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Marx and revolutionary Russia

Haruki Wada

Introduction

In Japan since the late 1960s Marx’s views of Russia in his later years have been a subject of repeated discussion. Indeed, they have been pursued with greater enthusiasm in Japan than elsewhere. Many papers have been written on the subject, and several books have appeared dealing exclusively with it, including my own, published in 1975.¹ Needless to say, the motives for taking up this matter differ from one writer to another. There have been all manner of motivations – a desire to understand the true image of the history of Russian social thought, an attempt to identify the place in this history occupied by Plekhanov, who introduced his version of ‘Marxism’ into Russia, a wish to discover in Marx’s studies of Russia in his later years a key to the structure of underdeveloped capitalist economies, an effort to re-evaluate Russian Populism on the basis of the similarities between Marx’s view of Russia in his later years and that of the Populists, a growing interest in Russian peasant communes, and even an attempt to find a recipe for rescuing the highly industrialized Japanese society from the depths of its contradictions. There has even been a heated controversy on the subject carried in the pages of non-academic magazines.

However, even the enthusiasm of today’s Japanese is in no way equal to that with which the Russians at different times discussed this matter in an effort to find the best possible path of development for their own society. When we look at these debates in Russia in retrospect, we realize at the same time that Marx’s theory on Russia was expressed mostly in unpublished letters or drafts of letters, and that the complexity of circumstances under which these letters or drafts were made public has made it peculiarly difficult for one to see what really was Marx’s view of Russia. The writings of Marx himself from which we can infer his thesis on Russia in his later years are the ‘Letter to the Editor of Otechestvennye Zapiski’ and the ‘Letter of Zasulich’ and its four different drafts. Both of these manuscripts had surprisingly strange histories prior to their publication.

To begin with, the so-called ‘Letter to the Editor of Otechestvennye Zapiski’ – the manuscript of a letter that was not completed and never sent – was discovered after Marx’s death by Engels who in March 1884 asked the Group for the Emancipation of Labour, which had been formed the year before, to publish it.² However, Zasulich and others in the group, in spite of their avowed desire to be the disciples of Marx in Russia, waited as long as seven months before responding to Engels with a promise that the letter, having been translated into Russian, would soon be printed;³ but the promise was never fulfilled. Bent on the publication of this letter, Engels tried through N.F. Danielson to have it published in a legal Populist magazine inside Russia but was unsuccessful.⁴ Finally the letter was published in Vestnik Narodnoi Voli, Volume 5, in December 1886, with this editorial note: ‘Although we obtained a copy of this letter much earlier, we have been withholding its publication because we were informed that Friedrich Engels handed the letter to other people for publication in the Russian language.’⁵ Two years later, in 1888, Marx’s letter was also printed in Yuridicheskii Vestnik, a legal magazine published inside Russia.

The first response to the letter was made by Gleb Uspenskii, a novelist with Populist leanings, in the form of an essay entitled ‘A Bitter Reproof, in which he deeply lamented the incapability of the Russian intellectuals to respond faithfully to Marx’s reproof and advice.⁶ Thereafter, in the 1890s, Plekhanov, Lenin and other Marxists, in opposition to the Populists who found in this letter a strong support for their line, insisted that in this letter Marx did not say anything definite about the direction in which Russian society should proceed.⁷

Somewhat similar conditions surrounded the ‘Letter to Zasulich’ and its draft manuscripts; that is, the recipient, Plekhanov and others close to her kept the letter’s contents to themselves, and even when asked about the letter kept replying that they knew nothing about it. The draft manuscripts of this letter were discovered in 1911 by D.B. Riazanov, who with the help of N. Bukharin succeeded in deciphering them in 1913. But then the manuscripts were left for a decade. In 1923, after the Revolution was over, B.I. Nikolaevskii, a Menshevik in exile, found the letter’s text in papers belonging to Aksel’rod and published it the following year. Upon reading the text, Riazanov also published the text in the same year as well as the drafts of the letter in Russian in the Arkhiv K. Marksa i F. Engel’sa, and in 1926, in the original French, in the Marx-Engels Archiv, Volume 1.⁸

Neither of the discoverers of the letter attached any special theoretical or philosophical significance to the new material. Nikolaevskii regarded the letter as a political utterance of Marx only,⁹ while Riazanov said, in addition to a similar remark, that the letter and its drafts merely exemplified a decline in Marx’s scholastic capability.¹⁰ In marked contrast, Socialist-Revolutionaries in new exile enthusiastically welcomed the publication of these new materials. V. Zenzinov, for instance, insisted that the programme Marx delineated in this letter was in perfect accord with ‘what has been developed by Russian revolutionary Populism’ and it offered testimony to the fact that on the question of the future of peasant communes ‘Marx definitely was on the side of Populism’.¹¹ V.M. Chernov, too, wrote that the publication of the ‘letter to Zasulich which has been stored under a paperweight for more than 40 years’ had brought the debate to a conclusion and that ‘the programme described in this letter is exactly what forms the foundation of the S-Rs’ theory of peasant revolution, agrarian demands and rural tactics.’¹²

The first person to support this letter inside the Soviet Union was A. Sukhanov who also strongly urged that the village commune should be used as a means for promoting collectivization in agriculture.¹³ Several other writers offered similar arguments in the Party organ Bol’shevik in early 1928,¹⁴ but in the world of historians no such opinion was heard.

It was not until 1929, the year when the collectivization issue commenced, that the letter was discussed fully on a theoretical level by M. Potash in a paper entitled ‘Views of Marx and Engels on Populist Socialism in Russia’. In this paper, Potash declared that the concluding passage of Marx’s letter to Zasulich – which stated that in order for the village commune to serve as ‘the point of support of a social regeneration of Russia … the poisonous influences that attack it from all sides must be eliminated, and then the normal conditions of a spontaneous development insured’ – was the passage that was ‘especially wide open to question’.¹⁵ A strong rebuttal of this view came from A. Ryndich, who maintained that Marx obtained his view of the Russian village commune as a ‘result of the long and detailed studies of the primary sources on Russia after the Reform’, and thus emphasized the significance of the concluding passage of Marx’s letter to Zasulich.¹⁶ However, in his rejoinder that accompanied Ryndich’s paper, Potash had to say that Ryndich’s piece was being printed precisely because ‘it reveals the true nature of all those whose stance is that of a revision of the Leninist view.’¹⁷ In the crucial year 1929, Potash represented the mainstream.

I

Marx’s attitude towards Russian Populism at the time of the publication of Volume 1 of Capital in 1867 seems to have been utterly negative. In appended Footnote 9 at the end of the first German edition of Capital, Marx writes high-handedly:

If, on the European continent, influences of capitalist production which destroy the human species … were to continue to develop hand in hand with competition in the sizes of national armies, state security issues … etc., then rejuvenation of Europe may become possible with the use of a whip and through forced mixture with the Kalmyks as Herzen, that half-Russian and perfect Moskovich, has so emphatically foretold. (This gentleman with an ornate style of writing – to remark in passing – has discovered ‘Russian’ communism not inside Russia but instead in the work of Haxthausen, a councillor of the Prussian Government.)¹⁸

Herzen’s view that the Russian village commune was unique to the Slavic world was considered merely laughable by Marx at that time. Marx thought it was to be found everywhere, and was no different from what had already been dissolved in Western Europe.

Everything, to the minutest details, is completely the same as in the ancient Germanic community. All that has to be added in the case of the Russians are … (i) the patriarchal nature … of their community and (ii) the collective responsibility in such matters as payment of taxes to the state…. These are already on their way to decay.¹⁹

Something like this cannot form a basis for a socialist development; this, I am sure, was the way Marx looked at the Russian peasant commune. For he wrote in the preface to the first German edition of Capital, ‘The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future!’²⁰ At this stage, it appears, he supposed that Russia, like Germany, would follow the example of England.

Marx’s thinking, however, began to change once he mastered the Russian language and became able to pursue his Russian studies using primary sources, and especially once he came across the studies of N.G. Chernyshevskii. Needless to say, this change in Marx’s attitude towards Russian Populism did not take place overnight.

Marx first wanted to study the Russian language in October 1869 when N.F. Danielson, a young Russian who asked his permission to translate Capital into Russian, sent him a copy of V.V. Bervi-Flerovskii’s newly published book, The Situation of the Working Class in Russia; Marx felt he would like to read this solid book by himself. He immediately started learning Russian, and learned it very quickly; by February 1870 he managed to read as many as 150 pages of Flerovskii’s book.²¹ Marx found Flerovskii’s book completely free from the sort of ‘Russian “optimism” ’ that was evident in Herzen.

Naturally, he is caught up by fallacies such as la perfectibilité de la proprieté perfectible de la Nation russe, et le principle providentiel de la proprieté communale dans sa forme russe. [The perfectable property of the Russian Nation, and the providential principle of communal property in its Russian form.] This, however, does not matter at all. Examination of his writing convinces one that a dreadful social revolution … is inevitable and imminent in Russia. This is good news.²²

In spite of Flerovskii’s Populism, Marx thus appraised his descriptions of the social realities on Russia very highly, because they clarified the inevitability of a Russian revolution.

Having finished reading Flerovskii’s work, Marx then tackled an article, ‘Peasant reform and communal ownership of land (1861-1870)’, which appeared in Narodnoe Delo, No. 2, an organ of the Russian Section of the International, the organization which, through its member Utin, once asked Marx to convey its membership application to the first International. Marx felt friendly towards Utin and his group because of their opposition to Bakunin and Herzen, but his attitude toward their Populist view of the Russian village commune was basically unchanged. While reading this paper, Marx wrote a word of rejection, ‘Asinus’[!], at various points. And beside a passage where the differences in the development of communities in Russia and the West are discussed, he wrote down the following comment: ‘Dieser Kohl kommt darauf heraus, daß russische Gemeineigentum ist verträglich mit russischer Barbarei, aber nicht mit bürgerlicher Civilization!’ [From this rubbish, it emerges that Russian communal property is compatible with Russian barbarism, but not with bourgeois civilization.]²³

It is clear from this that at this stage Marx continued to find nothing significant in the Russian village commune.

However, his view began to change as a result of the discussions he had with German Lopatin, who visited Marx in July 1870 and who, while staying with Marx in order to work on the Russian translation of Capital, talked very highly of Chernyshevskii. Marx first read ‘Comments on John Stuart Mill’s Principle of Political Economy’ by Chernyshevskii and found the author generally very capable.²⁴ He then seems to have started to read a paper of Chernyshevskii’s on the peasantry, though we do not know which particular one this was. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that reading this paper was a turning point; Marx began to see Populism and the village commune of Russia in a different perspective.

This can be seen from a letter by Elizaveta Dmitrievna Tomanovskaya, a member of the Russian Section of the International, who visited Marx towards the end of 1870. In this letter dated 7 January 1871, Tomanovskaya writes:

As regards the alternative view you hold about the destinies of the peasant commune in Russia, unfortunately its dissolution and transformation into smallholdings is more than probable. All the measures of the government … are geared to the sole purpose of introduction of individual ownership through abolition of the practice of collective guarantee.

She asked if Marx had already read the book by Haxthausen; she offered to send him a copy in case he had not. She goes on:

This includes many facts and verified data about the organization and management of the peasant commune. In the various papers on the communal ownership of land you are reading now, you may notice tht Chernyshevskii frequently refers to and quotes from this book.²⁵

This clearly shows that Marx either told or wrote to Tomanovskaya that he was reading Chernyshevskii’s paper on the Russian peasant commune, and that he thought it worthwhile to consider the question raised by Chernyshevskii, that is, the Populist question, about the ‘alternative’: was the communal ownership of land going to be dissolved? Or was it going to survive to form the lynchpin of Russia’s social regeneration? Marx’s view had changed a great deal.

We do not know whether Marx at this time was given Haxthausen’s book by Tomanovskaya or not, but there is no doubt that he now became interested in the conservative councillor of the Prussian government whom he had once scoffed at. It is therefore not a mere accident that Marx wrote at the end of his letter to L. Kugelmann dated 4 Februry 1871: ‘Once you told me about a book by Haxthausen which deals with the ownership of land in (I presume) Westphalia. I would be very happy if you would kindly send me that same book.’²⁶

However, Marx’s Russian studies, which had advanced this far, were now interrupted for a considerable time by the struggle of the Paris Commune and, after its defeat, by the internal fight within the International. It was only after the Hague Congress of September 1872 that Marx returned to theory and the Russian question.

When he was able to spare time for his theoretical works again, Marx prepared the second German edition of Capital, Volume 1, and published it in early 1873. Except for some rearrangement of chapters and sections, there are not many major changes from the first edition. Important among these few corrections are: (1) the deletion of the exclamation mark, (!), from the passage in the preface we quoted earlier: ‘The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future!’; and (2) the deletion of Footnote 9 at the end of the volume in which Marx, as we saw earlier, sneered at Herzen and his ‘Russian communism’. In addition to these changes, Marx in the ‘Postscript to the Second Edition’ paid a glowing tribute to Chernyshevskii by calling him ‘the great Russian scholar and critic’.²⁷ The fact that Marx deleted his disdainful remark about Herzen’s Populism and, furthermore, added a eulogy to the economics of Chernyshevkii clearly reveals that his attitude was undergoing a profound change.

In the period from the end of 1872 to some time in 1873, Marx read an anthology by Chernyshevskii, Essays on Communal Ownership of Land, published in Geneva immediately before. Of the nine articles collected in the anthology, the two most important are the review (written in 1857) of Haxthausen’s book, Studien über die inneren Zustände, das Volksleben und insbesondere die ländlichen Einrichtungen Russlands [Studies on the internal conditions, the life of the people and in particular the agrarian arrangements of Russia] and the article entitled ‘Criticism of philosophical prejudices against the communal ownership of land’ (1858). In these articles Chernyshevskii pointed out that the communal ownership of land in Russia was by no means a ‘certain mysterious feature peculiar only to the Great Russian nature’, but was something that survived till that day as ‘a result of the unfavourable circumstances of historical development’ in Russia which were drastically different from those in Western Europe. But anything that has a negative side ought to have a positive side as well. Among ‘these harmful results of our immobility’ there are some which are ‘becoming extremely important and useful given the development of economic movements which exist in Western Europe’, and which ‘have created the sufferings of the proletariat.’²⁸ Among these, thought Chernyshevskii, was the communal ownership of land.

When certain social phenomena in a certain nation reach an advanced stage of development, the evolution of phenomena up to this same stage in other backward nations can be achieved much faster than in the advanced nation…. This acceleration consists of the fact that the development of certain social phenomena in backward nations, thanks to the influences of the advanced nation, skips an intermediary stage and jumps directly from a low stage to a higher stage.²⁹

On the basis of such a theoretical premise, Chernyshevskii thought that, given the development of the advanced West … it would be possible for Russia to leap from communal ownership of land directly to socialism. Chernyshevskii sums up his view in the following terms:

History is like a grandmother; it loves the younger grandchildren. To the latecomers (tarde venientibus) it gives not the bones (ossa) but the marrow of the bones (medullam ossium), while Western Europe has hurt her fingers badly in her attempts to break the bones.³⁰

Marx was deeply impressed by this view.³¹ It is my contention that Marx went as far as to accept it as rational, and also to conceive it possible that, given the existence of the advanced West as a precondition, Russia could start out from its village commune and proceed immediately to socialism. Only by this inference can we reach a coherent understanding of his view in 1875.

That Marx was deeply interested in the question of the Russian village commune is evident from his letter to Danielson dated 22 March 1873, in which he asked for information on the origins of the village commune.³² Of the books which Danielson sent to Marx in response to this request, Materials About Artels in Russia (1873) and a book by Skaldin, In a Faraway Province and in the Capital (1870), were of importance, and Marx read these two volumes earnestly.³³

II

The new view which Marx formulated on the basis of his studies up to that time can be inferred from a correction made in the French edition of Capital, published in January 1875, and from an article by Engels written in April 1875, ‘The social conditions in Russia’.

Let us first consider the correction made in the French edition of Capital. There is in Chapter 26, ‘The secret of primitive accumulation’, a passage which reads as follows in both the first and second German editions:

The expropriation of the agricultural producers, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process. The history of this expropriation, in different countries, assumes different aspects, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different periods. In England alone, which we take as our example, does it have the classic form.³⁴

In the French edition this passage was struck out and replaced by a new one:

At the bottom of the capitalist system is, therefore, the radical separation of the producer from the means of production…. The basis of this whole evolution is the expropriation of the peasants.… It has been accomplished in a final form only in England … but all the other countries of Western Europe are going through the same movement.³⁵

An obvious implication of this correction is that the English form of the expropriation of the peasants is applicable only to Western Europe, or to put it differently, Eastern Europe and Russia may follow a completely different path of evolution. Thereafter Marx quotes only from the French edition whenever he refers to the passage above.

The essay by Engels was a byproduct of his polemic with P.N. Tkachev. The polemic was started by Engels when, by way of criticizing P.L. Lavrov, he took up Tkachev’s pamphlet, ‘The tasks of revolutionary propaganda in Russia’ (1874), and ridiculed him as a ‘green schoolboy’.³⁶ In a furious rage, Tkachev responded with the publication of a German pamphlet, ‘Offener Brief an Herrn Friedrich Engels’ [Open Letter to Mr Friedrich Engels] in Zurich at the end of 1874.

Upon reading this open letter by Tkachev, Marx handed it over to Engels with a brief note written on it:

Go ahead and let him have enough of a beating, but in cheerful mood. This is so absurd that it seems Bakunin has had a hand in it. Pyotr Tka[chev] wishes above all else to prove to his readers that you are treating him as your opponent, and for that purpose he discovers in your argument points that do not exist at all.³⁷

These words of Marx show that he found in Tkachev’s open letter to Engels something reminiscent of the argument of Bakunin, and advised that Engels had better treat him as an idiotic opponent.

I deduce that Marx read Tkachev’s ‘The tasks of revolutionary propaganda in Russia’ only after he read this open letter to Engels. Marx left behind him his copy of the former pamphlet in which he underlined passages here and there.³⁸ Reading this pamphlet he must have realized that Tkachev was fairly well versed in the social realities in Russia. In contrast to Engels, who wrote of Tkachev’s assertion that he ‘could not wait for a revolution’ – ‘Why, then, do you gentlemen keep chattering and making us sick of it? Damn you! Why don’t you start one right away?³⁹ – Marx was more impressed by the accompanying analysis which formed the basis of Tkachev’s assertion that he ‘could not wait’.

Of course, we cannot expect this social condition, which is convenient to us, to last for a long period of time. We are somehow, though stealthily and slugglishly, advancing along the path of economic development. This development now under way is subject to the same law and is in the same direction as the economic development of Western European countries. The village commune has already begun to dissolve…. Among the peasantry, there are being formed different classes of kulaks – peasant aristocrats…. Thus, there already exist in our country at present all the conditions necessary for the formation of the strong conservative classes of farmer-landholders and large tenants, on the one hand, and the capitalist bourgeoisie in banking, commerce and industry, on the other. As these classes are being formed and reinforced … the chance of success for a violent revolution grows more and more dubious…. Either now, or many years ahead, or never! Today, the situation is on our side, but ten years or twenty years from now, it definitely will become an obstacle to us.⁴⁰

This argument of Tkachev is half way between that of Chernyshevskii and the People’s Will Party. After his encounter with these views, Marx realized that anyone who wanted to debate with Tkachev would have to deal seriously with the question of the Russian village commune and present his own view of Russian society. We have thus good reason to suppose that it was because Marx gave advice of this kind that Engels’s rebuttal to Tkachev took an unexpected turn in its latter half in choosing to confront the ‘social conditions in Russia’ in the fifth article of the series, ‘Literature in Exile’. The materials as well as the logic which Engels used in the writing of this article were provided almost entirely by Marx. Although it bears the signature of Engels alone, the article’s major contents consist of the conclusions which Marx and Engels would have jointly reached after discussion. Engels’s article is well known for its attack upon Tkachev’s supposed failure to understand that socialism was only possible once the social forces of production had reached a certain level of development, and after examining Tkachev’s view of the Russian state threw this remark at him: ‘It is not the Russian state which is suspended in mid-air but rather Mr Tkachev.’ As far as this particular point is concerned, Engels is right in posing a question to Tkachev by asking him whether the ‘suckers of the peasants’ blood’ and ‘largely bourgeois’ who are under heavy protection of the state actually have no vested interest in the continued existence of the state. The data on landholdings of the peasants and the aristocrats which Engels cites in support of his rebuttal are taken from the book by Flerovskii. And where Engels talks about the situations of the peasantry and says that the heavy burdens of redemptions and land taxes are forcing the peasants to become dependent upon the moneylender-kulaks and that speculators are exploiting the peasants by subleasing lands, he obviously depends on the descriptions by Skaldin. These materials are all provided by Marx.

Next, Engels attacks Tkachev’s assertion that a socialist revolution is possible in Russia ‘because the Russians are, so to speak, the chosen people of socialism and have artel and collective ownership of land.’ Engels’s argument about artel here draws heavily upon the argument of Efimenko which Marx read in the Materials about Artels in Russia. Engels refers also to Flerovskii.⁴¹ It is evident that here too Engels depends on Marx. Summing up his argument about artel, Engels states:

The predominance of the artel form of organization in Russia proves the existence of a strong drive for association among the Russian people but does not prove by any means that this drive makes possible a jump directly from the artel to the socialist society. For this to be possible it is necessary above all that the artel itself becomes capable of development and divests itself of its original form, in which it serves the capitalists rather than labourers (as we have seen), and at least rises to the level of the Western European co-operative associations.

The artel in its present form is not only incapable of this, it is necessarily destroyed by large-scale industry unless it is further developed.⁴²

It is indeed worthwhile to note here that Engels talks about the existence of a ‘strong drive for association’ among the Russian people, for this means that he recognized the two alternative destinies of the artel: its further development or its destruction. This conclusion, it appears, owes much to Marx.

As regards the question of communal ownership of land, Engels notes that ‘in Western Europe … communal property became a fetter and a brake to agricultural production at a certain stage of social development and was therefore gradually abolished.’ In Russia proper, however, ‘it survives until today, and thus provides primary evidence that agricultural production and the corresponding conditions of rural society are here at a still very undeveloped stage.’⁴³ This perception has much in common with those of Marx and Chernyshevskii. Engels next maintains that the state of complete isolation of the various villages from each other is ‘the natural basis of Oriental Despotism’,⁴⁴ a rather general argument which is set forth even by Bakunin in Appendix A of his Statism and Anarchy. Engels’s assertion that ‘the further development of Russia in a bourgeois direction will destroy communal property gradually in this country also, without any need on the part of the Russian government to interfere with “bayonet and knout” ’ is a criticism directed against the extreme assertion Tkachev made in his open letter to Engels, but is actually not much different from the argument which Tkachev set forth in ‘The tasks of revolutionary propaganda in Russia’. As a matter of fact, Engels here points out Tkachev’s self-contradiction by quoting a passage from the essential part of his article where it is stated that ‘among the peasantry, there are being formed different classes of usurers (kulaks).’ Where Engels points out that ‘under the burden of taxes and usury, the communal property in land is no longer an advantage, but a fetter’, and refers to the peasants running away as migratory workers,⁴⁵ he relies, as he indicates in a footnote, on the description by Skaldin, which was also provided by Marx. Marx might have hesitated to definitively call the rural commune a ‘fetter’, but it is clear that this is not a point around which Engels’s argument pivots.

In conclusion of his argument, Engels makes the following statement:

We see that communal property long ago passed its highpoint in Russia, and to all appearances is nearing its doom. Yet there exists, doubtless, the possibility of transforming this social organization into a higher form in the event that it persists until the time when circumstances are ripe for such a change, and in case the institution of communal property proves to be capable of development so that the peasants do not continue to cultivate the land individually but jointly. Society would have to be transformed into this higher form without the Russian peasants going through the intermediate step of bourgeois individual private ownership of land.⁴⁶

It is clear that this statement, which is in agreement with the conclusion reached by Chernyshevskii (including the use of phrases such as ‘higher form’ and ‘intermediate step’), is the joint view of Marx and Engels in 1875.

What matters is the condition required for such transformation of the Russian community. Engels underlined the importance of a ‘victorious proletarian revolution’ in Western Europe ‘before the complete disintegration of communal property’, since ‘this would provide the Russian peasant with the preconditions for such a transformation of society, chiefly the material conditions which he needs, in order to carry through the necessary complementary change of his whole system of agriculture.’ This too was a conclusion that could be derived from the assertion of Chernyschevskii. From what we have seen so far it is natural for us to regard this as a conclusion made jointly by Marx and Engels. This does not mean to say that they are not thinking about a Russian revolution. As a matter of fact, this article is concluded with a prophecy of the inevitability of an imminent Russian revolution ‘which will be started by the upper classes in the capital, perhaps by the government itself, but which must be driven further by the peasants beyond its first constitutional phase.’ What is envisaged here is clearly not a mere bourgeois revolution. It is stated furthermore that the revolution ‘will be of the utmost importance for all Europe’ in the sense that ‘it will destroy the last, until now intact, reserve of all-European reaction with one coup.’⁴⁷ Although it is not stated explicitly, it would have been clear for both Marx and Engels that if a proletarian revolution were to become an actual issue in Europe – which in the aftermath of the defeat of the Paris Commune was as silent as the grave – it would do so only after Europe was shaken by a Russian revolution.

Engels insisted nevertheless that ‘if there was anything which can save the Russian system of communal property, and provide the conditions for it to be transformed into a really living form, it is the proletarian revolution in Western Europe.’ This, of course, was an exaggeration, in support of his point that ‘it is pure hot air’ for Tkachev to say that the Russian peasants, although ‘owners of property’ are ‘nearer to socialism than the propertyless workers of Western Europe’.⁴⁸ It was a product of his experiences in the first International which led him to see Bakunin behind Tkachev and to stand out against Bakunin’s ‘Panslavism’, in defence of Western European hegemony in the international proletariat movement. I believe that on this point too there was virtually no difference between Marx and Engels. Russia had two alternative paths of development to choose from; it could either follow the path of capitalist development or the route that led directly from the village commune to socialism. Chernyshevskii was well aware that Russia had embarked upon the former path, yet considered it possible for Russia to reject this path and pursue the latter course, without mentioning this precondition. Tkachev also insisted that since capitalist development was already under way in Russia, a revolution must be started at the earliest possible opportunity so as to enable it to switch paths before it became too late. Marx and Engels, accepting Chernyshevskii’s assertion, came to think that it would be possible for Russia to start from its village commune and jump directly to socialism. But their treatment of Tkachev’s thesis was affected both by the memory of their own struggle with Bakunin and Nechaev and by the exaggerated way in which Tkachev expressed it. They therefore argued against Tkachev that a precondition for the success of the communal path would be a victorious proletarian revolution in Western Europe and the material aid this revolution would offer. It thus seemed also that, in reaching this conclusion, Marx and Engels did not see any difference between their positions.

III

In the period from 1875 to 1876, Marx made further progress in his Russian studies. He read Die Agrarverfassung Russlands [The Agrarian Constitution of Russia] by Haxthausen, Communal Ownership of Land in Russia by A.I. Koshelev, Appendix A of Statism and Anarchy by Bakunin, an article by A.N. Engel’gardt entitled ‘Various problems of Russian agriculture’, a voluminous Report of the Committee of Direct Tax, and other materials, and made careful notes of their contents. Of these, Marx was particularly impressed by the criticisms which Bakunin directed at the patriarchal aspect and the closed character of the village communes. After a brief interruption, in the spring of 1877 Marx proceeded to read such works as Outlines of the History of Village Communes in Russia and Other European Countries by A.I. Vasil’chakov and Outline of the History of Village Communes in Northern Russia by P.A. Sokolovskii.⁴⁹

The year 1877 saw the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War. The desperate battles the Russian forces had to fight in its first phases led to the expectation of another Sevastopol and the hope that a revolution would follow soon after the Russian defeat. On 27 September of the same year, Marx wrote to F.A. Sorge:

This crisis is a new turning point for the history of Europe. Russia – I have studied the situation in this country on the basis of official and non-official original sources in the Russian language – has for a long period been on the brink of revolution. All the factors for this are already present. The brave Turks, by the hard blow they struck against not only the Russian army and Russian finance but also the dynasty in command of the army … have advanced the date of explosion by a number of years. The change will begin with a constitutional comedy, puis il y aura un beau tapage [then all hell will break loose]. If Mother Nature is not extraordinarily hard on us, we will perhaps be able to live long enough to see the delightful day of the ceremony. The revolution this time starts from the East, that same East which we have so far regarded as the invincible support and reserve of counter-revolution.⁵⁰

We see how excited Marx was at the prospect of Russian defeat in the Turkish war, followed by a Russian revolution, and then a revolution in Europe. However, these expectations were miserably disappointed. Somehow or other, Russia managed to reduce the Fort of Plevna by the end of 1877, and drove Turkey to admit its defeat in March the following year. In the face of this turn of events, Marx had to admit that ‘things have turned out differently from our expectations.’⁵¹

According to widely accepted hypothesis, Marx is supposed to have written his so-called ‘Letter to the Editor of Otechestvennye Zapiski’ some time in November 1877. This view, however, is completely without foundation. It is much more likely that Marx wrote this letter at the end of 1878 after his hopes of an imminent Russian revolution had already been disappointed. My hypothesis is supported by Marx’s letter of 15 November 1878 to Danielson, which reads in part as follows:

As regards the polemics which B. Chicherin and several others are directing against me, I haven’t seen anything other than what you sent me in 1877 (… an article by N.I. Ziber written as a response to Yu. Zhukovskii and another article, I guess it was, by Mikhailov – both of which appeared in the Otechestvennye Zapiski). Professor M.M. Kovalevskii who is staying here has told me that a fairly animated debate is going on in connection with Capital.⁵²

The ‘Letter to the Editor of Otechestvennye Zapiski’ was written as a refutation of an article entitled ‘Karl Marx before the Tribunal of Mr Zhukovskii’ which Mikhailovskii published in the tenth issue of the same journal in 1877 under the signature of ‘H.M.’. If Marx had actually finished writing his letter or if, after having started to write some part of it, he had chosen not to finish it and send it off, then it would have been nearly impossible for him to refer to this article inaccurately as an ‘article, I guess it was, by Mikhailov’. It would be far more logical for us to assume that he was tempted, partly perhaps stimulated by the conversations with Professor Kovalevskii, to read the article by Mikhailovskii and that only after reading the article did he feel that he should not keep silent.

Mikhailovskii in his article rejected Zhukovskii’s coarse and primitive understanding of Marx’s theory, while at the same time questioning the application of Marx’s theory to the Russian situation. Mikhailovskii first called into question the chapter on ‘The so-called primitive accumulation’ in Capital, and considered that there Marx was expounding a ‘historico-philosophical theory of Universal Progress’. In other words, Mikhailovskii took Marx to be asserting that every country must experience exactly the same process of expropriation of the peasant from the land as had been the case in England. Mikhailovskii then questioned Footnote 9 of the first German edition of Capital where Marx made a mockery of Herzen. Mikhailovskii criticized Marx as follows:

Even judging solely by its overall tone, it can easily be seen what attitude Marx would take towards the efforts of the Russians to find for their country a different path of development from that which Western Europe has followed and is still following – efforts for which there is no need whatsoever to become a Slavophile or to mystically believe in the specially high quality of the Russian nation’s spirit; all that is needed is to draw lessons from the history of Europe.⁵³

Mikhailovskii pointed out that ‘the soul of a Russian disciple of Marx’ was torn apart and that ‘this collision between moral feeling and historical inevitabiity should be resolved, of course, in favour of the latter.’ ‘But the problem,’ Mikhailovskii concluded, ‘is that one should thoroughly assess whether the sort of historical process that Marx described is truly unavoidable or not.’

Clearly Mikhailovskii directed his criticism against exactly those points which Marx himself had already either corrected or entirely struck out.

After reading this article by Mikhailovskii, Marx started writing the letter as he felt he should not remain silent. Since the letter was to be published in a legal journal in tsarist Russia under his own signature, Marx took the necessary precautions: he avoided talking about a revolution, chose to refer to Herzen and Chernyshevskii without explicitly mentioning their names, and on the whole talked in the ‘language of Aesop’. This is why, at first glance, this letter appears equivocal. Nevertheless, anyone who is familiar with the contents of Mikhailovskii’s article and the previous development of Marx’s thought can easily understand what Marx is trying to say.

In the first half of the letter, Marx comments on Mikhailovskii’s critique of the footnote in the first German edition of Capital in which Marx ridiculed Herzen, and points out that Mikhailovskii is utterly mistaken, since ‘in no case can it serve as a key’ to Marx’s views on the efforts of the Russians to find for their country a path of development different from that of Western Europe. Marx then reminds Mikhailovskii that he calls Chernyshevskii a ‘great Russian scholar and critic’ in the postscript to the second edition of Capital, which Mikhailovskii had a chance to read; thus Mikhailovskii, argues Marx, ‘might just as validly have inferred’ that Marx shared Chernyshevskii’s Populist views as to conclude that Marx rejected them. Reserved and brief as these statements are, Marx’s reference to the second German edition – the one in which, as we have noted earlier, he deleted his words of contempt for Herzen that were present in the first edition, and included words of praise for Chernyshevskii – without doubt reveals his sympathetic attitude toward the Russian Populists. Marx goes on to say that he ‘studied the Russian language, and, over a number of years, followed official and other publications that dealt with this question’, and reached this conclusion: ‘If Russia continues along the road which it has followed since 1861, it will forego the finest opportunity that history has ever placed before a nation, and will undergo all the fateful misfortune of capitalist development. ‘⁵⁴ This is the story told in ‘the language of Aesop’. From 1861 Russia started to follow the path of capitalist development; should it continue to follow the same path, the peasant commune would be destroyed and with it the possibility of proceeding directly towards socialism based on the rural community. Therefore, dear people of Russia, Marx pleads, don’t dare to ‘forego the finest opportunity that history has ever placed before a nation’, the opportunity that is too precious to be wasted. Throughout the period of the Russo-Turkish War, Marx kept looking forward to a Russian revolution which, he expected, would come on the heels of Russia’s defeat in the war, and after the failure of his expectations he felt as if the revolution had just slipped through the people’s fingers. This is exactly why he felt compelled here to remind the Russian people that they should not leave things as they were and thus lose for good the great chance of regeneration. This amounts to an appeal to the Russians to start a revolution right away.

In the second half of his letter, Marx quotes from the French edition of Capital, explains that the chapter on primitive accumulation only traces the path followed in Western Europe, and thus clarifies for the first time what really was his motivation when he revised this chapter in 1875. Marx further maintains that if this historical sketch were to be applied to Russia, the following two points must be made:

(1) If Russia attempts to become a capitalist nation, like the nations of Western Europe … it will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of its peasants into proletarians, and afterwards, (2) once it has crossed the threshold of the capitalist system, it will have to submit to the implacable laws of such a system, like the other Western nations.

It may be possible for us to interpret the second point above as suggesting that if Russia does not cross the threshold of the capitalist system, it need not submit to the implacable laws of capitalism. If our interpretation is correct, then the second point above is not much different from Mikhailovskii’s 1872 interpretation of the preface to Capital.⁵⁵ On closer reading of Capital, however, Mikhailovskii later began to wonder if he was actually doing justice to Marx’s theory. Marx takes advantage of this wavering in Mikhailovskii’s interpretation and accuses him of twisting his own theory. ‘For him’, asserts Marx, ‘it is absolutely necessary to change my sketch of the origin of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophical theory of a Universal Progress, fatally imposed on all peoples, regardless of the historical circumstances in which they find themselves, ending finally in that economic system, which assures both the greatest amount of productive power of social labour and the fullest development of man.’ Marx says that ‘this is to do me both too much honour and too much discredit.’ However, the reproach which Marx aims at Mikhailovskii is evidently wide of the mark and irrelevant, for Mikhailovskii’s interpretation cannot be regarded as totally mistaken. It is rather Marx himself who underwent a significant change after he wrote the first German edition of Capital.

Before concluding the letter, Marx emphasized that ‘events which were strikingly analogous, but which took place in different historical environments, led to entirely dissimilar results.’ When Marx made this remark, he had clearly in his mind the opportunity open to the Russian village community in the prevailing historical conditions, in particular the existence of the advanced West and the crisis of capitalism there.

This letter which contains Marx’s second conclusion on the Russian question was not to be sent. Engels later reasoned that Marx chose not to send it because he was ‘afraid that his name would be enough of a threat to the continued existence of the journal’ which was going to print the letter. The true reason, I suppose, was rather that Marx, after reading his letter again, saw something wrong with his critique of Mikhailovskii.

IV

The Russian victory in the war with Turkey, after all, reinforced the power of tsarism inside Russia. In a country whose modern history was literally a series of defeats in wars that resulted either in drastic internal changes or in revolutions, this was the only war that ended in victory. And this very fact seems to have been one of the important factors that precipitated the contest between tsarism and revolutionary Populism. But let us for the time being go back to the days when the result of the struggle between tsarism and Populism was still unknown.

Even before the end of the war, the revolutionary Populists were markedly stepping up their efforts. In February 1879 when Engels heard the news of the assassination of Governor Kropotkin of Kharkov, he found a positive meaning in the incident, stating that political assassination was the only means of self-defence available to the Russian intellectuals, and that the movement was ‘just about to explode’.⁵⁶ His expectations of a Russian revolution were thus brought to life again. They were further enhanced when the Executive Committee of People’s Will came into being in the summer of the same year and began its activities. Engels wrote in his New Year’s letter to Wilhelm Liebknecht dated 10 January 1880: ‘I offer you and all of you my congratulations on the New Year and on the Russian Revolution which is most likely to take place during it.’⁵⁷

In contrast, Marx in this period did not put into words any expectations of this sort; but it seems safe to say that he was in the same state of mind as Engels. When, for instance, Leo Hartman visited London in February 1880 as a representative of People’s Will, Marx received him very warmly, showed hearty affection for him, and offered to help him as much as possible.⁵⁸

In the months of May to July, Hartman wrote to N. Morozov saying that Marx was reading the ‘Programme’ which Morozov sent him, that he was critical toward the Black Repartition group (Chernyi Peredel) led by Plekhanov and supported the programme of the ‘Russian Terrorists’, and also that Marx, in spite of his sympathy toward the terrorists, was unwilling to write for their publications as he found their programme something other than that of socialists.⁵⁹ We cannot, however, hastily conclude from these observations of Hartman that such was indeed the attitude which Marx finally adopted towards the People’s Will.

Five months later, in November of the same year, Marx received a message from the ‘Executive Committee of the Russian Social Revolutionary Party’ as well as the programme which People’s Will prepared for its working-class party members.⁶⁰ That Marx read the programme of the worker-members of People’s Will very carefully, underlining it here and there, is an indication of how highly he evaluated it. As a matter of fact, ever since his encounter with this programme, Marx stopped calling this party the ‘Terrorist Party’. On the other hand, his feeling of antipathy toward the members of the Black Repartition, who were taking refuge in Geneva, grew deeper. Marx spoke of them thus:

These gentlemen are against all political-revolutionary action. Russia is to make a somersault into the anarchist-communist-atheist millenium! Meanwhile they are preparing for this leap with the most tedious doctrinairism, whose so-called principles have been hawked about the street ever since the late Bakunin.⁶¹

Meanwhile Marx advanced his Russian studies a step further. In the fall of 1879, he read M.M. Kovalevskii’s new book, Communal Ownership of Land – The Causes, Process and Consequences of its Dissolution, Part I (Moscow, 1879) and left a very detailed note of it.⁶² By comparing Marx’s note with the corresponding passage of the original text of the book, we can clearly see that Kovalevskii’s resentment towards the land policy of colonizers who accelerated the dissolution of communal ownership of land was emphasized even more strongly by Marx. Take, for instance, the following pair of excerpts:

Kovalevskii: Relying on their testimonies [i.e. testimonies of the government officials in India], the British critics took a calm attitude toward the dissolution of this social form which appeared archaic in their eyes. If some of them on some occasions expressed their regret about its decaying too fast, they did so simply out of considerations of an academic nature … it occurs to nobody that the British land policy should be regarded first of all as the offender responsible for the dissolution of communal ownership of land.⁶³

Marx: British officials in India, as well as critics like Sir Henry Maine who rely on them, describe the dissolution of communal ownership of land in Punjab as if it took place as an inevitable consequence of the economic progress in spite of the affectionate attitude of the British toward this archaic form. The truth is rather that the British themselves are the principal (and active) offenders responsible for this dissolution…. [emphasis original]⁶⁴

At about the same time as he read Kovalevskii’s book, Marx read an article by N.O. Kostomarov, ‘The revolt of Sten’ka Razin’, and made a very detailed note on it.⁶⁵ It may be that he turned to this article hoping to find out about the potential capabilities of the Russian peasants. Important among other Russian books which Marx read around that time is Collection of Materials for Studies on the Rural Land Commune, Volume 1, published jointly by the Free Economic Society and the Russian Association of Geography in 1880. Out of this book, Marx made a note only on the article by P.P. Semenov. This note has attracted the attention of scholars in the Soviet Union since, commenting on the social differentiation of peasant households, Marx ironically states: ‘The consequence of communal ownership of land is splendid!’⁶⁶ What is still more important about Semenov’s article is that in passages beyond the point where Marx’s note ends, Semenov talks about communal use of land.⁶⁷ Semenov notes that in most cases the Russian peasants practise a collective form of production in the meadowlands and distribute the grass mowed there equally among themselves. This description by Semenov left a profound impression on Marx, as can be inferred from his ‘Letter to Zasulich’.

Marx’s theory of Russian capitalism took shape in this period through his discussions with Danielson. To be more precise, Marx wrote a well-known letter on 10 April 1879, in reply to Danielson who in his long letter (dated 17 February 1879) pointed out to Marx that the peasants, because of the heavy burden of taxes, were forced to sell the cereals necessary for their own subsistence, and that railways and banks were accelerating these grain transactions, thereby further impoverishing the peasants.⁶⁸ In his letter of response, Marx elaborates on Danielson’s description of the destructive functions of railways and generalizes this as a phenomenon characteristic of capitalist development in backward countries everywhere.⁶⁹ We might suggest that this shows that Marx was beginning to perceive the structure unique to backward capitalism.

Encouraged by the support he received from Marx, Danielson further developed his idea into an article, ‘Outlines of our country’s society and economy after reform’, which was printed in the October 1880 issue of the Slovo. Marx’s assessment of this article as a whole was quite high, even though he was not satisfied with Danielson’s assessment of the abolition of serfdom or with his thesis on the absolute crisis of Russian capitalism.⁷⁰ There is no denying that Marx owed much to Danielson.