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/'SAINT-SIMON
PLEKHANOV
E. H. CARR
STUDIES
IN
REVOLUTION
ilt
FIRST
BY
PUBLISHED
BY
UNIVERSAL
LIBRARY
ARRANGEMENT
PRINTED
IN
WITH
THE
MACMILLAN
EDITION,
MACMILLAN
UNITED
& GO.
1950
1964
& CO.
STATES
LTD.,
OF
LTD.,
LONDON
AMERICA
CONTENTS
PACE
1. S a in t -S im
on
2. T h e
m u n is t
Gom
3. P r o u d h o n :
4. H
erzen
5. L
assalle
6. S ome N
: A
8. T
he
9. L
e n in
11. M
12 . T
radle
(19 4 7)
of
-C e n tu r y R
F ath er
P h il o s o p h e r
aster
r. G a lla c h e r
of
(19 4 7)
38
e v o l u t io n a r y
(19 4 7 )
56
e v o l u t io n
and
( 1947)
h in k e r s
a r x is m
(19 4 8 )
(19 4 8 )
S y n d ic a l is m
of
th e
th at
(19 4 7)
to
14 . S t a
(2 ) T
he
D ia l e c t ic s o f
18 1
P o w e r (19 4 6 )
S t a l in is m
152
16 6
F a il e d (19 4 9 )
R oad
10 5
134
C P G B (1 9 4 9 )
he
88
120
B u il d e r (1 9 4 7 )
( i) T
72
u s sia n
13. S t a l i n :
u n
15
S o c ia l is m
u s s ia n
B o l s h e v ism
of
B ism a r c k (19 4 6 )
he
rusoe
Intellectual R
r el
he
a n if e s t o
o b in s o n
in e t e e n t h
lekh anov
10. S o
P r e c u r so r (19 4 9 )
he
m eets
7. P
20 0
(19 4 9 )
2 11
PREFACE
articles out o f w hich this book has been m ade
appeared in the Literary Supplement o f The Times and
I am indebted to the E ditor o f the Supplement for
kind permission to republish th e m : I have also
incorporated in T h e R evolution that Failed
some passagcs from a talk given in the T h ird Pro
gram m e o f the British Broadcasting Corporation.
A few topical references have been adjusted, a few
cases o f overlapping rem oved, and a few corrections
m ade to m eet criticisms, public or private. O th er
wise the articles appear substantially unchanged ,*
the year o f original publication is appended to each
in the list o f contents. O f the two articles on Stalin
w ith w hich the volum e ends, the first was the earliest
tem in the collection to be written, the second the
last.
E. H . C A R R
T he
1
S A IN T -S IM O N :
TH E
PRECU RSO R
e n r i d e S A I N T - S I M O N was an intellectual
eccentric. H e was a m em ber o f an aristocratic fam ily w ho abandoned his title o f Comte with
a dram atic gesture in the French R evolution and
spent most o f his life in p e n u ry ; a rationalist and
a m o ra list; a m an o f letters who never succeeded
in w riting or com pleting any coherent exposition
o f his id e a s ; and, after his death, the eponymous
father o f a sect devoted to the propagation o f his
teaching, w hich enjoyed a E uropean reputation.
Saint-Sim on lacked most o f the traditional attributes
o f the great m an. It is never easy to distinguish
between w h at he him self thought and the much
more coherent body o f doctrine, some o f it astonishingly penetrating, some not less astonishingly silly,
w hich the sect built up round his name. It is certain
that posterity has read back into some o f his aphorisms a greater clarity and a greater significance than
he him self gave to them. But the study o f SaintSim on often seems to suggest that the great French
Revolution, not content w ith the ideas w hich in
spired its leaders and w hich it spread over the
contem porary world, also projected into the future
Studies in Revolution
a fresh ferment o f ideas which, w orking beneath the
surface, were to be the main agents o f the social
and political revolutions o f one hundred years to
come.
O f these ideas Saint-Sim on provided the first
precipitation on the printed page. N o one who
writes about him can avoid applying to him the word
precursor . H e was the precursor o f socialism,
the precursor o f the technocrats, the precursor o f
totalitarianism all these labels fit, not perfectly,
but, considering the distance o f time and the
originality o f the conceptions as first form ulated,
w ith am azing appositeness. Saint-Sim on died at the
age o f sixty-five in 1825, on the eve o f a period o f
unprecedented m aterial progress and sweeping social
and political c h a n g e ; and his writings again and
again gave an uncanny impression o f one who ha.s
had a hurried preview o f the next hundred years o f
history and, excited, confused and only h a lf under
standing, tried to set down disjointed fragments o f
w hat he had seen. H e is the type o f the great man
as the reflector, rather than the makcr, o f history.
T h e approach o f Saint-Sim on to the phenomenon
o f man in society already has the modern stamp. In
1783, at the age o f twenty-three, he had recorded
his lifes a m b itio n : Faire un travail scientifiquc
utile rh u m a n it . Saint-Sim on marks the transition
from the deductive rationalism o f the eighteenth to
the inductive rationalism o f the nineteenth cen tury
from metaphysics to Science. H e inaugurates the
cult o f Science and o f the scientific method. H e
rejects equally the divine order o f the theo-
Saint-Sim on:
T he Precursor
Studies in Revolution
three centuries was his visin o f the com ing
resubordination o f the individual to society. SaintSim on, though no partisan o f revolution in principie
(he once said flatly that dictatorship was preferable
to revolution), never abated his enthusiasm for the
revolution w hich had overthrown the ancien rgime.
L a fodalit was always the enem y ; incidentally,
it m ay w ell be due, directly or indirectly, to SaintSim on that feudalism becam e M a rx s chosen
label for the pre-bourgeois order o f society. N early
all Saint-Sim ons contemporaries, and most western
E uropean thinkers for at least two generations to
com e, took it for granted that liberalism was the
natural antithesis, and therefore the predestined
successor, o f feudalism
Saint-Sim on saw no
reason for the assumption. He was not a reactionary,
nor even a co n servative; but he was not a liberal
either. H e was something different and new.
It was clear to Saint-Sim on that, after Descartes
and K a n t, after Rousseau and the D eclaration o f
the R ights o f M an, the cult o f individual liberty, o f
the individual as an end in himself, could go no
farther.
T h ere are some astonishingly modern
echoes in a collection o f essays under the title
LTndustrie, dating from 1816 :
T h e D eclaration o f the R igh ts o f M a n w h ich has been
regarded as the solution o f the problem o f social liberty
was in reality only the statem ent o f the problem .
A passage o f Du systme industriei, in w hich SaintSim on a few years later sought to estabhsh the new
historical perspective, is worth quoting in f u ll:
Saint-Sim on:
T he Precursor
Studies in Revolution
practical application o f Science to industry cannot
be ascertained. It was his disciples who hailed the
building o f railw ays w ith an almost religious fervour
as the sym bol and instrument o f social progress
(one recalls L en in s definition o f socialism as the
Soviets plus electrification ), and other disciples
w ho in the 1840S founded the Socit d tudes du
C a n a l de Suez. But Saint-Sim on insisted it
becam e more and more the leitmotiv o f everything
he wrote that industrial production was hence
forth the m ain function o f society. Industry ,
production , organization these were the
key words in the Saint-Sim onist vocabulary.
L o gically enough, therefore, Saint-Sim on appears
as one o f the founders o f the nineteenth-century cult
o f work. T h e beginnings o f it are in Rousseau and
B a b e u f; but it was Saint-Sim on who placed it in
the very centre o f his system. T h e conception o f
Icisure and contem plation as the highest state o f
m ankind died w ith the last vestiges o f the m edieval
order. A ll men w ill w ork, wrote Saint-Sim on in
the Lettres dun habitant de Genve, where so m any o f
his ideas appear in their prim ary and simplest form ;
the obligation is imposed on every man to give
constantly to his personal powers a direction useful
to society . Indeed, in a later D eclaration of
Principies , he defines society as the sum total
and unin o f men engaged in useful work . W ork
is no longer a necessity but a virtue. T h e new
principie o f m orality is man must work ; and
the happiest nation is the nation in w hich there
are the fewest unem ployed . Saint-Sim on provided
Saint-Sim on:
T he Precursor
Studies in Revolution
other features still more curious. T h e divisin o f
functions is precise. T h e artists w ill appeal to the
im agination o f the worker and excite the appropriate
passions. T h e men o f learning w ill establish the
laws o f health o f the body social . (Incidentally
these provisions show that the marshalling o f art and
Science in the service o f the State is neither new nor
peculiar to ahy one part o f Europe.) T h e indus
triais (in w hich term Saint-Sim on includes producers o f all kinds and even traders) w ill legislate
and issue adm inistrative orders. Fin ally the executive it is an unexpected clim ax w ill be composed o f bankers. It was the age o f the great
private banks ; and the pow er o f credit in the affairs
o f governm ent and o f business was ju st becom ing a
current topic. F or Saint-Sim on, as for Lenin nearly
a century later, the banks were the hidden hand
that made the wheels o f production go round. It
was as logical for Saint-Sim on to give them a central
place in his adm inistrative scheme as for Lenin to
treat the nationalization o f the banks as the key
measure necessary to destroy the econom ic stranglehold o f the bourgeoisie. But w hat is interesting is
to find an em bryonic philosophy o f planning built
up b y Saint-Sim on round this central executive
function o f the banks :
T h e present an arch y o f production, w h ich corresponds to the fact th at econom ic relations are bein g
developed w ith out uniform regulation, must give w a y
to the organization o f production. Production w ill not
be directed b y isolated entrepreneurs independent o f each
other and ignorant o f the needs o f the people ; this task
Saint-Sim on:
T he Precursor
Studies in Revolution
the State w ill die aw ay. Even Engelss phrase that
the governm ent o f men will be replaced b y the ad
ministra tion o f things has not been traced textually
to the works o f Saint-Sim on and his disciples. But
the idea is borrowed direct from him. T h e influence
o f Saint-Sim on on Proudhon and on the developm ent
o f French syndicalist thought w ith its contem pt for
the politics o f governm ent is not less obvious.
H o w far should Saint-Sim on be called, not m erely
a precursor o f socialism, but him self a Socialist ?
T h e w ord had apparently not been coined in his
lifetime. It cannot be traced back farther than 1827,
when it appeared in England in an O w enite publi
cation. Its first recorded use in French is in an
article o f 1832 in Le Globe, a newspaper edited
b y Saint-Sim ons disciples after his death. Nous
ne voulons pas sacrifier , remarks the article, la
personnalit au socialisme, pas plus que ce dernier la
personnalit. In this sense o f placing the stress on
society rather than on the individual, Saint-Sim on
was a Socialist. But in the more political modern
sense m any doubts arise. T h e only occasion when
Saint-Sim on placed a label on his own political
opjnions was when he said that he belonged neither
to the Conservative Party nor to the L ib eral Party
but to the parii industriei; and w hile it m ay be mis
leading to transate industriei b y industrial , it
can hardly be m ade to mean Socialist or even
L ab o u r . His legislature o f industrieis and execu
tive o f bankers carne nearer to a benevolent despotism o f technocrats or to the m anagerial society o f
later speculations.
10
Saint-Sim on:
T he Precursor
Studies in Revolution
A ll social institutions should have as their aim the
moral, intellectual and physical improvement o f the
most numerous and poorest class.
All privileges of birh are abolished without exception.
From each according to his capacity, to each capacity
according to its works.
T h e Communist Manifest sets Saint-Sim on side by
side w ith Fourier and O w en as critical-U topian
Socialists , who attacked existing society on valid
grounds but prescribed U topian remedies. M ore
specifically, they are accused o f failing to appreciatc
the role o f the proletariat in the class struggle or to
countenance violent methods o f changing the estab
lished order. Y e t it is fair to recall Engelss handsom e
tribute though Saint-Sim on w ould not have liked
to be excluded from the scientific thinkers
nearly thirty years la t e r :
Germn theoretical Socialism will never forget that
it stands on the shoulders of Saint-Simon, Fourier and
Owen three thinkers who, however fantastic and
Utopian their teachings, belong to the great minds of
all times and by the intuition o f genius anticipated an
incalculable number o f the truths which we now demn
strate scientifically.
It was at the very end o f his life, and after the
failure o f an attem pt at suicide, that Saint-Sim on
w rote a book under the title Le Nouveau Christianisme,
w hich was the first o f several nineteenth-century
attempts to create a secular religin on a basis o f
Ghristian ethics. A t an early stage in his career,
w hile professing b elief in G od, he had declared that
12
Saint-Sim on:
T he Precursor
Studies in Revolution
be eclipsed b y the more sober and reputable ritual
o f Com te and the Positivists; and it is an odd irony
o f history that this posthumous apotheosis should
have aw aited one who strove so earnestly to establish
a secular science o f society.
*4
2
TH E
G O M M U N IST M ANIFESTO
Studies in Revolution
T h e first reviews the rise o f the bourgeoisie on the
ruins o f the feudal system o f property relations,
governm ent and m orality which it destroyed ; shows
how the powerful and colossal productive forces
w hich the bourgeoisie itself created have now grown
to a point where they are no longer com patible with
bourgeois property relations and bourgeois suprema c y ; and finally demonstrates that the proletariat
is the new revolutionary class w hich can alone
master the forces o f modern industry and end the
exploitation o f m an by man. T h e second part
proclaim s the policy o f the Com m unist Party, as
the most progressive and resolute section o f the
working class o f all countries , to prom ote the
proletarian revolution w hich w ill destroy bourgeois
pow er and raise the proletariat to the position o f
the ruling class . T h e third part surveys and
condemns other recent and existing schools o f
socialism ; and the fourth is a b rief tactical postscript on the relations o f Comm unists to other leftw ing parties.
A historie docum ent like the Communist Manifesto
invites exam ination from the point o f view both o f
its antecedents and o f its consequences. O n the
former count the Manifest owes as m uch to prede
cessors and contem poraries as most great pronounce
ments ; and the worst that can be said is that M a rx s
sweeping denunciations o f predecessors and contem
poraries sometimes mask the nature o f the debt.
Babeuf, who also called his proclam ation a m ani
festo , had announced the final struggle between
rich and poor, between a tiny m inority and the
i6
T he
Communist M anifesto
huge m ajority
Blanqui had anticipated the class
interpretation o f history and the idea o f the dictator
ship o f the proletariat (the phrase was not used b y
M a rx him self till 1850). Lorenz von Stein had
written that the history o f freedom, society and
political order was essentially dependent on the
distribution o f econom ic goods am ong the classes o f
the population. Proudhon also knew that the laws
o f political econom y are the laws o f history and
measured the progress o f society b y the develop
ment o f industry and the perfection o f its instru
ments ; and Pecqueur had predicted that, w ith the
spread o f com m erce, the barriers between nation
and nation w ill be broken down until the d ay when
every m an becomes a citizen o f the world
Such
ideas were current coin in advanced circles when
M a rx wrote. But neither such borrowings, nor
M a rx s overriding debt to H egels immense synthesis,
detract from the pow er o f the conception presented
to the world in the Communist Manifesto.
T o -d a y it is more appropriate to study the famous
manifesto in the light o f its hundred-year influence
on posterity. T h o u gh written when M a rx was in his
thirtieth year and Engels two years younger, it
already contains the quintessence o f M arxism .
Beginning w ith a broad historical generalization
( the history o f all hitherto existing society is the
history o f class struggles ) and ending w ith an
inflam m atorv appeal to the workers o f all countries
to unite for the forcible overthrow o f all existing
social conditions , it presents M arxist m ethodology
in its fully developed form an interpretation o f
*7
Studies in Revolution
history w hich is at the same time a cali to action.
Som e passages in M a rx s writings, especially at the
revolutionary criscs o f 1848 and 1871, appear to
com m end revolutionary action as a good thing in
itself. Som e passages, both earlier and later, appear
to dw ell on the iron laws o f historical developm ent
in such a w a y as to leave little place for the initiative
o f the hum an will. But these m om entary shifts o f
emphasis cannot be taken to im pair the dual ortho
doxy established by the Gommunist Manifest, where
interpretation and action, predestination and free
w ill, revolutionary theory and revolutionary practice
m arch trium phantly hand in hand. It propounds a
philosophy o f history, a dogm a o f revolution, belief
in w hich w ill take the spontaneous form o f appropri
ate action in the believer.
T h e Gommunist Manifesto is thus no broadsheet
for the hoardings or the hustings.
M arx and
m an y others w ho are not M arxists would deny
the possibility o f any rigid separation o f emotion and
in te lle ct; but using the terms in a popular sense,
it is to the intellect rather than to the emotions that
the Manifesto makes its prim ary appeal. T h e over
w helm ing impression w hich it leaves on the readers
mind is not so m uch that the revolution is desirable
(that, like the injustice o f capitalism in Das Kapital,
is taken for granted as som ething not requiring
argum ent) but that the revolution is inevitable. F or
successive generations o f M arxists the Manifesto was
not a plea for revolution that they did not need
but a prediction about the w a y in w hich the revolu
tion w ould inevitably happen com bined w ith a
18
T he
Communist M anifesto
Studies in Revolution
com plications do not seriously affect the ordered
sim plicity o f the m ain pattern o f revolution.
T h e pattern had been fram ed in the light of
M a rx s reading in modern English and French
history and in the works o f French and British
economists, and o f Engelss study o f factory conditions
in E ngland.
T h e English bourgeois revolution,
w inning its victory in the seventeenth century, had
fully Consolidated itself by 1832.
T h e French
bourgeois revolution, more suddenly and dram atica lly trium phant after 1789, had succum bed to
reaction only to re-emerge once more in 1830. In
both countries the first revolutionary struggle o f the
m odern age, the struggle between feudalism and
bourgeoisie, was virtually o v e r; the stage was set
for the second struggle, between bourgeoisie and
proletariat.
T h e events o f 1848, com ing hard on the heels of
the Aanifesto, did much to confirm its diagnosis and
nothing to refute it. In England the collapse of
Chartism was a set-back w hich none the less marked
a stage in the consolidation o f a class-conscious
workers m ovem ent.
In France the proletariat
m arched shoulder to shoulder w ith the bourgeoisie
in February 1848, as the Manifesto had said it would,
so long as the aim was to consoldate and extend
the bourgeois revolution. But once the proletariat
raised its own banner o f social revolution the line
was crossed. Bourgeoisie and proletariat, allies until
the bourgeois revolution had been com pleted and
m ade secure, were now divided on opposite sides o f
the barricades b y the cali for proletarian revolution.
20
The
Gommunist M anifesto
Studies in Revolution
bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary
m anner against the absolute m onarchy, the feudal
landlords and the petty bourgeoisie
But it could
not be argued that G erm any w ould sim ply follow the
same path as England and F rance at a greater or
less distance o f time. T h e G erm n revolution would
occur under the most advanced conditions o f European civilization w hich w ould give it a special
character. W here the proletariat was already so
advanced, thought M arx, the bourgeois revolution
can only be the im m ediate prelude to the pro
letarian revolution
W h en M a rx, in the b rief concluding section o f
the Manifest, devoted to Com m unist Party tactics,
thus announced the prospect in G erm any o f an
im m ediate transition from bourgeois to proletarian
revolution w ithout the intervening period o f bour
geois rule, he showed a keen historical perception,
even at the expense o f underm ining the valid ity o f
his own theoretical analysis. T h e events o f 1848
in the G erm n-speakin g lands confirm cd M arx's
intuition o f the impossibility in G erm any o f a period
o f established bourgeois suprem acy com parable with
that w hich has set so strong a m ark on English and
French history. T his im possibility was due not so
m uch to the strength o f the G erm n proletariat,
w hich M a rx perhaps exaggerated, as to the weakness
o f the G erm n bourgeoisie. W h atever the prospects
o f an eventual proletarian revolution in midnineteenth-century G erm any, the m aterial for a
bourgeois revolution such as England and France
had long ago achieved was still conspicuously absent.
22
The
Communist M anifesto
Studies in Revolution
W h at form the liquidation was to take when the
proletariat found itself directly confronted b y a
feudal society w ithout any effective and independent
bourgeoisie was not altogether clear. But i f one
insisted as M a rx apparently did, and Engels
continued to do down to the end o f his life that
our party can come to pow er only under some such
form as a dem ocratic republic , then the conclusin
followed that the im m ediate aim o f the proletariat
must be lim ited to the establishment o f a political
dem ocracy in w hich it was interested only as a
necessary stepping-stone to the proletarian social
revolution. T h is was, however, a theoretical con
struction unlikely to be realized in practice as the
experience o f both the G erm n and the Russian
revolutions was one d ay to show. M a rx never really
fitted his analysis o f revolution to countries where
the bourgeoisie was incapable o f m aking its own
revo lu tio n ; and acrimonious controversy about the
relation between bourgeois and proletarian revolu
tions continued to divide the Russian revolutionaries
for several decades.
T h e econom ic corollary o f this conclusin was
still more startling. I f the establishment o f a dem o
cratic republic was a prerequisite o f the proletarian
revolution, so also was the full developm ent o f
ca p ita lism ; for capitalism was the essential expression o f bourgeois society and inseparable from it.
M arx certainly held this view as late as 1859 when
he w rote in the preface to the Critique o f Political
Economy. N o social form perishes until all the
productivo forces for w hich it provides scopc have
24
T he
Communist M anifesto
been developed
It appeared to follow, paradoxi
cally enough, that in backw ard countries the interest
o f the nascent proletariat was to prom ote the most
rapid developm ent o f capitalism and capitalist ex
ploitation at its own expense.
Such was the view seriously propounded by
Russian M arxists, Bolshevik and M enshevik alike,
down to 1905 perhaps even dow n to 1917.
M eanw hile, how ever, in the spring o f 1905, L en ins
practical m ind w orked out a new schem e under
w hich the proletariat was to seize pow er in conju n ctio n w ith the peasantry, creating a dem ocratic
dictatorship o f workers and peasan ts; and this
becam e the official doctrine o f the O cto b er revolu
tion. T h e M ensheviks stuck to their guns, and their
survivors and successors to-day attribute the short
comings o f the Russian revolution to its failure to
pass through the bourgeois-dem ocratic, bourgcoiscapitalist phase on its w a y to the achievem ent o f
socialism.
T h e issue is not to be settled by
reference to M arx, who can hard ly be acquitted o f
inconsistency on this point.
E ither he m ade a
mistake in suggesting, in the last section o f the
Communist Manifesto, that G erm an y m ight pass
im m ediately from the bourgeois to the proletarian
revo lu tio n ; or he failed to fit this new conception
into the revolutionary fram ework o f the earlier part
o f the Manifesto.
M arx was to encounter sim ilar difficulties in
applying the generalizations o f the Communist Mani
festo about nationalism, w hich were also based on
British and French experience, to central and eastern
25
I, F
M ESTR m C j
c.
H.
So :
G ' ':
u- F
H.
g
' 0 Te c A
Studies in Revolution
E urope. T h e charge often brought against M a rx o f
ignoring or depreciating national sentiment rests
indeed on a misunderstanding. T h e famous remarle
th at the workers have no country , read in its
context, is neither a boast nor a p ro g ra m m e; it is a
com plaint w hich had long been a com m onplace
am ong socialist writers. B a b eu f had declared that
the m ultitude sees in society only an enem y, and
loses even the possibility o f having a country ; and
W eitlin g had connected the notion o f country w ith
th e notion o f p ro p e rty :
He alone has a country who is a property owner or
a t any rate has the liberty and the means o becoming
one. He who has not that, has no country.
In order to rem edy this State o f affairs (to quote
once m ore from the Manifesto) the proletariat
m ust first conquer political power, must rise to be
the dom inant class o f the nation, must constitute
itself the nation, so that the proletariat is so far
national itself, though not in the bourgeois sense .
T h e passage o f the Manifesto in w hich these
sentences occur is not free from am biguities. But
the thought behind it is clear. In M a rx s view,
w h ich corresponded to the facts o f English and
French history, nationalism grew up as an attribute
o f bourgeois society at a time when the bourgeoisie
was a revolutionary and progressive forc. Both in
England and in France the bourgeoisie, invoking
the national spirit to destroy a feudalism w hich was
at once particularist and cosm opolitan, had through
a period o f centuries built up a centralized State on
a6
T he
Gommunist M anifesto
Studies in Revolution
the first tim e a force to be reckoned w ith in central
and eastem Europe, it appeared not as in England
and France as an attribute and com plem ent o f
the State bu t as a sentiment independent o f any
existing State organization.
M oreover, the relation o f nation to State worked
itself out in different ways and sometimes involved
even the same national group in inconsistent attitudes. T his was particularly true o f the H apsburg
Em pire. T h e grow ing national consciousness o f the
G erm an-Austrian bourgeoisie did not diminish its
support o f im perial u n ity ; the bourgeoisie o f the
other constituent national groups sought to destroy
that unity or at least to dissolve it into a federation.
T h e H ungarians asserted the rights o f the M a g y ar
nation against the Germ an-Austrians, but denied
the national rights o f Croats and Slovaks.
In these circumstances it is not surprising that
M a rx and Engels never succeeded in w orking out,
even for their ow n d a y and generation, a consistent
theory o f nationalism w hich w ould hold good
throughout Europe.
T h e y supported the Polish
claim to national ind ep end ence; no revolutionary,
no liberal, o f the nineteenth century could have
done otherwise. But Engels, at an y rate, seemed
m ainly concem ed that this claim should be satisfied
at the expense o f Russia rather than o f Prssia,
proposing on one occasion to offer the Poles R ig a
and M itau in exchange for D an zig and E lb in g ;
and in the candid outburst o f a private letter to
M a rx he referred to the Poles as une nation foutue,
a serviceable instrument only until Russia herself is
28
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Communist M anifesto
Studies in Revolution
o f one individual b y another ends. B ut M a rx has
little to say (nothing at all in the Manifesto itself)
about the colonial question, touching on it in detail
only in the case o f Ire la n d ; and here it is perhaps
significant that, w hile in 1848 he was prepared to
sacrifice the Irish in the same w a y as the Austrian
Slavs, he had becom e convinced b y 1869 that the
direct absolute interest o f the English working class
dem ands a rupture o f the present connexion w ith
Ireland
M a rx did not, however, live to see the
full developm ent o f the process b y w hich the great
nations, alread y victim s o f the contradictions o f
capitalism , vied w ith one another in bringing the
w hole world under their yoke in a desperate attem pt
to save.them selves and the capitalist system the
process w hich L enin was afterwards to analyse in
his famous w ork on Imperialism as the Highest Stage
o f Capitalism', nor could he foresee that rise to
national consciousness o f innum erable unhistorica l nations o f w hich the Austrian Slavs had been
the harbingers. T h e Soviet theory o f nationality,
in w hich the colonial question and the question o f
sm all nations divide the honours between them, can
derive only a pal and faltering light from the simple
and far-aw ay form ulation o f the Communist Manifesto.
B u t critics o f the national theories, w hether o f M arx
or o f the Bolsheviks, m ay do w ell to reflect that
bourgeois thinkers and statesmen have also not been
able to form late, and still less to apply, a consistent
doctrine o f national rights.
M a rx s attitude to the tiller o f the soil is m ore
seriously open to criticism. H ere too there is a
30
T he
Communist M anifesto
Studies in Revolution
but in so doing they showed how far things would
h ave to travel before the French proletariat w ould
be able to m ake another French revolution.
In Prussia and throughout G erm any the revolu
tion o f 1848 was in the hands o f intellectuals who
thought as little o f the peasants as M a rx him self;
and the peasants failed to move. In A ustria the
peasants did move. T h e y rose in G alicia against
the landlords and w ould have risen elscwhere with
the right leadership. T h e y formed a large and
vocal group in the new dem ocratic Reichstag. But
the claim s o f the peasant cncountered the hostility
o f the bourgeoisie and the indiffcrence o f the urban
workers. Peasantry and proletariat were crushed
separately in the absence o f a leader and a pro
gram m e to unite th e m ; and in central Europe the
surest m oral o f 1848 was that no revolution could
succeed w hich did not w in the peasant and give a
high priority to his concerns.
In eastern Europe this was still more abundantly
clear.
A s regards Poland, even the Communist
Manifesto declared that the Com m unists support
the party that sees in agrarian revolution the means
to national freedom, the party w hich caused the
C racow insurrection o f 18 4 6 . But this passage,
which occurs in the tactical postscript, is the only
incursin o f the Manifesto into eastern Europe and
the only reference to agrarian revolution ; and even
here agrarian revolution is regarded as the ally o f a
bourgeois revolution leading to national freedom ,
not o f a proletarian revolution.
Spending the rest o f his years in E ngland, where
32
T he
Communist M anifesto
Studies in Revolution
V e ra Z a s u lic h ; and in the follow ing year the last
and most authoritative pronouncem ent appeared in
the preface to a Russian translation o f the Communist
Manifesto, signed jo in tly by both its authors :
I f the Russian revolution is the signal for a workers
revolution in the west so that these complement each
other, then the contemporary Russian system of communal ownership can serve as the starting-point for a
Communist development.
Russian Social-D em ocrats o f a later generation, both
Bolshevik and M enshevik, looked askance at this
quasi-N arodnik deviation, and returned to the purer
theoretical pattern o f the Manifesto w ith its clear-cut
dialectic o f bourgeois and proletarian revolution s;
and Lenin himself, not less than the Mensheviks,
sternly m aintained the paradox that the further
developm ent o f capitalism in Russia was a necessary
prelude to social revolution. Nevertheless, Lenin,
like M a rx in his later years, recognized that no
revolution, and no revolutionary, in eastern Europe
could afford to ignore the peasant and his demands.
A fter 1905 and before and after 1917 the
Bolsheviks were obliged to devote an immense
am ount o f energy and controversy to the task o f
fitting the Russian peasant into the western form ulae
o f the Communist Manifesto.
Franz M ehring, M a rx s best and most sym pathetic biographer, remarks o f the Communist Manifesto
that in m any respects historical developm ent has
proceeded otherwise, and above all has proceeded
more slowly, than its authors expected . T his is
true o f the expectations o f the tw o young men who
34
T he
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Studies in Revolution
constrained to adm it that a predom inantly peasant
country like Russia had the chance o f achieving the
social revolution without passing through the bour
geois capitahst phase at all, thus not m erely modifying but side-tracking altogether the revolutionary
analysis o f the Manifesto.
It is curious and significant o f the vitality o f
M a rx s thought to w atch how accurately this
evolution was repeated in the Russian SocialD em ocratic Party. Its first leaders Plekhanov and
A xelrod, L enin and M arto v accepted without
question the scheme o f the Gommunist Manifesto.
A fter 1903 the M ensheviks, rem aining consistent
w ith themselves and w ith the M arxist schem e, ended
in bankruptcy because they could find no w a y o f
applyin g it to Russian conditions. T h e more flexible
L enin took the scheme and brilliantly adapted it to
those co n d itio n s; and the adaptations w hich he
m ade followed in broad outline, though not in
every detail those w hich M a rx him self had admitted in his later years. T h e process can be justified.
M arxism was never oflered to the w orld as a static
body o f doctrine ; M a rx him self once confessed that
he was no M a r x is t; and the constant evolution o f
doctrine in response to changing conditions is itself
a canon o f M arxism .
It is on such grounds that the Russian revolution
can claim to be a legitm ate child o f the Gommunist
Manifesto.
T h e Manifesto challenged bourgeois
society and oflered a revaluation o f bourgeois vales.
T h e Bolshevik revolution, w ith all its deviations, alJ
its adaptations to specifically Russian conditions and
36
T he
Communist M anifesto
37
PROUDHON;
OF
ROBINSON
CRUSOE
SOCIALISM
38
39
Studies in Revolution
the G erm n occupation, depicts him w ith skill and
plausibility as the first progenitor o f Hitlerism.*
M ore ju d icia l than either o f these, M lle. A m oudruz
has produced a scholarly m onograph ^ which, while
professedly confined to Proudhons views on Inter
national affairs, necessarily touches on the w ider
ground o f his w hole political creed.
T h e elem ent o f incoherence in Proudhon derives
largely from the character o f the m an. H e had a
passion for contradiction, and contradicted himself
alm ost as read ily as he contradicted others. Som etimes, especially in the letters, one suspects the
practical joker. W h en he explains his hostility to
the N orth in the A m erican civil w a r b y his dislike
o f so-called liberal and dem ocratic States he m ay
be nine-tenths serious (though that was not the
fundam ental reason for his attitude). W h en he adds,
J ai en horreur la lib e rt , he is manifestly putting
out his tongue a t his correspondent and at him
self. B ut there was in Proudhon a profound and
unresolved contradiction between revolutionary
opinions w h ich expressed, in part, at a n y rate, his
resentments against a cram ped, poverty-stricken
and persecuted life and the passion o f the selfeducated peasant for bourgeois respectability. H e
m ight, in theory, reject G hurch and State, authority
and property.
B ut anything that touched the
sanctity o f the fam ily aroused his instinctive fury.
I t was this th at led him into his last and most
* J . S clw y n Sch ap iro , F ierre Josep h P ro u d h on , H arb in ger o f
F ascb m {American Historical Review, V o l. L , N o . 4, J u ly 1945.)
* M ad clein e A m o u d ru z, Proudhon ti VEurope.
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Studies in Revolution
(Proudhons dates are 1 8 0 9 -6 5 ) whose careers were
split in tw o b y the historical watershed o f 1848.
H is first prolific years as a w riter w ere passed am id
the generous revolutionary enthusiasms o f the 1840S
a period fertile in ideas so simple, so noble and
so U to p ian that it seems difficult to take them
seriously to-day, yet the seed-bed o f nearly all
p o litical thought for the rest o f the century. E very
thing that was radical and subversive in Proudhons
th ou gh t grew out o f this congenial soil. D estruam
e t A ed ificabo was the m otto w hich he prefixed to
one o f his early works. I t w ould have been repre
sentativo o f his attitude at this tim e i f he had been
content to plead, like Bakunin, that the passion
for destruction is also a Creative passion .
F o r the visionaries o f the 1840S, the year 1848
carne as a bitter disillusionment. T h e great u p
h eaval w hich was to com plete the w ork o f the French
R evo lu tio n and usher in the age o f social equality
and the brotherhood o f m an had ended, in the very
ca p ita l o f revolution, w ith the shooting dow n o f the
workers b y C av aig n a c am id the approbation of
th e self-satisfied bourgeoisie and its representative
assembly. T h e split had com e betw een the m iddle
class and the workers, betw een bourgeois dem ocracy
and social dem ocracy , alias Com m unism . T his
was the lesson and the consequence o f 1848. M a rx
drew the necessary conclusin and invented the
doctrines o f the dictatorship o f the proletariat
and perm anent revolution .
T h e proletariat
m ust now take matters into their ow n hands and
b rin g to full fruition the revolution w h ich the bour42
Studies in Revolution
petit bourgeois fear of, and contem pt for, the pro
letariat (a notew orthy anticipation here o f the ideo
lo gical foundations o f N ational Socialism ). Picking
up Saint-Sim ons form ula o f la classe la plus
nom breuse et la plus pauvre , he declared that
this class is, b y the very fact o f its poverty, the
most ungrateful, the most envious, the most im m oral
and the most cow ard ly ; and later he was to speak
the stupidity o f the proletariat content to work,
to hunger and to serve, provided its princes grow
fat and glorious .
F o r Proudhon, therefore, there was no escape
after 1848, as there was for M arx, into the ideology
o f the proletariat as the bearer o f the revolutionary
faith. Proudhon becam e a revolutionary w ithout
a party, w ithout a class, w ithout a creed, the
Robinson Crusoe o f Socialism , as T rotsky called
h im ; and the position suited, and intensified, the
w ayw ard individualism o f his tem peram ent. T h e
most significant analogies that can be found for his
developm ent are the Russian revolutionaries, H erzen
and Bakunin. Several curious letters to H erzen
appear in Proudhons correspondence o f the eighteenfifties. L ike him , H erzen had lost faith in western
dem ocracy w ithout acquiring faith in the pro
le ta ria t; and after 1855 H erzen sought to build his
hopes short-lived, indeed on the liberal aspirations o f the young T sa r A lexan d er II. M eanw hile
Bakunin had w ritten from a R ussian prison his
famous Confessions to N icholas I ; and in Siberia he
toyed w ith the potentialities o f enlightened despotism in the person o f the G overnor-G eneral,
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Studies in Revolution
first gave anarchism its place and its influence
in nineteenth-century though t; for Bakunin, who
m ight have ranked as a co-founder, gallantly
aw arded him the priority. Proudhon and Bakunin
stand side b y side as men who seem to have believed
in revolution as a good in itself (though Proudhon,
as usual, sometimes denounced even revolution),
and felt it unnecessary, perhaps because they felt
themselves unable, to fiirnish any positive definition
o f their goal. In this respect the successor who
stands nearest to them is the syndicalist Sorel, who
held that the business o f doctrine is to provide an
appropriate m yth, whether true or not, to inspire
and stim ulate the forces o f revolution.
Y et, notwithstanding all that has been said and
righ tly said about the self-contradictions o f
Proudhon and about the mood o f frustration and
disillusionm ent in w hich his teaching was rooted,
the immense impression w hich he m ade on his
contem poraries and on posterity bears witness to the
vitality and sincerity o f his thought. H e gave to
nineteenth-century political thinkers and political
program m e-m akers som ething w hich they needed
and w hich they greedily devoured.
O u t o f the
w elter o f Proudhons writings there rem ain two fixed
points round w hich he gravitates and to w hich he
returns again and again w ith all his wonted pertin acity and w ith an unw onted consistency. These are
his rejection o f the State and o f political pow er as a
principie o f evil, and his ad vocacy o f federalism
(w hatever precisely th at m ight m ean) as a form of
com m on organization for social and national groups.
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Studies in Revolution
first derives from a fruitful inspiration o f that queer
genius Saint-Sim on. H ere was a man w ho was not an
anarchist but to use an anachronistic piece o f
ja rg o n a technocrat, believing that les indus
trieis (by w hich he m eant all concem ed in the
productive or distributive processes) w ere destined
to control the State, that political pow er w ould be
succeeded b y econom ic pow er and governm ent
be replaced b y adm inistration
In a phrase
apparently not used b y Saint-Sim on himself, but b y
his disciples, the State w ould becom e an association o f workers
T his visin, like A uguste
C o m tes surrealist plan for the m anagem ent o f
the hum an planet b y 14,000 bankers, seemed
to presage the eventual elim ination o f the S ta te ;
an d it had the fortune to be adopted b y both
Proudhon and Engels, b y both syndicalists and
Bolsheviks. Proudhon attem pted to give shape to
the tem pting prospect b y outlining a scheme for a
free credit bank based on the principie o f m utualism ; but neither contem poraries nor posterity
have been induced to treat this seriously. I t is only
necessary to record on Proudhons b eh a lf this further
claim to originality as one o f the first crank financial
reformers.
Proudhons second answer, given in the last w ork
published in his lifetime, w hich he called D u principe
fdrateur et de la ncessit de reconstituer le parti de la
Rvolution, is that sovereignty rests w ith the com
m u n e the local unit w hich has, in Proudhons
eyes, as natural a basis as the fam ily. T his unit he
w ould allow to govern itself, to im pose taxes on
48
Studies in Revolution
only legitm ate form o f political organization.
Proudhon, w ith his usual inconsistency, took existing
States as his starting-point and approached the issue
from the angle o f current international affairs. H e
w anted federation as the basis o f relations between
States. But he perceived that one o f the difficulties
was the existing inequality between Slates, and
thought that this, too, m ight be got over b y the
application o f the federal principie, nam ely, b y an
interior distribution o f sovereignty and govern
m ent . Federalism , in both senses, was the alpha
and om ega o f m y policy
H ere it becomes necessary to say something on
the vexed question o f Proudhons attitude to nationality and nationalism. In his earlier life he was
influenced b y the ffam ing patriotism o f M ichelet.
But he afterwards reacted strongly both against the
m an and against his work, and denounced the
fashionable ad vocacy o f self-determ ination and o f
the rights o f nations to unity and independence.
T hose who speak so m uch o f re-establishing these
national unities , he wrote w ith a certain am ount
o f prescience, have little taste for individual
liberties. T h e South in the A m erican civil w ar
had his enthusiastic support against the N orth
because the Southerners were federalists seeking
to break up an artificial U nion.
A lone am ong
advanced thinkers o f the period, Proudhon was
bitterly opposed both to the liberation o f Poland
and to the unification o f Italy. Poland has always
been the most corrupt o f aristocracies and the
most indisciplined o f states ; w h at she needs is a
50
I. F C. H.
l!. F R, . K.
MESTRAGO Oc SOCiOLGEiA 6
B I Lj L 5 C T f ^
PO lifrC A
Studies in Revolution
sovereignty in the nam e o f federalism does not occur
to him . O n the contrary, Proudhon sometimes gave
offence to foreigners - including his Belgian hosts
during his period o f exile in Brusscls b y speaking
too freely o f the advantagc o f federation between
F rance and her smaller neighbours. His desire to
prevent the unification o f Italy and to bring about
the federalization o f A ustria-H ungary f tted in too
com fortably w ith French national inttv'sts and
French national prejudices to inspire une le confidencc in the objectivity o f his argum ent.
T h e case o f Poland is less straightforward. It
w ould be unfair to doubt the sincerity o f Proudhons
conviction that an independent Poland would be a
bulw ark o f opposition to the social revolution.
Poland has never had anything to offer the world
bu t her Catholicism and her aristocracy. H e can
hard ly have foreseen Russias future role as an ally
o f F ra n ce; for he died without having become
conscious o f the m enacing prospcct o f G erm n unity.
B ut he had an illogically persistent sym pathy for
Russia, whicr. m ay perhaps be explained b y his
tem peram ental leaning towards autocracy or b y a
com m on hatred o f dem ocratic liberalism .
Be that as it m ay, and even if one dismisses as a
passing aberration, or explains aw ay as a confusin
o f thought, his panegyric on w ar in La Giierre et la
paix, a disconcerting streak o f self-assertive national
ism is constantly getting in the w a y o f Proudhons
federalism. T h o u gh an enem y o f the State, one
whose loyalties should in theory have been bounded
b y the limits o f his own Franche-Com t, Proudhon
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Studies in Revolution
anarchism is, in Burkes phrase, the dissidence o f
dissent , and is, in its nature, recalcitrant to the idea
o f a school. Bakunin com m itted the superficial
inconsistency o f com bining anarchist doctrine with
the fruitful idea o f a conspiratorial party, highly
organized and disciplined from a b o v e ; and from
that mom ent anarchism and terrorism carne to be
associated in the public mind. T his com bination
was perhaps defensible so long as the targets o f
attack were the agents o f the detested State. But,
later on, the anarchists in the Spanish civil w ar were
to prove ju st as ruthless as other parties in their
denial o f liberty to any political opinin other than
their own, nnd ju st as confident o f their right and
duty to elim inate opponents w ith the knife or the
bullet. A s Dostoevsky once said, the end o f unlim ited liberty is unlim ited despotism.
Y e t it was not so m uch this inner inconsistency
as the w hole social and industrial developm ent o f
the period w hich condem ned anarchism to sterility.
N ineteenth-century anarchism was the philosophy
o f the isolated intellectual or o f the sm all group,
peasant or artisan, not o f the industrial masses. A t
its best it was a noble and salutary protest against
the centralizing and standardizing tendencies o f
mass civilization w ith its progressive encroachm ents
on individual freedom and individual eccentricity.
A t its worst it was a futile and aimless quest for
desperate remedies against symptoms w hich it failed
to diagnose or understand. Both these elements,
nobility and futility alike, were present in Proudhons
career and in Proudhons thought. In the history
54
r
Proudhon: Robinson Crusoe o f Socialism
o f ideas, as in his ow n life, Proudhon remains a
lonely figure an isolated eccentric. His visin o f
a world o f independent self-assertive individuais,
each seeking and striving in perfect liberty to realize
his own conception o f justice, belonged to an age
which was rapidly passing aw ay. T h e big battalions
o f the industrial revolution were on the side o f M arx.
55
HERZEN: AN
IN TELLECTU A L
R E V O LU TIO N A R Y
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Studies in Revolution
him self a rationalist, even a c y n ic ; and the profession was perfectly sincere. But this stratum was
overlaid in him b y a characteristic nineteenthcentury vein o f sentimental romanticism , both
personal and political. T his dual Outlook m ade him
a com plex character. H e was incapable o f those
straightforward enthusiasms w hich carne so naturally
and easily to his friend O garev or to Bakunin. H e
was capable though he never quite recognized it
h im self o f a naive political romanticism . But the
approach to it always la y through disillusionment
w ith current re ality ; and w ith H erzen the dis
illusionment generally seemed stronger than the
belief. T h e history o f his developm ent m ay be read
as a series o f disillusionments.
T h e first o f these disillusionments was w ith
the Russia o f Nicholas I. W hen H erzen entered
the U niversity o f M oscow in 1829 the dreary and
iron-handed repression o f N icholass regim e was at
its height, and the university was one o f the few
places where hot-headed and intelligent young men
still found an opportunity to indulge in dangerous
thoughts. A dvanced circles am ong the students fell
into two groups those who drew their revolution
a ry sustenance from G erm n metaphysics and the
teachings o f H egel, and those w ho sat at the
feet o f French political thinkers from Rousseau
to the U topian Socialists. H erzen, though he afterwards coined the famous aphorism w hich described
H egel as the algebra o f revolution , was never
a good H egelian. T h e political influences that
m ouldcd him were predom inantly F r e n c h : he
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thirteen people could be expected to travel, and was
in Paris b y the m iddle o f M arch, after seven weeks
on the road. T h e spirit o f 1789 lived on in the Paris
o f Louis-Philippe. It was still the home o f revolution
and the M ecca o f advanced political thinkers from
all over E u ro p e ; it played m uch the same role as
M oscow played in the 1920S and 1930S for the intel
lectuals o f western Europe. H erzen has left in his
memoirs an account o f his emotions when he first
stood on this holy ground :
We had been accustomed to connect the word Paris
with memories of the great events, the great masses, the
great men of 1789 and 1793, memories o f a colossal
struggle for an idea, for rights, for human dignity. . . .
The name o f Paris was closely bound up with all the
noblest enthusiasms of contemporary humanity.
I
entered it with reverence, as men used to enter Jerusalem
and Rome.
It was the first, and not the last, enthusiasm in
H erzens career bred b y rejection o f a repellent
reality.
It did not take H erzen m any weeks to becom e
disillusioned w ith the bourgeois m onarchy. In the
place o f revolution aiy ardour and passion for liberty
he found in it only a seventeen-year-old creed o f
crude egoism, o f the unclean worship o f m aterial
gain and tranquillity . Even before leaving Russia
he had described the m ercantilism and industrialism o f western Europe as a syphilitic growth
infecting the blood and bone o f so ciety . T here
was now an open clash between the spacious tradi
tions o f Russian life as lived by the well-to-do Russian
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crushed the workers.
T h e sequel provoked the
most famous passage in H erzens m em oirs:
O n the evcning o f June 26, after the victory over Pars,
we heard regular volleys at short intervals. . . . We
all looked at one another, our faces were green, . . .
Those are the cxecution squads we said with one
voice and turned away from one another. I pressed my
forehead to the window-pane and was silent: such
minutes descrve ten years o f hate, a life-time o f vengeance.
T h e year 1848 was the dividing-line in more than
H erzens life and thought. It was the moment
w hen the bourgeoisie, having, in alliance w ith the
nascent proletariat, got w hat it wanted, turned in
fear against its allies, and passed over from the
revolutionary to the conservative side o f the barrcades. It was the same story w hich was repeated,
though w ith a different ending, in that other
F ebru ary revolution o f 1917.
T his was the turning-point w hich was responsible
for H erzens last great political disillusionment and
last great act o f faith. A fter 1848 he shed altogether
his belief in the political institutions o f the west.
D em ocratic liberties w ere a sham, universal suffrage
a trck to deceive and cajole the masses. W estern
society was rotten to the core. T h e last word o
civilization , he w rote to M azzin i, is revolution.
So far H erzen, after 1848, followed the same road
as M arx, Proudhon and Bakunin. A ll four shared
the same attitude towards bourgeois d em o cracy;
none o f them had a n y words for it other than those
o f hatred or contem pt.
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social transformation, other countries will transform
themselves. There are some already prepared for this
movement, others which are preparing. One is known
I mean the States of North A m erica; the other, full o f
vigour, also full o f barbarity, is known little and badly.
H erzen s thoughts turned often at this time to
the U n ited S ta te s:
This young and enterprising people, more active than
intelligent, is so much occupied with the material
ordering o f its life that it knows none o f our torturing
pains. . . . The sturdy race o f English colonists multiplies exceedingly; and if it comes to the top, the people
belonging to it will be, I will not say happier, but more
contented. Their contentment will be poorer, more
commonplace, more sapless than that which was dreamed
o f in the ideis o f romantic E urope; but it will bring
with it no Tsars, no centralization, perhaps no hunger.
He who can put ofF the od European Adam and put on
the new Jonathan, let him take the first steamer to
somewhere in Wisconsin or Kansas. He will be better off
there than in decaying Europe.
B ut in the end it was not to A m erica but to his
ow n country that H erzen turned for salvation. I
have never felt more clearly than now , he writes
to his Russian friends in 1851, how Russian I
am .
A n d , looking back m any years later, he
records that faith in Russia saved me when I was
on the verge o f m oral ruin . T his belief in Russia
did not take the place o f the od belief in revolution :
it blended harm oniously w ith it. Russia, like the
U n ited States, was a country w ithout a history (all
the Slavs, except the Poles, belong to geography
rather than to history ) ; and nations w ithout a
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hailed the em pire o f N apolen I I I as the harbinger
o f social revolution ; how Bakunin in captivity saw,
or professed to see, visions o f an enlightened and
Progressive despotism even under Nicholas I ; and
how Lassalle was later to m ake terms with Bismarck.
H erzens illusion that A lexander I I could be impelled
b y public opinin to inaugrate in Russia an era o f
w hat he called peaceful hum an progress , though
equally vain, was on the whole less ignoble.
The Bell was a m onthly, or later a fortnightly,
Journal published in London in Russian, price sixpence, under the jo in t editorship o f H erzen and
O garev, H erzen being throughout the dom inant
partner and the driving forc o f the concern. Its
first num ber appeared on J u ly i, 1857;
its
circulation in its best period sometimes reached
from 4000 to 5000, a phenom enal success at that
time. It was the first uncensored Russian Journal
that had ever been published. Lenin, when he
wrote a laud atory article on the centenary o f
H erzens birth in 1912, praised H erzen for having
been the first to raise the standard o f battle by
turning to the masses with the free Russian word .
It sounds odd to suggest that The Bell was addressed
to the masses. H erzen was, and always rem ained,
an intellectual speaking to intellectuals, and he
belonged to an age when politics were still the prerogative and m onopoly o f the well-to-do. But he
was the first Russian public m an to use the appeal
to public opinin and the w eapon o f propaganda as
instruments o f political reform. T h a t was the perm anent significance o f The Bell in Russian history.
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notes his adm iration for Punch as a satirist o f English
bourgeois life, and records some hitherto undetected
borrowings.
B ut he found nothing to stim ulate him, and
never revised the verdict, penned three years after
his arrival in London, that life here is about as
boring as that o f worms in a cheese
In a period
o f thirteen years he made one or two English political
acquaintances C arlyle am ong them but no
English friends. T h e role o f E ngland in his political
developm ent was purely negative. A s in his youth
he had lived in Russia and believed passionately in
the freedom and dem ocracy o f the west, so now, in
his m aturity, residence in England nourished a
fervent faith in the political destinies o f a regenerated
Russia. H erzens enthusiasms always flourished in
isolation from the realities to w hich they related.
T h e liberation o f the serfs in 1861 was a Russian
landm ark com parable to the landm ark o f 1848 in
western Europe, and had similar results. B y liquidating the system o f feudal ownership it brought
Russia ostensibly into line w ith the west and paved
the w a y for industrialization.
B y satisfying the
aspirations o f the Russian liberis, it turned them
into conservatives; and it created a new generation
o f irreconcilable revolutionaries who w ould have no
truck w ith mere reformers. The Bell could no longer
hold a m iddle course. H erzen faltered and was
caught between the two fires. Both extremes seemed
to him w ro n g ; he becam e, as M a rx said o f the
Prussian bourgeoisie, revolutionary against the
conservatives, but conservative against the rcvolu-
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H erzen to rationalize his faith in Russia as the
pioneer o f social revolution. T hanks to this, Russia
could achieve socialism v/ithout havin g to pass
through the repulsive stage o f bourgeois capitalism
w hich had w rought such havoc in western Europe.
H erzen was the progenitor o f the w hole N arodnik
(and afterwards Social-R evolutionary) doctrine, o f
w hich the cult o f the Russian people, hatred o f the
western bourgeoisie and contem pt for the western
proletariat were the distinguishing features. Even
M a rx towards the end o f his life cautiously adm itted,
under pressure from the N arodniks, th at the existence
o f the Russian com m une m ight, in certain circumstances, enable Russia to m ake the direct transition
from feudalism to socialism w ithout the intervening
capitalist stage.
If, how ever, the N arodniks owed m uch to H erzen
in the shaping o f their doctrine, they em phatically
rejected his belief in the possibility o f peaceful
evolution. T h is belief H erzen also justified on the
ground o f the socialist character o f the Russian
co m m u n e; for what in the west can be achieved
o n ly through a series o f catastrophes can develop
in Russia on a basis o f w h at alread y exists . His
last political utterance is a series o f open letters
To an Od Comrade, w ritten in 1869. T h e od
com rade was Bakunin. Bakunin in his later years
idealized the Russian peasant as rom antically as
H erzen him self and believed as firm ly as H erzen in
the socialist tradition o f the Russian peasant com
m une. B ut Bakunin was a lifelong believer in
revolution b y v io le n c e ; and it is on this ground
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LASSALLE
Ge o r g
M EETS B ISM A R CK
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tem peram ent. B ut it is characteristic also o f the
age. I f the standard o f measurement be the weight,
the breadth and the duration o f the influence w hich
he exercised, H egel was beyond question the most
im portant o f m odern philosophers. H e m oulded
the thought o f more than one generation, and his
teaching was the, philosophical eradle o f every
significant political theory for a century to come.
It was his astonishing achievem ent to provide within
the limits o f a single coherent system both a creed
o f State worship and an algebra o f revolution .
From 1840 onwards the H egelian L eft had taken
the b it between its teeth and, b y a strictly logical
process o f interpretation, m ade o f the master
w h at he him self had certainly never dream ed o f
a revolutionary standard-bearer. It was prim arily
in this sense that the you n g Lassalle becam e a
H egelian. B ut he lacked M a rx s rigid consistency
and (after his early student years) M a rx s applica
tio n ; he was an agitator and pam phleteer rather
than a thin ker; and, as his later developm ent
showed, he had im bibed elements o f the H egelian
doctrine w hich w ere anathem a both to M a rx and to
Bakunin.
M a n s tem peram ent is his fate , quotes M r.
Footm an from his hero on the title-p age; and
beyond doubt Lassalles career ow ed m ore to his
tem peram ent than to his philosophy. A t the beginning o f 1846 he fell in love w ith the beautiful but
im pecunious Countess Sophie von H atzfeldt, long
separated from a w ealth y bu t m ean husband and
in the throes o f a perennial dispute w ith him about
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T h e indirect result o f Lassalles prison experiences
was to keep him out o f any direct participation
in revolutionary disturbances.
H e was the one
Prussian revolutionary o f any consequence w ho was
not seriously cornpromised, and was able to rem ain
on Prussian soil after the dbcle o f 1 8 4 9 . Thus,
through the reactionary period o f the 1 8 5 0 S , he was
uncontested leader o f w hat rem ained in G erm any of
a workers m ovem ent. W hen the political ice began
to m elt in the next decade, he becam e the founder
in 1 8 6 3 o f the first em bryonic G erm n L ab o u r
Party the G eneral G erm n W orkers Association.
T h e last tw o years o f his life m ade Lassalle a political
figure o f the first im portance.
T h a t such a m an should clash w ith M a rx for the
headship o f the G erm n workers m ovem ent was
inevitable. Personal rivalries and tem peram ental
incom patibility counted for m uch. H ere sympathies
w ill not be w h olly on the side o f M a rx. M a rx was
an intensely jealous m an, and Lassalles relative
affluence, his eloquence and the m agnetic personality w hich w on him so large a personal following,
were all more than his rival could stom ach. Lassalle
was capable o f an impulsivo generosity o f thought
and deed w hich was not in M a rx s n a tu r e ; and he
never bore m alice or nourished personal enmities.
T h a t Lassalle found time for w id e hum an and
intellectual interests including the w riting o f a
five-act historical dram a in blank verse was not
as serious a blemish on his character as it seemed to
M a rx s one-track mind.
O n the other hand, it could not be denied that,
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rebelliousness, had in it a m arked conservative
streak. C ertain ly he had a sense o f personal property
and o f the valu o f m oney (he was a constant speculator on the stock exchange) w hich was unthinkable
to M a rx or Bakunin. In the affair w ith the Countess
H atzfeldt he revealed both a keen eye to the m ain
chance and an unconcealed liking for high so c ie ty ;
and neither o f these tastes altered w ith advancing
years. These things are not com m only associated
w ith a revolutionary outlook. F ew o f those w ith
w hom he associated in his later years shared his
proletarian sym pathies. M ore im portant was the
d ictatorial strain in Lassalles character. His selfassurance, his am azing vitality, his lust for pow er
and fam e, his contem pt for the com m on m an all
these seemed, at the period o f history to w hich he
belonged, to deny him an y natural affinity w ith the
political Left.
It w ould, how ever, be superficial to dismiss the
rift between M a rx and Lassalle as an affair o f
personal or political rivals between w hom tem pera
m ent and circum stance had fixed an unbridgeable
g u lf o f incom patibility. T o take such a view w ould
be to underestim ate Lassalles influence and signifi
cance a mistake which, incidentally, M a rx him
self did not m ake. I t m ay w ell be argued th at
in the history o f nineteenth- and tw entieth-century
G erm any Lassalle proved eventually a more potent
forc than M a r x ; and the conceptions for w hich he
stood m ade their w ay, even in countries w here he
exercised no direct influence at all. H e was one o f
the first protagonists and instruments o f a historical
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the other was that the form er accepted the State (in
the form o f the dictatorship o f the proletariat) as a
tem porary, bu t necessary, evil until the communist
society had been fully established, w hile the anar
chists w ould not agree to palter even tem porarily
w ith the iniquities o f State power.
F or this tradition, w ith its belief in the dying
a w a y o f the State as the ultim ate goal, Lassalle was
too good a H egelian to have any sym pathy w h at
ever ; and as the years went on he carne more and
more to regard the State as the potential instrument
through w hich the wrongs o f the workers could be
redressed and the aims o f socialism attained. H e
attacked the bourgeois State not, like M arx, because
it was strong and oppressive, but because it was weak
and futile. His was the famous phrase o f contem pt
for the night-w atchm an State , coined in a speech
o f 1862 w hich he published as The Workers^
Programme:
T h u s the m id dle class conceives the m oral object o f
the State.
T h is object consists sim ply and solely in
securing the personal freedom o f the in d ivid u al and his
property. T h is is the n igh t-w atch m an theory, for this
conception can regard the State only under the form o f
a n igh t-w atch m an whose duties are confined to preventin g bu rglary an d theft.
Studies in Revolution
workers party
In 1862 he delivered in Berlin,
at the celebration o f the Fichte centenary, a laudatory lecture on Fichte as a great G erm n patriot
and the prophet o f G erm n unity.
T h e stage was now set for the final episode o f
Lassalles political career his meetings w ith Bis
m arck. A certain piquancy is added to the situation
by a letter o f some two years earlier to the Gountess
H atzfeldt, in w hich Lassalle had called Bism arck
a reactionary Junker from w hom one can only
expcct reactionary measures , a m an who would
rattle his sword to get the m ilitary budget through
on the pretence that w ar is im m inent . U ntil the
1 9 2 0 S the principal authority for these meetings was
a statem ent m ade in 1878 by Bism arck him self in
response to an interrogation in the R eichstag. This
statem ent left it in doubt exactly w hen they took
place and on whose initiative. Letters and other
docum ents now available date the first m eeting in
M a y 1863, at the mom ent when the G eneral Germ n
W orkers Association was being constituted, and
show that the invitation carne direct, without any
prelim inary contacts, from Bism arck himself. This
discovery p artially relieves Lassalle o f the charge
afterwards levelled at his m em ory b y his rivals o f
h avin g deliberately sought to ingratiate him self with
the ruling powers. But it also assigns to Bism arck
rather than to Lassalle the stroke o f genius w hich
perceived a bond o f com m on interest between them
capable o f being exploited to their m utual advantage. It m ay also be recalled that when, some years
later, M a rx received similar, though less direct,
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O u t o f the soil prepared b y these coincidences
o f interest and outlook grew that w orking alli
ance betw een Bism arcks nationalism and Lassalles
socialism the social-service State or State
socialism w hich was Bism arcks specific contri
bution to dom estic policy. E xactly w h at passed
between them when they met, exactly how m uch
Bism arck was influenced b y w hat did pass, cannot
be know n.
E ven the num ber o f meetings is a
m atter o f guesswork : Bism arck himself, fifteen years
later, m entioned three or fo u r , the Countess
H atzfeldt tw enty .
T h e records show that
Lassalle pressed for universal suffrage; and Bis
m arcks subsequent adoption o f it can h ard ly be
dissociated altogether from his pleadings.
It is
certain that, at Lassalles instigation, Bism arck
caused the K in g to receive a deputation o f Silesian
weavers and to promise them consideration o f their
grievances. Lassalle was acute enough to guess that
Bism arck w anted to put through the social part
o f our program m e, but not the political part .
W h at he did not foresee was that Bismarck, having
been astute enough to dish the socialists b y
stealing the m ore harmless and practical trappings
o f their program m e, w ould one d a y be strong
enough to take repressive measures against the p arty
itself.
W h atever their im m ediate influence, the meetings
were a historical landm ark. T h e com ing together
o f the masterful Prussian Prim e M inister and the
headstrong socialist agitator sym bolized the new and
pregnant alliance between nationalism and socialism.
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w ar, it can afford to spend w ithout lim it fo r social
purposes in peace. His proposal to organize, in the
p lace o f trade unions, productive unions supported b y the State, was a foretaste o f the alm ost
exactly sim ilar proposal w hich was m ade b y T rotsky
in the early 1920S and which, though then rejected,
helped to m ould the future shape o f the Soviet trade
unions and perhaps o f others. Lassalle was not
a profound or system atic thinker. H is treatises on
la w and economics, for all their prctentiousness, are
the w ork o f a clever dettante, not o f a master o f his
subjects. B ut he had an uncanny aplitude for
discerning the significant developm ent o r the signifi
cant idea o r rather the developm ent o r idea
w hich w ould one d a y becom e significant. In m an y
respects it is easier to-d ay than it w ould have been
fifty years ago to recognize how fa r he was in advance
o f his tim e..
T h e period follow ing Lassalles death seemed to
spell thedefeat o f nearly everything for w h ich he stood.
S ix weeks after the fatal duel in G eneva, M a rx
brought to birth in L ondon the International W orking
M en s Association the First International. In
G erm an y M a rx s followers steadily underm ined
the Lassallean trad itio n ; and w hen the U nited
Social D em ocratic P arty was at length founded
in 1875, Lassalles G eneral G erm n W orkers
Association was m erged in it w ith out leaving
more than superficial traces on its program m e
and leadership. Socialism had been established
on a solid international basis; an d Bism arcks
legislation against the socialists seemed to m ark the
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SOM E N IN E T E E N T H -C E N T U R Y
R U SSIA N TH IN K E R S
u s s i a n social and political thought in the nine. teenth century is o f high interest and im portance
on tw o counts. It inspired one o f the great Creative
periods o f m odern lite ra tu re ; and it forms the
backgrdund o f the Russian revolution o f 1917. Its
significance in the second context has been increased
b y the recent tendency to dwell on the continuity
o f Russian history before and after the revolution
rather than on the break in continuity w hich was
the them c o f the first revolutionary writers and
historians.
Shordy before the first world w ar T . G . M asaryk,
the future president o f the Czechoslovak R epublic,
published a detailed survey o f Russian ninetcenthcentury thought w hich was translated into English
in 1919 under the title The Spirit o f Russia. But,
w hile numerous articles have been written about
individuais or particular movements, no further
synoptic view o f the w hole field seems to have
been attem pted in any language till the publication
in Paris in 1946 o f B erd yacvs The Russian Idea,
w hich has since appeared in a w cicom e English
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In Russia itself Belinsky was the most signifi
can t representative o f the men o f the forties .
Belinsky shifted the focus o f the revolutionary m ove
m ent from the conscience-stricken gentry to the
middie-class intelligentsia o f which he was the forerunner and creator. T h o u gh m uch o f his com paratively b rief period o f literary activity was occupied
b y incessant controversy about the interpretation o f
H egel (one o f the guises in w hich political specula
tion m ight still hope to escape the censors vigilance),
he m ade the transition from the idealism o f H egel
to the m aterialism o f Feuerbach. H im self dying
in 1848 in his thirty-seventh year, he paved the
w a y for the new generation o f the sixties and set
the revolutionary m ovem ent on a m aterialist basis
w hich was not thereafter challenged.
I t was the m en o f the sixties Chernyshevsky, D obrolyubov and Pisarev are generally
nam ed as the most im portant and typical o f them
w ho began to give to the revolution the shape in
w hich it ultim ately trium phed. L ike Belinsky, they
were obliged to couch their ideas in the form o f
philosophical or literary criticism, and were contributors to those solid advanced periodicals to
w hich the relaxed censorship o f A lexan d er II offered
a tem porary and m uch qualified licence o f opinin,
Chernyshevsky, who w on laudatory appraisals both
from M a rx and from Lenin, has been m uch studied
in revolutionary Russia. A collected edition o f his
works in ten volum es appeared before the w a r ; and
his novel What is to be Done? published in 1864, the
yea r in w hich he was condem ned for subversive
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w ith the assassination o f A lexand er II b y Z h elyabo v
and his group in 1881.
T h e revolutionary m ovem ent was now ripe for
its last stage. H itherto every Russian revolutionary
had assumed that, in an agricultural country like
Russia, the peasantry must ultim ately be the back
bone o f the revolution. But b y the beginning o f the
1880S the cam paign o f going to the people had
failed to stir the peasant, and terrorism had been
defeated b y popular apath y and plice repression.
A new start was required. It was tw enty years since
the em ancipation o f the serfs had started the process
o f the industrialization o f Russia w ith foreign capital.
In 1883 Plekhanov founded the first Russian M arxist
group and planted the roots o f M arxism in the new
industrial proletariat o f Russia. T h e last consider
able social and econom ic essay o f the century was
L en in s m aiden work, On the Development o f Capitalism
in Russia, w hich set out to prove that R ussia was
treading the western path o f bourgeois capitalism
on the w a y to proletarian revolution.
Independent Russian thought , writes Ber
dyaev, was aw akened b y the problem o f the
philosophy o f history.
It had reflected deeply
upon w h at the thoughts o f the C reator w ere about
Russia, about w h at Russia is and about w h at sort
o f destiny it has. Such passages, as w ell as the very
title o f his book, show that B erdyaev em braces a
kind o f national mysticism a sense o f the destiny
o f Russia as the explanation o f her history w hich
seems to be bound up w ith his acceptance o f O rth o
d ox Christianity. H e does not even eschew the
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consistent expositors, it becam e a pow erful bod y o f
doctrine. Its essential tenets were that Russia had
a tradition and civilization o f her own cntirely
independent o f those o f the w e s t ; that Russia was
called on to follow her own line o f de\ elopment, not
to borrow from the west; and that the future
belonged not to decadent Europe but to young and
unspoiled Russia, w h at was com m only referred to as
R ussias backwardness thus becom ing a positive
asset.
A mistake com m only m ade about the controversy
between westerners and Slavophils is to equate
westerners w ith radicais and revolutionaries and
Slavophils w ith conservatives and reactionaries.
T h e re was a western conservative, as w ell as a
western radical, tra d itio n : C h aad aev, for exam ple;
though an out-and-out westerner, was not in an y
sense a radical. N or did those Russians who looked
for enlightenm ent to the west necessarily accept
existing western institutions. H erzen, a professed
westerner and dem ocrat, had little use for the
dem ocratic institutions w h ich he found at w ork in
western E u ro p e; and the Russian M arxists, w ho
must be classified as westerners, none the less
denounced the bourgeois d em ocracy o f the west.
O n the other hand, the first Slavophils, scarcely
less than the westerners, w ere in revolt against the
repressive officialdom o f N icholas I. It is true that
they purported to seek their ideal in an im aginary
Russian past.
B ut Slavophilism (w hich Pisarev
called a psychological phenom enon duc to unsatisfied needs ) had even less to do w ith the facts
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and wom en as to study individual birch trees. T h e
typical westerner Belinsky was as conscious o f the
underlying dilem m a as the typical Slavophil (so far
as concerns his later years) Dostoevsky and expresses
it in strikingly sim ilar terms.
H egel opened the debate. His immense influence
in Russia was beyond doubt due to the faet that he
represented a reaction against the individualism
o f the Enlightenm ent, a victory, in B erdyaevs
words, o f the general over the particular, o f
the universal over the individual, o f society over
personality . In the Russian argum ent over H egel,
Belinsky carne to occupy the central place. H e
ran through the w hole gam ut o f experience and
changed his attitude to the extent o f i8o degrees
between the article on G riboedov, in w hich he
cxclaim ed that society is always juster and higher
than the private person , and the letter to Botkin
in w hich he declared that the fate o f the subject,
o f the individual, o f the personality is more im portant
than the fate o f the w hole w orld
T h e second
position was that in w hich he ultim ately found
anchor. It was as a disciple o f Belinsky that Ivan
K aram azo v was presently to s a y : I renounce
altogether the higher h a rm o n y ; it is not w orth the
smallest tear o f one torm ented child .
Belinsky found his w a y out o f the dilem m a in
the conception o f a new society based on respect for
the individual personality, on truth and justice
that is to say, in a socialism w hich was U topian not
so m uch in its organization as in its m ajor premise.
Dostoevsky sought his solution in a new synthesis
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His ciiorm ously popular novel What is to be Done?
depicted a set o f young people actuated b y w hat
were supposed to be the purest principies o f rational
egoisin which, illogically enough, did not exelude
the duty, eagerly recognized and accepted, o f sacrificing ones im m ediate interest to those ultim ate
principies.
Pisarev, as usual, was responsible for the systematization and reductio ad extremum o f the doctrine :
T h e m orality o f m en does not depend on their
qualities o f heart or nature, on abundance o f virtue or
absence o f v i c e : words o f this kind have no tangible
m eaning. T h e m orality o f this or th a t society depends
exclusively on the question to w h at degree the members
o f the society are conscious o f their ow n interests.
M o re o v e r:
In order to b e a m oral m an it is indispensable to be
to a certain degree a thinking m an : bu t the facu lty of
thinking only becom es strong and w ell developed w hen
the in dividual succeeds in escaping from the yoke o f
m aterial necessity.
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Petersburg ch ef as a m ore useful m em ber o f society
than R ap h ael, and added that he him self would
rather be a Russian cobbler than a Russian R aph ael.
Stated in this extrem e form, such views ended b y
refuting themselves. But it w ould be rash to pretend
that the utilitarian view o f art was ever seriously
supplanted b y the opposition w hich Pisarevs chal
lenge excited. T h e glorification o f Pushkin b y the
Slavophils was an answer to Pisarev. B ut it was an
answer on his own ground. Pushkin was not, as
Pisarev had pretended, useless to society: on the
contrary, he was highly valuable to it because he
inculcated and encouraged a right view o f m ans
place in it. N either side denied that content was
w h at ultim ately m attered, or had a n y truck w ith
anything that sm acked o f art for arts s a k e ; not
until the symbolist m ovem ent appeared at the turn
o f the century was this view seriously contcsted.
or did anything happen to shake the conviction o f
the sixties that art was an essentially aristqcratic
and conservative phenom enon, w hile Science was
dem ocratic and progressive. Such prejudices died
hard in nineteenth-century Russia. It is not certain
that they are dead to-day.
It remains to consider Russian nineteenth-century
thought in its relation to the State. B erdyaev is
hard ly correct in claim ing anarchism as the
creation o f Russians . T h e genealogy o f anar
chism goes back to W illiam G odw in, if not farther :
it was firm ly em bedded in the incipient socialist
movements o f western Europe before it established
itself in Russia. B ut the significant point is that a
too
I. ^ c. H.
~ . F n. a. fs
C l IC .A POLlfiCA
CibLlCT(. A
Studies in Revolution
against M a rx was that M a rx was a believer in State
p o w er w hich the Russian anarchist regarded as a
characteristically G erm n trait.
W h en L enin, steeped as he was in Russian as
w ell as in M arxist thought, carne to expound his
view o f the State in State and Revolution, at the
criticai m om ent o f 1917, w h at he did was to refurbish
the old western socialist tradition o f hostility to the
State, w hich rem ained em bedded and h a lf buried in
classical Mai-xism, in order to convict the Germ n
Social-D em ocrats o f a State worship incom patible
w ith the fundam ental tenets o f M a rx. Beelzebub
was invoked to cast out Beelzebub.
State and
Revolution, w ith its double insistence on the im m ediate
dictatorship o f the proletariat and ultim ate dying
a w a y o f the State, is a characteristic synthesis o f
west and east, o f Jacobinism and anarchism . I t is
a striking exam ple o f L en ins superlativo skill in
rooting western revolutionary doctrines in congenial
Russian soil.
M asaryk, the western liberal, who com pleted his
survey o f Russian thought before the revolution at a
tim e when m any western observers still believed in
the prospect o f a liberal and dem ocratic evolution
o f Russian society, regarded the choice before
Russia as one between theocracy and dem ocracy.
B erdyaev, the O rth o d o x philosopher, has a double
advantage o f standpoint. H e writes as a Russian
w ho understands as no western liberal, how
ever acute his perceptions, could ever understand
the lack o f an y foundation in R ussian thought
and tradition w h ich could have carried the elabrate
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a philosophy w h ich em braces politics, society and
art and uses them as the expression o f its purpose
a ll these are the direct legacy to Bolshevism o f
R ussian rad ical thinkers o f the nineteenth century,
T h e debt to the Slavophils, though in some
respects paradoxical, is unm istakable. T h e rejection
o f bourgeois dem ocracy, o f bourgeois individualism ,
o f bourgeois notions o f property (Berdyaev him self
rem arks that the Soviet constitution o f 1936
enacted the best legislation in the w orld about
property ) links Soviet theory and practice w ith a
long line o f Russian thinkers. T h e Russian messianism o f the Slavophils, philosophical rather than
political in its origin but susceptible o f political
perversions, reappears in the form o f a messianism
o f the proletariat.
Com m unism , writes Ber
d yaev, is a Russian phenom enon in spite o f its
M arxist ideology. Com m unism is Russian d e stin y;
it is a m om ent in the inner destiny o f the Russian
people. T his is an exaggeration o f the specifically
Russian aspects o f Bolshevism, w h ich m ay be
dangerous i f it induces the belief that Com m unism
has no m ore than an exten ial and episodio interest
for other nations. B ut no student o f Russian history
w ill be tem pted to ignore the grain o f truth which
it contains.
104
PLEKHANOV:
FA TH ER OF R U SSIA N
M A R X ISM
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Studies in Revolution
M arxism , and laid the foundations o f Russian SocialD em ocracy. Born in 1856, he graduated as a revolu
tion ary in the N arodnik m ovem ent, breaking w ith
it in 1880 on the issue o f individual terrorism, which
he rejected as fu tile and irrelevant. T h e assassination o f A lexander II in 1881 led to a general round-up
ofrevolutionaries ; and Plekhanov was already abroad.
T h e next tw o years were decisive. T h e break
w ith the N arodniks on the policy o f terrorism, and
the manifest bankruptcy o f that p olicy after 1881,
led Plekhanov to re-exam ine the basic tenets o f the
N arodnik philosophy the belief that the peasantry
was the com ing revolutionary forc in Russia. T his
belief, attested b y a long tradition o f peasant revolts
and revolutionary peasant leaders, from Stenka R azin
to Pugachev, was universally held in the west as in
the east. M a rx him self had encouraged the favourite
N arodnik speculation that the Russian peasant
com m une was destined to evolve into a socialist
society without an intervening capitalist stage.
Plekhanovs claim to an outstanding place am ong
the makers o f the O cto b er revolution is the insight,
brilliantly original in the early eighteen-eighties,
that capitalism was already in the process o f striking
roots in Russia, that its developm ent w ould create
a Russian proletariat, and that it was this Russian
proletariat, and not the Russian peasantry, w hich
w ould provide the driving-force and the ideological
justification o f the Russian revolution. T h ere was
thus no rcason to place Russia outside the orthodox
M arxist scheme. T h e trend o f Plekhanovs thinking
was apparent in 1882 w h en he published a Russian
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Studies in Revolution
at all , he was uttering a bold paradox.
Such was the picture when L en in entered the
lists w ith a vigorous polem ic against the Narodniks,
in 1894. B y this time Russian capitalism , under the
pow erful im pulse o f W itte, was grow ing b y leaps
and bounds; the first serious strikes and demonstrations o f workers had occurred in P etrograd ;
and the views o f Plekhanov were com ing into their
own.
Sm all M arxist groups sprang up in the
principal Russian cities. O n the other hand, the
authorities still saw revolution in terms o f N arodniks
and terrorists; and they were not displeased w ith
the appearance o f this new sect w h ich was splitting
the revolutionary m ovem ent, w hich did not appear
to be preaching im m ediate action and w hich was
m ainly occupied in analysing the grow th o f Russian
capitalism . F or a few years the writings o f the
M arxists, provided they were couched in learned
and not openly provocativo language, received the
imprimatur o f the censors. It was the period o f w hat
carne to be known as legal M arxism .
T his curious circum stance explains w h y Ple
kh anovs c h ie f philosophical w ork was also the only
one o f his writings legally published in Russia before
the revolution. H e com pleted it in L ondon in 1894.
I t was copied out b y an enthusiastic young Russian
M arxist nam ed Potresov, who carried the m anuscript back w ith him to Petrograd and secured a
publisher for it. T h e conditions o f its publication
also explain w h y the title originally chosen for it b y
Plekhanov (which has been restored in the present
translation) was abandoned in favour o f the m eaning108
Studies in Revolution
process. In postulating that the ultim ate source is to
be found in changes in m aterial conditions o f production, M a rx does not pretend that these oprate
autom atically or without the conscious intervention
o f free hum an w ill. In a famous letter w ritten in
the last years o f his life, Engels goes so far as to adm it
that he and M a rx m ay sometimes have overstated
the role o f the econom ic factor and neglected the
o th er factors in the reciprocai interactions o f the
historical process .
T h e doctrine o f dialectical
m aterialism thus gains in subtlety w hat it loses in the
false sim plicity sometimes attributed to it.
T ranslated (as all M arxist philosophy must be)
into concrete political terms, the M arxist doctrine o f
m an and m atter raises the issue o f the respective
roles in revolutionary policy o f the spontaneous
action o f the masses, w hich is dependent on objective
m aterial situations, and o f conscious leadership,
w hich is based on a study and grasp o f revolutionary
theory. T h e balance is so nice that writcrs and
actors in the revolutionary dram a are in constant
danger o f tipping it over on one side or the other.
Plekhanov, w hile stating the doctrine fairly enough,
leans on the w hole towards those w ho count on the
ripening o f objective conditions to produce spon
taneous action as the m ain revolutionary forc.
H istory is m ade b y the masses , he wrote in a
famous passage. . . . W hile w e are preparing the
leaders o f the revolutionary arm y, the officers and
non-commissioned officers o f the revolutionary arm y,
that arm y itself is being created b y the irreversible
m arch o f social developm ents.
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Studies in Revolution
W hen L enin em erged from exile in 1900 he met
Potresov and another young revolutionary called
M arto v, and between them the three hatched a
project to found a popular revolutionary Journal and
a solid M arxist periodical, to be called Iskra ( T h e
S p ark ) and Z^rya ( T h e D aw n ) respectively,
a n d to be issued somewhere in Europe. It was
Potresov w ho, having well-to-do relations, furnished
the funds and seems at the outset to have been the
m oving spirit in the enterprise. M r. Rothstein, who
od d ly refers to Potresov as Plekhanovs publisher ,
ignores altogether Potresovs role in the foundation
o f Iskra, w hich he ascribes to Lenin alone. It is true
that Potresov becam e a M enshevik in 1903, a
defencist in 1914 and a bitter enem y o f the
Bolshevik revolution after 1917. But these subsequent falls from grace need not depose him from his
distinguished niche in the pre-history o f the revolu
tion. Be this as it m ay, the three young men
proceeded, one b y one, to Sw itzerland to la y the
scheme before Plekhanov and his group.
N ot
without difficulty, agreem ent was reached.
The
journals were to be published w ith an editorial
board consisting o f Plekhanov, A xelrod and Zasulich, Lenin, Potresov and M artov.
T h e possibilities o f friction were soon apparent.
Plekhanov, the snior m cm ber and undisputed doyen
o f the group, rem ained in his own eyes and in those
o f others the presiding genius o f the enterprise. Lenin
q uickly em erged head and shoulders above his fellow
editors b y his energy, b y the clarity o f his ideas, and
b y his determ ination to establish both a bod y o f
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Studies in Revolution
the d iscip le ; but now the determ ination and forcefulness o f the disciple carried a w a y the master
himself.
Plekhanov supported L en in throughout
the congress. T his did not save L enin from being
defeated on the issue o f the rules. B ut b y a turn o f
the wheel, his group secured a m ajority in the
elections o f p arty officers. T his victory had two
results. Lenin and his supporters are know n to
posterity as Bolsheviks or m ajority-m en, leavin g
the title o f M en sh evik s to the m in o rity; and
L enin and Plekhanov were left in undisputed
control o f Iskra, the organ o f p a rty policy.
Plekhanov had now reached the sum mit and
turning-point o f his career.
M a n y explanations
m ight be suggested o f the next phase. T h o u gh he
was not yet fifty, com plaints about his health began
to be heard at this tim e ; he m ay have lacked the
physical strength and endurance to cope w ith the
younger rival w ho was driving him w here he did
not w ant to go. Plekhanov was b y character a m ild
m an a man o f the pen rather than o f action. In
words he could be trenchant enough.
A t the
congress he had shocked the delegates, and provoked
some hisses, b y proclaim ing, w ith a logic less faulty
(unless the reporters have traduced him) than his
L a t in : salus revolutiae suprema lex. B ut in practice
the cloak and dagger were antipathetic to him.
N ature had fitted him to theorize about revolution,
not to m ake it. Stalin rather unkindly lum ps him
w ith K a u tsk y am ong the theorists whose role is
finished as soon as revolution a ctu ally begins.
A noth er cause o f the split was diagnosed by
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Studies in Revolution
betw een the proletariat and the peasantry and to
carry it forw ard a t the earliest m om ent to the
socialist stage, that he encountered the stern opposi- _
tion, in the am e o f M arxist orthodoxy, o f Plekhanov
and the Mensheviks.
Psychologically and politically the break was
overdue when Plekhanov and L en in celebrated
their jo in t victo ry at the 1903 congress. Plekhanov
was quickly shocked b y the ruthless consistency w ith
w h ich L en in proposed to exploit the victory. T h e
M ensheviks, w hom L enin wished to excom m unicate,
included most o f Plekhanovs old friends and associates. T h e rigid p arty discipline in matters o f opinin
as w ell as o f organization w h ich L en in wished to
enforce was alien to Plekhanovs western notions o f
political organization and agitation. U n th in kab ly
for Lenin, Plekhanov began to advcate reconciliation w ith the dissidents. Before the end o f 1903
L en in had resigned from the editorial board o f
Iskra; Plekhanov had co-opted on to it the form er
members rejected b y the congress, M ensheviks a l l ;
Iskra had becom e a M enshevik o rg a n ; and L en in
had been left to organize his Bolsheviks as an
independent faction.
T h e next tw elve months saw a series o f scathing
articles from Plekhanovs pen against L en in and
the Bolsheviks. L en in s What is to be Done? was
answered b y Plekhanovs What not to Do. L enin
was declared gu ilty o f fostering a sectarian spirit
o f exclusin , o f claim ing to act in obedience to
an infallible class instinct , o f confusing the
dictatorship o f the proletariat w ith the dictatorship
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Studies in Revolution
allow ed Plekhanov to return to Russia after an
in terval o f thirty-six years. H e took part in the
famous dem ocratic conference in M oscow in
A ugust, and denounced the Bolsheviks both before
and after the O cto b er revolution. F or a reissue o f
his thirty-four-year-old essay on Socialism and the
Political Struggle he wrote a postscript (it has not been
reprinted in the collected edition), in w hich he
accused Lenin o f reviving an old N arodnik heresy b y
supposing that the introduction o f socialism could
be m ade to coincide w ith the overthrow o f the old
regim e, and predicted fearful harm from the
attem pt to telescope the bourgeois and proletariat
revolutions. W hen over-zealous R ed G uards ransacked the house in Tsarskoe Selo w here Plekhanov
la y sick, his friends protested to Lenin ; and an order
was issued in the nam e o f the C ouncil o f Peoples
Commissars to protect the person and property o f
Citizen Plekhanov
T h e m aterial guarantee was
thus accom panied b y a verbal insult. Plekhanov
was no longer a socialist com rade bu t a bourgeois
Citizen ,
Plekhanov was now in an advanced stage o f
tuberculosis, and died before the revolution was a
year old. A t his own request he was buried in
Petrograd near the grave o f Belinsky. T h e request
was significant o f Plekhanovs political affinities in
his later years. Belinsky the typical m an o f the
forties had evolved from the position o f a
H egelian conservative to that o f a H egelian political
radical. H e ended where M a rx began, and, d ying
young, was always in the vanguard o f his ow n conii8
1*9
8
TH E
A
GRADEE
O F B O L S H E V IS M
VV
T he Oradle o f Bolshevism
Russian working-class was entirdy deprived of
what its foreign comrades freely and peacefully
enjoy a share in the administration o f the State,
freedom of the spoken and written word, freedom
of organization and assembly
These were neces
sary instruments in the struggle for its final liberation, against private property, for socialism
In
the west the bourgeoisie had won these freedoms.
In Russia conditions were different.
The farther east one goes in Europe, the weaker,
meaner and more cowardly becomes the bourgeoisie in
the political sense, and the greater the cultural and
political tasks which fali to the lot of the proletariat.
On its strong shoulders the Russian working class must
and will carry the work of conquering political liberty.
This is an essential step, but only the first step, to the
realization of the great historie mission of the proletariat,
to the foundation of a social order in which there will
be no place for the exploitation of man by man.
In western democratic terms, the programme was
extreme but constitutional.
In Tsarist Russia it
was unconditionally revolutionary; the intention to
throw off the yoke o f the autocracy was specific
ally proclaimed.
Nearly three years later a fresh start was made
when the three young revolutionary Marxists
Lenin, Potresov and Martov who had just served
sentences in Siberia for illegal activities met the
Liberation o f Labour group in Switzerland.
Lenin was then thirty.
Since 1894, when his
first political writing had been circulated in hectograph form, he had been known as an able and
I2Z
Studies in Revolution
vigorous disciple o f Plekhanov; and he had been,
before his arrest in December 1895, ^ leading spirit
in one of the groups represented at the 1898 conr
gress. He now showed himself the most energetic
member of the Iskra board. It was he who drafted
the manifesto announcing the new Journal, and who
was its steadiest and most prolific contributor. It
was he who led the agitation for a second party
congress to take up again the work begun and interrupted at Minsk. The congress, which opened
in July 1903, was the real founding congress of the
party not the less because its concluding stage
also produced the epoch-making split between
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
T he breach was
intensified when, three months after the congress,
the wavering Plekhanov went over to the M en
sheviks, Lenin resigned from the board and Ishra
became a Menshevik organ.
The party thus founded in 1898, refounded in
1903 and (so far as its Bolshevik wing was concerned)
remodelled by Lenin after the split, became the
directing instrument of the revolution o f October
1917. The congress of 1903 was the crucial turningpoint in its history, the focus round which all the
main party controversies, both earlier and later,
revolved.
Some understanding o f these contro
versies is essential to any judgment on the revolu
tion itself and on the events which issued from it.
The English reader can find an account o f them
in the unsatisfactory official short History o f the Gom
munist Party o f the Soviet Union, published in 1938, or
in Popovs less cursory Outline History o f the Gommunist
123
T he Oradle o f Bolshevism
Party o f the Soviet Union, published five years earlier.
T h e Russian reader is em barrassed only b y the
mass o f often indigestible and unreliable m aterial.
A n im portant recent accession to the Russian
sources o f p arty history is The Origin o f Bolshevism,
b y F. I. Dan,* the form er M enshevik leader, who
died almost at the m om ent o f its publication in
N ew Y o rk.
T h e last chapter contains w h at is
virtually a recantation o f D a n s previous attitude,
and the book represents a sincere, though not
uncritical, acceptance o f L en in s views. It bears
some o f the marks o f a w ork o f old age, but is full
both o f know ledge and o f penetration. N o more
objective account o f early party history has been
w ritten b y any o f those w ho participated in it.
W hen the 1903 congress met, three ideological
battles had been fought and w o n ; and these three
victories form ed the basis o f the p arty program m e
unanim ously adopted b y the congress. A s against
the N arodniks, the Russian Social-D em ocratic
W orkers P arty regarded the proletariat and not the
peasant as the bearer o f the com ing revo lu tio n ; as
against the legal M arxists , it preached revolu
tionary action and no com prom ise w ith the bourgeoisie ; as against the economists , it emphasized
the essentially political character o f the p arty pro
gram m e.
T h e cam paign against the N arodniks had been
conducted b y P lekhanov in the eighties and
early nineties.
T h e Russian revolution , ran
Plekhanovs famous aphorism, w ill trium ph as
* F . I . D a n , Proiskhozhdenie Bolshevizma.
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Studies in Revolution
a proletarian revolution, or it will not triumph at
all. This clearly meant that the way to revolution
in Russia would be paved by industrial developm en t; and in the last decade of the century Witte
and foreign capitalists were busy fulfilling this
requirement.
Lenin, in the writings against the
Narodniks which opened his polemicai career, had
little to do but to drive home Plekhanovs arguments
and to point tellingly to what was happening in
Russia before the eyes of all. The star of the indus
trial worker was rising, the star of the backward
peasant waning, in the revolutionary firmament. It
was not until 1905 that the problem of fitting the
Russian peasant into the revolutionary scheme
again became a burning party issue.
The struggle against the legal Marxists ,
whose views, expressed in slightly cryptic language,
were allowed by the censorship to appear in learned
journls, was more complicated. The ablest member
of the group was Peter Struve, author of the mani
festo o f the Minsk congress; and Bulgakov and
Berdyaev, who later joined the Orthodox Ghurch,
were at one time members of it. Lenin welcomed
the temporary alliance of the legal Marxists
against the Narodniks.
They accepted without
qualification the Marxist view of the development
of capitalism as a first step towards the eventual
achievement of socialism, and believed that in this
respect Russia must tread the western path. So far
Lenin agreed with them. But insistence on the
necessity of the capitalist stage led them to treat
this development as an end in itself and to substituto
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T he Oradle o f Bolshevism
reform for revolution as the process out o f w hich
socialism w ould eventually g ro w ; and it was on
this point that Lenin attacked legal M arxism as
tantam ount to dem ocratic liberalism and the enem y
o f the proletariat.
This attitude towards the legal M arxists was
sym ptom atic o f a dilem m a w hich pursued the party
for m any years. M arxist theory from the Communist
Manifesto onwards m ade it clear that, so long as
political freedom had not been achieved, the pro
letariat shared w ith the bourgeoisie the same interest
in w inning it. In pursuance o f this theory the p arty
program m e adopted b y the second congress laid it
down that the p arty supports every opposition and
revolutionary m ovem ent directed against the existing
social and political order in Russia
It was a
rather undistinguished delegate to the congress who
pointed out that o n ly tw o contem porary m ovem ents
answered to this description the Social-R evolutionaries (who were the heirs o f the Narodniks) and
the legal M arxists and that the congress had
passed resolutions specifically condem ning both o f
them. N o read y reply was forthcom ing. W h atever
M arxist theory required, co-operation between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie for a specific end,
com m on to both, could never be free from em barrassment so long as the destruction o f the bourgeoisie
rem ained the ultim ate goal o f the proletarian revolu
tion.
T h is inherent contradiction, and not the
intolerance o f L enin or his successors, was responsible
for a long-standing crux.
T h e economists , against w hom the third
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Studies in Revolution
ideological battle o f these years was fought, were
a group o f M arxist intellectuals who in the autum n
o f 1897 started in Petersburg a jo u m a l called .
The Workers' Thought. L ike the legal M arxists ,
they rem ained within the constitutional fram ework,
eschewed revolution and treated socialism as a
distant ideal. U nlike the legal M arxists , w ho
confined themselves to theory, they had a program m e
o f action. T h e advance to socialism must be b y
stages. A t the present stage in Russia, the classconsciousness o f the worker could be stim ulated
b y encouraging him to concntrate on econom ic
dem ands for econom ic ends, to better his condition b y trade-union organization, m utual aid, selfeducation and so forth.
M eanw hile, political action must be reserved for
the in tellectu als; and, since there was as yet no
basis for a M arxist political program m e, that action
could only take the form o f supporting the liberal
bourgeoisie in their dem and for political freedom.
In the words o f the docum ent w hich served as the
manifesto o f the group :
Discussions about an independent workers political
party are nothing but the result o f transferring foreign
problems and foreign Solutions to our soil. . . . For the
Russian Marxist there is one way o u t : to help the eco
nomic struggle o f the proletariat and to particpate in
the activity o f the liberal opposition.
T he Oradle o f Bolshevism
wa.ve of industrial strikes which began to sweep over
Russia in 1896, and it was for five years an influential movement, perhaps the most influential
movement, among Russian Marxists. But it was at
once denounced by Plekhanov in Switzerland and
by Lenin and his fellow-exiles in Siberia as a denial
of the essence of Social-Democracy. The controversy
was carried on into the Iskra period; and a good
part of Lenins first major work, What is to be Done ?
published in 1902, was devoted to a polemic against
the economists
Political as well as economic
agitation was needed to arouse the class-consciousness of the masses.
The ideal of the Social-Democrat must be not a
trade-union secretary, but a tribune o f the people. . . . A
trade-union policy for the working class is simply a
bourgeois policy for the working class.
When the second party congress met in 1903,
the three tendencies represented by the Narodniks,
the legal Marxists and the economists ap
peared to have received their death-blow, being
almost unanimously denounced by the delegates
by future Mensheviks as well as by future Bolsheviks.
Yet it was a Pyrrhic victory. The Social-Revolutionaries took up the unanswered challenge o f the
Narodniks; and the Mensheviks carne to occupy
positions scarcely distinguishable from those o f the
legal Marxists and of the economists . Nor
was this an accidental perversity. The issue of fitting
the Russian peasant into the Marxist scheme of
proletarian revolution had not yet been faced; and
the tragic contradictions of the attempt to make a
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Studies in Revolution
socialist revolution in a country where no bourgeois
revolution had yet occurred to win political freedom,
had not been resolved.
It was against the background o f these controversies that Lenin built up the future A ll-U n ion
Com m unist P arty (Bolsheviks) . H e accused the
Mensheviks,
as
he
had once
accused
the
economists , o f lack o f p rin c ip ie ; opportunism m eant for Lenin not a shifting o f ground
for tactical reasons (this he adm itted and advocatcd
freely enough) but a postponem ent o f revolutionary
work on the pretext that conditions were not ripe.
B ut most o f all he accused them o f lack o f organ
ization, o f amateurishness, o f sm all-scale craftsmanship
T h e most significant divisin at the
second congress was not the criticai vote or the
elcctions but the divisin on the party statute. W as
the party, like western political parties, to be a mass
organization o f supporteis and sym pathizcrs ? O r
was it to be a disciplined arm y o f active revolution
aries ?
T h e c|uestion o f organization thus raised a vital
question o f principie. E verything that has been
most controversial in the history o f the Russian
revolution was involved in it. In the M enshevik
view , the socialist revolution could be achieved only
as the sequel o f a bourgeois revolution and through
a political party o f the kind w hich had em erged
from the bourgeois revolutions o f the west. In the
Bolshevik view , the Russian socialist revolution
must carry w ithin itself the bourgeois revolution
w hich the Russian bourgeoisie had failed to a c h ie v e ;
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T he Oradle o f Bolshevism
and this called for a special form of party organiza
tion unknown to the west. In a sense both were
right.
Lenin, with his unerring perception of
realities, knew the only way in which the Russian
revolution could be led to victory. But if the survivors of Menshevism were to-day to retort that
this is not the socialist revolution as understood by
them or by the world in the early igoos it would be
difficult to prove them wrong. History disappoints
the programme-makers as often as it refutes the
prophets.
It must then be confessed, if justice is to be done,
that Lenins conception of the party, which he
drove home after 1903 with all the ruthlessness of
extreme consistency and unshakable conviction,
owed much less to theory than to his own intuition of
Russian requirements. I f he accused the economists of exaggerating the case for spontaneity
in the workers movement, and declared that the
class-consciousness of the workers could be developed
only from without by an organized party of
revolutionary intellectuals, the argument, however
theoretical and general in form, was a faithful
record of particular observed facts of Russian
society. Lenins conception o f the party had at
least the empirical justification that it was the kind
of party required to make the revolution triumph
in Russia. His opponents were prescribing for
conditions which did not exist.
Lenin had two essential prerequisites for a
revolutionary p a rty : it must be small in numbers
and disciplined and conspiratorial in character.
129
Studies in Revolution
While Plekhanov and Lenin both preached that
history is made by the masses , both recognized
that the main business of the party was to train the
officers and non-commissioned officers of the revo
lutionary army
Social conditions would provide
the rank and file when the moment arrived. For
Lenin the party was always a minority and its
backbone would always be a group o f professional
revolutionaries. The 1905 revolution for the first
time brought a significant number of workers into
the party; and from that time Lenin began, for
tactical reasons, to emphasize the importance o f the
role of the workers in the party. But it was not until
some years after 1917 that workers began to form
more than a small minority of the delegates to party
congresses or o f the members o f party committees.
Lenins second prerequisite for the party its
disciplined and conspiratorial character derived
even more directly from Russian conditions. Iso
lated revolutionary groups o f workers and students
in Russia, well-meaning amateurs, quickly fell
victims to the pohce, as Lenin himself had done. In
order to maintain secret revolutionary groups and
conduct secret revolutionary propaganda in Russia
itself, organization and discipline were paramount.
While the principies of democracy were professed
within the party, the necessities of the case precluded,
as Lenin explicitly recognized, anything like public
and open discussion or the election of leaders. Russian
conditions dictated a form of organization utterly
alien to the political parties o f the west.
The attempt to execute a western political
130
T he Cradle o f Bolshevism
program m e for such M arxism essentially was
in the conditions o f the autocratic plice State o f the
Rom anovs created a series o f contradictions w hich
were the tragic dilem m a o f the Gom m unist Party
and o f the Bolshevik revolution. It was impossible
to attain a congruence o f means and ends where
the indispensable means belonged to a different
order o f society from that in and for w hich the
ends had been conceived. It was impossible to
establish a stable or rational relation w ith the bour
geoisie, domestic or foreign, since the doctrine
appeared to impose two contradictory attitudes,
alliance being alternately sought and spurned.
F in ally it was impossible to create in terms o f men
and wom en that basis o f dem ocratic ad m inistraron
on w hich socialism o f the kind contem plated in the
M arxist tradition could alone rest.
A ll these dilem m as emerge clearly from the bitter
debates w hich accom panied the founding o f the
p arty and its initial steps in organization forty and
fifty years ago. T h e party m oved forw ard on the
course set b y L enin inexorably, in spite o f every
set-back, through an ever-tightening discipline and
an ever-narrow ing circle o f authority and power.
In the 1890S it had already been established that
the proletariat must lead the re v o lu tio n ; the
dictatorship o f the proletariat was naturalized in
Russia. In 1903 it becam e accepted doctrine that
the party must lead the p ro le ta ria t; and the
dictatorship o f the p a rty was a phrase lo n g in use.
T h e n carne the phase o f the leadership o f the party
b y its central co m m ittee; this was the period o f the
Studies in Revolution
revolution itself. After the introduction of the New
Economic Policy in 1921 Lenin himself tightened
the reins once more; and for a time the Politbureau
o f the party was the decisive organ, taking precedence over all other party and State institutions.
Finally, when the restraint o f Lenins personal
prestige was withdrawn, leadership passed to an
inner group whose composition was never certainly
known and which had no constitutional standing
even within the party.
The process had been
precisely foreseen by Trotsky (of all people since
none was more dictatorial than he by temperament
and ambition), who in a brilliant pamphlet pub
lished in 1904 predicted a situation in which the
party is replaced by the organization of the party,
the organization by the central committee, and
finally the central committee by the dictator .
It would be difficult to pretend that Lenin in
these early years of the partys history saw clearly
whither the demand for rigid organization and
discipline would lead.
It would be even more
difficult to pretend that, had he seen, he would have
recoiled from the choice. His mind and heart were
set on the revolution, in which he saw the crowning
necessity for Russia and for the world. He would
reject or neglect nothing that could contribute to its
consummation.
Yet the unresolved dilemma remains.
Dan
brilliantly diagnoses the immanent contradiction
in Russias social development: its retarded char
acter , which had brought it to the point o f revolu
tion only when socialism was already knocking at
132
T he Oradle o f Bolshevism
the door and dem ocracy could no longer be realized
w ithout socialism, and its backwardncss , w hich
prevented the realization o f socialism in free dem o
cratic forms . T h e words com e from D a n s concluding chapter, w hich is, in efec, a renunciation o f
his former M enshevism and an acceptance o f L en in s
conclusions and policy. Precisely because he recognizes the tragedy and the contradictions which,
how ever inescapable they m ay have been, lay behind
that policy, D a n s book constituios a more powerful
apologia for the party and for the revolution than
the stereotyped official histories.
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appeared to favour the process o f dispersai and to rule
out anything like a reconstitution o f former unity.
Y e t b y the end o f 1922, little more than two years
after the victorious conclusin o f the civil w ar, the
diverse units had been gathered into the fold o f the
new ly established U nion o f Soviet Socialist R epublics
(the form al incorporation o f the two C entral Asian
republics was delayed till 1924) ; and the cohesin
o f the new federation was destined to prove at least
as strong and enduring as that o f the defunct empire.
T his consum m ation, w hich few could have foreseen
in the dark days o f 1918 or 1920, was not the least
rem arkable o f L en in s achievements. In the eyes o f
history he appears not only as a great revolutionary,
but as a great Russian.
Public interest in Lenin, in his own country and
elsewhere, shows no signs o f abating. T h e second
and third editions o f his com plete works (really
two issues in different form at o f the same edition)
were published between 1926 and 1932. Shortly
before the w ar a fourth edition was decided on, and
its publication is now in progress. T h e copious
additional m aterial appearing in these volum es
had for the most part been published in the Leninskii
Sbornik or other periodical publications, so that it is
not, strictly speaking, n e w ; but its inclusin in a
new edition o f the works makes it, for the first time,
convcniently accessible.
O n the other hand, the lengthy and valuable
expository notes and the appcndices o f documents
(often convenient, even if the documents could be
found elsewhere) have disappeared.
A n official
136
f
>
i
'i
(
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In tw o volum es.
I2S. 6 d .'ca ch .
137
H o d d er and
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b y w a y o f a biograph y o f a great m an , has obviously been cram ped b y lim itations o f space. A p a rt
from the usual biographical details and a concluding
chapter o f appreciation, he has chosen to concn
trate on a few essential topics L en in s conception
o f the party, his agrarian policy, his philosophy o f
the State, his view o f the relations o f the revolutionary
republic w ith the outside w orld and his econom ic
policy. T h e choice o f topics is judicious, and the
handling sensible and accurate. T h e non-specialist
reader, for whom the book is designed, w ill obtain
from it a very fair and readable presentation o f the
main problems Lenin had to face and o f his methods
o f solving them.
T h e central focus o f L en in s thought and
action was his theory o f the State, w hich found its
most m ature expression in State and Revolution,
written on the eve o f the O cto ber revolution and
published in the spring o f 1918.
T h e socialist
tradition from G odw in onwards had been almost
unreservedly hostile to the State. M arx, especially
in his early works, repeatedly denounces the State
the form o f organization adopted b y the bour
geoisie for the guarantee o f its property and
interests . T h e Communist Manifesto, truc to this
tradition, looked forward to the d ay when, differences between classes having been wiped out,
social pow er w ill lose its political ch aracter .
But the Manifesto also concerned itself w ith the more
im m ediate practical step o f w inning the revolution ;
and for this purpose it was necessary that the
proletariat should establish its suprem acy by
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argument against the anarchists in defence of the
dictatorship o f the proletariat occupies only a few
hurried paragraphs; the bulk of the pamphlet is
an assault on those pseudo-Marxists who refuse to
recognize, first, that the State is a product of class
antagonisms and an instrument of class domination,
doomed to disappear with the disappearance of the
classes themselves, and secondly, that the immediate
goal is not the taking over of the bourgeois State
machine, but its destruction and the substitution o f
the dictatorship o f the proletariat.
For the student of history the most important
passages in State and Revolution are those which show
how Lenin at this time conceived the dictatorship
of the proletariat. It is something which is no
longer properly a State ; it is already a transitional State, no longer a State in the proper sense
It will begin to die away immediately after its
victory . M arx and Engels believed themselves to
have discovered the prototype of the dictatorship of
the proletariat in the Pars commune o f 18 71; in
April 1917 Lenin eagerly transferred the discovery
to the Soviets. The point of the discovery was that
neither the commune nor the Soviets were a State
in the proper sense . Both had the same exclusively
working-class representation and the same basis of
voluntary self-organization, and stood for the same
kind of loose federation of like-minded autonomous
units in place o f the sovereign authority of the
bourgeois State. Both were to exercise administrative as well as legislative functions, and the evils
both of regular armies and o f a regular bureaucracy
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In three years L enin leain ed m uch. O n the eve
o f the introduction o f N E P in the spring o f 1921 he
dismissed as a fairy tale the idea that every
w orker could know how to adm inister the State
H arsh necessity forced the Soviet adm inistration
into the traditional State m ould w hich Lenin had
never intended for it. Y e t, so long as L enin lived,
som ething rem ained o f the large-m inded distrust o f
the State w hich he had expressed in State and Revolu
tion. T h e Soviets, and especially the local Soviets,
retained a w ide measure o f autonom y and initiative,
even i f their com petence did not stray far from the
parish p u m p ; and Lenin continued w ith his last
official breath to preach the need for untiring vigilance in curbin g and controlling bureaucracy. N ot
till m any years after L en in s death did the inexorable
tide o f events re-establish a degree o f State worship
w hich w ould have seemed unthinkable to the men
who m ade the revolution.
L en in s personal share in m oulding the foreign
policy o f the new regim e was even more im portant
and decisive than in shaping its domestic p o lic y ;
and here, too, the same flexibility, the same readiness
to study and follow the dynam ic o f events, is equally
conspicuous.
T h e foreign policy o f the young
Soviet G overnm ent was m ade up o f three distinct
strands o f radical pacifism, o f w orld revolution
and o f national or State interest. T h e three strands
sprang from different origins and could rarely be
isolated in practice : the subtle w eb into w hich they
were deftly w oven was m ainly L en in s own work.
T h e motif o f radical pacifism was particularly
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Studies in Revolution
based on the right o f self-determ ination for all
nations b y a free vote
T h e decree declares
secret diplom acy abolished and announces the
intention w hich was prom ptly carried out to
publish the secret treaties o f the p a s t: future negotiations were to be conducted and this too was
carried out at Brest-Litovsk com pletely openly
before the w hole people
N othing is said, in the decree, o f capitalism as
the cause o f w ar or o f socialism as its cure. T h e one
hint o f world revolution occurs in the final injunction
to the workers o f England, France and G erm an y to
assist their Russian comrades to bring to successful
conclusin the w ork o f peace and also the w ork o f
liberating the labouring and exploited masses o f the
population from every kind o f slavery and exploita
tion . T h e decree reflects, above all, that radical
belief in the rightness and efficacy o f mass opinin
w hich was so deeply rooted in nineteenth-century
dem ocratic doctrine the appeal from xvicked
governments to enlightened people, w hich had been
a com m onplace o f W ilsons utterances. T his note
was echoed m uch later, though w ith rapidly diminishing sincerity, in Soviet pronouncem ents about
disarm am ent.
T h e second strand in Soviet foreign policy the
prom otion o f w orld revolution did not, however,
long rem ain in the background. Peace at any price,
how ever deep the psychological roots o f its appeal and
how ever great its political expediency at this jun eture, was dificult to reconcile w ith fundam ental
Bolshevik d o ctrin e ; and the policy o f transform ing
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State frontiers, as well as other State interests, to
defend. I f the rest o f the world was organized on a
system of States, it was not open to a single regin
to contract out o f the system by an act of will.
It would, however, be rash to deduce from all
this either a theoretical or a practical clash in Soviet
foreign policy between the claims o f world revolu
tion and those o f national interest. It was this clash,
and the priority given to national interest, which
had in Lenins view destroyed the Second Inter
national.
No such clash could occur in Soviet
policy for the simple reason that all the Soviet
leaders were agreed in believing that the survival of
the Soviet regime in Russia was bound up with the
success o f the revolution in the rest of the world, or
at any rate in Europe.
Mr. Hill, in common with most recent writers,
cxaggerates the difference between Lenin and Trot
sky on this point, and makes one of his few serious
mistakes when, having quoted Trotskys remark that
either the Russian revolution will cause a revolu
tion in the west, or the capitalists of all countries
will strangle our revolution , he adds that Lenin
would never have committed himself to such a
statement. H alf a dozen statements of the same
tenor can be fotind in Lenins works, of which one,
precisely contemporaneous with that of Trotsky,
may be quoted as a sample :
Anglo-French and American mperialism will in
strangle the independence and freedom of
Russia unless world-wide socialism, world-wide Bolshev
ism triumphs.
evitably
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o f world revolution, proved lasting.
A whole
generation o f communists Russian and foreign
was nurtured on the dual conception of the promotion of world revolution as the ultimate and
necessary crown and reinforcement o f the Soviet
republic, and of the strengthening of Soviet power
as the immediate and necessary spearhead o f world
revolution. The attempt to drive a wedge between
these two facets of policy and exalt Lenins realism
in foreign policy at the expense o f his loyalty
to world revolution is misleading and mistaken.
After Lenins retirement from the scene, when it
became clear that the prospects o f the world revolu
tion were, to say the least, far more remte than
Lenin or any o f his colleagues had dreamed,
fresh strains were put on the synthesis. But though
the balance was disturbed it was never broken. It
remained reasonably possible nearly thirty years
later to arge, as Lenin had argued over BrestLitovsk, that the survival and strength o f the Soviet
State were the best pledge for the socialist revolution
in other countries.
It has become a commonplace to praise Lenins
realism, his flexibUity, his practical common sense
in judging what could and what could not be done
at the given moment; and all these qualities he
possessed in a pre-eminent degree. But perhaps the
most vivid impression left by a re-reading of his
major works is of the amazing intellectual power
and consistency of purpose which runs through them.
His tactical readiness to compromise, to tack, to
retreat when it became necessary was an enormous
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o f the population. But even this policy bore the
marks of a strict and unbending consistency. It
first took shape at the Stockholm congress o f the
party in 1906, when Lenin found it tactically
necessary to retreat from the logical programme of
nationalization and large-scale cultivation o f the
land. It continued in 1917, when Lenin took over
the programme of the Social-Revolutionaries and
made it the basis o f the agrarian decree of the Soviet
Government. It was carried to its logical conclusin
in 1921, with the New Economic Policy. But, for all
these compromises, Lenin never abandoned the two
essential points that the leadership of the revolution
rested with the proletariat (and this, among other
reasons, presupposed a policy of industrialization as
the sine qua non of a socialist order), and that the
revolution could be carried into the countryside
only by splitting the peasantry and raising the
potentially revolutionary poor peasant against
the petty bourgeois kulak. Gollectivization was the
logical and ultimate triumph of Lenins agrarian
policy, which he did not live to see.
O f the founder of every great religin, philosophy
or political movement it is customary to say that
he would have been horrified by much that was
done by his disciples in his name. The statement
is usually made meaningless in its application to a
dynamic world by the assumption that the ideas of
the founder remain static at the point where he left
them. The curious compound o f consistency and
flexibility or, as the critic might put it, of dogmatism and o f opportunism which marks Soviet
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SOREL:
PHILOSOPHER
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his famous conception o f the socialist m yth
T h e study o f Sorel reveis unexpectedly numerous
points o f contact between M a rx and N ietzsche. It
is often puzzling w hether Sorcls thought should be
described as M a rx refiected through a Nietzschean
prism, or vice \'ersa. But the dual influence, blended
w ith an extreme subtlety, is always there, and colours
all Sorels fundam ental beliefs.
T h e first article in Sorels corrosive creed is
derived equally from both his masters his convic
tion o f the decadence o f bourgeois society. Sorel,
one o f his com m entators has said, was literally
haunted w ith the idea o f decadence. La Ruine du
monde antique was his first m ajor work. T h e persistent attfaction o f Ghristianity for him is its dogm a
o f original sin. T h e princes o f secular thought ,
from D idcrot onwards, are philistines ; they
bear (like M a rx s vu lgar economists ) the hallm ark o f bourgeois culture the b elief in progress.
Les Illusions du progrs, published in the same year
as Rjlexions sur la violence, is the most clearly and
closely reasoned o f his books.
Secondly, the rejection o f the bourgeoisie and
o f bourgeois philosophy carries w ith it a revolt
against the intellect. Sorels earliest literary essay.
Le Procs de Socrate, denounces Scrates for having
corrupted civilization through the false doctrine that
history moves forward through a process o f intel
lectu al in quiry and persuasin. T his is the essence
o f the bourgeois h e re sy : Est bourgeois , in
A la in s well-known aphorism, tout ce qui vit
de persuader.
Like M arx, Sorel beheves in
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last word of democratic Science. N o attempt has ever
been made to justify this singular paradox by which the
vote o f a chaotic majority is supposed to produce what
Rousseau calis the general will which is infallible.
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syndicalist program m e since 1892. A sworn enem y
o f all U topias, Sorel refuses to draw an y picture at
all o f the social order w hich w ill follow this healthgivin g outburst o f proletarian violence. H e borrows
a phrase from Bernstein, the G erm n revisionist
who, from a different point o f view , also laboured
to purge M arxism o f its U to p ian in gred ien ts:
T h e end is nothing, the m ovem ent is all
And
i f critics drew attention to the motivelessness o f
the general strike so conceived. Sorel bold ly re
je cte d this excursin into rationalism . T h e general
strike was not a rational construction, but the
m yth o f socialism, necessary like the dogm as o f
the Christian G hurch and, like them, above rational
criticism .
T h is famous Sorelian concept o f the m yth involves two significant consequences. T h e first is a
purely relativist and pragm atic view o f truth w hich
in his earlier writings he had vigorously rejected.
T h e m yth is not som ething w hich is true in any
abstract sense, but som ething in w hich it is useful to
believe : this is indeed the m eaning o f truth. From
the im plied pragm atism o f Bergson Sorel went on to
the avow ed pragm atism o f W illiam Jam es and the
A m erican school. T h e last o f all his writings was
De Vutilit du pragmaiisme, published in 1921.
T h e other consequence, w hich Sorel faced less
clearly, was an aristocratic view o f the m ove
m ent w hich was asked to accept this philosophy.
T h e syndicalist m ovem ent was to be based on a
m yth devised and propagated b y an lite o f leaders
and enthusiastically accepted b y the rank and file.
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centred round a modest periodical, Les Cahiers de la
Quinzaine, edited, and for the most part written, b y
Pguy himself, C ontrary to all the traditions o f the
affaire, P guy was strongly nationalist, pro-Catholic,
anti-dem ocratic and a hater o f the bourgeoisie.
Since 1902 Sorel had written occasional papers for
the Cahiers, had attended the w eekly Thursdays o f
the group, and had been accepted as its eider
statesm an and mentor. T h ro u gh this group Sorel
elaborated the idea o f a reconciliation between
French syndicalism and French nationalism . His
first contribution to the Cahiers had borne the signifi
cant title, Socialismes nationaux : its them e was
th at there are at least as m any socialisms as there
are great nations
French nationalism was at this tim e scarcely
thinkable outside the fram ework o f Catholicism ,
and it was therefore logical, though surprising, that
Sorel and his syndicalist disciple Berth should in
1910 have form ed, in alliance w ith three members
o f the Action Franaise, a group w h ich they called
La Cit Franaise, to publish a periodical under the
title LTndpendance Franaise; and in the same year
Sorel wrote in xction Franaise (his sol contri
bution to the Journal) an appreciation o f P guys
Mystre de la charit de Jeanne d'Arc. T h e w hole
enterprise, the form o f w hich changed in 1912 to a
C ercle Proudhon , was short liv e d ; the cohabitation was never easy. B ut the break carne in
1913, not from Sorel but from Pguy.
T h e causes o f the rupture are obscure, and P guy
m ay have suffered from persecution m ania. B ut it
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revolution w ith open arms. F or five years he had
written scarcely anything. T h e w ar, begun as a
w ar for the French nation, w hich he loved, was being
more and more w idely hailed as a w ar for dem ocracy,
w hich he loathed. H ere was a long-aw aited breath
o f fresh air a revolution w hich preaehed and
practised a salutary violence, spat on bourgeois
dem ocracy, cxalted the m orality o f the producer ,
alias the proletariat, and installed Soviets as autono
mous organs o f self-government.
M oreover, the
Bolshevik P arty had Sorel cared to note the fact
- - w a s built up precisely on the Sorelian premises
o f an audacious m inority leading the instinctive
proletarian mass.
Sorel m ade no form al declaration o f adhesin to
the new cause and creed. But he wrote several
articles for the French Revue Communiste; and in
1920, when Bolshevism was at the height o f its
unpopularity in France, he added to the fourth
edition o f Rjlexions sur la violence a plaidoycr pour
Lnine in w hich he hailed the Russian revolution
as the red daw n o f a new epoch .
Before descending into the tomb [concluded the
plaidoyer ] m ay I see the hum iliation o f the arrogant
bourgeois democracics, to-day so cynically trium phant.
Studies in Revolution
Fascism a realization o f the syndicalist dream o f
an adm inistrativa pow er independent o f the State.
T h e question w hich Sorel died w ithout h avin g to
answer was that o f his attitude to the totalitarian
State. A ll his life he had been a strong, almost
violent, in d iv id u a list; all his life he had fought, not
for the concentration o f pow er but for its dispersai
and decentralization to the very lim it o f anarchism .
A t the v e ry end o f his life he argued against any
absoluta religious b elief on the ground that it could
not be successfully propagated w ithout restoring the
Inquisition. It w ould have been disconcerting
to say the least to find Sorel as a prophet o f
totalitarianism . B ut his thought contains too m any
inconsistencias, his career too m an y unexpected
turns, for anyone to pronounce w ith assurance on
this hypothetical question.
B ut the most interesting point raised b y Sorels
career is that o f the resemblances and diferences
betw een Bolshevism and Fascism. I f Sorel stands
on the com m on ground w here M a rx and N ietzsche
meet, this is also the com m on ground from w hich
Bolshevism and Fascism diverge.
M a rx and
N ietzsche, Bolshevism and Fascism, both deny
bourgeois dem ocracy w ith its bourgeois interpretations o f liberty and e q u a lity ; both reject the bour
geois doctrines o f persuasin and com prom iso; both
(though this is w here Sorel held a lo o f from both)
proclaim absolutas w h ich com m and the obedience
o f the ind ivid ual at the cost o f all else.
T h ere was, how ever, an essential difference.
T h e absoluta o f Nietzsche and o f Fascism ends
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Socialist Labour Party; other groups o f a similar
character flourished in particular localities. The
strongly pacifist Left wing of the IL P contained many
fellow-travellers; and the Plebs Lcague, a group of
intellectuals interested in the education of the
workers in Marxist doctrine, formed the theoretical
spearhead of the movement. O n another front the
rapidly developing shop-stewards movement had a
marked revolutionary colour. It was opposed both
to the old trade-union leadership and to parliamentary action in general; though varying in Out
look from place to place and from time to time, it
was syndicalist in character and tended to advcate
direct action without any very clear definition
o f political purposes. It was with this movement,
collectively known as the Workers Committee
Movement, that Mr. Gallacher was at this time
primarily associated.
The funding of the Third or Communist Inter
national in Moscow in March 19 ig had little
immediate impact on these groups.
It was the
second congress of Gomintern in July 1920 which
proved the decisive force in the creation o f the
British party. The party was officially founded in
London on July 31, 1920, while the Moscow con
gress was actually in progress. But the real arguments which moulded its shape and destiny were
conducted in Moscow, where Lenin presided over a
commission to advise on the afairs of the new party.
The British Left was more amply represented at this
than at any other congress of Gomintern; and in
those formative years a latitude and diversity of
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su p p o rt o f the thesis th a t the fu tu re C om m u n ist
P a rty o f G r e a t B rita in sh ould tak e p a r t in p arlia m c n ta ry elections an d seek alilia tio n to th e L a b o u r
P a rty . I t is p iq u a n t th a t B rita in s fu tu re C om m u n ist
M .P . sh ould h a v e gon e on record as d e cla rin g th at
C om m un ists h a v e so m cth in g b c ttc r to do than
w aste tim e o v e r p a rlia m e n ta ry elections
B iit M r.
G a lla c h e r, h a v in g becn ou t-voted , a llo w ed h im self
to b e w on o v e r b y L c n in s persuasivo p erso n ality,
a n d W'ent h om e p rom isin g not o n ly to c a rry ou t the
m a jo rity p o lic y b u t to dissuade his S cottish friends
fr o m in d u lg in g th eir n atio n alist feclings so fa r as to
fo u n d a sep rate Scottish C o m m u n ist P a rty . T h e
new s o f the fo u n d a tio n o f the C P G B re ach cd M o sco w
w h ile th e congress w as in progress. I t w as d u e in
p a r t to M r . G a lla c h e r s cforts th a t it secured the
adhesin o f all the m ain L e ft-w in g groups north and
South o f the B o rd er. T h e form al co nstitution o f the
p a r ty w as ap p ro ved at a con feren ce a t L eeds in
J a n u a r y 1921.
A rth u r M a cM a n u s w as elected
president (a post w h ich has lo n g since d isa p p e a re d );
M r . G a lla c h e r w as th e ru n n er-u p .
T h e h istory o f the first years o f the C P G B has y et
to b e w ritten . In th e 1 9 3 0 S an a ttem p t w as m a d e
b y one o f its founders a n d its first n a tio n a l org an izer.
T o m B ell. B u t his w o rk w as su b jccted in p a rty
circles to charges, not u n fo u n d ed , o f in a c c u ra c y and
d is to r tio n ; a n d n o b o d y has since been b o ld enough
to rep eat the cxp erim en t. T h e a u th o r o f The Rollinp,
o f the Thunder has no claim to b e a h istorian. B ut
as a p a rticip a n t in e ve ry stage o f p a r ty h istory he is
a n im p o rta n t witness. H is p a rtic u la r co n trib u tio n
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Britsh Gom m unist P arty to p lay an active part in
British parliam en tary dem ocracy and to seek affiliation to the L ab o u r Party. B ut they also imposed
on it, in com m on w ith other Gom m unist parties, a
rigid organization subject to iron discipline and
periodical purges o f the unruly, as w ell as to acceptance o f all decisions o f the Gom m unist In te rn a tio n a l;
and th ey required it not only to conduct propaganda
for the establishment o f the dictatorship o f the
proletariat but to create an underground organ
ization in preparation for civil w ar. N o b o d y in
M oscow seems to have realized th at these were
incom patible alternatives.
O f all the Gom m unist parties the G P G B was the
o n ly one w hich, thanks in p art to peculiar British
conditions, in p art perhaps to its share o f the famous
British genius for com prom ise, seriously attem pted the
impossible. T h e mem bership o f the G P G B after its
congress o f J a n u a ry 1921 am ounted to not m ore than
2000 or 2500; the total o f 10,000 announced at the
third congress o f G om intern that yea r and repeated
b y M r. G allach er was obtained, as Bell admits, b y
adding up the wishful estimates o f half-organized
branches. O n the other hand, the H ands o ff
Russia m ovem ent and the Gouncils o f A ction in
the last stages o f the Russian civil w a r had revealed
a vast mass o f vague sym pathy w ith Soviet Russia
and her institutions. T his sym pathy was strongly
tinged w ith pacifism and hostility to w ar in general,
and did not betoken revolutionary convictions.
B ut few and, least o f all, the Gommunists
recognized these lim itations; and to create a dis172
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These inconsistencies w ithin the C P G B were,
how ever, com plicated b y violent zigzags o f policy
in Gom intern itself. D elays in the realization o f
European revolution, the introduction o f N E P , the
opening up o f trade relations w ith the capitalist
world, all brought a certain m itigation o f M oscow s
uncom prom ising hostility to the non-com m unist
w orld.
In D ecem ber 1921 the E xecutive C o m
m ittee o f Gom intern (E C C I) for the first time
issued the slogan o f a United front w ith other
working-class parties and support for L abo u r
Governm ents ; and three months later the C P G B
was specifically instructed to establish relations
w ith the G eneral C ouncil o f the T U C and to a p p ly
once m ore for admission to the L ab o u r Party.
T h is blind persistence m erely courted another snub.
T h e 1922 conference o f the L ab o u r P arty at Edinburgh produced more plain speaking at the expense
o f the Com m unists than ever before. T his tim e the
p arty could not fail to perceive that som ething was
seriously w rong. O n M r. G allach ers proposal a
com m ittee o f three non-oflScial members o f the p arty
M r. H a rry Pollitt, a trade unionist, M r. Palm e
D utt, an intellectual, and H a rry Inkpin, brother o f
the secretary o f the p arty was appointed to report
on its afairs.
T h e results o f this report were far-reaching. T h e
party was reorganized on the m odel o f the Russian
party, discipline was tightened, and it was decided
to refrain from electoral attacks on the L ab o u r
P arty. These changes yielded some dividends. In
1923 two Com m unists, N ew bold and Saklatvala,
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munists bu t had put an effective brake on official
action against Soviet Russia. N o w only the feeblest
o f protests follow ed the Arcos raid and the breaking
ofF o f relations w ith the Soviet U n ion in 1927.
U n d er the first Baldw in Governm ent, w ith Joynson
H icks as H om e Secretary, anti-Com m unist feeling
reached its height. A ccordin g to the figures quoted
b y M r. G allacher, the p arty m embership fell from
11,000-12,000 after the general strike to 5000 in the
follow ing year.
These disasters led to a second reorganization o f
the C P G B in the w inter o f 1927-28. T h e policy
o f supporting the L ab o u r P arty against the bourgeois
parties, equivocai though it was, and inconsistently as
it had been pursued, had been an official plank in
the p a rty platform ever since its foundation and
rested on the m ndate given to the p a rty b y L enin
himself. T h e m ajority o f the central committee,
including M r. G allach er himself, saw no reason to
change this policy. B ut a m inority, led b y M r.
Palm e D u tt and M r. Pollitt, now challenged it as
w rong in principie. T h e y argued that the situation
in G reat Britain had changed rad ically since Len in
m ade his recom m endations o f 1920. T h e econom ic
position o f G reat B ritain was deteriorating and
therefore bringing nearer the objective conditions
for a mass revolutionary m ovem ent; the L ab o u r
P arty had been in office and had revealed itself
as a third bourgeois p arty ; and it had in
effect abandoned the loose and undogm atic federal
structure, w hich had m ade it seem possible for
Com m unists to seek admission to it, in favour o f a
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po licy as a w hole.
From 1 9 2 8 onwards, and
especially after the sixth congress held in A ugust o f
that year, it becam e the fashion to treat L abo u r and
Social-D em ocrat Parties not m erely as declared
enemies, but as the worst enemies, o f the w o rk ers;
and this line, pursued to its logical conclusin, had
fatal consequences in G erm any during the period
o f H itlers ascent to power. M r. G allacher, who is
too good a p arty man to defend his own stand in
1 9 2 7 - 2 8 (he does not even refer to it), admits the
error o f the G erm n Gommunists in the early 1 9 3 0 S ,
though he makes out a case for assigning an equal
share o f blam e to the Social-D em ocrats.
The
dilem m a w hich had dogged the steps o f the G PG B
from the outset proved an equally insuperable
obstacle to the unity o f the G erm n Left.
In Britain the ch ief result o f the 1928 decisin
was the retirem ent o f A lb ert Inkpin, the secretary
o f the party since its inception. H e was succeedcd
b y M r. Pollitt, w ho has been its virtual leader for
the past tw enty years. T h e history o f the G PG B
under M r. Pollitts leadership has been less turbulent
and less eventful than in the preceding eight years
o f its existence. T ech n ica lly the p arty has been
m uch more efficiently run. T h e Daily Worker dates
from 1930. Sharp changes o f policy, even sudden
changes, have occurred. But the party line, how ever
vulnerable, has always been clear and precise, and
has always responded to directives from M oscow.
O n the other hand, thoughts o f a mass p arty have
been abandoned or relegated to an indeterm inatc
future. T h e influx o f members into the party in
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Som ething o f this attitude tinges even the
cautious and carefully balanced pages o f The Case
for Communism. A s a popular exposition o f M arxist
theory and o f the econom ic aims, im m ediate and
ultm ate, o f Socialism and Com m unism , this could
not be bettered either in m atter or in style.
But
when it comes to the political Instruments for translatin g theory into practico and realizing econom ic
ends, everything is suddenly vague and blurred.
T h e dictatorship o f the proletariat is lost altogether
in the haze, and does not seem to be m entioned at
all. T h e haze thickens to a fog in the last chapter,
in w hich M r. G allach er returns some bew ildering
answers to questions from an im aginary critic.
H ere and there the reader even catches glimpses o f
an independent versin o f Com m unist doctrine and
Com m unist tactics adapted to the dem ands o f
British politics. B ut this is surely a lost cause. Its
developm ent is inhibited b y the slavish im itation o f
Soviet methods and o f Soviet policies w hich has
becom e endem ic in the C P G B . T h e vicious circle
cannot be broken.
A more independent party
w ould have shown greater health and stre n g th ; a
healthier and stronger party w ould have achieved
greater independence. T h e grow th o f the child has
been fatally stunted b y too successful and too masterful a parent.
i8o
12
TH E
R E V O L U T IO N
TH AT
F A IL E D
Studies in Revolution
initials w hich was against the w ar. E ven the
U S P D was not really a revolutionary party. It
w anted prim arily to end the w ar, and found room
for elements w hich were pacifist rather than M arxist.
But it was w ithin the U S P D that there arse a group
callin g itself the Spartakusbund, w hich was out-andout M arxist and revolutionary as w ell as anti-w ar,
and carne nearer than an y other group in G erm any
to acceptance o f L en in s slogan o f turning the
im perialist w ar into a civil w ar o f the proletariat
against the bourgeois ruling class. T h e intellectual
driving forc o f the Spartakusbund was R osa Luxem b u rg ; K a r l Liebknecht, w ho was a leader and
agitator rather than a theorist, was also one o f the
leaders o f the group. T h e Spartakusbund and all its
publications and activities were, o f course, highly
illegal in war-tim e G e rm a n y; both L iebknecht and
L uxem burg spent the last months o f the w a r in
prison.
T h e Spartakusbund carne into existence before the
Russian revolution. B ut events in Russia gave its
w ork a fresh mpetus. A t the end o f D ecem ber
1918, in the midst o f the turm oil and upheaval
w h ich followed the armistice in G erm any, a congress
was hcld in Berlin. It was attended b y R ad ek as a
fraternal delegate from the central com m ittee o f
the A ll-R ussian Congress o f Soviets : Zin oviev and
Bukharin were also to have come, but were refused
admission b y the G rm an Governm ent. T h e con
gress decided to found a G erm n Com m unist P arty
(K P D ) ; and for od tim es sake the am e Spartakus
bund was kept in brackets at the end o f its am e,
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leaders stultified the negotiations w hich Liebknecht
carried on w ith the shop-stewards m ovem ent during
the founding congress o f the K P D .
T h e shopstewards w ould have com e in on terms, including
p arity o f representation in the organs o f the ncw
party, which, considering the numbers they had
behind them, was not unreasonable. But the od
stalwarts o f the Spartakusbund were obdurate and
negotiations broke down. It was a decisive moment.
W ithin a fortnight the Independent Social-D em o
crats had been ousted from the E bert Governm ent.
Noske had becom e M inister o f W a r w ith a m ndate
to use the R eichsw ehr to restore order in Berlin,
and L iebknecht and R osa L uxem burg had both
been arrestcd and shot while trying to escape
one o f the earliest uses o f this famous euphemism
for the official assassination o f political opponcnts.
T ra g e d y dogged the steps o f G erm n communism
from the very outset.
Just two months after the foundation o f the K P D
in Berlin, the Gom m unist International G om in
tern was born in M oscow . R osa Luxem burg,
w ho had regarded the creation o f a mass G om
munist P arty in G erm an y as prem ature, took the
same view o f the creation o f a Gom m unist Inter
national w ith w orld-w ide pretensions; and this
view was reinforced in G erm n minds b y the wellgrounded fear that, i f a Gom m unist International
were brought into being at a tim e when the G erm n
p arty was still a puling infant and the Russian
p arty was the only one w ith a successful revolution
to its credit, the centre o f gravity w ould inevitably
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w a r to have m uch tim e or thought for anything
not directly concerned w ith it. In G erm any R ad ek
had been arrested and imprisoned b y the G erm n
au th o rities; no other lead ing Bolshevik carne to
take his place.
T h e K P D played no role in the famous B avarian
revolution o f A p ril 1919, though some communists
jo in ed the short-lived Soviet G overnm ent w hich was
set up in M un ich. It had only a w alking-on part in
the first attem pted nationalist com e-back after the
hum iliation o f N ovem ber 1918 the so-called
K a p p p u ts c h o f M arch 1920 w h ich was
defeated, not b y the communists but b y a general
strike organized b y the od trade unions. B ut in the
autum n o f 1920, p artly under Russian pressure, a
split occurred am ong the G erm n Independent
Social-D em ocrats the U S P D . U n d er the combined infiuence o f the prestige o f Gom intern and the
eloquence o f Zinoviev, w ho addressed a party
congress at H alle for four hours on end, a m ajority
o f the U S P D decided to jo in the communists to
form the U nited Gom m unist P arty o f G erm any.
T h ere was thus, at the end o f 1920, a mass G erm n
Gom m unist P arty w ith an effective mem bership o f
over 300,000 and a m uch larger num ber o f fellowtravellers. But the unreality o f the unin between
the intellectuals o f the K P D and the workers o f the
U S P D has been b rillian tly portrayed b y an eyewitness o f the Berlin convention w hich ratified i t :
There was an artistic frame o f classical music and
revolutionary poetry. T h e U S P D delegates, mostly
workers from the bench, were disgusted by the new
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Some o f M rs. Fischers political speculations are not
particu larly convincing. O n e can rarely prove a
negative. B ut it does not seem at all likely that
T rotsky failed to return to M oscow in tim e for
L en in s funeral as the result o f a secret understanding w ith the Politburo ; or that the famous
Z inoviev letter w hich played a part in the
British general election o f 1924 was a forgery o f the
G P U ; or that J . D . G regory, the British civil
servant involved in the case, was in the p a y o f the
G P U ; or that D im itrovs defence in the R eichstag
fire trial was a put-up jo b after a bargain for his
release had been struck w ith his own cognizance
between the G P U and the Gestapo.
T h e other qualification that must be m ade
concerns M rs. Fischers political attitude. A t first
sight her reminiscences invite com parison w ith
those o f another w om an who worked in Com intern
in the early days and was bitterly disillusioned by
the experience. A n glica Balabanoff.
But hey
belong to different worlds.
B alab an off was a
disappointed idealist who apparently did not know
that Com m unist parties, like other political organ
izations, are not run without a great deal o f wirepulling, m anipulation and sordid calculation o f
expediency. M rs. Fischer was, from the outset, a
politician to the finger-tips. I f she becam e embittered, it was because she lost the last move in the
gam e, not because she did not understand the gam e
that was being played. In G erm n p arty affairs she
belonged to the Left, that is to say, to those com
munists who were opposed to tem porary tactical
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anxious to score a G erm n success to counterbalance troubles at home. W h atever the background o f the attem pt, its failure m ade a change of
leadership inevitable. Paul L evi was succeeded as
leader o f the R ig h t first b y Ernst M eyer, another
intellectual, and later b y H einrich Brandler, a
w orker from Saxony, who had all the caution o f the
old trade-union tra d itio n ; M rs. Fischer together
w ith her cise associate M aslow soon em erged as the
leaders o f the Left.
T h e fiasco o f the M a rch rising in G erm any
discredited not only the G erm n com m unist leaders,
but Com intern itself and Zinoviev as its presiding
genius. T his resounding defeat for the cause of
revolution in the country where, b y every token, its
prospects were most favourable, forced on M oscow a
reconsideration o f the w hole tim e-table o f world
re v o lu tio n ; and it carne at a time when L enin had
ju st announced the forced retreat on the hom e front
em bodied in N E P the N ew Econom ic Policy of
lim ited toleration and encouragem ent for prvate
enterprise. It had becom e clear that Soviet Russia
w ould have to go on living in a w orld o f capitalist
States for a m uch longer tim e than had at first been
foreseen. T h e idea o f m arching straight forward to a
w orld-w ide victory o f socialism had to be discarded.
Strategic manoeuvres, tem porary retrcats, political
expedients o f all kinds w ould be required to m ain
tain and increase Soviet pow er until such tim e as
the final goal was in sight. A n d this was ju st as
true o f foreign as o f domestic policy.
In internation al terms it m eant that the star o f N arkom indel
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A cco rd in g to R u th Fischer, whose testim ony does
not stand alone, this idea was first conceived b y
R a d ek when he was in prison in Berlin in the
yea r 1919, and was then laughed out o f court in
M oscow . But after 1921, when N E P was in full
swing and optimism about world revolution was no
longer in fashion, things looked very different. In
the next year the bargain was sealed b y the famous
R a p a llo T rea ty signed b y Chicherin and R athenau
during the G enoa conference. It was about this
time that the secret arrangem ents were started
between the G erm n Reichsw ehr and the R e d A rm y
for the purpose o f evading the m ilitary provisions
o f the Versailles T reaty. In brief, the Reichsw ehr
was to get facilities in Russia to carry out certain
processes o f m anufacture and training, and the R ed
A rm y got in return technical training and equipment. But this new partnership between govern
ments cast som ething o f a blight on the G erm n
Gom m unist Party.
R adek, now ch ief agent o f
Gom intern for G erm any, cast the m antle o f M oscow
over Brandler, w ho wanted no rash revolutionary
ventures and was prepared for tem porary com pro
misos w ith the Social-Dem ocrats, and worked to
oust M aslow and R u th Fischer as the leaders o f the
Left. N atu rally enough, R u th Fischer has no love
for R adek, and still less for Brandler, as every turn
o f her narrativo shows. But the m ain facts here
cannot be challenged.
R a d ek was prepared to
coquet even w ith the extrem e G erm n nationalists,
ju st as they were prepared to coquet w ith Russia,
on the ground o f a com m on hatred o f the western
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communists had seats. T his should have been the
signal for a general rising. But the leaders were not
re a d y ; and, except for an unprem editated outbreak at H am burg w hich was suppressed w ith m uch
bloodshed, nobody m oved. T h e great project o f a
G erm n communist revolution was snuffed out
before it could start. Seen from the inside ,
writes M rs. Fischer o f this experience, the com
munists were an insufficiently organized group o f
panic-stricken people, torn b y factional quarrels,
unable to com e to a decisin, and unclear about
their ow n aim s.
T h a t seems a not unfair
epitaph on the largest Com m unist P arty outside
Russia.
T h e G erm n defcat, like every other failure o f a
m ilitant revolutionary policy, discredited T rotsky
and Z inoviev and, b y the same token, helped Stalin ;
and since it also m eant the downfall o f Brandler in
G erm any, Stalin parad oxically becam e, for the
m om ent, the patrn o f the G erm n Left. M anuiisky,
w ho was a Stalin m an, replaced R ad ek as principal
Com intern agent in G erm any. M rs. Fischer passes
rather ligh tly over the period when the Left com
munists in G erm any hitched their w aggon to S talin s
rising star. A relie o f this period is a vivid and
revealing description o f Stalin in the sum m er o f
1924, when he was ju st em erging into prom i nence
am ong Bolshevist le a d e rs:
A t this Fifth W orld Congress Stalin becam e known
to Com intern delegates for the first time. H e glided
silently, almost furtively, into the salons and corridors
round St. A ndrew s H all. Smoking his pipe, wearing
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good on this occasion. It was only at the cnd o f 1925
that M rs. Fischer jo in ed the Z in oviev opposition
against Stalin. B ut b y this tim e her popularity in
the G erm n party had been cclipsed b y that o f
T h alm an n , and in the follow ing year M anuilsky
had not m uch difficulty in bringing about her ex
pulsin from the party as a Trotskyite. It is not
a p articularly edifying story. B ut it is not so simple,
or are the rights and wrongs so clear, as M rs.
Fischers narrative m ight suggest to the uninitiated
reader.
T h e party was now in a tragic decline, numerically, intellectually and as a political forc. D urin g
the spurious prosperity o f the D aw es period there
could be no thought o f a communist c o u p ; and
in the great depression w hich set in in 1929 the
G erm n Com m unist Party fell between two stools.
It allow ed the N azis and the nationalists to m ake
the pace in the cam paign against the ineffective
W eim ar republic. O n the other hand, the principie
o f non-co-operation w ith Social-D em ocrats, w hich
had held ever since the debacle o f 1923, prevented
the communists from form ing a com m on front
against the Nazis. It is these years rather than the
earlier period w hich justify one o f the moris draw n
b y M rs. Fischer : the difficulty 'w h ich any C o m
munist Party outside Russia has in standing up to
the Russian party. A w eak opposition party, often
persecuted in its own country, is clearly no m atch
for a p arty w hich has a victorious revolution behind
it, and Controls the afairs o f a great nation. A cco rd
ing to M rs. Fischer, the influence o f M oscow in the
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crushed had only been scotched. M oscow was not
alone in the m iscalculation o f supposing that G erm n
nation al resentment could be encouraged up to a
point, utilized and kept within safe bounds. Both
M oscow and the western Powers from their different
points o f view overestim ated the strength o f G erm n
social-dem ocracy. Both failed to take account o f
the absence in G erm an y o f any o f the conditions
or traditions o f western liberal dem ocracy. T h e
attem pt to create a liberal dem ocracy in G erm any
failed in 1848 and again after 19 18 ; the attenjpt to
create a social-dem ocracy on the western pattern
failed e q u a lly ; and extrem e R ig h t and extrem e L eft
confronted one another, ju st as they did in the
Russia o f 1917.
B ut in G erm any, more than in a n y other country, the old pre-bourgeois ruling class, the feudal
order o f society w ith its m ilitary tradition, had
succeeded in capturing and harnessing to its purposes
the modern pow er o f organized large-scale h eavy industry. T his was the achievem ent o f Bism arck who, b y
his brilliant invention o f the social Services, also roped
an influential section o f the workers and the trade
unions into a new pow er com plex. This com bination
w ent into action in 19 14 ; and, after the m ilitary
disaster o f 1918 and the political fiasco o f the
W eim ar republic, it was still strong enough for
H itler to furbish it up once again in a rather more
up-to-date and ostensibly popular guise.
The
strongest impression w h ich the reading o f M rs.
Fischers book leaves on the m ind is the terrifying
pow er w hich the old forces in G erm an y continued
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socialism against anarchism . These writings reveal
Stalin, not indeed as an original thinker, but as an
active and com petent propagandist and popularizer
and as a faithful disciple o f the Bolshevik creed.
L en in is m entioned b y am e only a few times
(Stalins first m eeting w ith him occurred at the end
o f 1 9 0 5 , but is not referred to h e r e ); and, on the
only tw o notew orthy occasions during this period in
w hich L en in s personal opinin was rejected and
overruled b y the m ajority o f the party, Stalin
supported the m ajority. H e w rote in favour o f
boycotting the elections to the first D um a, where
L en in was for p a rticip a tio n ; and he voted at the
fourth p arty congress in 1 9 0 6 for the distribution
o f land to the peasants, w here L en in was for
nationalization.
It is, how ever, apparent that even at this early
period Stalin was, consciously or unconsciously,
m oulded b y Len in and b y a particular aspect o f
L enin. T h e acute and bitter controversics w hich
m arked the form ative years o f the p arty all turned
in one w a y or another on an issue w hich involved
both ideas and organization. W as the workers
m ovem ent to be supplied w ith its philosophy, its
leadership and its initiative b y a sm all and highly
organized group o f determ ined revolutionaries, who
must, in the nature o f things, be draw n m ainly from
the intellectuals ? O r was the p arty to regard itself
as the servant and follow er o f the workers and rcly
for its initiative on the spontaneous urge to
revolution w hich intolerable conditions w ould sooner
or later breed am ong them ? Lenin, the passionate
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and this can be achieved only b y a sm all organized
p a rty o f high intellectual as w ell as m oral quality,
im bued w ith com plete m astery o f the intricacies o f
revolutionary socialist doctrine.
T h e danger plainly inherent in this doctrine is
the tem ptation to exalt organization as a necessary
means to revolution, and revolution as an end in itself.
F orm ally speaking, the Bolshevik theorists Stalin
perhaps less than Len in guard themselves against
this danger. O n e passage in these early writings
o d d ly recalls the optim istic conviction o f pious
V ictorians that the good, b y some ultim ate la w o f
progress, w ill prevail over the bad.
I f the teaching o f the anarchists represents the truth,
it w ill, o f course, necessarily make its own w ay and
gather the masses round it. I f it is unsubstantial and
built on a false foundation, then it w ill not hold for long
and w ill vanish into the air.
T his optimism is supported elsewhere b y a reference to the fam ous H egelian doctrine in view
o f the recent attitude o f the Russian philosophical
schools to G erm n philosophy in general and
H egel in particular, it is interesting to find Stalin
defending H egel o f the identity o f the real and
the rational. M arxism w ill trium ph, says Stalin
explicitly, because it is ra tio n a l: w h at is irrational
is doom ed to perish. Y e t the first critics o f H egel
perceived clearly the dilem m a o f finding any
criterion o f w hat is rational other than w hat, in fact,
succeed s; and the youthful Stalin is no more
successful than they in resolving it. T h e cause o f
revolution is the rational, and therefore the good,
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ordinary citizen him self learning to adm inister and
control, as the antidote to State bureaucracy. O f
such visions, unsubstantial ag they proved to be,
there is little or no trace in Stalins speeches or
writings.
Such differences o f doctrine and emphasis as m ay
be detected between L enin and Stalin can, however,
be plausibly attributed not so m uch to personal
divergcnces o f Outlook or tem peram ent as to differ
ences in the historical situation w hich confronted
them. Lenin, for all his insistence on the leadership
o f a highly trained and organized group o f professional revolutionaries, knew that revolutions are
m ade b y the masscs and that to w in the active, or
even the passive, support o f the masses something
more than organization and leadership was required.
H e knew that even discontent w ith existing conditions, indispensable though that was as a startingpoint, was not enough to sustain a revolutionary
ardour. T h e visin o f a new w orld in w hich men,
freed from the oppression o f bourgeois capitalism
and o f the bourgeois State, w ould learn to govern
themselves and to organize the processes o f production and distribution for the com m on good was
necessary to fire the revolutionary im agination.
Lenin inherited the splendid visin from a lon g line
o f nineteenth-century socialists. H e acccpted it,
sincerely believed in it, and justified his policies b y
the prospect o f its realization. If, after the first few
months o f power, the prospect seemed to recede
into a remte future and the difficulties o f its realiza
tion becam e increasingly apparent, there is no
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e x ce p t for visits to three or fou r p a rty conferences
before 1 9 1 4 an d for his recen t excursions to T e h e r n
a n d P otsdam . H is G e o rg ia n origin a cco u n ted for
his e a rly sp ecial studies o f nation alism an d for his
ch oice as P e o p le s C om m issar for N ation alities in
1 9 1 7 ; b u t it does n ot seem to h a v e h a d a n y
im p o rta n t in flu en ce on h im unless it w as to g iv e
an alm ost fa n a tica l in ten sity to his S o viet p atriotism .
I t w as thus no a ccid e n t th at m ad e h im th e sponsor
o f socialism in one co u n try in the 1 9 2 0 S , the
an tago n ist o f the in tern a tio n a lly m in d cd T ro tsk y ,
an d the p ro tagon ist o f the reviva l o f R u ssian n a tio n a l
sentirnent, after its re vo lu tio n a ry eclipse, in th e
1930S.
W h e n w a r carne in 1 9 4 1 he w as a lre a d y
th e n a tio n a l ra th er th a n the re v o lu tio n a ry h ero .
H is relation s w ith the a rm y seem from th e outset
to h av e been easy. H e h ad done m u ch , even before
the w a r, to restore its prestige an d to b rin g it b a ck
to its form er p la ce o f h on o u r in the n a tio n a l life.
T h e w a r b ro u g h t his finest qu alities a n d cap acities
to th eir fu ll fruition ; an d his design ation as M a rsh a l
o f the S oviet U n io n in M a rc h 1 9 4 3 could be regard ed
as a n a tu ra l cu lm in a tio n o f his ca reer ra th e r th an
as a m ere conccssion to the exigencies o f w ar.
It is no d o u b t a p a ra d o x th a t one w h o a p p eared
on the scene as a re vo lu tio n a ry con sp irator should be
a cclaim e d to -d a y p rin c ip a lly for his p a trio tic devotion to his co u n try an d for his u n flin ch in g leadership
in tim e o f w a r. T h e frontispiecc to his co llected
W orks sign ifican tly shows h im in his m a rsh als
un iform .
B u t such p arad oxes are n ot w ith o u t
p rc ccd c n t in the h istory o f revolutions ; a n d L e n in ,
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w h ich attem pted to m aintain an independent
existence. E ven L en in s prestige and his genius for
persuasin did not suffice in his later years to m ain
tain p arty unity w ithout threats o f expulsin and
lim itations on the freedom o f speech and opinin o f
its members. W h en Len in disappeared from the
scene, profound rifts quickly revealed themselves,
and the weapons o f repression hitherto used only
against dissentients outside the party were, logically
and almost inevitably, turned against dissentients
w ithin it.
T h e ju d gm en t o f history on Stalins role w ill
depend in part on the w ider ju d gm en t w hich it
passes on the Bolshevik revolution. T h e claim o f
that revolution to have inaugurated a new civilization has been asserted and contested. But, on
any view , it was one o f the great turning-points in
history, com parable w ith the French revolution and
perhaps surpassing it in significance. N o country in
the w orld has rem ained indifferent to it, no form o f
governm ent has been able to evade its challenge,
no political or econom ic theory has escaped its
searching criticism ; or, according to all signs and
portents, has its influence yet reached a peak. T h e
collected edition o f Stalins writings and speeches,
w hile it will probably add little that is specific to
existing knowledge o f the m an or his work, w ill help
to place it in perspective, and w ill constitute a
historical docum ent o f the first im portance.
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irrelevant to the other. A story so dram atic as
S talin s cannot be dull. M r. D eutscher has missed
none o f the points and has written a book which,
am ong its other merits, is absorbing to read. B ut
it is absorbing in part because, in all the cxcitem ent o f the externai detall, he has never lost sight
o f his central them e o f the nature o f Stalins
achievem ent and his place in the history o f the
revolution.
It need hard ly be said that this, like everything
else about Stalin, is highly controversia!. It raises
m an y questions which, like most o f the profound
questions o f history, cannot be readily answered
w ith a simple yes or no. Is Stalin the disciple o f
M a rx or an O rien tal despot? Has he fulfilled or
renounced the heritage o f L e n in ? Has he built
socialism in one country or blightcd the prospects
o f socialism throughout the world for a generation
to com e ? Has he a second Peter the G reat
Europeanized Russia, or^ a second Genghis K h a n
m ade Russia part o f a vast A siatic em pire ? Is
he a nationalist assiduously seeking to increase the
prestige and pow er o f Russia, or an internationalist
concerned to bring about the universal trium ph o f
a revolutionary creed ? These qiiestions are sus
ceptible o f m any different answers. M r. D eutschers
book w ill enable the reader, i f not to answer them,
at any rate to ask them w ith greater understanding.
H istory never stands still least o f all in the
m iddle o f a revolution. "What I.enin created and
w h at Stalin inherited from him was a constantly
changing entity, not a static system, but a process
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o f developm ent.
It was a process in which, to
borrow the H egelian idiom , thesis was continually
begetting antithesis, so that the question whether
Stalin continued or negated the work o f Lenin m ay
reflect a distinction o f language rather than o f
substance. Put less abstractly, the truth seems to
be that every revolution is succeeded by its own
reaction and that, when Lenin was w ithdraw n
from the scene, the Russian revolution had already
entered this secondary stage o f its course. T h e once
current slogan, Stalin is the Lenin o f to-day , did
not assert that Stalin was the Len in o f 1917, but
that he was perform ing the function w hich Lenin
him self would have had to perform if he had re
mained the leader o f the revolution ten years later.
Even so, it was not w holly true. But it contained
some elements o f the truth.
T h e early Bolsheviks were students o f history and
knew w hat happens to revolutions : they feared that
their revolution, too, would meet its Therm idor.
B ut the spell o f Bonapai te made them assume that
the source o f danger was a dictator in shining
arm our. It was this assumption w hich proved fatal
to T rotsky and smoothed Stalin's path to pow er. In
M r. D eutschers w o rd s:
It had always been admitted that history might repeat
itself, and that a directory or a single usurper might once
again climb to power on the back of the revolution. It
was taken for granted that the Russian usurper would,
like his French prototypc, have a personality possessed
of brilliancc and legendary fame won in battles. The
mask of Bonaparte seemed to fit Trotsky only too wcll.
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Indeed, it might have fitted any personality with the
cxception of Stalin. In this lay part of his strength.
T hus it was that Stalin becam e, i f not the Lenin
o f to-day , the Bonaparte o f to-day, the heir o f
Len in as Bonaparte was the heir o f Robespierre, the
m an who chained and disciplined the revolution,
and Consolidated its achievements, and garbled its
doctrines, and w edded it to a great national power,
and spread its influence throughout the world.
Y e t this, too, was not the whole truth. For,
w hile history sometimes repeats itself in unexpected
disguises, every historical situation is nonc the less
unique. T h e odd thing is that Stalin, unpredictably
and seem ingly in spitc o f himself, becam e, unlike
Bonaparte, a revolutionary in his o^vn right. M ore
than ten years after L en in s revolution, Stalin made
a second revolution without w hich L en in s revolu
tion w'ould have run out into the sand. In this sense
Stalin continued and fulfillcd Leninism, thoxrgh the
slogan o f socialism in one country , under w hich
he m ade his revolution, was the rejection o f w hak
Lenin believed (the eforts o f Stalins theorists to
father it on Lenin were childishly disingenuous) and
L enin would have recoiled in horror from some o f
the methods b y w hich the second' revolution was
made.
Intcllectually, as M r. D cutscher is careful to
point out, socialism in one country m ade no
new and original contribution to doctrine. It was
not even very coherent, since Stalin himself, clinging
frm ly to the ill-fitting garments o f M arxist orthodoxy, adm itted that socialism could never be coin214
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U nfortunately this tim e-table had not been
realized.
R evolution in Europe, w hich seemed
certain in 1919 and im m inent in 1920 when the R ed
A rm y was outside W arsaw , still unaccoun tably
tarried. In the autum ii o f 1923, when the G erm n
proletariat for the third or fourth tim e since 1918
suffered a crushing defeat (recriminations about wlio
was to blam e did not help), it carne to be gradually
understood in M oscow that the E uropean revolution
was still a long w a y of. But what, on this new
hypothesis, was the role o f the Russian Bolsheviks ?
N obod y dcnied, it was truc, that one o f their tasks
was to procccd w ith the building o f socialism iu
R u s s ia : T rotsky was pressing the case for intensivo
planning and industrialization long before it had
been taken up b y Stalin. But, none the less, since
it seemed to follow from the orthodox doctrine that
it was not possible to gct very far in R ussia in the
absence o f revolution clsewhcrc, a sense o f unreality
and frustration could hard ly be avoidcd. T h e rank
and file, i f not the party intelligentsia, needed the
stirnulus and inspiration o f a finite goal set in a not
too remte future, and dependent for its realization,
not on incalculable events in far-aw ay E urope but
on their own cfforts.
'
T his need was brillian tly met b y socialism in
one country . M r. D eutschers im aginative reconstruction o f w hat the new slogan m eant to Stalins
followers cannot be bettered :
O f course we are looking forward to internatlonal
revolution. O f course we have been brought up in the
school o f M arxism ; and we know that contemporary
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in backw ard Russia w ithout a socialist revolution in
the proletarian countries o f western Europe. Per
haps even though nobody ,dared to hint this in
R ussia the M ensheviks had not been altogether
w rong when they m aintained that it was not possible
to pass over direct from the bourgeois to the socialist
stage o f the revolution and that socialism could be
built only on an established foundation o f bourgeois
capitalism .
N atu rally the answer to these questions turned
p artly on w h at was m eant b y socialism. Stalin had
undertaken to produce socialism in one country .
W h atever he produced must clearly be called
socialism ; moreover, the F ive-year Plan and
the collectivization o f agriculturc were unim peachable tems in a revolutionary socialist program m e.
Nevertheless it w ould be a mistake to assume that
these measures were imposed on Stalin, or imposed
b y Stalin on Russia, on the strength o f any slogan
or program m e, w hether socialism in one country
or another. T h e y were imposed b y the objective
situation w hich Soviet Russia in the later nineteentwenties had to face.
T h e Leninist revolution had b y this tim e run its
course. T h e key industries had been nationalized
and, in a superficial and fragm entary w ay,
planned , but not fitted into an econom y designed as a single unit. T h e land had been given
to the peasants. E very device had been tried to
step up agricultural production the key to the
w hole structure. T h e kulak had been first terrorized
for the benefit o f the poor peasant, then encouraged
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the idea that revolutions are m ade b y the spontaneous enthusiasm o f the m asses; he believed in,
and imposed, strict revolutionary discipline. Stalin,
whose theory on this point did not difer from
L en in s, could not have executed his colossal task
unless he had been able to rely on a broad base o f
popular support. Y e t it is clear that Stalin had to
contend w ith far more apath y and disillusionment
in the masses, far more opposition and intrigue in
the p arty lite, than Len in had ever known, and was
driven to a p p ly correspondingly harsher and more
ruthless measures o f discipline. It is also significant
that most o f the appeals b y w hich Stalin justified
his revolution w ere to instincts norm ally the reverse
o f revolutionary to law and order, to the sanctity
o f the fam ily, to the defence o f the fatherland and
to the virtue o f cultivatin g ones own g a r d e n : it
was as a restless international adventurer, a m an
who cared nothing for his country, a Champion
o f perm anent revolution , that T rotsky was
pilloried.
Stalin thus presents tw o faces to the w orld a
revolutionary-M arxist face and a national-Russian
face two aspects w hich are partly conflicting and
partly com plem entary. A n d i f th gradation from
the Leninist to the Stalinist revolution is expressed
in these terms, it m ay perhaps be said that the one
was essentially designed as an international revolu
tion occurring in Russia and to that extent adapting
itself to Russian conditions, and the other as a
national revolution w hich no doubt carried w ith it
its international dem ands and its international
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I t was thus that Stalin becam e the reviver o f
Russian patriotism , the first leader explicitly to
reverse the International or anti-national attitude
w hich had dom inated the early stages o f the revolu
tion. T h e first Bolshevik historiaos had depicted
previous Russian history in the m ain as a long series
o f barbarities and scandals. Backw ard was the
standard epithet to attach to the nam e Russia .
Stalin changed all that. H e put out o f business
altogether the M arxist school o f historians headed
b y Pokrovsky (whom Len in had highly praised and
valued), and rehabilitated the Russian past. A new
drive was required in place o f the cooling revolu
tionary ardour in order to render tolerable the
hardships o f industrialization and to Steel resistance
to potential enemies. Stalin found it in nationalism.
N ew -found enthusiasms tend to exag g era tio n ; and
victory over H itler was an intoxicating achievem ent.
Soviet nationalism since the w a r has taken some
forms w hich western observers have thought sinister
and others w hich they have thought absurd. But
it has, perhaps, not differed as m uch as is sometimes
supposed from that o f other great Powers at the
m om ent o f their ascent to greatness.
O th er aspects o f Stalins retufn to a national
tradition m ay w eigh more heavily against him in the
scales o f history. T h e real charge against Stalinism
is that it abandoned those fruitful elements o f the
western tradition w hich were em bodied in the
original M arxism , and substituted for them retro
grade and oppressive elements draw n from the
Russian tradition. M arxism stood on the shoulders
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passage quoted b y M r. D eutscher from his speech
at the last p arty congress he attended penetrates to
the taproots o f Stalinism :
I f the conquering nation is more cultured than the
vanquished nation, the former imposes its culture on the
latter; but if the opposite is the case, the vanquished
nation imposes its culture on the conqueror.
Som ething o f the same sort, Lenin continued, could
happen between classes. In the R S F S R the culture
o f the vanquished classes, miserable and low as
it is, is higher than that o f our responsible Gom
munist administrators ; the old Russian bureaucracy, in virtue o f this relatively higher level o f
culture, was vanquishing the victorious, but ignorant
and inexperienced, Gommunists.
This was the danger w hich Lenin, w ith the clearsightedness o f genius, diagnosed in w h at he saw
around him in the fifth year o f the revolution. It
was im plicit in the continued isolation o f socialist
Russia from the rest o f the w orld and in the
necessity o f building socialism in one country .
International M arxism and international socialism,
planted in Russian soil and left to themselves, found
their international character exposed to the constant
sapping and m ining o f the Russian 'national tradition
w hich they had supposedly vanquished in 1917.
T e n years later, w hen Len in was dead, the leaders
w ho had most conspicuously represented the
international and western elements in Bolshevism,
Trotsky, Zin oviev and K am enev, not to mention
m inor figures like R ad ek, K rasin and R akovsky
had all disappeared ; the m ild and pliable Bukharin
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and again gestures o f approach were m ade to the
western w orld. B ut only under the stress o f w ar
could the barriers be overeme. O nce it was over,
the iron curtain again descended. T h e rift between
the Russian revolution and the west was too wide
to be bridged.
A t the end o f 1949 Stalin celebrated his
seventieth birthday. H e has led his country victoriously through its greatest w ar and surm ounted
the im m ediate difficulties o f dem obilization and
reconstruction as sm oothly as any o f the belligerents.
T o all outw ard seeming he stands at the pinnacle o f
his own and his nations power. In spite o f the
fam iliar injunction to cali no m an happ y till he is
dead, the tem ptation is strong to assume that the
shape o f Stalins career is fixed and w ill not be
substantially modified b y anything yet to come.
Even, however, i f this assumption is correct, it does
not m ean that Stalins place in history is already
fixed or w ill be for a generation to come. W e
can still only begin to see, through a glass, darkly ,
w hat has been happening in the last thirty years.
W e dim ly perceive that the revolution o f 1917, itself
the product o f the upheaval o f 1914, was a turningpoint in world history certainlj^ com parable in
m agnitude w ith the French revolution a century and
a quarter earlier, and perhaps surpassing it. T h e
significance o f L en in s w ork is ju st com ing into focus.
B ut o f Stalin it is still too early to sp e a k ; Stalins
w ork is still too plain ly subject to the distorting lens
o f excessive propinquity. H ow far has he generalized
the experience o f the revolution o f 1917 and h o w
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T H E END