Читать книгу Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Vol V - Hal Draper - Страница 19

The last incident that raised the specter of 1793 was the Russian invasion of Hungary in April 1849. Up till this point the Hungarian insurrection had appeared on the verge of victory. And not only victory in Hungary. After being driven out of its main strongholds by numerically superior forces the Hungarian revolutionary forces aided by international allies, especially Poles, had waged a successful guerilla war that demoralized the armies of the Empire. At one point they appeared to be in a position to take Vienna. Even after the defeat of the revolution elsewhere it took a Russian invasion in April of 1849 to finally break the Hungarian resistance. We know that this was the last act of the 1848 revolution. From the vantage point of Engels and the NRZ it looked like the opening of a new round. In the second to last issue of the paper, just before it was shut down, Engels outlined what was at stake:

. . . the Magyar war very soon lost the national character it had in the beginning, and assumed a clearly European character, precisely as a result of what would seem to be a purely national act, as a result of the declaration of independence. Only when Hungary proclaimed her separation from Austria, and thereby the dissolution of the Austrian monarchy, did the alliance with the Poles for the liberation of both countries, and the alliance with the Germans for the revolutionisation of Eastern Germany acquire a definite character and a solid basis. If Hungary were independent, Poland restored, German Austria turned into the revolutionary focus of Germany, with Lombardy and Italy winning independence—these plans, if carried out, would destroy the entire East-European system of states: Austria would disappear, Prussia would disintegrate and Russia would be forced back to the borders of Asia.²²

Engels predicted that the German insurrectionary forces in the Baden-Palatinate, which he was shortly to join, and the troops of a renewed French revolutionary movement would meet with the Polish and Hungarian armies before the walls of Berlin. It was not to be. The German and French revolutionary movements were spent and the Hungarians and their Polish allies were crushed by Austrian and Russian troops.

But Hungarians and Poles were united by something else than their mutual antagonism to the international relations of post-1815 Europe. For some time before the outbreak of revolution Marx and Engels had come to the conclusion that in Poland the only successful national uprising had to be based on a democratic social revolution and that, in a country like Poland, the only possible democracy was an agrarian democracy. In Poland, then, a successful uprising could only be an uprising which was also a civil war.

Already the first partition led quite naturally to an alliance of the other classes, i.e. the nobles, the townspeople and to some extent the peasants, both against the oppressors of Poland and against the big Polish aristocracy. The Constitution of 1791 shows that already then the Poles clearly understood that their independence in foreign affairs was inseparable from the overthrow of the aristocracy and from agrarian reform within the country.²³

When the Hungarian revolution, somewhat unexpectedly, broke out in late 1848, the NRZ found its hypothesis derived from the Polish case confirmed in this corner of Eastern Europe. Polish and Hungarian revolutionary democrats, leaders of independence movements on whose success or failure the success or failure of the revolution itself depended, also faced an enemy at home.