaedias and bibliographical
dictionaries, a large collection of books on general history,
collections of various Marxist series such as the J.H.W. Dietz’s
Internationale Bibliothek, bibliographical and philological
reference works, a set of the Sombart Archive and other
publications on the history of the social movement, social policy and
the labour question (including a complete set of publications by the
Union of Social Policy).
The main task is the preparation of a scholarly edition of the complete works of Marx and Engels. To this day, well over a hundred of their articles remain unpublished, scattered across various journals. Among them are works of the utmost importance. Suffice it to say that there is still no complete collection of the articles written by Marx and Engels during the revolution of 1848–49. Such an important source as their correspondence has been published with incredible distortions and unjustifiable – and very often inexplicable – omissions.
And the last five years have yielded, in addition to several hundred articles I discovered between 1909 and 1912, a further number of new articles by Engels and letters from both him and Marx, extracted from the family archive of Engels’s relatives and the Lassalle archive by Gustav Mayer. As far back as 1921, I was fortunate enough to discover a new, previously unknown pamphlet by Engels on Schelling.
The edition of the works of Marx and Engels undertaken by Mehring covers, and even then, with very large gaps, only the period of their activity up to 1850. The edition of their works from 1850 to 1862, on which I worked until 1917, did not progress beyond the first two volumes. [10] The first volume of a major work on the First International, which was to include all the resolutions, proclamations and manifestos written by Marx for the General Council, remained in the proofreading stage.
The materials collected at the Institute make it possible to resume this work, which was interrupted in 1917. Only now will it be possible to produce a complete bibliography of the works of Marx and Engels, just as only now will it be possible to undertake the preparatory work without which it is inconceivable to produce a satisfactory biography of Marx and Engels.
Modelled on the index I compiled for the first volume of Capital, it is necessary to compile an even more comprehensive and detailed index covering all the works of Marx and Engels. This index must become a veritable dictionary of Marx and Engels, in which all the subjects, terms, concepts and issues contained and discussed in their works are recorded, so that, for each of these topics, a systematic comparison of all relevant passages is provided. Next, all the names of historical figures and authors mentioned by Marx and Engels must be recorded, in order to provide an overview of the development of their views on particular figures or writers. A geographical index must also be compiled, in which the material is grouped by country. It is also necessary to provide a list of all the works cited by Marx and Engels, in order to account for the sources, they drew upon. Such an index, if supplemented – on the basis of the published and unpublished correspondence of Marx and Engels – all those who came into contact with them, whether friendly or hostile, would become a dictionary of Marx and Engels, which would at the same time serve as an encyclopaedia on the history of socialism and the labour movement, chiefly in the 19th century.
Such a work requires the collaboration of several people, and one can only hope that the necessary contributors will be found.
But apart from these projects – the publication of the complete works of Marx and Engels, an international edition reproducing these works in the languages in which they were written, making use of all unpublished manuscripts, the publication of documents on the history of the International and the dictionary of Marx and Engels, which are also publications on an international scale, – the Institute pursues more narrowly defined objectives, which might be described as ‘national’.
It has already been noted on numerous occasions that a country whose entire revolutionary movement is imbued with the spirit of Marx, where his name is better known than in his homeland, and where the proletariat is in power, still does not have a collected works of Marx and Engels. Poor-quality translations, disfigured by censorship omissions, are still in circulation and are being republished.
Therefore, the Institute has set itself the immediate task of publishing, as far as possible, a complete collected works of Marx and Engels in Russian.
Alongside this, the Institute is undertaking the publication of the collected works of the classics of modern socialism who were schooled by Marx and Engels – Lassalle, Plekhanov, Kautsky, Lafargue, Labriola, Mehring, Luxemburg and Zasulich.
The publication of Plekhanov’s works will be completed in 1924–1925. Twelve volumes have already been published, and a further nine volumes have been sent to press. A plan has already been drawn up for the publication of the collected works of V.I. Zasulich. Preparatory work on the publication of Kautsky’s collected works – the editing of old translations and the organisation of new ones – has progressed to such an extent that it will soon be possible to proceed with the urgent printing of a number of volumes.
In view of the enormous significance that Lassalle played not only in the German labour movement but also in the history of Russian socialism from the second half of the 1860s, the Marx and Engels Institute is preparing, to mark the centenary of Lassalle’s birth (11 April 1825), a new edition of his selected works and letters.
Alongside this series of classics of modern socialism, a popular series will be published, comprising the most outstanding works of Marxist thought, adapted for our Party schools and communist universities. The first volume of this series is the second, substantially expanded edition of the Communist Manifesto, with my introduction and notes.
With the same aim in mind – namely, to give young Marxists who have not yet mastered foreign languages the opportunity to familiarise themselves more thoroughly with the principal predecessors of Marx and Engels in the fields of philosophy, political economy and socialism, who to a certain extent shaped their views – the Institute is undertaking the publication of three series: philosophical, economic and socialist.
The first of these comprises the Library of Materialism, which is intended to provide Russian translations of the principal works of ancient, English, French and German materialists: Democritus, Hobbes, Priestley, Holbach, Helvétius, La Mettrie, Diderot, Feuerbach and others.
Alongside this, a collection of selected works by Hegel is being prepared. Comrade Deborin has already published A Reader in the History of Philosophy (Книга для чтения по истории философии) and is preparing a concise course on the history of philosophy for publication.
The Library of Classical Economists will include the works of Petty, the leading physiocrats (Turgot, Quesnay, Mercier de la Rivière), Smith, Ricardo, Sismondi and Mill, with notes by Chernyshevsky and Rodbertus. First and foremost, a complete collection of David Ricardo’s works will be published, the first volume of which has already gone to press.
The Library of Utopian Socialists will contain editions of the works of Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella, Gerrard Winstanley, John Bellers, Jean Meslier, Étienne-Gabriel Morelly, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, François Boissel, Gracchus Babeuf, Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, William Thompson, John Francis Bray and Théodore Dézamy, each with introductions and notes.
In addition, the Institute is undertaking a series of publications on the history of the labour movement in Western Europe and America – THE KARL MARX AND FRIEDRICH ENGELS INSTITUTE
The Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Institute is a research institution whose aim is to establish a well-equipped research laboratory in which researchers may, under the most favourable conditions, study the genesis, development and spread of the theory and practice of scientific socialism, revolutionary communism, as conceived and formulated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
And the extent to which it was difficult in Russia to properly establish the scientific study of Marxism is best illustrated by the fact that, as early as the beginning of 1919, an institution such as the Socialist Academy did not possess a complete set of the works of Marx and Engels, republished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Admittedly, the entire scientific and technical apparatus for the study of the historical and social sciences was not in a much better state either.
In November 1919, following my report on the organisation of the Socialist Academy’s work in light of changes to its plan and objectives, work began on setting up a number of research departments.
In the course of this work, I came to the conclusion that it was necessary to set up a special department dedicated to the study of the theory, history and practice of Marxism. It was established in a separate building in Moscow (in Vozdvizhenka Street, on the corner of Sheremetev Lane). A trip to London in the summer and autumn of 1920 gave me the opportunity to enrich this room with a number of very valuable and rare publications.
It was precisely at this time (by a resolution of the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party dated 8 December 1920) that I was entrusted with the task of ‘creating the world’s first museum of Marxism’, a task of ‘exceptional international significance’. I declined to organise the Marx Museum and proposed setting up a research institute on a larger scale than I had originally envisaged.
First and foremost, it was necessary to find premises that were even remotely suitable. Unfortunately, this was not achieved until November 1921, when, after a long and arduous process, the former premises of the People’s Commissariat for Maritime Affairs – which had come under the jurisdiction of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs [11] – were vacated. It was not until May 1922, however, that the building was finally cleared of all extraneous elements left over from the old dormitory for employees of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (Narkomindel).
Despite all these obstacles, which hindered the smooth running of operations and were only removed after the May session of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the work of organising the Institute progressed rapidly. The necessary repairs – which the dilapidated building was in dire need of – adapting the new premises to the Institute’s requirements, and equipping the rooms with the necessary equipment – all this work was completed in a relatively short time. By November 1922, the organisation of the Institute could be considered broadly complete. The next step is now to carry out more detailed finishing work on its various parts and to provide more sophisticated equipment, since, for lack of funds, we had to make do with whatever could be obtained and quickly adapted to the Institute’s needs. The form still does not fully correspond to the content.
Meanwhile, even now, in terms of its book collections, the Marx and Engels Institute ranks among the world’s leading specialist libraries, and as a Museum of Marxism it undoubtedly holds first place not only in terms of the number of rare and valuable books, but also in terms of the organisation of the scholarly material it has assembled. The compilation of the card catalogue is nearing completion. The Institute will shortly begin printing a systematic catalogue covering the most important sections.
The Institute’s book collections were assembled in various ways. A significant number of books were transferred to the Institute, as the Socialist Academy, from various nationalised libraries, either directly or via the book collection of the People’s Commissariat for Education. Libraries abandoned by their owners were also utilised and, to a large extent, saved from certain plunder. It should be noted that workers in certain districts, particularly Krasnopresnensky and Zamoskvorechsky (two prominent historical areas located within the Central Administrative Okrug of Moscow), were especially eager to assist in this endeavour to save these scholarly treasures. The Department of Ideology at the Socialist Academy and our Institute owe a great deal to these numerous ‘freelance’ collaborators, who conscientiously pointed out to me all manner of books they considered interesting. I still remember how, after giving a lecture in the Zamoskvorechye district, I returned with a magnificent copy of Louis Moréri’s Le Grand Dictionaire Historique, which had formed a significant part of the library of Jean Meslier, an 18th-century communist priest.
First place amongst the nationalised libraries is held by the library of the late Vladimir Ivanovich Taneyev, part of which – containing a fine collection of books on the history of socialism and a magnificent collection of engravings on the history of the Great French Revolution – now forms an integral department of the Institute.
The second source from which the Institute’s book collections were expanded consisted of books I purchased during my trips abroad in 1920–22 (England, Sweden, Germany, Austria). Among these purchases, two in particular are worth noting. I succeeded in acquiring two of the finest private libraries on the history of socialism and the labour movement. One of them – together with Anton Menger’s library, now owned by the University of Vienna – served as the main source material for the well-known three-volume bibliography of socialism and communism compiled by Stammhammer (Josef Stammhammer’s Bibliographie des Socialismus und Communismus, 3 volumes, Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1893–1909). Its owner, Theodor Mauthner, who died in April 1922, was a passionate collector who began his work as early as 1876 and, with the help of his friend Wilhelm Pappenheim, managed to assemble, before the war of 1914, an exceptionally rich collection on socialism and anarchism. In addition to books and journals, it includes a collection of autographs, engravings and revolutionary medals. A great admirer of Ferdinand Lassalle, the late Mautner collected all of his works in their first editions, as well as many letters, including those Lassalle wrote to his family.
Mautner’s library was soon joined by that of the renowned economist and historian of socialism, Professor Carl Grünberg, editor of the Archive on the History of Socialism and the Labour Movement (Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung). This, too, is the result of many years of collecting, from 1886 to 1918, and, whilst significantly inferior to Mauthner’s library in terms of the number of rare and valuable editions – not to mention its fine collection of utopian works – it has the advantage of having enriched the Institute’s library with a number of periodicals and books on the history of socialism and the labour movement in various countries.
The Institute now also possesses Germany’s finest collection
of Fichte’s works and literature on him, formerly belonging to
Prof. Wilhelm Windelband. It also serves as an excellent resource for
the history of German philosophy in general during the late 18th
century and the first third of the 19th.
The internal organisation of any research institute must be geared
towards its primary objective. A researcher working there must have
at their disposal all the necessary materials and tools for their
specific research work. In accordance with the main task of the Marx
and Engels Institute, the first priority was to collect all the works
of Marx and Engels. The central study of the entire Institute serves
this purpose:
Five large fireproof cabinets contain all the first editions of Marx, Engels and Lassalle in a collection more comprehensive than anywhere else in the world, although it is not yet exhaustive. It will take more than a year to achieve this. Our collection includes: the Rheinische Zeitung 1842–43, to which Marx was first a contributor and later editor-in-chief; Vorwärts 1844, published in Paris, to which Heine and Bakunin contributed alongside Marx and Engels; all the journals and anthologies of ‘true socialism’; the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung of 1847, in a more complete form than anywhere else in the world, the first edition of the Communist Manifesto, and the Kommunistische Zeitschrift, published in September 1847 with the motto ‘Workers of the world, unite!’, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung from 1848–1849, and so on and so forth. Among Marx’s early publications is such a rarity as a copy of Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy), which belonged to Lassalle and is covered in his handwritten notes. The study also contains a complete copy of the American Encyclopaedia, to which Marx and Engels contributed.
One of the main tasks set by the Marx and Engels Institute is the preparation of a scholarly edition of all their works. To this end, manuscripts are being collected – a list of which will be published in due course – along with copies of articles by the founders of scientific socialism, which are scattered across numerous journals. [12] Preference is given to photographic reproductions of printed or handwritten originals. The department already holds photographs of letters from Marx and Engels to Nikolai-on (Nikolai Danielson) as well as photographs of the correspondence between Marx and Engels from the 1840s and 1850s, and from the mid-1860s. This work is ongoing, and in the near future the institute will have photographs of all of Marx and Engels’ manuscripts. [13] Anyone who is aware of the invaluable service rendered to Pushkin scholars by the Vengerov collection of photographs of all Pushkin’s manuscripts will readily understand the immense significance for research of a complete collection of photographs of all Marx and Engels’ articles and manuscripts. No amount of meticulous transcription can guarantee the absence of errors and omissions, let alone the arbitrary omissions that abound in both the literary legacy of Marx and Engels, edited by Franz Mehring, and the correspondence of Marx and Engels, edited by Bernstein and Mehring. [14]
The same study also houses the materials I have collected on the history of the First International, including photographs of the General Council’s minutes and a number of extremely rare manuscripts and printed materials. The main categories into which all the material is divided are:
In terms of its international influence and reach, scientific socialism ranks first amongst all theoretical systems. There is no country in which there are even the beginnings of a labour movement where the works of Marx and Engels are not read, just as there is no country in which bourgeois science has not been forced to take scientific socialism into account, refuting and interpreting it in every possible way.
Yet scientific socialism is international by very virtue of its origins. Although its founders were Germans, they would not have been able to produce the Communist Manifesto had they not drawn upon the rich experience of French and English history. Since their views were shaped and conditioned by a particular era, and developed within a specific milieu, that milieu comprised not only German reality, but also French and English reality. Their political and social activities were no less international in scope, taking place chiefly in Germany, France and England. This fact alone compels any researcher of the history and theory of Marxism to focus on the study of the history of Germany, France and England. A separate study is dedicated to each of these countries at the Institute.
We shall begin with
It contains almost all the most significant general works on German history, biographical and bibliographical reference works, a wealth of literature on the agrarian history of the Middle Ages (the history of the German peasant and land relations) and, more generally, on the economic and social history of Germany.
In compiling the literature, particular attention is paid to those periods or issues that most preoccupied Marx and Engels. Thus, the collection contains a large number of works on the Great Peasants’ War, on Müntzer and the Anabaptists, as well as a range of materials and sources on the history of the era of enlightened absolutism, Frederick II, Lessing, the Sturm und Drang period – an era to which numerous digressions in the writings of Marx and Engels are devoted, and to which Merling’s finest historical work is also dedicated.
Yet, however rich the literature prior to 1789 may be – this period accounts for a significant proportion of the three or four thousand dissertations and research papers on the most diverse topics held in the collection – its main collection, and this is where its particular value lies, consists of works relating to the revolutionary and labour movements in Germany and Austria in the nineteenth century (more precisely, from 1789 onwards).
In collecting and organising all these materials, the most significant revolutionary events, figures and issues served as focal points, whilst for the period after 1841, the arrangement of the material is determined by the objectives of studying the lives and work of Marx and Engels.
Thus, the section devoted to the influence of the Great French Revolution on Germany contains a rich collection of sources and works on the Mainz uprising of 1792 and on Georg Forster. There are also extensive collections relating to the revolutionary movements of the second decade of the 19th century, the resulting campaign against the universities, the so-called ‘Demagogenhetze’ (witch-hunt against demagogues), and the activities of the ‘Central Investigative Commission’.
Collections are dedicated to the movements spurred on by the July Revolution, relating to the ‘Hambach Festival’ – one of whose active participants and organisers was the young Johann Philipp Becker, who served as a living link between this era and the First International – to the Frankfurt Uprising, to the trials of Silvestr Jordan and the priest Weidig, who, together with Georg Büchner, was responsible for the first attempts at propaganda among the peasantry. Publication groups such as the ‘case of the seven Göttingen professors’, the constitutional-democratic movement of the 1830s in the South German states and Prussia (Karl von Rotteck, Carl Theodor Welker, Johann Jacobi, Robert Blum), the Cologne Church Controversy and the German Catholic movement, introduce us to the main political and religious issues that preoccupied Germany at the time when Marx and Engels were entering the arena of conscious political life.
A very rich, though still not exhaustive, collection of literature on social issues in the first half of the 19th century (pauperism, the labour question, socialism, communism) leads us to the socialist and labour movements in the narrower sense of the term. Of the 277 works listed in Mombert’s most recent and detailed bibliography [15], the collection contains up to 200, and, in addition, around 200 works not mentioned there at all. There are almost all the works of the first German socialist, Ludwig Hall, a complete set of the journal Geächtete (The Outcast), and an almost complete collection of all Wilhelm Weitling’s pamphlets and writings, as well as literature about him. Separate groups represent the various strands of ‘true socialism’ and German radicalism. Carefully selected are the works of those representatives – (Jakob Venedey, Ruge, the Bauers, and political poets of the 1840s such as Georg Herwegh, Ferdinand Freiligrath and others) – who were in more or less close contact with Marx and Engels. We have already mentioned the collection of journals and anthologies on ‘true socialism’ in connection with its most valuable part, which is kept in the study of Marx and Engels.
Among the materials on the history of the Revolution of 1848–49, it is worth noting, in addition to general literature, the reports of the Frankfurt and Berlin parliaments, a collection of 700 posters, leaflets and proclamations, a collection of sources and literature devoted to the uprisings in Baden, the Palatinate and Saxony, as well as the events in Cologne. We also possess an almost complete run of the newspaper Kölner Arbeiterverein (Cologne Workers’ Union), the significance of which – as a publication that appeared alongside the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and was undoubtedly more closely linked to the Cologne workers – has as yet been very little researched.
As regards the period from 1850 to 1914, the collection contains all the most important works relating to the era of reaction, the ‘liberal era’, the budget conflict and the founding of the empire. There are up to 2,500 issues from the extensive collection of pamphlets. In addition to the complete collection of Reichstag reports, there are also complete sets of the most important political journals.
However, the main focus of this section is literature on the history of the labour movement and Social Democracy in both Germany and Austria. This includes all periodicals dating from the time of Lassalle’s speeches, publications by the party and trade unions, and underground literature from the era of the Anti-Socialist Law. Suffice it to say that all the literature cited in Mehring’s works on the history of German social democracy, in the biographies of Engels and Schweitzer written by Gustav Mayer, and in the biography of Lassalle written by Hermann Oncken, with very few exceptions, is held by the Institute. [16] Furthermore, the collection contains a considerable number of pamphlets and brochures that have not yet been utilised by researchers. Thus, a historian of the German labour movement will find here, in a systematic collection, such a wealth of material that even in Germany he would find it scattered across various libraries and archives.
To conclude the description of this collection, it should be noted
that it contains a special section on the history of the Rhine
Province, given its significance for the biographies of Marx and
Engels. Furthermore, the study contains a collection of literature on
the history of the Austrian and Hungarian labour movements and, more
generally, on the history of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, as
well as literature on the history of Switzerland and the Swiss labour
movement.
is, even more so than the German section, essentially a collection on modern history, beginning in 1789.
Apart from general works on the history of France, for the period prior to the Great French Revolution, the collection comprises only literature on social and economic history, as well as on revolutionary movements – the Commune, the peasant uprising (the Jacquerie), the Fronde, riots, uprisings and strikes up to 1789.
There are seven main sections:
1. The Great Revolution and the Napoleonic Era. This extensive collection of primary sources includes highly valuable collections of memoirs, works by contemporaries and pamphlets on various topics, etc. Periodicals from that period are less well represented. There is a complete collection of the original Le Moniteur universel up to the July Revolution of 1830.
Among the individual collections, the one dedicated to Marat stands out; it contains a collection of all his writings, including the journals he published, amongst which is an almost complete set of L’Ami du Peuple (The Friend of the People). An extensive body of literature on Marat is also gathered here.
There are collections devoted to Robespierre, Danton, Anacharsis Cloots and, in particular, Babeuf. The collection of engravings and portraits of figures from the Revolution, which we have already mentioned at length, is exceptionally extensive.
2. The Restoration and the July Revolution. Particular attention is paid to materials on the history of revolutionary societies and the Republican Party up to 1830. There is a large collection of memoirs devoted to the July Revolution.
3. The July Monarchy. In addition to general works on the history of this period, there is a collection of primary sources and literature on the labour and revolutionary movements of the 1830s and 1840s (the Lyon uprising, Louis-Auguste Blanqui and Armand Barbès, the Babeuf movement, and the materialist communists).
4. The February Revolution. A very substantial collection of primary sources and literature, among which the following are particularly noteworthy: a) a collection of pamphlets from the period; b) a collection of newspapers and journals: around 300 titles, including the newspapers of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Victor Prosper Considerant, Joseph Sobrier, Charles Delécluse, François-Vincent Raspail, Félicité Robert de Lamennais and others; collections devoted to Louis Blanc, Lamartine and Ledru-Rollin are highlighted in particular; c) a collection of posters, engravings and medals.
5. The Second Empire. Of particular note here is the collection of writings and pamphlets against Napoleon III and concerning the coup d’état of 2 December. Among them is a complete set of Henri Rochefort’s La Lanterne.
6. The Paris Commune of 1871. Several hundred volumes, comprising an almost complete collection of all the major newspapers of the time, including the Journal Officiel, Blanqui’s La Patrie en Danger (The Fatherland in Danger), La Commune, and so on. A wealth of illustrative material and a collection of photographs of leading figures of the Commune.
7. The Third Republic and the labour movement after the
Commune. This section is less well-developed, although it
does contain some very rare sets of newspapers from the 1870s and
1880s. Only once direct relations with France have been
re-established will it be possible to bring this section up to the
standard it deserves.
has its own distinctive features. As the classic country of capitalism and the birthplace of the first mass labour movement, England was always the subject of close study by Marx and Engels.
Whilst the process of class struggle, as the principal driving force of history, could best be traced in the history of France – Marx had been studying its modern history without interruption since 1843 – the development of various forms of production, the anatomy of bourgeois society, its division into classes, the origins of the proletariat and the various forms of its protest against the capitalists, and its transformation into a distinct class – all these processes were studied by Marx and Engels chiefly on the basis of English sources.
From this perspective, the social and economic history of England, the development of its state institutions, and the history of social classes and their struggles are of particular interest. In addition to general works and monographs on the history of trade, industry, the agrarian movement, public credit, finance, taxation, transport, legislation, constitutional law, Parliament, local government, the army and the navy, the study contains a copy of Hansard (parliamentary debates) up to the second half of the 19th century, a multi-volume collection of state court cases from 1163 to 1820 by Howell [17], and a number of other sources.
The remaining material is organised by historical period, with each period centred on the popular movements, uprisings and revolutions that feature so prominently in England’s ‘peaceful’ history.
The workers’ movement in the 14th century, their struggle for higher wages, which led to the so-called ‘labour legislation’, Wat Tyler’s rebellion (The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381), the Lollard and Wycliffite movements (14th–15th Century), Kett’s Rebellion (1549) and other protests against the horrors of primitive accumulation and forcible expropriation, and the era reflected in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) – all of this is documented and catalogued in the English section first and foremost.
The collection on the history of the 17th-century English revolutions – the ‘Great Rebellion’, the Puritans, the Independents, the Levellers and the Diggers – is particularly rich. The cabinet contains several dozen pamphlets from that period, including an excellent collection of almost all of John Lilburne’s pamphlets, a pamphlet by Gerrard Winstanley, the author of the first manifesto of agrarian communism, John Bellers, whom Marx, in the first volume of Capital, describes as ‘a veritable phenomenon in the field of political economy’, and a number of pamphlets directed by the ‘Cavaliers’ against the ‘Roundheads’.
In the history of the 18th century, the main focus is on the era of the Industrial Revolution and the revolutionary movement of the masses it sparked, which by the end of the century had grown to even greater proportions due to the influence of the Great French Revolution. In addition to general works and monographs, it is worth noting the collection of the Annual Register from 1758 to 1800, the collection of the journal The Anti-Jacobin from 1798 to 1813, and, in particular, the collection relating to the history of the first revolutionary workers’ societies, the so-called Corresponding Societies (1792–1799).
The general history of the 19th century is represented, in addition to comprehensive works, by a large collection of biographies, of which English historiography is so rich. The main effort, however, was directed towards gathering literature on the history of the labour and social movements. Here, the following periods naturally emerged, which have been very inadequately researched from a Marxist perspective.
Firstly, the period from 1815 to the so-called Great Reform Act of 1832. The Luddite movement, the agitation of William Cobbett and the Spenceans (followers of land reformer Thomas Spence), Robert Owen’s campaign, the struggle for the right to form coalitions, the Manchester (Peterloo) Massacre (August 1819), and the Thistlewood (Cato Street) Conspiracy (February 1820) – all these events were reflected in pamphlets and periodicals. Although considerable effort will still be required to make this collection complete, we already possess a series of extremely rare journals, and Owen’s collection of pamphlets, in terms of its comprehensiveness, is on a par with the finest collections in England.
Secondly, the period from 1832 to 1858: the era of the struggle against the Corn Laws, the era of Chartism and co-operation. This section is exceptionally rich. It suffices to mention the Chartist journals, and amongst them an almost complete run of the Chartists’ central organ, the Northern Star, which belonged to George Julian Garney [Harney – correction by MIA], one of the chief editors and a close friend of Marx, Engels and Wilhelm Liebknecht.
Thirdly, the era of the formation of local trade union councils and the First International (1859–1874).
The last quarter of the 19th century – the struggle between old and new trade unionism, the formation of the first Social Democratic Party, and the emergence of an independent labour party – is represented much less extensively. It must be borne in mind that the trade union publications, which play a leading role in the English labour press, are not even held in the British Museum. For the time being, one has to make do with the painstaking collection of the scant literature on the history of the labour movement, congress minutes and pamphlets.
Special sections are devoted to Ireland, whose historical fortunes were of interest to both Marx and, in particular, Engels; to the East Indies, whose history Marx studied not only as an object of British colonial policy but also as the key to understanding the history of various forms of land tenure; and to Canada, Australia and other British colonies.
The English study, meanwhile, contains literature on the history
of the United States of America. And this not only because, ‘just
as in the 18th century the American War of Independence sounded a
wake-up call for the European middle class, so too did the American
Civil War in the 19th century play exactly the same role in relation
to the European working class’. Also, because Marx and Engels
had direct links with the United States, both as participants in and
leaders of various socialist movements in America from the late 1840s
onwards, and as contributors to the highly influential Anglo-American
newspaper The New York Tribune from 1852 to 1862.
Unfortunately, American Marxists have so far done nothing to
facilitate research in this field, whilst bourgeois American
historical literature completely ignores this entire period. Our
specific task, therefore, is to collect all the materials that will
enable us to shed more light on the history and context of Marx and
Engels’ work for the American labour movement and their
contribution to American literature.
Whilst the centres outlined above set themselves the task of facilitating the researcher’s study of the historical conditions and environment in which Marx and Engels developed and from which they drew their impressions, impulses and stimuli – both as practitioners and as politicians – then another group of research centres aims to create the most favourable conditions for studying all the fundamental ideological elements from the processing and synthesis of which the system of scientific socialism was created and developed.
“We, the German socialists,” writes Engels, “are proud to trace our origins not only to Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, but also to Kant, Fichte and Hegel.” Thus, Engels emphasises – not without a certain degree of exaggeration, given that he is referring to some of the thinkers he names – that scientific socialism is, above all, the product of a philosophy in which the worldview of their era crystallised, and of socialism, in which the contemporary critique of bourgeois society from the standpoint of ‘the most numerous and most suffering class’ found its expression.
But this is precisely what distinguishes scientific socialism from utopian socialism: instead of merely condemning and discussing bourgeois reality, it has substituted a scientific analysis of bourgeois society and, by carefully studying the development of law and legal institutions, seeks the explanation for all these superstructures in the economy of bourgeois society, which is itself just as much a historical product as the social and ideological forms dependent upon it.
Marx and Engels both began, immediately after freeing themselves from the shackles of the traditional worldview, with philosophy, only to later become communists, the sole difference being that Marx had already undergone thorough training in law and history before turning, like Engels, to the study of political economy.
It was precisely these considerations that dictated the organisation of special sections devoted to philosophy, law, political economy and socialism.
We begin our description with
First and foremost, researchers will find here a rich collection of works and monographs on the history of philosophy, organised both by historical period and by individual countries. As in all the study rooms, efforts are focused on compiling a comprehensive collection of the literature used by Marx and Engels (whether quoted by them or mentioned in their bibliographies), or which might have been used by them – in other words, literature up to and including the first half of the 19th century. Naturally, particular attention is paid here to those subjects or philosophers with whom Marx and Engels were concerned.
Consequently, the collection includes works on the history of ancient philosophy in connection with Marx’s work on Epicurus and Democritus, on the history of modern philosophy (Descartes and Spinoza), on the history of English philosophy (Bacon, Hobbes, Locke and the English materialists, with a special collection of Joseph Priestley’s works), on the history of French philosophy with a special collection of 18th-century French materialists and Enlightenment thinkers (the complete works of Voltaire and Diderot, and two editions of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie).
In the German philosophy section, apart from Leibniz’s works and literature about him, there are five main groups: 1) Kant (five hundred and twelve titles), 2) Fichte (the collection we have already mentioned, with a printed catalogue containing 624 titles, to which works on Fichte in Russian and French literature have now been added), 3) Schelling, to whom Engels dedicated several works, 4) Hegel, 5) the Young Hegelian school (Strauss, the Bauer brothers and, in particular, Feuerbach). The latter collection includes a complete set of the Hallische Jahrbücher für deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst and a wealth of pamphlet literature.
The study, which occupies three rooms, also contains the following
sections: 1) – Literature on logic, ethics, aesthetics and
psychology; 2) – History of science by country and by
discipline; 3) – Methodology and philosophy of science, the
natural sciences and the humanities, with a special sub-section on
Historical Materialism, which brings together all literature
both for and against dialectical materialism.
primarily offers a collection of literature on the philosophy of law and the history of the philosophy of law, dating from the late 1830s and early 1840s, when Marx was engaged in the study of jurisprudence. Special collections are devoted to the historical and Hegelian schools. A separate section is dedicated to old civil and criminal law, the theory of the state and international law.
In addition to the section on the history of law, organised by historical period and by country, the Law Cabinet also contains a special section devoted to the history of political thought, which includes a collection of the works of the most eminent political thinkers and literature about them (Niccolò Machiavelli, Jean Bodin, Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, Montesquieu, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Jean-Jacques Rousseau).
However, the Law Library is not limited solely to the literature required by a researcher wishing to trace the genesis and development of Marx and Engels’ views on law and the state. The practice of the labour movement – in particular the Paris Commune and the October Revolution – has brought to the fore a number of issues in the field of public and civil law which had no place in traditional academic scholarship. These are questions concerning the functions of the state, centralism and federalism, bourgeois and workers’ democracy, the main factors in the transformation of the political structure, revolutions, the dictatorship of the proletariat, political parties and the party apparatus, trade union law, the press, the national question and the right to self-determination. Literature is selected for all these groups to facilitate the work of those researchers who, guided by Marx’s method, wish to replace the ideological and metaphysical arguments of bourgeois jurisprudence with an analysis of actual relations and real forces that determine the development of political and legal norms.
In the preface to the first volume of Capital,
Marx writes that he has in mind readers who wish to learn something
new. And this presupposes knowledge of the existing body of work that
had been produced in the field of economic theory and history prior
to the publication of his Capital. That is why
primarily collects literature on the history of political economy. In addition to general works, the collection contains – in first editions or reprints – the works of almost all the economists cited in all four volumes of Capital. Needless to say, the collection brings together the bulk of the literature on Marx as an economist.
The second major section comprises literature on the evolution of capitalism, as outlined in Capital. This includes the general history of economic development from the time of the disintegration of primitive society and the histories of individual sectors of economic life.
The third section is devoted to the main issues addressed in Capital. The literature is grouped according to the following topics: the theory of value, the theory of surplus value and profit, the theory of prices, the theory of money and credit circulation, the theory of the concentration of capital, the theory and history of crises, the world economy, the theory of rent, and the agrarian question.
The fourth major section is devoted to the labour question, as set out by Engels in his The Condition of the Working Class in England and by Marx in the descriptive chapters of Capital. This section brings together old English pamphlets and monographs from the late 18th century, characterising the condition of the working class in England during the Industrial Revolution, as well as works by Engels’ predecessors (Peter Gaskell, Louis-René Villermé, Michel de Bourges) on the condition of the working class in England and France on the eve of 1848, later comprehensive studies on the condition of the working class in various countries and industrial sectors, and literature on the working day, wages, women’s and children’s labour, the housing problem, unemployment, and so on. It also includes theoretical literature on the trade union movement, occupational health and safety, and factory legislation.
The collection also includes, organised into separate groups, literature from the new schools of bourgeois political economy, insofar as they have been subject to the ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ influence of Capital.
The researcher will also find here the principal literature on the theory and history of finance, on the theory and history of statistics, on the methodology of political economy, as well as a large collection of reference works and leading economic journals.
We now turn to
Whilst the history of the social and labour movements up to 1848 has found its place in the cabinets on the history of Germany, France and England, the history of socialist thought and the various systems of socialism and communism constitutes the core collection of the Socialism Cabinet.
In addition to general works and monographs on the history of socialism, organised by historical periods and individual countries – in accordance with the traditional arrangement adopted in Benoît Malon’s history (Histoire du socialisme depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’à nos jours, 1882) and even in the comprehensive work by Kautsky, Mehring, Lafargue and Bernstein – dating back almost to the Stone Age and ancient times – all socialists and communists prior to 1848 are represented by their original works.
In the extensive collection of utopian works, the researcher will find a range of editions of Thomas More’s Utopia – with the exception of the first edition, the earliest edition held by the Institute dating from 1548 – various translations of it, including a Russian translation from 1789, as well as a collection of literature on More. The utopian works of Anton Francesco Doni, Francis Bacon, Johann Valentin Andreae, James Harrington (including the first edition of 1656 of The Commonwealth of Oceana), Denis Vairasse, Gerrard Winstanley and John Bellers form the 16th- and 17th-century section.
The history of socialism in the 18th century begins with the works of Jean Molière, among which is one of the manuscript copies circulated in France in the 1640s and 1650s, before Voltaire first published extracts from Molière’s will.
There are first editions by Étienne-Gabriel Morelly, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Étienne-Gabriel Boissel, François-Noël "Gracchus" Babeuf and other minor 18th-century utopians.
The collection of works by the great utopians is exceptionally rich. Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen are represented in such a comprehensive manner that their works are not gathered in one place anywhere else. First editions of their major works, key journals (Le Globe, Le Producteur, New Moral World, Le Phalanstère, La Phalange), the works of their principal disciples, and literature on Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen – all this awaits young Marxists who wish to trace the influence of the great utopians on the formation of Marx and Engels’ views.
No less extensive is the collection of works by later socialists and communists who were contemporaries of Marx and Engels – Pierre Leroux, Félicité de Lamennais, Étienne Cabet, François Vidal, Constantin Pecqueur, Louis Blanc, Théodore Dézamy, Louis Auguste Blanqui and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
This same room also houses the works of socialists from the second half of the 19th century, including all representatives of the various currents of Marxist thought. Literature is also collected on those currents which are themselves the result of Marxism’s influence on older socialist systems – namely, the literature of revolutionary syndicalism and guild socialism.
It is also necessary to mention a special section containing literature that examines, from a socialist perspective, issues such as education, religion, the church, the national question, and so on; literature on the so-called ‘social question’, which includes representatives of all varieties of ‘bourgeois socialism’ – state socialism, Christian socialism, and so on; – a section containing the most characteristic works of bourgeois thought that refute and ‘destroy’ socialism; and a section on socialist poetry and fiction, with a large subsection devoted to utopian novels.
A special section is dedicated to literature on anarchism. It contains all the works and pamphlets by Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Élisée Reclus, Johann Most, Jean Grave, Sébastien Faure and others. No other library possesses such a collection of anarchist journals and newspapers – including complete runs of Johann Most’s Freiheit (his own copy), French journals – such as the extremely rare Le Libertaire by Joseph Déjacque – and complete runs of Révolté and Temps Nouveaux. This also includes literature on anarchism and its leading figures, including a beautifully preserved copy of a lithographed biography of Bakunin written by Max Nettlau. [18]
Closely associated with this study is a special
dedicated to the history of Russian socialism and Marxism. Its specific aim is to examine the relationships – whether hostile or friendly – that developed between the Russian people of the 1840s, 1860s and 1870s, on the one hand, Marx and Engels, on the other; and to identify the channels and pathways through which Marxist thought seeped into Russian literature, until, together with the ‘Emancipation of Labour’ group, Russian Marxism became a full member of the international Marxist family. Annenkov, Bakunin, Nikolai Sazonov, Ivan Golovin, Nikolai Utin, German Lopatin, Pyotr Lavrov, Nikolai-on (Nikolai Danielson), all the so-called ‘scholarly friends’ of Marx – Maxim Kovalevsky, Nikolai Kablukov and others, the Narodniks – Leo Hartmann and Nikolai Morozov – this list alone shows just how great the number of those ‘Russian people’ was who were in direct contact – through personal acquaintance or correspondence – with Marx and Engels.
Without setting itself the task of studying the history of the Russian labour movement and the history of the Russian Social-Democratic parties – which is one of the main tasks of the Department of the History of Russian Social and Revolutionary Movements, organised under the Communist Academy – the Plekhanov Department collects literature on all currents of Russian Marxist thought, the struggle between which shaped the development of Marxism in Russia.
In this connection, the Plekhanov Department has set itself
another task, one that follows naturally from the first. In none of
the major Russian libraries – neither the Lenin Library
(formerly the Rumyantsev Library), nor the Leningrad Library
(formerly the Public Library), nor the Academic Library – are
there such favourable conditions for studying the interaction and
influence of Western philosophical and socialist thought on Russia as
there are at the Marx and Engels Institute. The influence of
18th-century English, German and, in particular, French philosophy
(Alexander Radishchev and his circle, Russian Freemasonry), the
influence of Schelling, the influence of Western socialist, political
and philosophical thought on the Decembrists, the influence of Kant
and Fichte – whether direct or via classical German literature,
the influence of Hegel and his school, the influence of Saint-Simon,
Fourier, Pierre Leroux, Théodore Dézamy, Proudhon and
Owen on Herzen, Ogarev, the Petrashevists, Belinsky, Chernyshevsky,
Dobrolyubov and Nikolai Nozhin; the influence of the First
International and Lassallean agitation, from as early as the second
half of the 1860s, on the Karakozovites, Nechayevites, Tchaikovites,
Lavristovites and Jacobins [19] –
all these topics are still awaiting scholarly investigation. To
facilitate the work of future researchers, the Plekhanov Study is
compiling the writings of various representatives of all schools of
political thought, dating back to the 18th century.
So far, we have been dealing with various factors – historical, social and ideological – which shaped the development of scientific socialism and influenced its founders up to 1848, when the Communist Manifesto appeared.
One need only glance at its first chapter to see that the materialist explanation of history was limited to ancient, medieval and capitalist societies. It is true that, as early as in The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx had outlined the main phases of the development of the capitalist economy, but he was not yet familiar with primitive economic systems or classless society. It was only in the early 1850s, when he had to engage closely with the history of British colonial policy, that, whilst studying on land relations in the East Indies, he came across various forms of communal land ownership and reached a conclusion which he had formulated well before Henry Maine’s works, namely, that a detailed study of Asian, and particularly Indian, communal forms of ownership might reveal how various forms of its degeneration arise from the various forms of naturally developed communal ownership.
Marx had already concluded at that time that it was necessary to identify a distinct epoch in the economic formation of society, to which he gave the not entirely apt name of the ‘Asiatic mode of production’. In Capital there are even more passages showing that Marx, entirely independently and often anticipating the results of future comparative-historical research, applied his dialectical method to the analysis of various forms of primitive society. Although, in the final years of his life, he concentrated his greatly diminished energy on working on the subsequent volumes of Capital, he continued to follow closely the development of a new academic discipline: the study of primitive culture and the development of social institutions. Alongside him, and subsequently continuing his work, Engels focused his attention on this range of issues; and under their joint, and at times direct, influence, questions concerning the origin of the state, the family, private property, the disintegration of communal land ownership, and the origin and development of religion, technology and so on were explored by Paul Lafargue, Karl Kautsky, Nikolai Sieber, Georgi Plekhanov, Heinrich Cunow and Maksim Kovalevsky.
For Marxist researchers wishing to study the development of Marx
and Engels’ views on the above-mentioned issues and to explore
them further, the following has been established:
First and foremost, it brings together all the key works on primitive society which, in one way or another, may have influenced the views of Marx and Engels – those by Johann Bachofen, John MacLennan, Henry Maine, Lewis Henry Morgan, etc. – followed by all the works published after their deaths.
This section also includes a vast body of literature on anthropology and ethnography, featuring a collection of the most ethnographically interesting ‘travelogues’ and a collection of ethnological journals – Globus, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie and a number of others – which contain a wealth of specialised studies on various topics.
The department also houses literature on theoretical sociology across all its schools of thought, including ‘Marxist’ sociology. This section complements the ‘historical materialism’ section in the philosophy department.
Although the department, in accordance with its primary remit, groups together only literature on the origins and development of various forms of ideology in the prehistoric period, a special section has been established for the history of religion and Christianity; in particular, literature on the issues addressed by Marx and Engels is collected with great care. The history of the science of religion and theology, insofar as it is linked to the history of philosophy, falls within the remit of the Philosophy Department.
Until 1848, Marx and Engels had only touched upon issues of foreign policy in connection with the Polish question, but had not dealt with them specifically. The revolution of 1848, which immediately took on a European character, compelled them to engage intensively with the study of international politics. The Polish question itself, the role of Russia and Britain as the principal actors in the counter-revolution, the Schleswig-Holstein question, the Hungarian and Italian questions, the Czech question and the role of Pan-Slavism – all these compelled them at that time, in a series of articles, to address the pressing issues of the day. The Crimean War provided Marx and Engels with an opportunity to study the Eastern Question and the history of Russia’s foreign policy. The European crisis of the late 1850s, which found political expression, amongst other things, in a severe complication of the entire foreign-policy situation, compelled both Engels and Marx to address, in a series of articles and pamphlets, all the major events of the military and diplomatic history of that period.
The immense importance Marx attached to the study of foreign policy is also demonstrated by the fact that, in the founding address of the First International, he insistently pointed out to the workers that ‘the time has come for them to penetrate the mysteries of international politics’, and that ‘the time has come for them to observe the diplomatic actions of their governments’.
To facilitate the study of Marx and Engels’ views on foreign
policy issues and to enable researchers to critically examine their
development, a special
in which the above-mentioned issues serve as the guiding principle for the collection of literature. In addition to general works on the history of foreign policy, literature on those issues and topics specifically addressed in the works of Marx and Engels is grouped separately. With regard to literature on the Eastern Question, all of David Urquhart’s works are being meticulously collected to enable researchers to ascertain the extent of the influence of this leading expert on foreign policy on Marx and Engels.
This same office also houses literature on military matters, as these were of interest to Engels, particularly given their close connection to issues of foreign policy. From the time of the 1848 revolution right up to 1895, there was not a single war or significant issue in the field of military organisation to which the ‘General’ of the international proletarian army did not respond, either in a series of articles or in special pamphlets.
The Hungarian campaign of 1848, the campaign in defence of the imperial constitution, in which Engels personally took part as a soldier, the Crimean War, the Indian Rebellion, the volunteer movement in England in the late 1850s, the Austro-French War of 1859, the American Civil War of 1862–65, the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 – Engels devoted dozens of articles to all these events. Alongside these are articles on the history of military art, the internal organisation of the army, the police and the standing army, and so on.
Naturally, in this section too, in addition to general works on the history of military science, there is a carefully compiled collection of contemporary literature on the main issues that interested Engels and which served as source material for him, as well as the writings of those military authors whom he regarded as his teachers (Clausewitz, Wilhelm Rüstow, and others).
A special section is also currently being organised
At its centre will be the collection I have assembled on the history of the First International, consisting of appeals, manifestos, minutes and journals – including photographs of the minutes of the General Council.
One of the main tasks of this room is to study the history of the First International and the international organisations that preceded it, as well as the development of internationalism in the history of social and revolutionary movements.
Whilst the First International, even in those countries – England, France and Germany – whose representatives were its principal organisers, ushered in a new era for the labour movement, for a whole range of other countries it was only with its foundation and activities that the organised labour movement can be said to have begun.
What is more, the direct influence that Marx and Engels exerted on the international labour movement during the era of the First International did not cease with its dissolution. Subsequently – until 1883, chiefly through Marx, and then, almost until the Fourth Congress of the Second International (London 1896), through Engels – this influence not only deepened but also spread to an ever-increasing number of countries. And in connection with the history of the International and the growth of Marxism’s international significance, it is necessary to examine the history of three groups of smaller countries – in comparison with England, France and Germany – namely the Scandinavian group (Sweden, Norway, Denmark), the Romance group (Italy, Spain and Portugal) and the Balkan group (Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece). If we add Belgium, the Netherlands and Poland to these, we obtain, together with England, France and Germany, Russia, Switzerland, the United States of America and Australia, the entire sphere of influence of the First International.
Some of these countries interested Marx and Engels quite apart from the labour movement. For instance, in connection with the Crimean War, Marx turned his attention to the history of the Spanish revolutions and the history of Sweden. The result of these studies was a series of articles which are of particular interest to the Russian reader.
The history of Belgium in the 1840s is also significant when studying the biographies of Marx and Engels, who lived in Belgium and took part in its political and social life. When studying the history of Italy – which is particularly important for understanding the fate of the Bakuninist International – one cannot fail to dwell on the struggle waged by both Marxists and Bakuninists against Mazzini and his followers. With this in mind, in addition to specialist literature on the history of the social movement in each of these countries, attention has been focused on collecting literature on those specific issues and themes that interested Marx and Engels. So far, this has been achieved only in the case of Spain, for which there is a collection of works on the revolutions of the first half of the 19th century, including the minutes of the Cortes from that period, and in the case of Italy, for which there is a collection of works on Mazzini and his era.
The Institute has at its disposal a vast collection of engravings, portraits, illustrations and autographs of various socialists and revolutionaries, now distributed amongst the various rooms.
To conclude this brief overview of the individual rooms, it should
also be mentioned that a special reference library has been set up in
the reading room, containing all the necessary reference materials
for studies in the history of socialism and the labour movement,
including complete sets of almost all socialist and Marxist journals
(Die neue Zeit, Sozialistische Monatshefte,
Revue Socialiste, Critica Sociale,
Il Divenire Sociale, La Devenir Social,
La Vie Ouvrière, Le Mouvement
Socialiste, Der Kampf, and the English
journals Social Democrat and Socialist
Review), all general encyclopaedias and bibliographical
dictionaries, a large collection of books on general history,
collections of various Marxist series such as the J.H.W. Dietz’s
Internationale Bibliothek, bibliographical and philological
reference works, a set of the Sombart Archive and other
publications on the history of the social movement, social policy and
the labour question (including a complete set of publications by the
Union of Social Policy).
The main task is the preparation of a scholarly edition of the complete works of Marx and Engels. To this day, well over a hundred of their articles remain unpublished, scattered across various journals. Among them are works of the utmost importance. Suffice it to say that there is still no complete collection of the articles written by Marx and Engels during the revolution of 1848–49. Such an important source as their correspondence has been published with incredible distortions and unjustifiable – and very often inexplicable – omissions.
And the last five years have yielded, in addition to several hundred articles I discovered between 1909 and 1912, a further number of new articles by Engels and letters from both him and Marx, extracted from the family archive of Engels’s relatives and the Lassalle archive by Gustav Mayer. As far back as 1921, I was fortunate enough to discover a new, previously unknown pamphlet by Engels on Schelling.
The edition of the works of Marx and Engels undertaken by Mehring covers, and even then, with very large gaps, only the period of their activity up to 1850. The edition of their works from 1850 to 1862, on which I worked until 1917, did not progress beyond the first two volumes. [20] The first volume of a major work on the First International, which was to include all the resolutions, proclamations and manifestos written by Marx for the General Council, remained in the proofreading stage.
The materials collected at the Institute make it possible to resume this work, which was interrupted in 1917. Only now will it be possible to produce a complete bibliography of the works of Marx and Engels, just as only now will it be possible to undertake the preparatory work without which it is inconceivable to produce a satisfactory biography of Marx and Engels.
Modelled on the index I compiled for the first volume of Capital, it is necessary to compile an even more comprehensive and detailed index covering all the works of Marx and Engels. This index must become a veritable dictionary of Marx and Engels, in which all the subjects, terms, concepts and issues contained and discussed in their works are recorded, so that, for each of these topics, a systematic comparison of all relevant passages is provided. Next, all the names of historical figures and authors mentioned by Marx and Engels must be recorded, in order to provide an overview of the development of their views on particular figures or writers. A geographical index must also be compiled, in which the material is grouped by country. It is also necessary to provide a list of all the works cited by Marx and Engels, in order to account for the sources, they drew upon. Such an index, if supplemented – on the basis of the published and unpublished correspondence of Marx and Engels – all those who came into contact with them, whether friendly or hostile, would become a dictionary of Marx and Engels, which would at the same time serve as an encyclopaedia on the history of socialism and the labour movement, chiefly in the 19th century.
Such a work requires the collaboration of several people, and one can only hope that the necessary contributors will be found.
But apart from these projects – the publication of the complete works of Marx and Engels, an international edition reproducing these works in the languages in which they were written, making use of all unpublished manuscripts, the publication of documents on the history of the International and the dictionary of Marx and Engels, which are also publications on an international scale, – the Institute pursues more narrowly defined objectives, which might be described as ‘national’.
It has already been noted on numerous occasions that a country whose entire revolutionary movement is imbued with the spirit of Marx, where his name is better known than in his homeland, and where the proletariat is in power, still does not have a collected works of Marx and Engels. Poor-quality translations, disfigured by censorship omissions, are still in circulation and are being republished.
Therefore, the Institute has set itself the immediate task of publishing, as far as possible, a complete collected works of Marx and Engels in Russian.
Alongside this, the Institute is undertaking the publication of the collected works of the classics of modern socialism who were schooled by Marx and Engels – Lassalle, Plekhanov, Kautsky, Lafargue, Labriola, Mehring, Luxemburg and Zasulich.
The publication of Plekhanov’s works will be completed in 1924–1925. Twelve volumes have already been published, and a further nine volumes have been sent to press. A plan has already been drawn up for the publication of the collected works of V.I. Zasulich. Preparatory work on the publication of Kautsky’s collected works – the editing of old translations and the organisation of new ones – has progressed to such an extent that it will soon be possible to proceed with the urgent printing of a number of volumes.
In view of the enormous significance that Lassalle played not only in the German labour movement but also in the history of Russian socialism from the second half of the 1860s, the Marx and Engels Institute is preparing, to mark the centenary of Lassalle’s birth (11 April 1825), a new edition of his selected works and letters.
Alongside this series of classics of modern socialism, a popular series will be published, comprising the most outstanding works of Marxist thought, adapted for our Party schools and communist universities. The first volume of this series is the second, substantially expanded edition of the Communist Manifesto, with my introduction and notes.
With the same aim in mind – namely, to give young Marxists who have not yet mastered foreign languages the opportunity to familiarise themselves more thoroughly with the principal predecessors of Marx and Engels in the fields of philosophy, political economy and socialism, who to a certain extent shaped their views – the Institute is undertaking the publication of three series: philosophical, economic and socialist.
The first of these comprises the Library of Materialism, which is intended to provide Russian translations of the principal works of ancient, English, French and German materialists: Democritus, Hobbes, Priestley, Holbach, Helvétius, La Mettrie, Diderot, Feuerbach and others.
Alongside this, a collection of selected works by Hegel is being prepared. Comrade Deborin has already published A Reader in the History of Philosophy (Книга для чтения по истории философии) and is preparing a concise course on the history of philosophy for publication.
The Library of Classical Economists will include the works of Petty, the leading physiocrats (Turgot, Quesnay, Mercier de la Rivière), Smith, Ricardo, Sismondi and Mill, with notes by Chernyshevsky and Rodbertus. First and foremost, a complete collection of David Ricardo’s works will be published, the first volume of which has already gone to press.
The Library of Utopian Socialists will contain editions of the works of Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella, Gerrard Winstanley, John Bellers, Jean Meslier, Étienne-Gabriel Morelly, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, François Boissel, Gracchus Babeuf, Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, William Thompson, John Francis Bray and Théodore Dézamy, each with introductions and notes.
In addition, the Institute is undertaking a series of publications on the history of the labour movement in Western Europe and America – first and foremost, a documentary history of the First and Second Internationals, followed by the history of class organisation and the revolutionary movement of the proletariat in England, France and Germany.
Under the title The Archive of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Архив К. Маркса и Ф. Энгельса) the Institute publishes a quarterly review containing studies on the history of Marxism, material for biographies of Marx and Engels and their contemporaries, previously unpublished manuscripts, critical reviews of current Marxist literature – both Russian and foreign – and a bibliography covering all aspects of the history and theory of Marxism.
I shall conclude my report with the same words with which I ended my speech at the 11th Party Congress.
‘We old people are gradually fading away, and even the youngest among us will, in ten or fifteen years’ time, have turned into nothing more than fertiliser for Red Square by the Kremlin walls. We need young comrades who will carry on the glorious traditions of the Russian Communist Party. We occupy a prominent position at the forefront of international communism, not least in the study and development of Marxist theory and history. We now invite the youth to a new sanctuary, where they can work independently under conditions more favourable than those enjoyed by any other communist party in the world. We invite comrades to learn through practice and theory; we invite them to draw from us, the older generation, everything we still have left, so as to create a genuine school of young Marxists, of Marxist theorists.”
David Ryazanov
1. The former mansion of the Dolgorukov brothers, Znamenka district, 5 Malo-Znamensky Lane, Moscow.
2. For details of what has already
been done in this regard, see my paper New Data on the Literary
Legacy of Marx and Engels, delivered in November 1923 at the
Socialist Academy. It is reprinted here, with some abridgements, as
an appendix to this pamphlet.
Рязанов
Д. Б. Новые данные
о литературном
наследстве
К. Маркса и Ф.
Энгельса :
(сообщение
тов. Рязанова,
сделанное в
Соц. академии
20/XI-23 г.) // Вестник
Социалистической
академии. –
1923. – Кн. 6 (октябрь-декабрь).
– С. 351–376.
https://archive.org/details/ryazanov-novyye-dannyye-1923.
3. The total number of photographs of Marx and Engels’ manuscripts and articles now exceeds ten thousand.
4. Franz Mehring (Hrsg.): Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle. 4 Bände. Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz Nachf., 1902. Band 1: Gesammelte Schriften von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels. Von März 1841 bis März 1844. Band 2: Gesammelte Schriften von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels. Von Juli 1844 bis November 1847. Band 3: Gesammelte Schriften von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels. Von Januar 1848 bis Oktober 1850. Band 4: Briefe von Ferdinand Lassalle an Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, 1849 bis 1862. August Bebel und Eduard Bernstein, (Hrsg.): Der Briefwechsel zwischen Friedrich Engels und Karl Marx, 1844 bis 1883. 4 Bände. Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz Nachf., 1913. Erster Band: 1844 bis 1853. Zweiter Band: 1854 bis 1860. Dritter Band: 1861 bis 1867. Vierter Band: 1868 bis 1883.
5. Paul Mombert, Aus der Literatur über die soziale Frage und über die Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (1792–1852), Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung (Grünbergs Archiv), vol. 9, 1921, pp. 169–236.
6. Gustav Mayer, Johann Baptist von Schweitzer und die Sozialdemokratie. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, Gustav Fischer, Jena 1909. Gustav Mayer, Friedrich Engels. Eine Biographie. 2 Bände (Martinus Nijhoff, Haag 1934). Band 1: Friedrich Engels in seiner Frühzeit. Springer, Berlin 1920. Band 2: Engels und der Aufstieg der Arbeiterbewegung in Europa. Martinus Nijhoff, Haag 1934. Hermann Oncken, Lassalle: Eine politische Biographie. 3. vollständig durchgearbeitete und erweiterte Auflage. Stuttgart / Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1920.
7. Thomas Bayly Howell and Thomas Jones Howell (eds.), Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors from the Earliest Period to the Present Time. 34 vols. London: T.C. Hansard, 1809–1828.
8. Max Nettlau, Michael Bakunin. Eine Biographie. 3 Bände (in mehreren Abteilungen). Selbstverlag, London 1896–1900. Band 1 und erste Abteilung des 2. Bandes (1814 bis September 1868). London 1896–1897. Zweite Abteilung des 2. Bandes und erste Abteilung des 3. Bandes (September 1868 bis August 1871). London 1898. Zweite Abteilung des 3. Bandes (September 1871 bis 1. Juli 1876). London 1900.
9. The followers of Dmitry Karakozov, Sergey Nechayev, Nikolai Tchaikovsky, Peter Lavrov and, finally, the Russian “Jacobin” Peter Tkachev.
10. Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, Gesammelte Schriften von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, 1852 bis 1862. Hrsg. von N. Rjasanoff. Übersetzungen aus dem Englischen von Luise Kautsky. 2 Bände. Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz Nachf., 1917.
11. The former mansion of the Dolgorukov brothers, Znamenka district, 5 Malo-Znamensky Lane, Moscow.
12. For details of what has already
been done in this regard, see my paper New Data on the Literary
Legacy of Marx and Engels, delivered in November 1923 at the
Socialist Academy. It is reprinted here, with some abridgements, as
an appendix to this pamphlet.
Рязанов
Д. Б. Новые данные
о литературном
наследстве
К. Маркса и Ф.
Энгельса :
(сообщение
тов. Рязанова,
сделанное в
Соц. академии
20/XI-23 г.) // Вестник
Социалистической
академии. –
1923. – Кн. 6 (октябрь-декабрь).
– С. 351–376.
https://archive.org/details/ryazanov-novyye-dannyye-1923.
13. The total number of photographs of Marx and Engels’ manuscripts and articles now exceeds ten thousand.
14. Franz Mehring (Hrsg.): Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle. 4 Bände. Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz Nachf., 1902. Band 1: Gesammelte Schriften von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels. Von März 1841 bis März 1844. Band 2: Gesammelte Schriften von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels. Von Juli 1844 bis November 1847. Band 3: Gesammelte Schriften von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels. Von Januar 1848 bis Oktober 1850. Band 4: Briefe von Ferdinand Lassalle an Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, 1849 bis 1862. August Bebel und Eduard Bernstein, (Hrsg.): Der Briefwechsel zwischen Friedrich Engels und Karl Marx, 1844 bis 1883. 4 Bände. Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz Nachf., 1913. Erster Band: 1844 bis 1853. Zweiter Band: 1854 bis 1860. Dritter Band: 1861 bis 1867. Vierter Band: 1868 bis 1883.
15. Paul Mombert, Aus der Literatur über die soziale Frage und über die Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (1792–1852), Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung (Grünbergs Archiv), vol. 9, 1921, pp. 169–236.
16. Gustav Mayer, Johann Baptist von Schweitzer und die Sozialdemokratie. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, Gustav Fischer, Jena 1909. Gustav Mayer, Friedrich Engels. Eine Biographie. 2 Bände (Martinus Nijhoff, Haag 1934). Band 1: Friedrich Engels in seiner Frühzeit. Springer, Berlin 1920. Band 2: Engels und der Aufstieg der Arbeiterbewegung in Europa. Martinus Nijhoff, Haag 1934. Hermann Oncken, Lassalle: Eine politische Biographie. 3. vollständig durchgearbeitete und erweiterte Auflage. Stuttgart/Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1920.
17. Thomas Bayly Howell and Thomas Jones Howell (eds.), Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors from the Earliest Period to the Present Time. 34 vols. London: T.C. Hansard, 1809–1828.
18. Max Nettlau, Michael Bakunin. Eine Biographie. 3 Bände (in mehreren Abteilungen). Selbstverlag, London 1896–1900. Band 1 und erste Abteilung des 2. Bandes (1814 bis September 1868). London 1896–1897. Zweite Abteilung des 2. Bandes und erste Abteilung des 3. Bandes (September 1868 bis August 1871). London 1898. Zweite Abteilung des 3. Bandes (September 1871 bis 1. Juli 1876). London 1900.
19. The followers of Dmitry Karakozov, Sergey Nechayev, Nikolai Tchaikovsky, Peter Lavrov and, finally, the Russian “Jacobin” Peter Tkachev.
20. Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, Gesammelte Schriften von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, 1852 bis 1862. Hrsg. von N. Rjasanoff. Übersetzungen aus dem Englischen von Luise Kautsky. 2 Bände. Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz Nachf., 1917.
Last updated on 11 October 2026