Many people calling themselves Marxists will profoundly dislike this modest book, because on reading it they will realize that their conventional and traditional views on Russia are at odds with, even contrary to, the views of their models and idols Marx and Engels. While most leftists are still stunned by the events of the Russian Revolution (which they erroneously identify with the coup staged by Lenin and Trotsky in October 1917), Marx and Engels – as well as many of the Marxists of the classical era – had a quite different view of Russia and the Russian state. Tim Graßmann is a member of the core group of researchers working on the complete works edition of Marx and Engels in Berlin and has been involved in the edition of several volumes of the second MEGA in recent years. A seasoned editor of the manuscripts and published works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels like Graßmann knows what he is talking about – unlike the majority of Marxists who remain bedazzled by the myth of the “October Revolution” and the Soviet Union. One myth that many votaries of Marxism cherish to this day is thoroughly debunked in this book: the legend that Marx and Engels started as Russia haters or Russophobes in their youth, but later changed their minds and became near Russophiles, even foreseeing a Russian revolution on the horizon. That is simply untrue. Marx and Engels never converted to the belief of “Russian exceptionalism”; considering the possibility of mass upheavals in Russia, they expected an outburst of that very brand of barbarism so peculiar to Russian politics for centuries.

In three chapters, preceded by an introduction and rounded off with a conclusion, the author presents us with a vast array of rather neglected or even unknown views on Russia and the Russian state that Marx and Engels shared. Since the early 1850s, they studied Russian history and Russian politics, a fact to which many journal articles together with a vast array of excerpts and notes bear witness. Engels was the first to learn Russian, Marx followed his example much later. Although they never produced a comprehensive monograph dealing with the Russian Empire, it is possible to reconstruct their analysis and view of Russian imperialism from their many writings on related topics. Graßmann does an excellent job in this respect. The central topic of his book remains the rise of Russia as a great power and the impact of Russian imperialism on European and world politics as Marx and Engels saw it.

Graßmann goes further, arguing that we can find in Marx’s and Engels’s writings the first elements of a new concept, the concept of the “authoritarian state”. Inevitably, that concept, although never spelled out by either Marx or Engels, stays opposed to the concept of “democracy”. Beyond any doubt, the relationship between modern capitalism and the modern, bourgeois state was a core theme for them – a relationship that was and would continue to be precarious. “Bonapartism” as an alternative would remain a constant threat to political democracy under the conditions of modern bourgeois society. The late Engels became convinced that Bonapartism had already become the “normal”, “regular” form of the modern state. Graßmann’s argument cannot escape the objection that the modern Russian state never became a bourgeois state and never allowed a bourgeois society to flourish. Rather, since the early 1850s, both Marx and Engels considered it a specific variety of “oriental despotism”.Footnote ¹

One of the most underrated and neglected writings by Marx on Russia, his series of articles published in the English weekly The Free Press in 1856–1857 titled “Revelations on the Diplomatic History of the 18th Century”, is treated at length and in detail here – and rightly so. Marx himself regarded the sketch of a “general history” of the Russian state from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century and his presentation of the diplomatic history of this time as just an “introduction” to a major work on the topic (which, unfortunately, he never accomplished). Although Marx’s daughter Eleanor republished these articles in 1897, and although David Rjazanov, the editor and spiritus rector of the first MEGA and one of the leading experts on Marx in his time, did an excellent job presenting this study by Marx in a special issue of the Neue Zeit, the most important Marxist journal of the classical period, the official Soviet Marxism kept it under lock and key. This text by Marx was never admitted to the Russian or German complete or collected works editions.Footnote ² Marx did not gloss over the brutalities and atrocities that the making of a modern Russian state entailed: the mode of expansionist, imperialist politics that the principality of Moscow had pursued since the early fifteenth century had been shaped by Mongolian rule over large parts of Russia – a system of tributary rule, based on sheer terror, in which the Muscovites played the role of tax and tribute collector for the Mongolian overlords, learning and emulating the rule by terror, devastation, enslavement, deportation, and plunder. Expanding in all directions, subjugating the neighbouring Russian republics and principalities, the Muscovite Tsardom became obsessed with the West. To prevail, the Tsars needed the means of power (technologies, modes of organization) that only the West (Western Europe) could provide. West European powers were happy to oblige, dazzled as they were by the “tremendous power” of that tremendous, mythical empire in the East. For Marx, the disturbing fact was that the ruling classes in Western Europe, first and foremost the British, did not oppose but rather supported the rise of Imperial Russia to the status of a great power in Europe, a power that eventually claimed some kind of prerogative in European politics, including the right to military intervention. Russia’s might hinged upon illusions; it was more imagined than real. Only the weakness, cowardice, complicity, and, finally, corruption of Western (in particular British) elites allowed Imperial Russia, despite its lack of commercial, industrial, financial power, despite its lack of naval power, to play the role of a great power in Europe. Even when Russia, Britain, and France clashed over the southward expansion of Russia, continuously encroaching upon affairs in the Ottoman Empire, and went to war, Marx and Engels considered the ensuing Crimean War a kind of drôle de guerre. Despite the horrendous casualties, it was a war fought without a strategy and without determination, ended by a peace that left Russia, the aggressor, virtually without any serious damage. The parallels with the present situation are obvious, as the author does not hesitate to point out.

In the third chapter, the author introduces some ideas of both Marx and Engels on international politics, ideas rather unknown to most ardent Marxists. Marx did admit that he and Engels had neglected and underrated the importance of international relations and world politics.Footnote ³ When the International Workingmen’s Association was created in 1865, Marx proclaimed that the working-class movement should have a foreign policy of its own. As another great power in its own right, the International, like its national components, could not avoid intervening in the internal and external affairs of their respective governments. Hence, Marx outlined basic principles of foreign or international policy for the labour movement. He did so in an age when international law was still in its infancy. Moreover, Marx and Engels were pressing for open intervention in actual affairs, taking sides in actual international conflicts according to the principles of the “foreign policy of the working class” that the IWA should heed. What is more, they were never pacifists. On the contrary, they took issue with the pacifists on the left, attacking their pushing for “peace at all costs” as unacceptable partisanship with the aggressor. They accused prominent figures on the European left like Proudhon of being “peacemongers”. In particular, Proudhon’s attitude towards the Polish uprisings against the yoke of Russian imperialism aroused the ire of Marx and Engels. Proudhon had criticized the Polish people’s fight for freedom and independence as endangering world peace and even advised the Poles to accept their fate and adapt to Muscovite rule. The view of Marx and Engels was completely different: Europe had only two choices – either submitting to Russian barbarism or standing tall, supporting the Polish rebels in their struggle for independence by all means, supplying arms included.

Marx’s and Engels’s view of Russian imperialism is the overarching theme of the book. Graßmann seizes the opportunity to consider the other forms of imperialism that Marx and Engels knew and criticized as well: the imperialism of the French Second Empire and the imperialism of the British Empire. Both were still on the rise during their lifetime, the British Empire reached its apogee in the years just after the Indian Rebellion of 1857 when India became incorporated as the “jewel in the crown”. Obviously, Marx and Engels considered their own age as an age of rivalling imperialisms, some, like the Russian specimen, very old, some, like the German variety, rather young. They observed and analysed the rise and fall of different great power regimes, the Pentarchy (rule of the five), established in 1815, falling apart in the 1850s, and new constellations emerging with the rise of new powers like Italy and the German Empire. Accordingly, their view of imperialism was much more differentiated than the crude Leninist orthodoxy allowed for.

Another insight worth mentioning here is that in his last years Marx discovered Ukraine and began studying Ukrainian history – reading and excerpting the works of the Ukrainian historian M. Kostomarov. His excerpts from Kostomarov were published in the MEGA at the end of 2024. They clearly show that Marx (and Engels) became aware of the Ukrainians as a people of their own and the Ukrainian language as a language of its own. What is more, Kostomarov’s work confirmed Marx’s earlier views on Russian history: contrary to a legend still popular today, the Russian state did not emerge from the Kievan Rus, but rather from the rise of the principality of Moscow, which built a state on the ruins and ashes of the merchant, peasant, and noble republics of Kiev, Novgorod, Tver, and the Cossack republics in Western Russia, Poland, and Ukraine. Moscow rose to power through the destruction of all older republican forms of political life. The modern Russian state, the great power of Imperial Russia, was created by conquest; the Tsars created a state that subjugated the whole of society by brute force and systematically stifled every movement of civil society. Parallels with the authoritarian Putin regime in today’s Russia are no coincidence, as Graßmann points out.