The Russian Revolution (5 page)

By the end of the century, when the development of high-status professions had provided educated Russians with a broader range of occupational choice than had existed earlier, an individual's selfdefinition as an intelligent often implied relatively passive liberal attitudes rather than active revolutionary commitment to political change. Still, Russia's new professional class inherited enough of the old intelligentsia tradition to feel sympathy and respect for the committed revolutionaries, and lack of sympathy for the regime, even when its officials tried to pursue reforming policies or were assassinated by revolutionary terrorists.

Moreover, some types of professional avocation were peculiarly difficult to combine with total support for the autocracy. The legal profession, for example, blossomed as a result of the reform of the legal system in the i86os, but the reforms were much less successful in the long term in extending the rule of law in Russian society and administration, particularly in the period of reaction that followed the assassination of Emperor Alexander II by a group of revolutionary terrorists in 1881. Lawyers whose education had led them to believe in the rule of law were likely to disapprove of arbitrary administrative practices, untrammelled police power, and governmental attempts to influence the working of the judicial system.' A similar inherent adversary relationship to the regime was associated with the zemstvos, elected local-government bodies that were institutionally quite separate from the state bureaucracy and frequently in conflict with it. In the early twentieth century, the zemstvos employed around 70,000 professionals (doctors, teachers, agronomists, and so on), whose radical sympathies were notorious.

Engineers and other technical specialists working for the state or in private enterprises had less obvious reason to feel alienated from the regime, especially given the energetic sponsorship of economic modernization and industrialization that came from the Ministry of Finance under Sergei Witte in the t89os and subsequently from the Ministry of Trade and Industry. Witte, indeed, made every effort to rally support for the autocracy and its modernization drive among Russia's technical specialists and businessmen; but the problem was that Witte's enthusiasm for economic and technological progress was obviously not shared by a large part of Russia's bureaucratic elite, as well as being personally uncongenial to Emperor Nicholas II. Modernization-minded professionals and entrepreneurs might not object in principle to the idea of autocratic government (though in fact many of them did, as a result of their exposure to radical politics as students of the Polytechnical Institutes). But it was very difficult for them to see the Tsarist autocracy as an effective agent of modernization: its record was too inconsistent, and its political ideology too clearly reflected nostalgia for the past rather than any coherent vision of the future.

The revolutionary tradition

The task which the Russian intelligentsia had taken on itself was the betterment of Russia-first, drawing up the social and political blueprints for the country's future, and then, if possible, taking action to translate them into reality. The yardstick for Russia's future was Western Europe's present. Russian intellectuals might decide to accept or reject different phenomena observed in Europe, but all were on the agenda for Russian discussion and possible inclusion in the plans for Russia's future. In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, one of the central topics of discussion was Western European industrialization and its social and political consequences.

One view was that capitalist industrialization had produced human degradation, impoverishment of the masses, and destruction of the social fabric in the West, and therefore ought to be avoided at all costs by Russia. The radical intellectuals who held this view have been retrospectively grouped under the heading of `Populists', though the label implies a degree of coherent organization which did not in fact exist (it was originally used by the Russian Marxists to differentiate themselves from all the various intelligentsia groups that disagreed with them). Populism was essentially the mainstream of Russian radical thought from the i86os to the i88os.

The Russian intelligentsia generally accepted socialism (as understood by Europe's pre-Marxist socialists, especially the French `utopians') as the most desirable form of social organization, though this was not seen as incompatible with the acceptance of liberalism as an ideology of political change. The intelligentsia also reacted to its social isolation by a fervent desire to bridge the gulf between itself and `the people' (narod). The strain of intelligentsia thought described as Populism combined an objection to capitalist industrialization with an idealization of the Russian peasantry. The Populists saw that capitalism had had a destructive impact on traditional rural communities in Europe, uprooting peasants from the land and forcing them into the cities as a landless and exploited industrial proletariat. They wished to save the Russian peasants' traditional form of village organization, the commune or mir, from the ravages of capitalism, because they believed that the mir was an egalitarian institution-perhaps a survival of primitive communism-through which Russia might find a separate path to socialism.

In the early 187os, the intelligentsia's idealization of the peasantry and frustration with its own situation and the prospects for political reform led to the spontaneous mass movement which best exemplifies Populist aspirations-the `going to the people' of 1873-4. Thousands of students and members of the intelligentsia left the cities to go to the villages, sometimes envisaging themselves as enlighteners of the peasantry, sometimes more humbly seeking to acquire the simple wisdom of the people, and sometimes with the hope of conducting revolutionary organization and propaganda. The movement had no central direction and no clearly defined political intent as far as most of the participants were concerned: its spirit was less that of a political campaign than a religious pilgrimage. But the distinction was hard for either the peasantry or the Tsarist police to grasp. The authorities were greatly alarmed, and made mass arrests. The peasants were suspicious, regarding their uninvited guests as offspring of the nobility and probable class enemies, and often handing them over to the police. This debacle produced deep disappointment among the Populists. They did not waver in their determination to serve the people, but some concluded that it was their tragic fate to serve them as outcasts, revolutionary desperadoes whose heroic actions would be appreciated only after their deaths. There was an upsurge of revolutionary terrorism in the late 187os, motivated partly by the Populists' desire to avenge their imprisoned comrades and partly by the rather desperate hope that a wellplaced blow might destroy the whole superstructure of autocratic Russia, leaving the Russian people free to find its own destiny. In 1881, the `People's Will' group of Populist terrorists succeeded in assassinating Emperor Alexander II. The effect was not to destroy the autocracy, but rather to frighten it into more repressive policies, greater arbitrariness and circumvention of law, and the creation of something close to a modern police state.10 The popular response to the assassination included anti-semitic pogroms in the Ukraine, and rumours in Russia's villages that nobles had murdered the Tsar because he had freed the peasants from serfdom.

It was in the i88os, in the wake of the two Populist disasters, that the Marxists emerged as a distinct group within the Russian intelligentsia, repudiating the utopian idealism, terrorist tactics, and peasant orientation that had previously characterized the revolutionary movement. Because of the unfavourable political climate in Russia and their own repudiation of terrorism, the Marxists made their initial impact in intellectual debate rather than by revolutionary action. They argued that capitalist industrialization was inevitable in Russia, and that the peasant mir was already in a state of internal disintegration, propped up only by the state and its state-imposed responsibilities for the collection of taxes and redemption payments. They asserted that capitalism constituted the only possible path towards socialism, and that the industrial proletariat produced by capitalist development was the only class capable of bringing about true socialist revolution. These premises, they claimed, could be scientifically proven by the objective laws of historical development that Marx and Engels had explained in their writings. The Marxists scoffed at those who chose socialism as an ideology because it was ethically superior (it was, of course, but that was beside the point). The point about socialism was that, like capitalism, it was a predictable stage in the development of human society.

To Karl Marx, an old European revolutionary who instinctively applauded the struggle of `People's Will' against the Russian autocracy, the early Russian Marxists clustered around Georgii Plekhanov in emigration seemed too passive and pedanticrevolutionaries who were content to write articles about the historical inevitability of revolution while others were fighting and dying for the cause. But the impact on the Russian intelligentsia was different, because one of the Marxists' scientific predictions was quickly realized: they said that Russia must industrialize, and in the t89os, under Witte's energetic direction, it did. True, the industrialization was as much a product of state sponsorship and foreign investment as of spontaneous capitalist development, so that in a sense Russia did take a separate path from the West." But to contemporaries, Russia's rapid industrialization seemed dramatic proof that the Marxists' predictions were right, and that Marxism had at least some of the answers to the Russian intelligentsia's `great questions'.

Marxism in Russia-as in China, India, and other developing countries-had a meaning rather different from that which it had in the industrialized countries of Western Europe. It was an ideology of modernization as well as an ideology of revolution. Even Lenin, who could scarcely be accused of revolutionary passivity, made his name as a Marxist with a weighty study, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, that was both analysis and advocacy of the process of economic modernization; and virtually all the other leading Marxists of his generation in Russia produced similar works. The advocacy, to be sure, is presented in the Marxist manner ('I told you so' rather than `I support. . . '), and it may surprise modern readers who know Lenin only as an anti-capitalist revolutionary. But capitalism was a `progressive' phenomenon to Marxists in late-nineteenth-century Russia, a backward society that by Marxist definition was still semi-feudal. In ideological terms, they were in favour of capitalism because it was a necessary stage on the way to socialism. But in emotional terms, the commitment went deeper: the Russian Marxists admired the modern, industrial, urban world, and were offended by the backwardness of old rural Russia. It has often been pointed out that Lenin-an activist revolutionary willing to give history a push in the right direction-was an unorthodox Marxist with some of the revolutionary voluntarism of the old Populist tradition. That is true, but it is relevant mainly to his behaviour in times of actual revolution, around 1905 and in 1917. In the t89os, he chose Marxism rather than Populism because he was on the side of modernization; and that basic choice explains a great deal about the course of the Russian revolution after Lenin and his party took power in 1917.

The Marxists made another important choice in the early controversy with the Populists over capitalism: they chose the urban working class as their base of support and Russia's main potential force for revolution. This distinguished them from the old tradition of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia (upheld by the Populists and later, from its formation in the early igoos, by the SocialistRevolutionary (SR) Party), with its one-sided love affair with the peasantry. It distinguished them also from the liberals (some of them former Marxists), whose Liberation movement was to emerge as a political force shortly before 1905, since the liberals hoped for a `bourgeois' revolution and won support from the new professional class and the liberal zemstvo nobility.

Initially, the Marxists' choice did not look particularly promising: the working class was tiny in comparison with the peasantry, and, in comparison with the urban upper classes, lacked status, education, and financial resources. The Marxists' early contacts with the workers were essentially educational, consisting of circles and study groups in which intellectuals offered the workers some general education plus the elements of Marxism. Historians differ in their assessment of the contribution that this made to the development of a revolutionary labour movement.12 But the Tsarist authorities took the political threat fairly seriously. According to a police report in 19oI,13

Agitators, seeking to realize their goals, have achieved some success, unfortunately, in organizing the workers to fight against the government. Within the last three or four years, the easygoing Russian young man has been transformed into a special type of semi-literate intelligent, who feels obliged to spurn family and religion, to disregard the law, and to deny and scoff at constituted authority. Fortunately such young men are not numerous in the factories, but this negligible handful terrorizes the inert majority of workers into following it.

Clearly Marxists had an advantage over earlier groups of revolutionary intellectuals seeking contact with the masses: they had found a section of the masses willing to listen. Although Russian workers were not far removed from the peasantry, they were a much more literate group, and at least some of them had acquired a modern, urban sense of the possibility of `bettering themselves'. Education was a means of upward social mobility as well as the path towards revolution envisaged by both revolutionary intellectuals and the police. The Marxist teachers, unlike the earlier Populist missionaries to the peasantry, had something more than the risk of police harassment to offer their students.

From workers' education, the Marxists-illegally organized from 1898 as the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party-progressed to an involvement in more directly political labour organization, strikes, and, in 1905, revolution. The match between party-political organization and actual working-class protest was never an exact one, and in 1905 the socialist parties had great difficulty keeping up with the working-class revolutionary movement. Between 1898 and 1914, nevertheless, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party ceased to be a preserve of the intelligentsia and became in the literal sense a workers' movement. Its leaders still came from the intelligentsia, and spent most of their time living outside Russia in European emigration. But in Russia, the majority of members and activists were workers (or, in the case of professional revolutionaries, former workers).14