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tsarism or the Petersburg emperorship it is impossible to love.’19 He argued that Russians, with their love for bold experiments, might well lead the world toward socialism.

Bakunin’s article, ‘Die Reaktion in Deutschland’ (The Reaction in Germany, 1842), claimed that the age of unfreedom would soon come to an end when the ‘eternal spirit’ of history finally destroyed the old European order. He rejected traditional Christianity in the name of a new ‘religion of humanity’, which, by expressing justice and love through liberty, would fulfill the highest commandment of Christ. Bakunin’s pamphlet, Vozzvanie k slavianam (Appeal to the Slavs, 1848) demanded the Central European Slavs seek their independence from the Austrian empire. To liberate themselves from the German yoke, the Slavs would have either to wring concessions from the erstwhile masters or annihilate them as oppressors. In 1848–9 he began to suggest that the Russian people themselves lived under a ‘German’ yoke in the form of the Romanov dynasty. He forecast in Russia a popular revolution patterned on the Pugachev rebellion that would sweep away the ‘German monarchy’. In Ispoved’ (Confession, 1851), written in prison to Tsar Nicholas I, Bakunin admitted that he hoped to provoke ‘A Slav war, a war of free, united Slavs against the Russian Emperor.’20 The simultaneous emancipation of Slavs everywhere in Europe would make possible a Slavic confederation consisting of Russia, Poland, South Slavs and West Slavs.

In retrospect, the Westernisers shared love of liberty, but they did not define it in the same way. The moderates associated liberty with representative government and with virtually unfettered self-determination in the private sphere, while the radicals thought it the absence of all oppression – a definition that logically entailed the disappearance of government itself.

National identity, representative government and the market

The Great Reforms so altered Russian social and civil life as to radically affect subsequent political debates. As the long-standing discussion over ancient and modern Russia soon lost much of its salience, other questions quickly became urgent: whether the edifice of the Great Reforms would be ‘crowned’ by the addition of a European-style representative government at the imperial

19A. I. Gertsen, O razvitii revoliutsionnykh idei v Rossii, in Sochineniia (Moscow: Gos. izd. khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1956), vol. III, p. 491.

20The Confession of Mikhail Bakunin, trans. Robert C. Howes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977) p. 57.

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level; whether Russia’s economic transformation from serfdom to a market economy should be hastened by the abolition of the peasant commune and the creation of an urban working class on the English model; and whether in the political and economic realms the Russian ethnos should be privileged over non-Russian elements or whether the empire should be rebuilt on an egalitarian, multinational footing.

In the reform period Russian thinkers developed a range of political ideas that, at least superficially, resembled the right-to-left spectrum existing in continental Western European countries. Conservative thought built on Uvarov’s formula – Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality – but, under the threat of social instability, became more aggressive in its attitude toward non-Russian nationalities. Russian liberalism was, generally speaking, closer in spirit to European social liberalism than to classical liberalism, so most Russian liberals identified with the left rather than the centre or right. On the left populists, anarchists and social democrats vied for ascendancy.

The leading conservative thinkers of the post-reform period were the jurist Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev (1827–1907), the journalist Mikhail Nikiforovich Katkov (1818–87), the Pan-Slav theoretician Nikolai Iakovlevich Danilevskii (1822–85), the diplomat Konstantin Nikolaevich Leont’ev (1831–91) and the novelist Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821–81).

Among Russian officials the most assertive conservative was Pobedonostsev, who tutored the last two Romanov tsars and served as procurator of the Holy Synod from 1880 to 1905. He was a critic of Western representative government and the Enlightenment whose antidote to those evils was strong central government and an assertive established Church. In an anthology entitled Moskovskii sbornik (Moscow Anthology) (1896), he described Rousseau’s notion of popular sovereignty as ‘the falsest of political principles’.21 In practice, he contended, parliamentary institutions constituted the ‘triumph of egoism’: they were bodies that promised to represent the will of the people but which actually did the bidding of a handful of wilful leaders and served as pliant instruments of political factions. Western public opinion was ruled not by reason but by lying journalists who manipulated an idle public characterised ‘by base and despicable hankering for idle amusement’.22

Outside the government the dominant conservative of the early reform era was Katkov whose journals Russkii vestnik (Russian Courier), Sovremmennaia letopis’ (Contemporary Chronicle) and Moskovskie vedomosti (Moscow Courier)

21K. P. Pobedonostsev, Reflections of a Russian Statesman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), p. 32.

22Ibid., pp. 65–6.

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strongly influenced state policy. Katkov made his reputation as patriot during the Polish uprising of 1863–4, when he demanded the military suppression of the Poles on the ground that ‘any retreat . . . would be a death certificate for the Russian people’.23 He described the political monopoly of Russians within the empire ‘not as coercion . . . but a law of life and logic’.24 In 1867, he called for the introduction of Russian language into schools in Estonia and for the elimination of traditional Baltic German privileges in the area – a harbinger of the Russification policies pursued by Alexander III after 1881. In foreign policy Katkov was a Realpolitiker, who sometimes raised the banner of Pan-Slavism against Germany and Austria, but who always made it clear that Russian interests took priority over those of other Slavic peoples.

In Rossiia i Evropa (Russia and Europe, 1869) Danilevskii elaborated a theory of historical types claiming that ten distinctive civilisations had appeared in the past. He considered the European or ‘Germano-Romanic’ civilisation as the latest to reach world dominance, but he regarded the industrial stage into which that civilisation had evolved as proof of its decline. He predicted that Slavdom would constitute the eleventh great civilisation in world history. The Slavic peoples would be brought together by Russia, through the conquest of Istanbul and the destruction of Austro-German power in Europe. To achieve these objectives, Russians would have to subordinate themselves to the centralised state, for only by the merciless execution of the state’s divine mission would the past bloodshed of Russian history be redeemed.

In a remarkable book, Vizantizm i slavianstvo (Byzantinism and Slavdom, 1873), Leont’ev defined the earmarks of Byzantinism as: autocracy, Orthodoxy, a disinclination to overvalue the individual, an inclination to disparage the ideal of earthly happiness, rejection of the notion that human beings can achieve moral perfection on earth, and rejection of the hope that the universal welfare of all peoples can be attained. He argued that the historic vitality of Russia was directly related to Russians’ loyalty to autocracy, faith in Orthodoxy, and acceptance of earthly inequality – all ‘Byzantine’ traits. He celebrated Peter the Great and Catherine the Great precisely because their reforms increased social inequality, thereby making possible the flowering of a creative, ‘aristocratic’ culture among the nobility. He warned that modern-day Russians faced a crucial choice: either to maintain their distinctive, hierarchically based national culture; or to ‘subordinate themselves to Europe in the pursuit of [material]

23 Quoted in K. Durman, The Time of the Thunderer: Mikhail Katkov, Russian Nationalist Extremism and the Failure of the Bismarckian System, 1 87 1 –1 887 (Boulder: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 56.

24 Durman, Time of the Thunderer, p. 62.

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progress’. To follow the second option would be disastrous, for it would risk Russia’s survival for the false religion of human felicity on earth. Although Leont’ev recognised the tribal connections between Russians and other Slavs, he did not think common blood or similarity of languages to be adequate foundations for Slavic political unity. In view of his scepticism toward the other Slavs, Leont’ev cannot be regarded as a Pan-Slav of the Danilevskii type.

Dostoevsky’s conservatism was predicated on opposition to Western liberalism and socialism, on hostility to individualism and capitalism, on rejection of Catholicism and religious authoritarianism in any form, on opposition to movements inimical to Russia – nihilism, Polish nationalism, Jewish separatism and feminist radicalism. In his fiction he balanced his many antipathies by applauding the religiosity of common Russian people, the wisdom of saintly monastic elders and the fabled capacity of Russians from every social stratum to embrace suffering. Although Dostoevsky the novelist was self-evidently an anti-nihilist, a conservative nationalist, a partisan of Orthodoxy and the Great Russian ethnos, his fictional politics were less programmatic than the positions taken by his publishers, Katkov and the gentry reactionary Prince Vladimir Petrovich Meshcherskii (1839–1914). However, Dostoevsky’s journalistic writing, particularly his Dnevnik pisatelia (Diary of a Writer, 1873–81), was lamentably clear. In March 1877, for example, he predicted: ‘Sooner or later Constantinople will be ours.’25 That same month, in a series of articles on the Jewish question, he accused the Jews of material greed, of hostility toward Russians, of constituting themselves a ‘state within a state’. Later, in his June 1880 speech at the Pushkin monument in Moscow, he issued a call for ‘universal human brotherhood’ based on Russians’ disposition to ‘bring about universal unity with all tribes of the great Aryan race’.26 Although his auditors received the speech well, sober readers found his messianic nationalism and religious exclusivism disturbing.

Among Russian liberals the four most interesting thinkers were the classical liberal Boris Nikolaevich Chicherin (1828–1904), the philosopher Vladimir Sergeevich Solov’ev (1853–1900), the social liberal Pavel Nikolaevich Miliukov (1859–1943) and the right liberal Petr Berngardovich Struve (1870–1944).

Chicherin began his intellectual career as a moderate Westerniser. In his earliest political writing, the article ‘Sovremmennye zadachi russkoi zhizni’ (Contemporary Tasks of Russian Life, 1856), he championed the abolition

25F. M. Dostoevskii, ‘Eshche raz o tom, chto Konstantinopol’, rano li, pozdno li, a dolzhen byt’ nash’, Dnevnik pisatelia za 1 87 7 god, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad: Nauka,

1983), vol. XXVI, pp. 65–6.

26F. M. Dostoevskii, ‘Pushkin’, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. XXVI, p. 147.

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of serfdom and the introduction of civil liberties (freedoms of conscience, of speech and press, academic freedom, public judicial proceedings, publicity of all governmental activities) in Russia. In his book, O narodnom predstavitel’stve (On Popular Representation, 1866), however, he explained why he thought Russia was yet unprepared for constitutional government. Pointing to the practical flaws of representative institutions and the falsity of Rousseau’s theory of popular sovereignty, he argued that representative governments are workable only in ‘healthy’ societies with some experience of civil liberties, and only when the voting franchise is limited to educated property owners. This sharp distinction between civil and political liberties was a hallmark of Chicherin’s thinking.

In the late 1870s Chicherin undertook a systematic study of German socialism. His trenchant critique of Marx’s Das Kapital was a cardinal contribution to Russian social thought, a rare defence of free markets against their increasingly vociferous enemies. His book, Sobstvennost’ i gosudarstvo (Property and the State, 1882–3), was nineteenth-century Russia’s most erudite attempt to identify entrepreneurial freedom as an essential civil liberty. In the book Chicherin pointed to the incommensurability of individual liberty with social equality. He warned contemporaries against the danger of ‘a new monster’, – namely, intrusive society, which threatened to ‘swallow both the state and the private sphere’.27 His book, Filosofiia prava (Philosophy of Law, 1900), criticised legal theories that, in the name of morality or utility, would take away individual rights for some appealing social end. Chicherin’s philosophical legacy was his conception of individual freedom from constraint by others, in so far as that liberty is compatible with others’ freedom, as the sole and original right that belongs to every human being by virtue of his or her humanity. His political legacy can be found in the anonymous pamphlet, Rossiia nakanune dvadtsatogo stoletiia (Russia on the Eve of the Twentieth Century, 1900), in which he predicted the imminent end of Russian absolutism and demanded the addition of elected delegates to the imperial State Council. Miliukov called Chicherin’s proposal ‘the minimum demand of Russian liberalism’.

Solov’ev began his intellectual life as a religious philosopher in the Slavophile tradition, yet he made two signal contributions to liberalism. First, in his remarkable Natsional’nyi vopros v Rossii (National Question in Russia, 1883– 91), he made the case for setting nationality policy on a genuinely Christian foundation. He demanded that state officials take seriously the moral duties of Russia toward non-Russian groups by making a voluntary act of ‘national

27 B. N. Chicherin, Sobstvennost’ i gosudarstvo (Moscow, 1882), vol. I, pp. xix–xx.

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self-denial’ – that is, by renouncing the dangerous principle of Russian exclusivity and dominance over others. This self-renunciation would require Russians not only to tolerate non-Orthodox peoples, but to build a community in which they were equal members. His irenic interpretation of Christianity provided a theoretical basis for pluralism and equality among the empire’s peoples. Second, he insisted that Christianity requires recognition of the individual’s right to a dignified material existence. In his system of ethics, Opravdanie dobra (Justification of the Good, 1897), he argued against classical liberalism that private property must never be assigned an absolute ethical value, that the exploitation of nature must be limited by ‘love of nature for its own sake’, and that the freedom of economic consumption must be subordinated to ethically defensible principles.

A distinguished historian and thoroughgoing positivist who accepted Auguste Comte’s three-stage theory of human social development, Miliukov anticipated that the spread of science in Russia would mean the liberation of its people from religious prejudice and exclusive nationalism. His three-volume Ocherki po istorii russkoi kul’tury (Essays on the History of Russian Culture, 1896–1900) argued that critical social consciousness was gradually displacing national consciousness as the dominant force in Russia. The book implied that this historical evolution was creating the basis for popular representative government in the empire. Miliukov’s political ideal was progressive social legislation and constitutional monarchy, wherein the monarch’s authority would be balanced by an elected legislature. Under Russian conditions, he argued, that ideal might be attained through the practical co-operation of socialists and liberals. Repeatedly during the revolutionary crisis from 1904–7 he countenanced from the left ‘direct action’, including terrorism, for the sake of undermining the government. To counter Great Russian nationalism, he recommended the redrawing of internal administrative jurisdictions along ethnic borders, but he stopped short of advocating a federal solution to ethnic disputes. As his Istoriia vtoroi russkoi revoliutsii (History of the Second Russian Revolution, 1918–21) made clear, Miliukov lived to regret his alliance with the revolutionary left and also his attempts to encourage nationalist consciousness among minority peoples.

Not all Russian liberals in the duma period followed Miliukov’s ‘new liberalism’ or his policy of ‘no enemies to the left’. In the anti-revolutionary polemic Vekhi (Signposts, 1909), Struve posited that the revolutionary gospel had led in practice to ‘licentiousness and demoralisation’. Once a social democrat, Struve joined the right wing of the Constitutional Democratic party, declaring himself a partisan of Chicherin’s theory of individual rights. In internal politics he

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defended the equitable treatment of national minorities but under the proviso that Great Russians remain the empire’s dominant ethnos. In foreign policy he supported expansion of Russian influence in the Balkans, for the empire’s destiny as a great power was in the south. The irony of a Russian liberal assuming a ‘Pan-Slav’ perspective on nationality and foreign policy could not be more striking. Struve’s grand design was to reconcile Russian liberalism to a strong centralised state and to an assertive international policy – that is, to pursue a policy of national liberalism not unlike that adopted by the German national liberals in the Bismarck period.

Among Russian socialists there were three main currents of political thinking: populism, built on hostility toward capitalism, on the idealisation of the urban guild (artel’) and of the peasant land commune (obshchina or mir); anarchism, focused on the abolition of state power; and social democracy, oriented toward the destruction of market relations and the eventual elimination of bourgeois democracy.

Among the populists the leading figures were the ‘enlightener’ (prosvetitel’) or ‘nihilist’ Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (1828–89), and the ‘classical populists’ Petr Lavrovich Lavrov (1823–1900), Nikolai Konstantinovich Mikhailovsii (1842–1904) and Petr Nikitich Tkachev (1844–86).

Chernyshevsky rejected traditional Christianity in the name of the new ‘religion of humanity’ that would establish earthly justice based on material equality and gender equity. His ethical system of ‘rational egoism’ judged the virtue of human actions according to the benefits they would bring not to the individual but to the majority of society. His novel, Chto delat’? (What Is to Be Done?, 1863), described the heroism of young people who, being rational egoists, emancipate themselves from slavery to social conventions. Superficially, the story was a narrative of consciousness-raising and women’s liberation, but its meta-narrative posited a mysterious revolutionary elite whose sudden disappearances, commitments to outrageous actions (faked suicides, approval of euthanasia, vigilante justice) and deliberately obscure leadership hierarchy were meant to teach readers the ethics and modus operandi of revolutionary conspiracy. This elitism captured the imaginations of progressive readers, including the young Lenin, who confessed that the book ‘ploughed a deep furrow’ in him.

Lavrov’s essay ‘Ocherki teorii lichnosti’ (Outlines of a Theory of Personality, 1859), contended that the most important aspect of human consciousness is free will, that critically thinking individuals express free will in society by seeking justice for all, and that social justice requires the abolition of property as an affront to human dignity. This ethical perspective constituted the

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skeleton of Lavrov’s book, Istoricheskie pis’ma (Historical Letters, 1868–9), which identified the goal of history as ‘the physical, intellectual, and moral development of the individual, and the incorporation of truth and justice in social institutions’.28 Lavrov regretted that no existing society had fulfilled this formula, for everywhere critically thinking individuals were in a small minority, able to effect social change only on the margins. Even the existence of these few justice seekers had cost humanity dearly: ‘Progress for a small minority was purchased at the price of enslaving the majority, depriving it of the chance to acquire the same bodily and mental skills which constituted the dignity of the representatives of civilization.’29 Lavrov’s argument that, in Russia, critically thinking individuals had a moral responsibility to the suffering masses helped mobilise ‘repentant nobles’ of the 1870s to join the socialist movement.

Mikhailovskii attacked Western industry for its dependence on specialised labour, which inhibited workers from developing all sides of their personality. In contrast, he noted, Russian communal peasants performed a variety of agricultural tasks, from sowing and reaping to constructing houses, in the process exercising their minds as well as bodies. Building on that simple juxtaposition, his article ‘Chto takoe progress?’ (What Is Progress?, 1869), elaborated his famous definition: ‘Progress is the gradual approach to the integral individual, the fullest possible and most diversified division of labour among an individual’s organs and the least possible division of labour among individuals.’30 The article rejected Herbert Spencer’s view that there is a positive correlation between modern technological sophistication and individual happiness, and it sided with Marx’s moral critique of industrial specialisation and worker alienation.

The goal of annihilating individualism was at the centre of Tkachev’s political agenda. His article ‘Chto takoe partiia progressa?’ (What Is the Party of Progress?, 1870), defined progress as ‘the fullest possible equality of individuals’ – that is, ‘organic physiological equality stemming from the same education and from identical conditions of life’.31 Because individual needs will vary and most societies are too impoverished to satisfy those needs, Tkachev advocated strict limitation of individual demands on material resources. In his socialist collective, there would be no adjustments in distribution of goods

28P. Lavrov, Historical Letters, trans. James P. Scanlan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), p. 111.

29Lavrov, Historical Letters, p. 133.

30N. K. Mikhailovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh (St Petersburg: Tip. M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1908), vol. I, p. 150.

31P. N. Tkachev, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Izd. sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoi literatury, 1975), vol. I, p. 508.

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to accommodate differences in age, gender, personality or occupation. In his journal Nabat (The Tocsin, 1875) Tkachev demanded that Russian radicals band together to launch an immediate revolution. Peasants would be led by determined conspirators, who would destroy ‘the immediate enemies of the revolution’, seize state power, then ‘lay the basis for a new rational social life’. After the revolution Tkachev imagined a generation-long dictatorship that would construct anew ‘all our economic, juridical, social, private, family relations, all our viewpoints and understandings, our ideals and our morality’.32

The populists hoped to avoid or curtail capitalist development in Russia. In 1859 Chernyshevsky raised the prospect that Russia, by studying the experience of more advanced Western societies, might be able to skip ‘intermediate phases of development’ between the communal order and socialism. He pleaded with Russians: ‘Let us not dare attack the common use of the land.’33 Tkachev’s outlook on the question derived from reading Marx’s Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, from which he concluded that a socialist revolution could be made to occur in Russia either after capitalism had fully developed or before it had developed at all. In 1874, in his ‘Otkrytoe pis’mo F. Engel’su’ (Open Letter to F. Engels), he argued that the Russian bourgeoisie and capitalist relations were so weak that they could be easily eradicated. In 1877 Mikhailovskii rejected Marxist determinism on the grounds that it would compel Russians to accept ‘the maiming of women and children’ entailed by capitalism; it was morally preferable, he thought, to resist ‘inevitable’ capitalism in the hope that socialism could be built on the foundation of the commune.

The three principal anarchist thinkers were Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, Petr Kropotkin (1842–1921) and Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828–1911).

Bakunin’s major anarchist writings were Fed´eralisme,´ socialisme et antitheologisme´ (1868), L’Empire knouto-germanique et la revolution´ sociale (1870–1)

´

and Etatisme et anarchie (1873). In the first text Bakunin attacked religion as a prop of the existing political order, rejected centralised government as inimical to liberty and defended a ‘bottom-up’ federalist organisation of society. Soon after writing it, he fell into rivalry with Marx over the control of the International Working Men’s Association. In September 1868 Bakunin pronounced communism ‘the negation of liberty . . . because communism concentrates and swallows up in itself for the benefit of the state all the forces in society’.34

32Quoted in D. Hardy, Petr Tkachev, the Critic as Jacobin (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977) p. 275.

33Quoted in A. Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism: Studies in the Social Philosophy of the Russian Populists (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 19.

34Quoted in E. H. Carr, Michael Bakunin (London: Macmillan, 1937), p. 341.

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In his view, the Marxian principle ‘from each according to his work, to each according to his need’ would require an external mechanism of surveillance and distribution – a state apparatus – that would destroy liberty. In the name of liberating human beings from material want and establishing scientific socialism, Marx would set up a government that ‘cannot fail to be impotent, ridiculous, inhuman, cruel, oppressive, exploiting, maleficent’.

In The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution Bakunin adopted Feuerbach’s theory of God as a psychic projection of human virtues whose ‘existence’ impoverishes and enslaves human beings. According to Bakunin, the courage to dissent from God, to embrace materialism and therefore liberty, comes to human beings from our two highest faculties: the ability to think and the desire to rebel. He took the original rebel, Satan, as his literary inspiration. How did Bakunin expect ‘Satanic’ materialists to provoke a revolution in Christian Russia? Following Belinsky, he contended that the religiosity of Russian peasants was superficial, and he thought it could give way at any moment to the peasants’ instinctive rebelliousness. The anarchists’ task was to arouse within the peasantry the slumbering spirit of outlawry. He insisted that anarchists not impose revolution on the masses but provoke it, seeing in this policy a major difference with Marx.

Kropotkin sought a theoretical foundation for ‘scientific anarchism’. In the revolutionary manifesto, Dolzhny-li my zaniatsia rassmotreniem ideala budushchego stroia? (Should We Devote Ourselves To Analysing the Ideal of the Future Order?, 1873), and in his major books La Conqueteˆ du pain (1892) and Mutual Aid (1904), he elaborated that theory. In the manifesto Kropotkin argued that social equality cannot be achieved if the means of production remain in private hands, nor can equality be reached if property falls under state control, for that would mean the tyranny of some self-appointed body over workers. The state apparatus would have to be destroyed and the power decentralised in local federations, each based on a network of communes and guilds. In The Conquest of Bread, Kropotkin argued against Marx that a just society must not be based on the principle, ‘from each according to his work, to each according to his needs’. Taking the product of workers’ labour would require the establishment of a supervisory body to monitor labour and confiscate the goods produced by it, to the detriment of liberty. In place of such a bureaucratic approach, Kropotkin projected a voluntary arrangement whereby workers would contribute five hours per day to satisfy collective needs, but would retain the right to do additional labour to produce luxury goods for themselves. Thus, his mature social philosophy entailed social ownership of the means of production, but not the elimination of all private property.

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In Mutual Aid Kropotkin criticised those followers of Charles Darwin who saw competition as the motor of evolution. According to Kropotkin, animal species, including human beings, are less likely to survive through pitiless competition than through mutual aid. Early societies had been based on cooperation in the clan, commune, guild and free city, but unfortunately the rise of the state had destroyed those free institutions. Kropotkin now expected the peoples of Europe to overthrow centralised government, thus liberating the submerged principle of mutual aid.

The immediate cause of Tolstoy’s conversion to anarchism was the decision, following his spiritual crisis from 1876 to 1878, to rethink his religious principles. In Ispoved’ (Confession, 1879) he described his painful realisation that the simple Christian faith of the peasantry constituted a more viable world-view than the selfish rationalism to which he and his privileged peers had adhered. In V chem moia vera? (What I Believe), Tolstoy set out his own interpretation of Christianity, based on reading the evangelist Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount. He reduced Jesus’s message to five commands: ‘Do not be angry, do not commit adultery, do not swear oaths or judge your neighbors, do not resist evil by evil, and do not have enemies.’ He interpreted the injunction against oaths as a justification for refusing to pledge loyalty to the tsar and state. He saw in the command to ‘resist not evil’ an ethical prohibition against state violence of any kind. The order not to have enemies he understood as a directive not to divide peoples into states. His book Tsarstvo Bozhie vnutri vas (The Kingdom of God Is Within You, 1893) rejected the term ‘Christian state’ as a contradiction, classified universal history as a ‘pagan epoch’ and spoke of human progress as ‘the conscious assimilation of the Christian theory [of nonviolence]’.35 He described the modern conscript army as a barbarous institution, and he held up modern patriotism as a vicious lie. His anarchism started with the ethical individual refusing to acknowledge the right to shed blood or use force.

Among social democrats the key political thinkers were the classical Marxist and Menshevik Georgii Valentinovich Plekhanov (1856–1918), the Legal Marxist Petr Berngardovich Struve (1870–1944), the internationalist Lev Davidovich Bronshtein (Trotsky) (1879–1940), the Bolshevik theoretician Vladimir Il’ich Ulianov (Lenin) (1870–1924) and the futurologist Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Malinovskii (Bogdanov) (1873–1928).

35L. Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You: Christianity Not as a Mystic Religion But as a New Theory of Life, trans. Constance Garnett (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984) p. 247.

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Plekhanov, the ‘father of Russian Marxism’, began his revolutionary career as a populist. In Sotsializm i politicheskaia bor’ba (Socialism and the Political Struggle, 1883) and Nashi raznoglasiia (Our Differences, 1885) he explained his break with that movement. Both books criticised Lavrov for not understanding that the overthrow of the Russian monarchy by a bourgeois constitutional regime would be a progressive step. They also criticised Tkachev for imagining that a revolutionary minority could initiate a socialist revolution in feudal Russia, and they warned that a premature socialist revolution would lead to monstrous dictatorship. For socialists the only realistic immediate goal was ‘the conquest of free political institutions and making preparations for the formation of a future Russian workers’ socialist party’.36 Plekhanov assumed that skipping stages of historical development is impossible. Interpreting Marx as a historical determinist, he stressed the necessity of capitalism as a preliminary to socialism. Not surprisingly, he defined freedom as co-operation with the laws of history.

The Legal Marxists rejected Plekhanov’s historical determinism and again unlike Plekhanov classified political freedoms as valuable in themselves, not just as stepping stones on the path to socialism. In the book Kriticheskie zametki k voprosu ob ekonomicheskom razvitii Rossii (Critical Observations on the Economic Development of Russia, 1894), Struve made the case against Marx’s theory of the inevitable impoverishment of the working class and in favour of evolutionary socialism – a position that anticipated the conclusions of the German revisionists. In his article, ‘Die Marxsche Theorie der sozialen Entwicklung’ (Marx’s Theory of Social Development, 1899), he endorsed Eduard Bernstein’s idea that socialism may emerge from capitalism non-violently, by slow degrees. By the turn of the century, under pressure from Lenin, Struve had begun to turn away from Marxism. In his essay for the anthology Problemy idealizma (Problems of Idealism, 1902) Struve criticised social democrats for their simplistic historical determinism and dismissal of universal ethics – a conclusion that signalled his transition to liberalism.

Lenin came to Marxism under the influence of Chernyshevsky’s elitism and Tkachev’s Blanquism. These sources reinforced his innate wilfulness, contributing significantly to his subsequent historical voluntarism. In his earliest Marxist work Lenin attacked Struve’s book on Russian economic development by insisting that Marxism is not just a sociological hypothesis but a theory of revolutionary struggle. In Zadachi russkikh sotsial-demokratov (Tasks

36G. V. Plekhanov, Sotsializm i politicheskaia bor’ba. Nashi raznoglasiia (Moscow: OGIZ-Gos. izd. politicheskoi literatury, 1939), p. 65.

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of Russian Social Democrats, 1898) he endorsed Plekhanov’s strategy of making alliances with bourgeois opponents of the autocracy but emphasised that Social Democrats must take advantage of these alliances for their own purposes. He was impatient with Plekhanov’s necessitarian Marxism, which linked social democracy too closely to the pursuit of bourgeois freedoms. His most important early book, Razvitie kapitalizma v Rossii (Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1899), argued that, in rural Russia, capitalism had already led to the social differentiation of the peasantry. That simple conclusion was both a blow against neo-populists, who imagined that Russia might still avoid capitalism, and a theoretical basis for a future revolutionary alliance between the proletariat and poor peasants against the bourgeoisie.

Lenin’s pivotal book Chto delat’? (What Is to Be Done?, 1902), laid out his theory of the vanguard party. He stated: ‘the history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness’.37 In his opinion, social democratic consciousness could only be brought to workers ‘from without’, by members of a tightly organised, centralised party of professional revolutionaries. Although other Marxists had advocated strong revolutionary leadership, Lenin was the first to contend that, absent the guidance of the revolutionary vanguard, the working class could develop only bourgeois consciousness. In the wake of What Is to Be Done?, Plekhanov accused Lenin of mocking Marx’s belief in socialism’s inevitability. Trotsky warned of the prospect that Lenin’s theory of the party might lead Russia to permanent ‘Jacobin’ dictatorship: eventually, he wrote, the ‘organization of the party takes the place of the party; the Central Committee takes the place of the organization; and finally the dictator takes the place of the Central Committee’.38 Later it became clear that What Is to Be Done? was a first step toward a party ideocracy, a system of government in which the party, conceived as the source of historically privileged knowledge, imposed its will in all spheres of culture.

After he elaborated the theory of the vanguard party, Lenin developed two other crucial ideas. First, he moved toward a theory of nationality policy in which he opposed ‘any attempt to influence national selfdetermination [among non-Russian peoples of the empire] from without by violence or coercion’, and simultaneously limited the expression of the right to

37V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (New York: International Publishers, 1969), p. 31.

38Trotsky’s prophecy, from his pamphlet Our Political Tasks, is discussed in Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. II: The Golden Age (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 408.

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self-determination to those cases in which self-determination was in the interests of social democrats.39 In effect, he made national self-determination contingent on permission from the party vanguard. Second, he incorporated into his own theory of socialist revolution Trotsky’s idea of ‘permanent revolution’, which held that, due to the weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie, the Russian proletariat would have to lead the bourgeois revolution and that, therefore, the bourgeois revolution could be transformed into a socialist revolution in one continuous process. According to Trotsky, the Russian proletariat was numerically too weak to hold power for long unless it received assistance from the West, but he felt that the revolution in Russia might provide a ‘spark’ to ignite a general revolution in Western Europe. When combined with Lenin’s idea of contingent national self-determination, Trotsky’s idea of permanent revolution produced the curious result that Russia was both a subordinate part of a universal process of historical change and the director/initiator of that process. In other words, revolutionary Russia could be understood simultaneously as ‘of Europe’ and as ‘apart from Europe’.

Lenin’s crowning work was Gosudarstvo i revoliutsiia (State and Revolution, 1917). Taking the experience of the Paris Commune as his guide, Lenin asserted that a socialist revolution should entail the ruthless destruction of the old, bourgeois administrative machinery by the armed masses and the insertion in its place of a proletarian dictatorship. He imagined that, in the socialist state, workers themselves would execute most governmental functions, for simple ‘bookkeeping’ could be done by any literate person. For as long as the proletarian state remained in power it would exercise the strongest possible control over production and consumption and would maintain its vigilance over the remnants of the bourgeoisie. Only at the end of the socialist stage, after an equitable scheme of economic distribution had been established and after class antagonism had been annihilated, would the state begin to ‘wither away’, as Marx had predicted. Nowhere in State and Revolution did Lenin enumerate protections for individual liberty, for he was interested only in the workers’ collective freedom from want.

It is valuable to compare Lenin’s view of the socialist state to that of Bogdanov, the most prolific philosopher among the early Bolsheviks. In his science fiction novel Krasnaia zvezda (Red Star, 1908) Bogdanov imagined communism as a stateless order wherein individual workers would select their jobs based on statistical employment projections, and citizens would be clothed androgynously, be fed manufactured rations and be offered free medical care.

39 Quoted in Kolakowski, Main Currents, vol. II, p. 400.

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Simultaneously, however, Bogdanov projected a desperate collective effort to keep social production ahead of population growth, technology ahead of nature, and the human spirit ahead of satiation and depression. He was suggesting that communism would not constitute the end of history after all. Moreover, Red Star depicted within ‘stateless’ communism a directorate of intellectuals, an exclusive group of scientific experts, who would make society’s most crucial decisions. In Bogdanov’s prophetic reckoning, the socialist state as a formal legal entity might dissolve only to re-emerge in a new, supralegal form.

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