Bolshevism: The Road to Revolution by Alan Woods

[section 1 of 7]

The Death of an Autocrat

On 1st March 1881 the carriage of tsar Alexander II was passing along the Catherine Canal in St Petersburg, when a young man suddenly threw what looked like a snowball. The explosion that followed missed its mark, and the tsar dismounted, unharmed, to speak to some wounded Cossacks. At that moment, a second terrorist, Grinevetsky, rushed forward and with the words “it is too early to thank God”, threw another bomb at his feet. An hour and a half later, the Emperor of all the Russias was dead. This act marked the culmination of one of the most remarkable periods in revolutionary history—a period in which a handful of dedicated and heroic young men and women took on the combined might of the Russian tsarist state. Yet the very success of the terrorists in eliminating the figure at the apex of the hated autocracy simultaneously dealt the death-blow to the so-called Party of the People’s Will which had organised it.

The phenomenon of the Russian Narodniks (“populists”, men of the people) was a consequence of the extreme belatedness of Russian capitalism. The decay of feudal society proceeded faster than the formation of the bourgeoisie. Under these conditions, sections of the intelligentsia, especially the youth, broke away from the nobility, bureaucracy and clergy and began to look for a way out of the social impasse. However, when they looked around for a point of support within society, they could not be attracted by the crude, backward and underdeveloped bourgeoisie, whilst the proletariat was still in its infancy, unorganised, politically untutored and small in numbers, particularly in comparison with the many millions of peasants who made up the dumb, oppressed and crushed majority of Russian society.

It was therefore understandable that the revolutionary intelligentsia should look to the “people” in the person of the peasantry as the main potential revolutionary force within society. This movement had its roots in the great turning-point in Russian history in 1861. The emancipation of the serfs that took place in that year was by no means, as has been frequently suggested, the result of the enlightened benevolence of Alexander II. It flowed from the fear of a social explosion after Russia’s humiliating defeat in the disastrous Crimean War of 1853-56, which, like the later war with Japan, served to cruelly expose the tsarist regime. Not for the first, nor the last time, military defeat revealed the bankruptcy of the autocracy, providing a powerful impetus to social change. But the Edict of Emancipation solved none of the problems and, indeed, made the lot of the mass of the peasants considerably worse. The landlords naturally made off with the best plots of land, leaving the most barren areas to the peasants. Strategic points such as water and mills were usually in the hands of the landlords who forced the peasants to pay for access. Worse still, the “free” peasants were legally tied to the village commune or mir which had collective responsibility for collecting taxes. No peasant could leave the mir without permission. Freedom of movement was hampered by the system of internal passports. The village commune, in effect, was transformed into “the lowest rung of the local police system”.[1]

To make matters worse, the reform allowed the landlords to cut off and appropriate one-fifth (in some cases, two-fifths) of the lands formerly cultivated by the peasants. They invariably chose the best and most profitable parts —woods, meadows, watering places, grazing grounds, mills, etc.—which gave them a stranglehold over the “emancipated” peasant. Year after year, a greater number of peasant families sunk hopelessly into debt and impoverishment as a result of this swindle.

The emancipation of the serfs was an attempt to carry through reform from the top to prevent revolution from below. Like all important reforms, it was a by-product of revolution. The Russian countryside had been shaken by peasant uprisings. In the last decade of the reign of Nicholas I, there were 400 peasant disturbances, and an equal number in the following six years (1855-60). In a space of 20 years, 1835-54, 230 landowners and bailiffs had been killed, and a further 53 in the three years before 1861. The announcement of the emancipation was met by a further wave of disorders and uprisings, brutally suppressed. The hopes placed by an entire generation of progressive thinkers on the ideas of reform were cruelly betrayed by the results of the emancipation, which turned out to be a gigantic fraud. The peasants, who believed that the land was rightfully theirs, were cheated in all directions. They had to accept only those allotments laid down by the law (by agreement with the landlord) and had to pay a redemption fee over a period of 49 years at 6 per cent interest. As a result, the landlords retained approximately 71,500,000 desyatins of land, and the peasants, representing the overwhelming majority of society, only 33,700,000 desyatins.

In the years after 1861, the peasantry, hemmed in by repressive legislation on “poverty lots” and impoverished by the weight of debt, staged a series of desperate local uprisings. But the peasantry, throughout history, has always been incapable of playing an independent role in society. Capable of great revolutionary courage and sacrifice, its efforts to shake off the rule of the oppressor have only succeeded where leadership of the revolutionary movement has been taken up by a stronger, more homogeneous and conscious class based in the towns. In the absence of this factor, the peasant “jacqueries”,[A] from the middle ages onwards, have inevitably suffered the cruellest defeats. The result of the scattered nature of the peasantry, its lack of social cohesion and lack of class consciousness.

In Russia, where capitalist forms of production were still at the embryonic phase, no such revolutionary class existed in the towns. Yet a class, or more accurately caste, of largely impoverished students and intellectuals, the raznochintsy (those without rank) or “intellectual proletariat” proved exceptionally sensitive to the subterranean mood of discontent which lay deep within the recesses of Russian life. Years later, the terrorist Myshkin declared at his trial that “the movement of the intelligentsia was not artificially created, but was the echo of popular unrest.”[2] As always, the ability of the intelligentsia to play an independent social role was no greater than that of the peasantry. Nevertheless it can act as quite an accurate barometer of the moods and tensions developing within society.

In 1861, the very year of the Emancipation, the great Russian democratic writer Alexander Herzen wrote from exile in London in the pages of his journal Kolokol (The Bell) urging the youth of Russia to go “to the people!” The arrest of prominent publicists like Chernyshevsky (whose writings were influenced by Marx and who had a big impact on Lenin and his generation) and Dimitri Pisarev, demonstrated the impossibility of peaceful liberal reform. By the end of the decade of the 1860s, the basis of a mass revolutionary movement of populist youth had been laid.

The appalling conditions of the masses in post-reform Russia moved the best sections of the intelligentsia to anger and indignation. The arrest of the most radical of the democratic wing, Pisarev and Chernyshevsky, only served to deepen the alienation of the intellectuals and push them further to the left. While the older generation of liberals accommodated themselves to the reaction, a new breed of young radicals was emerging in the universities, immortalised in the figure of Bazarov in Turgenyev’s novel Fathers and Sons. The hallmark of this new generation was impatience with the fumbling of the liberals, whom they treated with contempt. They believed fervently in the ideas of a complete revolutionary overturn and a radical reconstruction of society from top to bottom.

Within 12 months of the Emancipation, the “reforming tsar” had moved towards reaction. There was a clamp-down on intellectuals. The universities were placed under the oppressive vigilance of the reactionary Minister of Education, Count Dimitri Tolstoy, who imposed an educational system designed to crush independent spirits and stifle imagination and creativity. The schools were forced to teach 47 hours of Latin a week and 36 hours of Greek, with a heavy emphasis on grammar. Natural science and history were excluded from the curriculum as potentially subversive subjects—and the system of policing the mind was rigidly enforced under the baleful eye of the school inspector. The heady days of “reform” gave way to the bleak years of police surveillance and grey conformity. The move to reaction was intensified after the unsuccessful Polish uprising of 1863. The revolution was drowned in blood. Thousands of Poles were killed in battle, hundreds were hanged in the repression that followed. The brutal Count Muravyov personally hanged 128 Poles and transported 9,423 men and women. The total exiled to Russia was twice that number. Peter Kropotkin, the future anarchist theoretician, witnessed the sufferings of the Polish exiles in Siberia where he was stationed as a young captain of the Imperial Guard: “I saw some of [them] on the Lena, standing half naked in a shanty, around an immense cauldron filled with salt-brine, and mixing the thick, boiling brine with long shovels, in an infernal temperature, while the gate of the shanty was wide open to make a strong current of glacial air. After two years of such work, these martyrs were sure to die from consumption.”[3]

But, beneath the permafrost of reaction, the seeds of a new revolutionary revival were swiftly germinating. The case of Prince Kropotkin is a striking example of how the wind blows the tops of the trees first. Born into an aristocratic family, this one-time member of the Imperial Corps of Pages was, like many of his contemporaries, affected by the terrible suffering of the masses and driven to draw revolutionary conclusions. A keen scientist, Kropotkin, vividly describes in his memoirs the political evolution of an entire generation: “But what right had I to these higher joys,” he asked himself, “when all around was nothing but misery and the struggle for a mouldy bit of bread; when whatever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotion must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not bread enough for their children?”

The cold cruelty towards the Poles showed the other face of the “reforming tsar”, a man who, in Kropotkin’s words, “merrily signed the most reactionary decrees and then afterwards became despondent about them”.[4] The corrupt and degenerate system of autocratic rule, the dead hand of bureaucracy, the all-pervasive whiff of religious mysticism and obscurantism roused all the living forces of society to revolt. “It is bitter,” wrote the poet Nekrasov, “the bread that has been made by slaves.” The revolt against slavery spurred the revolutionary student youth to search for a way out. Echoing Herzen, their watchword became: “V Narod!” (To the people!). To these courageous and dedicated youth, the words uttered by Herzen made an indelible impression: “Go to the people… That is our place… Demonstrate… that from among you will emerge not new bureaucrats, but soldiers of the Russian people.”[5]

‘Going to the People’

This movement of mainly upper-class youth was naive and confused, but also courageous and utterly selfless, and left behind a priceless heritage for the future. While criticising the utopian character of their programme, Lenin always paid warm tribute to the revolutionary valour of the early Narodniks. He understood that the Marxist movement in Russia was raised on the bones of these martyrs, who cheerfully gave up wealth and worldly comforts to face death, prison and exile for the sake of the fight for a better world. Theoretical confusion was only to be expected in a movement as yet in its infancy. The absence of a strong working class, the lack of any clear traditions or model from the past to light their path, the dark night of censorship which prevented them from having access to most of the writings of Marx, all this deprived the young Russian revolutionaries of the chance to understand the real nature of the processes at work in society.

To most of the youth, Marx was seen as “just an economist”, whereas Bakunin’s doctrine of “implacable destruction”, and his calls for direct action, seemed to be more in tune with the spirit of a generation tired of words and impatient for results. Pavel Axelrod, in his memoirs, recalls how the theories of Bakunin gripped the minds of the radicalised youth with its striking simplicity.[6] The “people”, according to Bakunin, were revolutionary and socialist by instinct—going right back to the Middle Ages—as shown by peasant revolts, the Pugachov uprising, and even brigands, who were held up as a good example to follow! All that was required to ignite a universal revolt, he maintained, was for the students to go to the villages and raise the standard of revolution. Local uprisings would soon provoke a general conflagration, bringing the whole existing order crashing down.

In a striking passage, Trotsky graphically recaptures the spirit of these youthful pioneers: “Young men and women, most of them former students numbering about a thousand in all, carried socialist propaganda to all corners of the country, especially to the lower reaches of the Volga, where they sought the legacy of Pugachov and Razin.[B] This movement, remarkable in its scope and youthful idealism, the true cradle of the Russian revolution, was distinguished—as is proper to a cradle—by extreme naiveté. The propagandists had neither a guiding organisation nor a clear programme; they had no conspiratorial experience. And why should they have? These young people, having broken with their families and schools, without profession, personal ties, or obligations, and without fear either of earthly or heavenly powers, seemed to themselves the living crystallisation of a popular uprising. A constitution? Parliamentarianism? Political liberty? No, they would not be swerved from the path by these western decoys. What they wanted was a complete revolution, without abridgement or intermediate stages.”[7]

In the summer of 1874, hundreds of young people from upper or middle class backgrounds went out to the villages, burning with the idea of rousing the peasantry to revolution. Pavel Axelrod, one of the future founders of Russian Marxism, recalls the radical break which these young revolutionaries had made with their class: “Whoever wished to work for the people had to give up university, renounce his privileged condition, and his family, turn his back even upon science and art. They had to cut all the bonds which linked them to the highest social classes, burn their bridges behind them. In one word, they had to voluntarily forget about any possible road of retreat. The propagandist, so to speak, had to effect a complete transformation of his inner essence, so that he would feel at one with the lower strata of the people, not only ideologically, but also in his habitual everyday behaviour.”[8]

These courageous young men and women had no definite programme, other than to find a road to “the people”. Dressed in old working clothes bought from second-hand stalls in markets, clutching false passports, they travelled to the villages hoping to learn a trade which would enable them to live and work undetected. The wearing of peasants’ clothes was not the theatrical gesture it might appear at first sight. Kropotkin points out that: “The gap between the peasant and the educated people is great in Russia, and contact between them is so rare that not only does the appearance in a village of a man who wears the town dress awaken general attention, but even in town, if one whose talk and dress reveals that he is not a worker is seen to go about with workers, the suspicion of the police is aroused at once.”[9]

Unfortunately, this admirable revolutionary spirit was founded upon theories which were fundamentally unsound. The mystical idea of a “special Russian road to socialism” which could somehow leap from feudal barbarism to a classless society, skipping the phase of capitalism, was the source of an endless series of errors and tragedies. A false theory inevitably leads to a disaster in practice. The Narodniks were motivated by revolutionary voluntarism—the idea that the success of the revolution can be guaranteed by the iron will and determination of a small group of dedicated men and women. The subjective factor,[C] of course, is decisive in human history. Karl Marx explained that men and women make their own history, but added that they do not make it outside of the context of social and economic relationships established independently of their will.

The attempts of the Narodnik theoreticians to establish a “special historical path” for Russia, differently from that of Western Europe inevitably led them down the road of philosophical idealism and a mystical view of the peasantry. The theoretical confusion of Bakunin—a reflection of the very underdeveloped and inchoate class relations in Russia—found a ready audience among the Narodniks, seeking an ideological justification for their vague revolutionary aspirations.

Standing reality on its head, Bakunin portrayed the mir—the basic unit of the tsarist regime in the village—as the enemy of the state. All that was necessary was for the revolutionaries to go to the village and rouse the “instinctively revolutionary” Russian peasants against the state and the problem would be solved, without recourse to “politics” or any particular form of party organisation. The task was not to fight for democratic demands (since democracy also represented a form of state and therefore another expression of tyranny) but to overthrow the state “in general” and replace it with a voluntary federation of local communities, based on the mir, purged of its reactionary features.

The contradictory elements of this theory rapidly became evident when the Narodnik youth attempted to put it into practice. The revolutionary exhortations of the students were met with sullen suspicion or outright hostility by the peasants, who frequently handed over the newcomers to the authorities.

Zhelyabov, one of the future leaders of the Narodnaya Volya party (People’s Will), graphically described the Narodnik youth’s desperate efforts to win over the peasants “like fish beating their heads against the ice”.[10] Despite the terrible conditions of oppression and exploitation, the Russian peasant, who believed that “the body belongs to the tsar, the soul to God and the back to the squire”, proved impervious to the revolutionary ideas of the Narodniks. The shock and disappointment of the intelligentsia is echoed in the words of a participant:

“We ourselves were too blindly assured of the imminence of the revolution to notice that the peasants had not nearly as much of the revolutionary spirit as we wanted them to have. But we did notice that they all wanted the land to be divided up among them. They expected the Emperor would give an order and the land would be divided up … most of them imagined he would have had it carried through long ago if he had not been prevented by the big landowners and the officials—the two arch-enemies of both the Emperor and the peasants.”

The naive attempt to pass for peasants frequently had its tragi-comical side, as one of the participants, Debogori-Mokrievich, recalls: “The peasants did not want to let us stay the night in their cottages: quite obviously they did not like the look of our dirty, ragged clothing. This was the last thing we expected when we first dressed up as workmen.”[11]

Sleeping out in the open, hungry, cold and tired, their feet bleeding from long marches in cheap boots, the spirits of the Narodniks were dashed against the solid wall of peasant indifference. Gradually, inexorably, those who had not been arrested drifted back, disillusioned and exhausted, to the towns. The movement of “going to the people” was swiftly broken by a wave of arrests—more than 700 in 1874 alone. It was an expensive defeat. But the heroic and spirited speeches of defiance hurled from the dock by the arrested revolutionists served to kindle a new movement which began almost immediately.

The Narodniks swore by “the people” in every other sentence. Yet they remained completely isolated from the peasant masses they idolised. In reality, the entire movement was concentrated into the hands of the intelligentsia: “The Populists’ worship of the peasant and his commune was but the mirror image,” wrote Trotsky, “of the grandiose pretensions of the ‘intellectual proletariat’ to the role of chief, if not indeed sole, instrument of progress. The whole history of the Russian intelligentsia develops between these two poles of pride and self-abnegation—which are the short and long shadows of its social weakness.”[12]

But this social weakness of the intelligentsia merely reflected the underdeveloped state of class relations in Russian society. The rapid development of industry and the creation of a powerful urban working class which was to be brought about by a massive influx of foreign capital in the 1890s was still the music of an apparently remote future. Thrust back upon their own resources, the revolutionary intelligentsia sought salvation in the theory of a “special Russian road to socialism”, based upon the element of common ownership which existed in the mir.

The theories of guerrillaism and individual terrorism which have become fashionable among certain circles in recent times repeat in caricatured form the antiquated ideas of the Russian Narodniks and terrorists. Like the latter, they try to find a base in the peasantry of the Third World, in the lumpenproletariat, in fact, any class except the proletariat. Yet such ideas have nothing in common with Marxism. Marx and Engels explained that the only class capable of carrying through the socialist revolution and establishing a healthy workers’ state leading to a classless society was the working class. And this is no accident. Only the working class, by virtue of its role in society and in production, especially large scale industrial production, possesses an instinctive socialist class consciousness. Not accidentally, the classical methods of struggle of the proletariat are based upon collective mass action: strikes, demonstrations, picket lines, the general strike.

By contrast, the first principle of every other social class is the individualism of the property owner and exploiter of labour, both big and small. Leaving aside the bourgeoisie, whose hostility to socialism is the first condition of its existence, we have the middle class, including the peasantry. The latter is the social class least able to acquire a socialist consciousness. In its upper reaches, the wealthy peasant, lawyer, doctor, parliamentarian, stand close to the bourgeoisie. However, even the poor landless peasant in Russia, although formally a rural proletarian, had a consciousness very far removed from his brothers in the cities. The one desire of the landless peasant was to possess land, i.e. to become transformed into a small proprietor. Individual terrorism and “guerrillaism” in all its multiplicity of forms, are the methods of the petty bourgeoisie, particularly the peasantry, but also the students, intellectuals and lumpenproletariat. It is true that under certain conditions—particularly in the present epoch—the mass of the poor peasants can be won over to the idea of collective ownership, as we saw in Spain in 1936. But the prior condition for such a development is the revolutionary movement of the working class in the towns. In Russia, the working class came to power by mobilising the poor peasants, not on the basis of socialist slogans, but on the basis of “land to the tillers!” This fact, in itself, shows how far the mass of Russian peasants stood from a socialist consciousness even in 1917.

To the Narodniks, lacking in a sound theoretical basis, and setting out with a confused and amorphous concept of class relations (“the people”), the Marxist argument of the leading role of the proletariat sounded like so much hair-splitting. What did the working class have to do with it? Clearly Marx and Engels had not understood the special situation in Russia! The Narodniks, in as much as they considered the role of the workers in the towns, regarded them as an aberration—as “peasants in factories”, capable of playing only the role of auxiliaries to the peasantry in the revolution—precisely the opposite to the real relationship of revolutionary class forces, as subsequent events demonstrated.

As a crowning paradox, despite all the prejudice of the Narodnik theoreticians, almost the only area where the revolutionary appeals got an echo was among the despised “town peasants” as they called the factory workers. Like the modern guerrillas, the supporters of Zemlya i Volya (Land and Freedom) adopted the policy of taking revolutionary workers out of the factories and sending them to the countryside. Plekhanov, before he became a Marxist, participated in this kind of activity and was able to see the consequences: “The factory worker who has worked in the city for several years,” he wrote, “feels ill at ease in the country and goes back to it reluctantly… Rural customs and institutions become unendurable for a person whose personality has begun evolving a little…

“These were experienced people, sincerely devoted to and profoundly imbued with Populist views. But their attempts to set themselves up in the countryside led to nothing. After roving about the villages with the intention of looking for a suitable place to settle down (at which some of them were taken to be foreigners), they shrugged their shoulders at the whole business and finished by returning to Saratov where they established contacts among the local workers. No matter how astounded we were by this alienation from the ‘people’ of its urban children, the fact was evident, and we had to abandon the idea of involving workers in a purely peasant business.”[13]

According to the Narodnik theory, the town worker was further away from socialism than the peasant. Thus, a Narodnik organiser in charge of work amongst the workers of Odessa complained that “the men in the workshops, spoilt by urban life and unable to recognise their links with the peasants, were less open to socialist propaganda”.[14] Nevertheless, the Narodniks did conduct work amongst the workers and obtained important results. The initiator of this pioneer work was Nikolai Vasilevich Chaikovsky. His group established propaganda circles in the workers’ districts of Petersburg, where Kropotkin was one of his propagandists. Reality forced sections of the Narodniks to come face to face for the first time with the “worker question” which, expelled by Bakuninist theories by the front door, persistently flew back through the window. Even at this very early period, the Russian working class, despite the extreme smallness of its numbers, was beginning to set its stamp upon the revolutionary movement.

The attitude of the workers to the “young gentlemen” was instructive. The Petersburg worker I.A. Bachkin recommended to his fellow workers: “You must take the books from the students, but when they begin to teach you nonsense, you must knock them down.” It was possibly Bachkin of whom Plekhanov was thinking when he passed the remark about the unwillingness of the workers to go to the villages to work. Bachkin was arrested in September 1874 and, upon his release in 1876, he told Plekhanov that he was “ready, as before, to work for revolutionary propaganda, but only among the workers… ‘I don’t want to go into the country on any account’ he argued. ‘The peasants are sheep, they will never understand revolution’.”[15]

While the Narodnik intelligentsia wrestled with the theoretical problems of the future revolution, the first stirrings of class consciousness were emerging in the urban centres. The emancipation of the serfs represented a collective act of violence against the peasantry in the interests of the development of capitalism in agriculture. The landlords were, in effect, “clearing the estates” for capitalism, as Lenin explained, accelerating the process of inner differentiation of the peasantry through the crystallisation of a class of rich peasants (kulaks) at the top and a mass of impoverished peasants at the bottom. In order to escape the grinding poverty of village life, the poor peasants migrated in massive numbers to the towns, in search of jobs. In the period 1865-90, the number of factory workers increased by 65 per cent, with those employed in mining increasing by 106 per cent. A.G. Rashin gives the figures of the number of workers in European Russia (in 1,000s) as follows:[16]

The development of industry experienced a particularly powerful impetus during the 1870s. The population of St Petersburg grew from 668,000 in 1869 to 928,000 in 1881. Torn from their peasant backgrounds and hurled into the seething cauldron of factory life, the workers’ consciousness underwent a rapid transformation. Police reports chartered the growing discontent and audacity of the workforce: “The crude, vulgar methods employed by factory employers are becoming intolerable to the workers,” complains one such report. “They have obviously realised that a factory is not conceivable without their labour.” Tsar Alexander read the reports and pencilled in the margin: “Very bad.”

The growth of this labour unrest permitted the establishment of the first organised workers’ groups. The Southern Workers’ Union was set up by E. Zaslavsky (1844-78). Son of a noble but impecunious family, he went “to the people” in 1872-73, became convinced of the uselessness of this tactic and began propaganda work amongst the workers of Odessa. Out of these worker-circles, with weekly meetings and a small subscription, the Union was born. Its programme started from the premise that “the workers can get their rights recognised only by means of a violent revolution capable of destroying all privileges and inequality by making work the foundation of private and public welfare”.[17] The Union’s influence grew rapidly until it was smashed by arrests in December 1875. The leaders were sentenced to hard labour. Zaslavsky himself got ten years. His health undermined by the harsh conditions of imprisonment, he became deranged and died of tuberculosis in prison.

A more substantial development was the Northern Union of Russian Workers, set up illegally in the autumn of 1877 under the leadership of Khalturin and Obnorsky. Victor Obnorsky, son of a retired NCO, was a blacksmith, then a mechanic. While working at different factories in St Petersburg, he became involved in workers’ study circles, and had to flee to avoid arrest to Odessa, where he came into contact with Zaslavsky’s Union. He travelled abroad as a sailor, where he was influenced by the ideas of the German Social Democracy. Returning to St Petersburg, he met P.L. Lavrov and P. Axelrod, the leading lights in the Narodnik movement. Stepan Khalturin was an important figure in the revolutionary movement of the late seventies. Like Obnorsky, a blacksmith and a mechanic by trade, he began his activity in the Chaikovsky group, where he worked as a propagandist. In his series of pen portraits of Russian worker militants, Plekhanov has left an enduring picture of this working-class revolutionary:

“When his [Khalturin’s] activities were still on the right side of the law, he willingly met students and tried to make their acquaintance, getting every kind of information from them and borrowing books. He often stayed with them until midnight, but he very rarely gave his own opinions. His host would grow excited, delighted at the chance to enlighten an ignorant workman, and would speak at great length, theorising in the most ‘popular’ way possible. Stepan would gaze carefully, looking up at the speaker. Every now and then his intelligent eyes would reflect an amiable irony. There was always an element of irony in his relations with the students… with the workers, he behaved in a very different way… he looked upon them as more solid and, so to speak, more natural revolutionaries and he looked after them like a loving nurse. He taught them, he sought books and work for them, he made peace with them when they quarrelled and he scolded the guilty. His comrades loved him dearly: he knew this, and in return gave them even greater love. But I do not believe that even in his relations with them, Khalturin ever gave up his customary restraint… In the groups he spoke only rarely and unwillingly. Among the workers of Petersburg, there were people just as educated and competent as he was: there were men who had seen another world, who had lived abroad. The secret of the enormous influence of what can be called Stepan’s dictatorship lay in the tireless attention which he devoted to every single thing. Even before the meeting began, he spoke with everyone to find out the general state of mind, he considered all sides of a question, and so naturally he was the most prepared of all. He expressed the general state of mind.”[18] Khalturin was an outstanding representative of a type: the worker-propagandist active in the circles in the first period of the Russian labour movement. Yet even he was drawn into terrorist activities in the subsequent period, organising a spectacular attempt on the tsar’s life.

‘Land and Freedom’

In the meantime, the remnants of the Narodnik movement were attempting to regroup their forces in the towns under a new banner. In 1876, Zemlya i Volya was set up by the Natansons, Alexander Mikhailov and George Plekhanov. The new underground organisation was headed by a General Council with a smaller elected Executive Committee (or Administrative Centre). Subordinate to these bodies were a Peasants’ Section, a Workers’ Section, a Youth (Students’) Section and, a new development, a “Disorganisation Section”, an armed wing for “protection against the arbitrary conduct of officials”. The programme of Zemlya i Volya was based on a confused idea of “peasant socialism”—all land was to be transferred to the peasants and self-determination was to be granted to all parts of the Russian empire. Russia was to be run on the basis of self-governing peasant communes. However, all this was subordinate to the central objective of the revolutionary overthrow of the autocracy, which was to be carried out “as speedily as possible”—the extreme haste being due to the idea of preventing the undermining of the peasant commune (the mir) by capitalist development! Thus, the real originators of “socialism in one country” were the Narodniks, who sought to deliver society from the horrors of capitalism by espousing the idea of a “special path of historical development” for Russia, based on the supposed uniqueness of the Russian peasantry and its social institutions.

On 6 December 1876, an illegal demonstration of anything up to 500— mainly students—assembled on the steps of Kazan Cathedral, with cries of “land and freedom” and “long live the socialist revolution!” The demonstration was addressed by a 21-year old student called George Plekhanov, whose revolutionary appeal led to the beginning of years of exile and underground life. Born in 1855, the son of an aristocratic family from Tambov, Plekhanov, like many of his generation, cut his teeth on the writings of the great school of Russian democratic authors—Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, and, above all, Chernyshevsky. While still an adolescent, he joined the Narodnik movement, participating in dangerous missions, including the release of arrested comrades and even the liquidation of an agent provocateur. Arrested several times, he always succeeded in escaping from his tsarist captors.

Following his daring speech, Plekhanov was forced to flee abroad, but his prestige was such that he was elected, in his absence, as a member of the “basic circle” of Zemlya i Volya. Returning to Russia in 1877, the future founder of Russian Marxism led a precarious underground existence. Armed with a knuckleduster and a pistol which he kept under his pillow at night, he went first to Saratov, on the lower Volga, where he was subsequently put in charge of the “worker section” of Zemlya i Volya. The young man’s first-hand experience of work with factory workers had a profound effect on his thinking, which undoubtedly helped him to break with Narodnik prejudices and find a road to Marxism.

In December 1877, an explosion in the gunpowder store at an arms factory on Vasilevsky Island killed six workers and injured many more. The workers’ funeral turned into a demonstration. Plekhanov wrote a manifesto which ended with the words: “Workers! Now is the time to understand reason. You must not expect help from anyone. And do not expect it from the gentry! The peasants have long been expecting help from the gentry, and all they have got is worse land and heavier taxes, even greater than before… Will you too, the workers in towns, put up with this for ever?”[19]

The author got his reply far sooner than he, or anyone else, expected. The economic boom which arose from the Russo-Turkish War (1877-78) created the conditions for an unprecedented explosion of strikes, spearheaded by the most downtrodden and exploited section of the class, the textile workers. Not for the last time, the more oppressed and volatile textile workers moved into action far more quickly than the big battalions in the metal industries. The workers went to ask for help from “the students”, through the agency of a number of individual worker-revolutionaries.

Plekhanov, as head of the worker section of Zemlya i Volya, found himself virtually in control of the movement. Unfortunately, the Narodniks had no idea what to do with a workers’ movement which did not really enter into their scheme of the universe. In the space of two years, St Petersburg saw 26 strikes. Not until the massive strike wave of the 1890s was this to be equalled. The members of the Northern Union played a prominent part in these strikes, and, by the first months of 1879, it reached its high-water mark, with 200 organised workers and another 200 in reserve, carefully distributed in different factories. They were all linked to a central body. The workers’ circles even had a library, also carefully split up between different underground groups and widely used even by workers outside the Union. The resourceful Khalturin set up an underground print-shop. Obnorsky entered into agreements with a workers’ group in Warsaw, “the first example of friendly relations between Russian and Polish workers”, as Plekhanov observed with satisfaction.[20]

But within months of the appearance of the first issue of its illegal journal, Rabochaya Zarya (Workers’ Dawn), the police smashed the Union’s print-shop and the bulk of its membership was swept away by a wave of arrests into hard labour, imprisonment and exile. The result of the break up of this first solid organisation of the working class was catastrophic. Khalturin and others drew pessimistic conclusions and went over to terrorism. It took ten years and countless unnecessary sacrifices for the movement to get the terrorist bug out of its system.

From its very outset, the revolutionary movement in Russia was divided by the polemics between “educators” and “insurrectionists”, the two lines being broadly identified with the respective positions of Lavrov and Bakunin. The failure of the movement “to the people” brought this disagreement to the point of an open split. In the period 1874-75, there were thousands of political prisoners in Russia, youngsters who had paid the price of their defiance with the loss of their freedom. Some were later released on bail and kept under surveillance. Others were exiled to Siberia by administrative order. The rest merely rotted in gaol awaiting trial. Of those who remained active and at liberty, some decided to return to the villages, but this time as school teachers or doctors, devoting their time and energies to humble educational work and waiting for better days. But for others, the realisation that Bakunin’s theory of an “instinctively revolutionary peasantry” was false meant that an entirely different road had to be found.

Zemlya i Volya was never a mass organisation. A few dozen, mainly students and intellectuals in their 20s and 30s, made up its active membership. But the seeds of dissolution were present from the outset. Lavrov’s supporters looked to “open the people’s eyes” by peaceful propaganda. “We must not arouse emotion in the people, but self-awareness,”[21] he argued. The frustrated attempts to provoke a mass movement of the peasantry by means of propaganda gave rise to a new theory whereby Bakuninism was stood upon its head. From “denying politics” and especially political organisation, a section of the Narodniks effected a 180° turn and set up a secret, highly centralised terrorist organisation—the Narodnaya Volya—designed to provoke a revolutionary movement of the masses by means of the “propaganda of the deed”.

The latest military humiliation of tsarist Russia in the Russo-Turkish War revealed anew the bankruptcy of the regime and gave fresh heart to the opposition. The leaders of Narodnaya Volya were determined to wage a war against the autocracy in a kind of terrorist single combat which would encourage “from above” the flame of revolt. A section of the youth was now burning with impatience. The words of Zhelyabov, future leader of Narodnaya Volya, sum the whole thing up: “History,” said Zhelyabov, “moves too slowly. It needs a push. Otherwise the whole nation will be rotten and gone to seed before the liberals get anything done.”

“‘What about a constitution?’

“‘All to the good’.

“‘Well, what do you want—to work for a constitution or give history a push?’

“‘I’m not joking, just now we want to give history a push’.”[22]

These four lines show up starkly the relation between terrorism and liberalism. The terrorists had no independent programme of their own. They borrowed their ideas from the liberals, who leaned upon them to give emphasis to their demands.

In the autumn of 1877, nearly 200 young men and women were brought to trial for the crime of “going to the people”. They had already spent three years in gaol without trial and there were numerous cases of ill-treatment meted out to the prisoners by brutal warders and officials. For the revolutionaries the systematic ill-treatment, torture and humiliation suffered by the prisoners was the last straw. One particularly atrocious case caused widespread indignation in July 1877. When General Trepov the notorious Petersburg police chief had visited the Preliminary Detention Centre, a young “political” called Bogolyubov refused to stand up. He was sentenced to 100 lashes on Trepov’s orders. A decisive turning point was passed in January 1878 when a young girl by the name of Vera Zasulich fired a shot at Trepov. This action, which Zasulich had planned and executed all on her own, was intended as a reprisal for the ill-treatment of political prisoners. After the Zasulich affair, the swing towards the “propaganda of the deed” became irresistible, particularly since, against all expectations, the jury had found her not guilty.

Initially, the use of terror was conceived as a limited tactic for freeing imprisoned comrades, eliminating police spies, and for self-defence against the repressive actions of the authorities. But terrorism has a logic of its own. In a short space of time, the terrorist mania took possession of the organisation. From the outset, there were doubts about the “new tactics”. In the pages of the official party journal critical voices were raised: “We must remember,” says one article, “that the liberation of the labouring masses will not be achieved by this (terrorist) path. Terrorism has nothing in common with the struggle against the foundations of the social order. Only a class can resist against a class. Therefore, the main bulk of our forces must work among the people.”[23]

The adoption of the new tactics caused an open split in the movement, between the terrorists and the followers of Lavrov who argued in favour of a prolonged period of preparation and propaganda among the masses. In practice, the latter trend was moving away from revolutionism, advocating the politics of “small deeds” and a “little by little” gradualist approach. The right wing of Narodnism was becoming indistinguishable from liberalism, while its more radical section prepared to stake everything on the force of the bullet and the “revolutionary chemistry” of nitro-glycerine.

In the recent period, attempts have been made by the modern terrorists to distinguish themselves from their Russian forebears. The Narodnik terrorists, it is asserted, believed in individual terrorism, substituting themselves for the movement of the masses, whereas modern proponents of “armed struggle” or “urban guerrillaism” see themselves only as an armed wing of the mass struggle, whose purpose is to detonate the masses into action. Yet the supporters of Narodnaya Volya never claimed to be acting as a self-sufficient movement. Their stated objective was to initiate a mass movement, based on the peasantry, which would overthrow the state and institute socialism. Their aim was also supposed to be the “detonation” of the mass movement by giving a courageous example.

However politics has a logic of its own. All the appeals of the Narodnaya Volya in the name of the masses, merely served as a smoke-screen to reveal a deep-seated distrust in the revolutionary capacity of those same masses. The arguments advanced more than a century ago in Russia to justify terrorism have a strikingly similar ring to the arguments of “urban guerrilla” groups in more recent times: “We are in favour of the mass movement, but the state is too strong,” and so on and so forth. Thus, the terrorist Morozov affirmed:

“Observing contemporary social life in Russia the conclusion is reached that, because of the arbitrary conduct and violence of the government, no activity at all is possible on behalf of the people. Neither freedom of expression, nor freedom of the press exists to work by means of persuasion. In consequence, for every vanguard activist it is necessary, first and foremost, to put an end to the present system of government, and to struggle against it there is no other means than to do it with arms in hand. As a consequence, we will fight against it in the style of William Tell, until we reach the moment when we win free institutions under which it will be possible for us to discuss without obstacles in the press and in public meetings all the political and social questions, and decide upon them by means of the free representation of the people.”[24]

The Narodniks were courageous, but misguided, idealists who confined their targets to notorious torturers, police-chiefs guilty of repressive acts and the like. More often than not, they subsequently gave themselves up to the police in order to use their trials as a platform for the indictment of existing society. They did not plant bombs to slaughter women and children, or even to murder ordinary soldiers. On the rare occasions they killed individual policemen, it was to get hold of weapons. Yet, despite this, their methods were completely incorrect and counterproductive, and were roundly condemned by the Marxists.

The allegedly “modern” theories of urban guerrillaism only repeat in caricature form the old pre-Marxist ideas of the Russian terrorists. It is quite ironic that these people, who frequently lay claim to be “Marxist-Leninists”, have not the vaguest idea that Russian Marxism was born out of an implacable struggle against individual terrorism. The Russian Marxists scornfully described the terrorist as “a liberal with a bomb”. The liberal fathers spoke in the name of “the People”, but considered the latter too ignorant to be trusted with the responsible work of reforming society. Their role was to be reduced to passively casting a vote every few years and looking on while the liberals in Parliament got on with their business. The sons and daughters of the liberals had nothing but contempt for Parliament. They stood for the revolution, and, of course, “the People”. Except that the latter, in their ignorance, were unable to understand them. Therefore, they would resort to the “revolutionary chemistry” of the bomb and the revolver. But, just as before, the role of the masses was reduced to that of passive spectators. Marxism sees the revolutionary transformation of society as a conscious act carried out by the working class. That which is progressive is that which serves to raise the consciousness of the workers of their own strength. That which is reactionary is that which tends to lower the workers’ own opinion of their role. From this point of view, the role of individual terrorism is a wholly reactionary one. Thus, the policy of individual terrorism is most harmful to the cause of the masses precisely when it succeeds. The attempt to find short-cuts in politics frequently leads to disaster. What conclusions are the workers supposed to draw from a spectacularly successful act of individual terrorism? Only this: that it is possible to attain their ends without any necessity for the long and arduous preparatory work of organising trade unions, participating in strikes and other mass actions, agitation, propaganda and education. All that would be seen as an unnecessary diversion, when all that is needed is to get hold of a bomb and a gun, and the problem is solved.

The history of the 20th century provides some tragic lessons in what happens when revolutionaries try to substitute the heroic actions of an armed minority for the conscious movement of the working class. Most often—as with the Narodnaya Volya—the attempt to challenge the might of the state by such methods leads to a terrible defeat and the strengthening of the very apparatus of repression that was meant to be overthrown. But even in those cases where, for example, a guerrilla war succeeds in overthrowing the old regime, it can never lead to the establishment of a healthy workers’ state, let alone socialism. At best, it will lead to a deformed workers’ state (a regime of proletarian Bonapartism) in which the workers are subjected to the rule of a bureaucratic elite. In fact, such an outcome is pre-determined by the militaristic structure of terrorist and guerrillaist organisations, their autocratic command structure, lack of internal democracy and, above all, the fact that they function outside the working class, and independently of it. A genuine revolutionary party does not set itself up as a group of self-appointed saviours of the masses, but strives to give an organised and conscious expression to the movement of the workers themselves. Only the conscious self-movement of the proletariat can lead to the socialist transformation of society.

A section of the old Zemlya i Volya movement attempted to resist the trend towards terrorism, but was swept aside. An attempt to reach a compromise at the Voronezh Congress of June 1879 failed to stop the split which finally took place in October of that year with a formal agreement of both sides to dissolve the organisation. The funds were divided and both sides agreed not to use the old name. The terrorist faction adopted the name of Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will), while the remnants of the old school “village” Narodniks took the name of the Cherny Peredel (Black Redistribution), echoing the old Narodnik idea of an agrarian revolution. It was from the latter organisation, led by Plekhanov, that the first forces of Russian Marxism were to emerge.

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NOTES

[A] This refers to the numerous peasant uprisings that took place in France during the late Middle Ages. They invariably had an extremely violent character.

[B] Emilian Pugachov, a Don Cossack, led a great uprising of the Cossacks and serfs against the gentry in 1773, in the reign of Catherine the Great. The rebellion initially met with success, with the mass seizure of land and the capture of a string of imperial fortresses. The rebels took Kazan and could have taken Moscow but, despite riots which broke out in a number of towns, the peasant rebellion proved incapable of linking up with the urban masses against the common enemy—the gentry and the autocracy. Although the rebels proclaimed the abolition of serfdom, they lacked a coherent political programme capable of creating a broad revolutionary movement of the masses. This fatal weakness, plus localist tendencies, lack of organisation and discipline, eventually undermined the revolt. The rebellion disintegrated and Pugachov was executed in Moscow in January 1775.
Stepan Razin, another Cossack rebel, sailed up the Volga at the head of a pirate fleet in 1670 calling on the peasants to rise. Betrayed by the Ataman of the Don Cossacks, Razin was captured and sent to Moscow where he was executed on 6 June 1671.

[C] By the “subjective factor” Marxists mean the conscious factor in history—the action of men and women to change their lives and destinies, as opposed to the objective conditions, established by social development, which provide the basis for such actions. Most especifically, it refers to the role of the revolutionary party and leadership in the struggle for the socialist transformation of society.

[1] See Bernard Pares, A History of Russia, p. 404.

[2] Quoted in Trotsky, The Young Lenin, p. 29.

[3] P. Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, vol. 1, p. 253.

[4] Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 20 and 25.

[5] Quoted in S.H. Baron, Plekhanov. The Father of Russian Marxism, Spanish edition, p. 21.

[6] See P. Axelrod, Perezhitoe i Peredumannoe, pp. 111-2.

[7] Trotsky, The Young Lenin, p. 28.

[8] From Axelrod, The Working Class and the Revolutionary Movement in Russia, quoted in Baron, Plekhanov, p. 25.

[9] Kropotkin, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 119.

[10] D. Footman, Red Prelude, p. 86.

[11] Quoted in D. Footman, op. cit., pp. 47 and 49 (my emphasis).

[12] Trotsky, The Young Lenin, p. 25 (my emphasis).

[13] Quoted in Fyodr Dan, The Origins of Bolshevism, pp. 162-3.

[14] Quoted in F. Venturi, The Roots of Revolution, p. 511.

[15] Ibid., p. 800 in both quotes.

[16] A.G. Rashin, Formirovaniye Rabochego Klassa Rossiy, p. 12.

[17] Quoted in Venturi, op. cit., pp. 515 and 516.

[18] Ibid., p. 543.

[19] Ibid., p. 548.

[20] Ibid., p. 556.

[21] Ibid., p. 556.

[22] Quoted in Footman, op. cit., p. 87.

[23] Quoted in J. Martov, Obshchestvennoe i Umstvennoe Techeniye v Rossii 1870-1905 gg, p. 44.

[24] Quoted in Baron, op. cit., p. 56 (my emphasis).