Late Marx and the Russian Road. Теодор Шанин

begin with, the so-called ‘Letter to the Editor of Otechestvennye Zapiski’ – the manuscript of a letter that was not completed and never sent – was discovered after Marx’s death by Engels who in March 1884 asked the Group for the Emancipation of Labour, which had been formed the year before, to publish it.² However, Zasulich and others in the group, in spite of their avowed desire to be the disciples of Marx in Russia, waited as long as seven months before responding to Engels with a promise that the letter, having been translated into Russian, would soon be printed;³ but the promise was never fulfilled. Bent on the publication of this letter, Engels tried through N.F. Danielson to have it published in a legal Populist magazine inside Russia but was unsuccessful.⁴ Finally the letter was published in Vestnik Narodnoi Voli, Volume 5, in December 1886, with this editorial note: ‘Although we obtained a copy of this letter much earlier, we have been withholding its publication because we were informed that Friedrich Engels handed the letter to other people for publication in the Russian language.’⁵ Two years later, in 1888, Marx’s letter was also printed in Yuridicheskii Vestnik, a legal magazine published inside Russia.

      The first response to the letter was made by Gleb Uspenskii, a novelist with Populist leanings, in the form of an essay entitled ‘A Bitter Reproof, in which he deeply lamented the incapability of the Russian intellectuals to respond faithfully to Marx’s reproof and advice.⁶ Thereafter, in the 1890s, Plekhanov, Lenin and other Marxists, in opposition to the Populists who found in this letter a strong support for their line, insisted that in this letter Marx did not say anything definite about the direction in which Russian society should proceed.⁷

      Somewhat similar conditions surrounded the ‘Letter to Zasulich’ and its draft manuscripts; that is, the recipient, Plekhanov and others close to her kept the letter’s contents to themselves, and even when asked about the letter kept replying that they knew nothing about it. The draft manuscripts of this letter were discovered in 1911 by D.B. Riazanov, who with the help of N. Bukharin succeeded in deciphering them in 1913. But then the manuscripts were left for a decade. In 1923, after the Revolution was over, B.I. Nikolaevskii, a Menshevik in exile, found the letter’s text in papers belonging to Aksel’rod and published it the following year. Upon reading the text, Riazanov also published the text in the same year as well as the drafts of the letter in Russian in the Arkhiv K. Marksa i F. Engel’sa, and in 1926, in the original French, in the Marx-Engels Archiv, Volume 1.⁸

      Neither of the discoverers of the letter attached any special theoretical or philosophical significance to the new material. Nikolaevskii regarded the letter as a political utterance of Marx only,⁹ while Riazanov said, in addition to a similar remark, that the letter and its drafts merely exemplified a decline in Marx’s scholastic capability.¹⁰ In marked contrast, Socialist-Revolutionaries in new exile enthusiastically welcomed the publication of these new materials. V. Zenzinov, for instance, insisted that the programme Marx delineated in this letter was in perfect accord with ‘what has been developed by Russian revolutionary Populism’ and it offered testimony to the fact that on the question of the future of peasant communes ‘Marx definitely was on the side of Populism’.¹¹ V.M. Chernov, too, wrote that the publication of the ‘letter to Zasulich which has been stored under a paperweight for more than 40 years’ had brought the debate to a conclusion and that ‘the programme described in this letter is exactly what forms the foundation of the S-Rs’ theory of peasant revolution, agrarian demands and rural tactics.’¹²

      The first person to support this letter inside the Soviet Union was A. Sukhanov who also strongly urged that the village commune should be used as a means for promoting collectivization in agriculture.¹³ Several other writers offered similar arguments in the Party organ Bol’shevik in early 1928,¹⁴ but in the world of historians no such opinion was heard.

      It was not until 1929, the year when the collectivization issue commenced, that the letter was discussed fully on a theoretical level by M. Potash in a paper entitled ‘Views of Marx and Engels on Populist Socialism in Russia’. In this paper, Potash declared that the concluding passage of Marx’s letter to Zasulich – which stated that in order for the village commune to serve as ‘the point of support of a social regeneration of Russia … the poisonous influences that attack it from all sides must be eliminated, and then the normal conditions of a spontaneous development insured’ – was the passage that was ‘especially wide open to question’.¹⁵ A strong rebuttal of this view came from A. Ryndich, who maintained that Marx obtained his view of the Russian village commune as a ‘result of the long and detailed studies of the primary sources on Russia after the Reform’, and thus emphasized the significance of the concluding passage of Marx’s letter to Zasulich.¹⁶ However, in his rejoinder that accompanied Ryndich’s paper, Potash had to say that Ryndich’s piece was being printed precisely because ‘it reveals the true nature of all those whose stance is that of a revision of the Leninist view.’¹⁷ In the crucial year 1929, Potash represented the mainstream.

      I

      Marx’s attitude towards Russian Populism at the time of the publication of Volume 1 of Capital in 1867 seems to have been utterly negative. In appended Footnote 9 at the end of the first German edition of Capital, Marx writes high-handedly:

      If, on the European continent, influences of capitalist production which destroy the human species … were to continue to develop hand in hand with competition in the sizes of national armies, state security issues … etc., then rejuvenation of Europe may become possible with the use of a whip and through forced mixture with the Kalmyks as Herzen, that half-Russian and perfect Moskovich, has so emphatically foretold. (This gentleman with an ornate style of writing – to remark in passing – has discovered ‘Russian’ communism not inside Russia but instead in the work of Haxthausen, a councillor of the Prussian Government.)¹⁸

      Herzen’s view that the Russian village commune was unique to the Slavic world was considered merely laughable by Marx at that time. Marx thought it was to be found everywhere, and was no different from what had already been dissolved in Western Europe.

      Everything, to the minutest details, is completely the same as in the ancient Germanic community. All that has to be added in the case of the Russians are … (i) the patriarchal nature … of their community and (ii) the collective responsibility in such matters as payment of taxes to the state…. These are already on their way to decay.¹⁹

      Something like this cannot form a basis for a socialist development; this, I am sure, was the way Marx looked at the Russian peasant commune. For he wrote in the preface to the first German edition of Capital, ‘The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future!’²⁰ At this stage, it appears, he supposed that Russia, like Germany, would follow the example of England.

      Marx’s thinking, however, began to change once he mastered the Russian language and became able to pursue his Russian studies using primary sources, and especially once he came across the studies of N.G. Chernyshevskii. Needless to say, this change in Marx’s attitude towards Russian Populism did not take place overnight.

      Marx first wanted to study the Russian language in October 1869 when N.F. Danielson, a young Russian who asked his permission to translate Capital into Russian, sent him a copy of V.V. Bervi-Flerovskii’s newly published book, The Situation of the Working Class in Russia; Marx felt he would like to read this solid book by himself. He immediately started learning Russian, and learned it very quickly; by February 1870 he managed to read as many as 150 pages of Flerovskii’s book.²¹ Marx found Flerovskii’s book completely free from the sort of ‘Russian “optimism” ’ that was evident in Herzen.

      Naturally, he is caught up by fallacies such as la perfectibilité de la proprieté perfectible de la Nation russe, et le principle providentiel de la proprieté communale dans sa forme russe. [The perfectable property of the Russian Nation, and the providential principle of communal property in its Russian form.] This, however, does not matter at all. Examination of his writing convinces one that a dreadful social revolution … is inevitable and imminent in Russia. This is good news.²²