Late Marx and the Russian Road. Теодор Шанин
Moscow, 1961, vol. 18, p. 51 (written by Marx in 1872).
9. R. Samuel, ‘Sources of Marxist history’, New Left Review, 1980, no. 120, p. 36. See also Nikoforov, op. cit., pp. 81-103.
10. R. Nisbet, The Social Philosophers, St. Albans, 1973, p. 11. Nisbet described the issue of community as the main axis of the whole history of Western social philosophy.
11. H. Wada, ‘Marx and revolutionary Russia’ (see p. 40). Wada’s achievement stands out in particular when compared with the work of analysts who ‘knew it all’, i.e. were aware of the evidence, yet made little of it. See, for example, the editorial comments in K. Marx and F. Engels, The Russian Menace to Europe, Glencoe, Illinois, 1952, and many Soviet equivalents to it, especially so in the 1930s.
12. M. Rubel and M. Manale, Marx without Myth, Oxford, 1975, p. 252.
13. Marks Istorik, Moscow, 1968, p. 373. The book offers an important contribution to the whole of the issue discussed. The most important earlier study of relevance is that of ‘Marx’s Russian library’, written by B. Nikolaevskii and published in Arkhiv K. Marksa i F. Engel’sa, Moscow, 1929, vol. 4.
14. Marks i Engels, op. cit., vol. 32, p. 358. Marx has clearly used the superlative ‘most’ referring to a type of book, i.e. the analytical descriptions of contemporary plebeian classes. Two decades later, Plekhanov was hard at work ‘explaining away’ as ill-informed Marx’s admiring comment about this evidently populist book.
15. The book referred to is The Development of Capitalism in Russia and the populists selected for punishment in it were Danielson (who has signed himself Nikolai-on) and Vorontsov (the V.V.). Lenin, whose admiration of Chernyshevskii was profound, but tempered by the tactical needs of struggle against the Socialist Revolutionary Party (which claimed Chernyshevskii’s heritage), solved it all by naming Chernyshevskii ‘a revolutionary democrat’, semantically unrelated to ‘populism’. This position was often followed by official Soviet publications. For further discussion, see A. Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism, Oxford, 1969, pp. 16-22.
16. The word volya meant in nineteenth-century Russian both ‘will’ and ‘liberty’.
17. For biographical details, see pp. 172-8, this volume. For a selection of relevant writings, see Part Three. For studies of the Russian populist tradition available in English, see in particular F. Venturi, Roots of Revolution, London, 1960, I. Berlin, Russian Thinkers, Harmondsworth, 1979, and Walicki, op. cit. See also T. Dan, The Origins of Bolshevism, London, 1964, chs 3, 6 and 7, and L. Haimson, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism, Boston, 1966. There is considerable Russian literature on the topic of which the most recent is the excellent study by V. Kharos, Ideinye techeniya narodnicheskogo tipa, Moscow, 1980. Contrary to an often held view, the Russian populists did not reject industrialisation but wanted it socially controlled and adjusted to regional needs, ideas which often bridge directly with some of the demands of the most contemporary ‘environmentalists’ and socialists. See Walicki, op. cit., pp. 114-16, and Khoros, op. cit., pp. 36-40, 220-5.
18. See Part Three, and especially the analysis by Kibalich on pp. 212-18.
19. See the last wills of members of the People’s Will, pp. 239-40.
20. Statistika zemlevladeniya 1905 g, St. Petersburg, 1907. The figures referred to the fifty guberya’s of European Russia, i.e. excluded Russian Poland and the Caucasus.
21. For further discussion of the Russian commune, see G.T. Robinson, Rural Russia under the Old Regime, New York, 1979, T. Shanin, The Awkward Class, Oxford, 1972, and, in Russian, V. Aleksandrov, Sel’skaya obshchina v Rossii, Moscow, 1976, and the general discussion by L. and V. Danilov within Obshchina v afrike: problemy tipologii, Moscow, 1978.
22. E.g. already Herzen spoke of the need to overcome simultaneously ‘the British cannibalism’, i.e. total surrender to the rules of capitalist competition, and the total immersion of the Russian peasant in his commune, to keep the personal independence of the first and the collectivist élan of the second.
23. See Venturi, op. cit., chs 20 and 21; also Dan, op. cit., chs 6, 7 and 8. For a good self-description of the Black Repartition group see L. Deutch in V. Nevskii, Istoriko-revolyutsionyi sbornik, Leningrad, 1924, vol. 2, pp. 280-350. For biographical details, see pp. 177-8, this volume.
24. See below, Part Two. This line of analysis has been reflected subsequently with particular strength in the works of the Russian ‘legal marxists’, e.g. M. Tugan Baranovskii Russkaya fabrica, St Petersburg, 1901, vol. 1, ch. 4.
25. Central to that line of argument were the works and views of B. Chicherin adapted in Marx’s time by A. Wagner and in the latter generations by P. Miliukov, K. Kocharovskii, etc., as well as by G. Plekhanov and I. Chernyshev in the marxist camp. This view was often referred to as the ‘state school’. It was opposed by an equally impressive list of scholars and political theorists of whom N. Chernyshevskii and I. Belyaev were paramount to Marx’s own generation. Marx himself spoke up sharply against Chicherin (Marks i Engels, op. cit., vol. 33, p. 482). For a good historiography of the debate see Aleksandrov, op. cit., pp. 3-46.
26. Marx wrote the passage in ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ (1852) referring to France but deleted it in the reprint of 1869. The dates are significant for reasons discussed in our text.
27. Marx and Engels, Sochineniya, op. cit., vol. 32, p. 158. Relatedly in time, Marx has attacked Herzen’s view in 1867 and spoke in absolute terms of the French peasantry’s conservatism (e.g. in the 1871 notes on the Paris Commune, ibid., vol. 17, pp. 554-7).
28. Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, op. cit., p. 68.
29. For full text, see Part Two.
30. Marks-Istorik, op. cit., p. 431.
31. See below, p. 631.
32. See below, p. 129. How much all that still ‘aches’ can be best exemplified by a short aside from P. Konyushaya, Karl Marx i revolyutsionnaya rossiya, Moscow, 1975, where after a stream of invectives against the multiplicity of ‘falsifiers of Marx’, i.e. everybody who discussed him outside Russia, tells us that Plekhanov ‘based his argument on the position formulated by Marx in his letter to “Otechestvennye Zapiski” ’ (p. 357). She forgets to inform us when, where and how.
33. David Ryazanov, see below, Part Two. For contemporary Western equivalents of that view see Marx and Engels, The Russian Menace to Europe, op. cit., p. 266, and on the left, J. Elster in K. Marx, Verker i Utlag, Oslo, 1970, p. 46.
34. See below p. 130.
35. Plekhanov’s speech at the Fourth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party in 1906 stated it explicitly. On the other hand, the year 1905 has seen also the appeals of the Saratov Bolsheviks and of Nikodim (A. Shestakov, the chief of the agrarian section of the Bolsheviks Moscow committee) against Lenin’s new agrarian programme, treated by them as ‘capitulation’ to the populist petty bourgeoisie.
36. Letters of 2 and 30 November 1876, Rubel and Monale, op. cit., pp. 229-31.
37. Ibid., p. 254. For further discussion, see the paper by K. Mohri in Monthly Review, 1979, vol. 30, no. 11.
38. From the 1847 speech about the independence of Poland, Marx and Engels, Sochineniya, op. cit., vol. 4, p. 273.
39. Ibid., vol. 19, p. 28.
40. The quotation comes from Marx’s letter of 21 March 1881 to his daughter, ibid., vol. 35, pp. 145-8.