We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
When all other countries are crisscrossed by railroads and are able rapidly to concentrate and to shift their armed forces, Russia must necessarily be able to do the same. It is difficult, it is expensive, but, alas, inevitable.... With regard to railroads, as in many other things, we are particularly fortunate; we did not have to expend energy on experiments and strain our imagination; we can and shall reap the fruits of others’ labor.
A. K. Khomiakov1 An excellent study of the meaning for Russian Socialist thought of stikhiinost’ and its supposed opposite, soznatel'nost', is in Leopold H. Haimson, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (Cambridge, Mass., 1955).
2 General Cavaignac, Minister of War in the French Provisional Government set up by the uprising of February 1848, put down the uprising of the Paris workingmen in June of the same year. Lenin applied the epithet now to the generals of the army, now to the Kadets, now to Kerensky. Characteristically, he expected his readers to know who Cavaignac was, and since polemics were largely addressed by intellectuals to each other and not to the workers or peasants, his readers, living in the same French dream as he, knew.
3 Versailles had been the headquarters of the Republican government of France which, in 1870, attempted to disarm the National Guard of Paris. Resistance to the disarming was the beginning of the uprising of the Paris Commune.
4 Actually the Paris Commune was an emergency city government, while the Soviets of 1905 (imitated in 1917) were an emergency general-strike committee. Marx's final verdict on the Paris Commune, written in a letter to Domela Nieuwenhuis on February 22, 1881, said : “The Commune was merely the rising of a town under exceptional circumstances; the majority of the Commune was in no sense socialist nor could it be. With a small amount of common sense, they could have reached a compromise with Versailles.” Lenin read this letter when he was preparing State and révolution but studiously ignored’ it.
5 “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” in Karl Marx and Frederick, Engels, Selected Works in Two Volumes (Moscow, 1962), I, 363–64Google Scholar. The passage reads : “In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production … at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society created the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation brings, therefore, the prehistory of human society to a close.” Professor Karl Wittfogel has suggested in his Oriental Despotism that Marx's “progressive” epochs here do not constitute a developmental scheme, but rather a typological listing of “antagonistic” societies. This is no doubt so. However, a total reading of Marx's work makes it clear that he frequently made a mental switch from “typology” to “inevitable succession,” at least when he was thinking of three of these types, namely, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism. When the peasants and artisans are “expropriated” and thrown on the labor market, feudalism “leads into” the bourgeois order. And the bourgeois order, by its very nature, is pregnant with the seeds of the socialist order. Thus the passage from Zur Kritik quoted above begins with typology but ends with the idea of “pregnancy,” with its strong suggestion of inevitability.
6 Quoted by Marx from the first French edition of his own Das Kapital, in a letter written in 1877 to Otechestvennye zapiski. This letter, in the original French, is in Ausgewählte Briefe (Berlin, 1953), pp. 365-68, and in Russian translation in Perepiska K. Marksa 1 F. Engel'sa s russkimi politicheskimi deiateliami (Moscow, 1957), pp. 177-80 (hereafter referred to as Perepiska).
7 Ausgewählte Briefe, p. 366, where the sentence is quoted in Russian from a review by N. Mikhailovskii entitled, “Karl Marx devant le tribunal de M. Joukovsky.“
8 Anti-Dühring (2d ed.; Moscow, 1959), p. 250.
9 Perepiska, p. 242, in a letter to Vera Zasulich.
10 Ausgewählte Briefe, p. 366.
11 Though Vera Zasulich, when she wrote her letter to Marx, still believed that the obshchina might serve as a shortcut to socialism, her letter speaks of the necessity of first “freeing it from excessive taxes, redemption payments, and police arbitrariness” (Perepiska, p. 240). Marx did not touch these points in his answer. See Michael Karpovich : “The prevailing opinion among the authorities tends to view the most characteristic features of the rural commune in modern times as a product of comparatively late historical development.” The periodic redivision of the land arose in the eighteenth century, likewise the strip system and the compulsory course of husbandry. (W. H. Bowden, Michael Karpovich, and Albert Payson Usher, An Economic History of Europe since 1750 [New York, 1937], pp. 296-97. The sections on Russia are by Professor Karpovich.) In the Emancipation of the serfs by Alexander, wherever communal landholding prevailed allotments were turned over to the village to distribute (and redistribute) according to the fluctuating size of the household (ibid., p. 600). Florinsky writes : “The Emancipation Acts of 1861, granting personal freedom to the former serfs, created at the same time a highly complicated system of economic and legal relationships which amounted, in the last resort, to the establishment of a new bondage for the now ‘free’ tiller of the soili his bondage to the land commune. Established primarily for fiscal reasons—in order to secure the collection of redemption payments imposed on the liberated serfs in exchange for the parcels of land transferred to them on their emancipation—the land commune became one of the chief obstacles to the economic development of the country. Not only did it prevent any improvement in agriculture, but it also greatly hindered the formation of a permanent class of hired labor, of a town proletariat, which is one of the indispensable conditions of industrial progress … It was not until the shock of the Russo-Japanese War and the terrible agrarian disturbances which followed it that the Government [under Stolypin] undertook a radical agrarian reform [of the communal village]” (The End of the Russian Empire [New York, 1931], p. 15).
12 Ausgewählte Briefe, pp. 367, 368.
13 Perepiska, pp. 241-42.
14 The articles which are here summarized are programmatic. Their main formulator was presumably N. Morozov, but they represent the views of the little circle of leaders of the group that published them. I have followed the summary by Venturi, Franco in Roots of révolution (New York, 1960), pp. 667–68 Google Scholar. They are excerpted from Narodnaia volia, Nos. 1-3, 1880, which were reprinted in Literatura partii ‘Narodnoi voli’ (Moscow, 1906). See also L., Tikhomirov, La Russie politique et sociale (Paris, 1886), p. 206.Google Scholar
15 Alexander, Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. 14, 21.Google Scholar
16 Lenin, V. I., Sochineniia (4th ed.; Moscow), XXVI (1949), 82; XXXIII (1951), 68.Google Scholar
17 Stalin, I. V., Sochineniia, XIII (Moscow, 1951), 38.Google Scholar
18 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Werke (Berlin, 1960), IX, 116 Google Scholar; quoted in Engels, Marx and, The Russian Menace to Europe, ed. Blackstock, Paul W. and Hoselitz, Bert F. (Glencoe, 111., 1952), p. 141.Google Scholar
19 Gerschenkron, pp. 22-29.
20 And not only Marxists. Today the idea that heavy industry is the measure of a state's progress and greatness is widespread among new nations and among older nations faced with the possibility of total war. The idea of Denmark that it can remain a prosperous, modern, progressive, and happy land, on the basis of intensive agriculture and dairy farming for the markets of more heavily industrialized countries, is rare indeed.
21 Sovetskaia Rossiia i kapitalisticheskaia Frantsiia (Moscow, 1922), p. 21, as quoted in B. B. Grave, “Byla li tsarskaia Rossiia polukoloniei?” in Voprosy istorii, No. 6, June 1956, pp. 65-66. Pavlovich compared the Russian army to the black-skinned troops who also had to die for the glory of the “French Shylocks.“
22 Quoted in Grave, pp. 65 and 67.
23 These views of Stalin are to be found in Sochineniia, VI, 75; Istoriia Vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (b) : Kratkii kurs (Moscow, 1938), p. 156; and “O stat'e Engel'sa ‘Vneshniaia politika russkogo tsarizma, ’ “ Bol'shevik, No. 9, May 1941, p. 4. Stalin's article in Bol'shevik was originally a letter sent by him to the editors of that journal in 1934, when he ordered them not to publish Engels's article in their issue commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the outbreak of the World War in 1914. His letter and his order to suppress Engels's article were kept secret until their publication during the Second World War.
24 Grave, p. 66.
25 It is frequently forgotten that tsarist Russia also led the world in book publishing with 34, 000 titles in 1914.
26 For these comparative figures, as for much of the statistical material in the present article, I have drawn on Alexander Gerschenkron's ground-breaking study “The Rate of Industrial Growth in Russia Since 1885,” Journal of Economic History, Vol. VII (1947), Supplement 7, pp. 144-74. Gerschenkron's comparative tables include Sweden, whose rate of growth during the same decades surpassed even Russia's, without either government subsidies or a lowering of living standards. Sweden, like the United States, suggests how widely methods of industrialization may differ, according to differing situations, traditions, outlooks, and institutions.
27 Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness, p. 10.
28 “Taxation by price” was what Preobrazhenskii called it when in the 1920s he proposed the development of Soviet industry through “primary socialist accumulation.” And “taxation by price” has been the method of pressing out of the masses the sums for Soviet industrialization. The turnover tax has been levied and is still levied on articles of mass consumption on a scale which would have shocked Vyshnegradskii and Witte, as well as Marx and Engels.
29 Lenin, Sochineniia, XV (1947), 30-31.
