Late Marx and the Russian Road. Теодор Шанин
thus appraised his descriptions of the social realities on Russia very highly, because they clarified the inevitability of a Russian revolution.
Having finished reading Flerovskii’s work, Marx then tackled an article, ‘Peasant reform and communal ownership of land (1861-1870)’, which appeared in Narodnoe Delo, No. 2, an organ of the Russian Section of the International, the organization which, through its member Utin, once asked Marx to convey its membership application to the first International. Marx felt friendly towards Utin and his group because of their opposition to Bakunin and Herzen, but his attitude toward their Populist view of the Russian village commune was basically unchanged. While reading this paper, Marx wrote a word of rejection, ‘Asinus’[!], at various points. And beside a passage where the differences in the development of communities in Russia and the West are discussed, he wrote down the following comment: ‘Dieser Kohl kommt darauf heraus, daß russische Gemeineigentum ist verträglich mit russischer Barbarei, aber nicht mit bürgerlicher Civilization!’ [From this rubbish, it emerges that Russian communal property is compatible with Russian barbarism, but not with bourgeois civilization.]23
It is clear from this that at this stage Marx continued to find nothing significant in the Russian village commune.
However, his view began to change as a result of the discussions he had with German Lopatin, who visited Marx in July 1870 and who, while staying with Marx in order to work on the Russian translation of Capital, talked very highly of Chernyshevskii. Marx first read ‘Comments on John Stuart Mill’s Principle of Political Economy’ by Chernyshevskii and found the author generally very capable.24 He then seems to have started to read a paper of Chernyshevskii’s on the peasantry, though we do not know which particular one this was. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that reading this paper was a turning point; Marx began to see Populism and the village commune of Russia in a different perspective.
This can be seen from a letter by Elizaveta Dmitrievna Tomanovskaya, a member of the Russian Section of the International, who visited Marx towards the end of 1870. In this letter dated 7 January 1871, Tomanovskaya writes:
As regards the alternative view you hold about the destinies of the peasant commune in Russia, unfortunately its dissolution and transformation into smallholdings is more than probable. All the measures of the government … are geared to the sole purpose of introduction of individual ownership through abolition of the practice of collective guarantee.
She asked if Marx had already read the book by Haxthausen; she offered to send him a copy in case he had not. She goes on:
This includes many facts and verified data about the organization and management of the peasant commune. In the various papers on the communal ownership of land you are reading now, you may notice tht Chernyshevskii frequently refers to and quotes from this book.25
This clearly shows that Marx either told or wrote to Tomanovskaya that he was reading Chernyshevskii’s paper on the Russian peasant commune, and that he thought it worthwhile to consider the question raised by Chernyshevskii, that is, the Populist question, about the ‘alternative’: was the communal ownership of land going to be dissolved? Or was it going to survive to form the lynchpin of Russia’s social regeneration? Marx’s view had changed a great deal.
We do not know whether Marx at this time was given Haxthausen’s book by Tomanovskaya or not, but there is no doubt that he now became interested in the conservative councillor of the Prussian government whom he had once scoffed at. It is therefore not a mere accident that Marx wrote at the end of his letter to L. Kugelmann dated 4 Februry 1871: ‘Once you told me about a book by Haxthausen which deals with the ownership of land in (I presume) Westphalia. I would be very happy if you would kindly send me that same book.’26
However, Marx’s Russian studies, which had advanced this far, were now interrupted for a considerable time by the struggle of the Paris Commune and, after its defeat, by the internal fight within the International. It was only after the Hague Congress of September 1872 that Marx returned to theory and the Russian question.
When he was able to spare time for his theoretical works again, Marx prepared the second German edition of Capital, Volume 1, and published it in early 1873. Except for some rearrangement of chapters and sections, there are not many major changes from the first edition. Important among these few corrections are: (1) the deletion of the exclamation mark, (!), from the passage in the preface we quoted earlier: ‘The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future!’; and (2) the deletion of Footnote 9 at the end of the volume in which Marx, as we saw earlier, sneered at Herzen and his ‘Russian communism’. In addition to these changes, Marx in the ‘Postscript to the Second Edition’ paid a glowing tribute to Chernyshevskii by calling him ‘the great Russian scholar and critic’.27 The fact that Marx deleted his disdainful remark about Herzen’s Populism and, furthermore, added a eulogy to the economics of Chernyshevkii clearly reveals that his attitude was undergoing a profound change.
In the period from the end of 1872 to some time in 1873, Marx read an anthology by Chernyshevskii, Essays on Communal Ownership of Land, published in Geneva immediately before. Of the nine articles collected in the anthology, the two most important are the review (written in 1857) of Haxthausen’s book, Studien über die inneren Zustände, das Volksleben und insbesondere die ländlichen Einrichtungen Russlands [Studies on the internal conditions, the life of the people and in particular the agrarian arrangements of Russia] and the article entitled ‘Criticism of philosophical prejudices against the communal ownership of land’ (1858). In these articles Chernyshevskii pointed out that the communal ownership of land in Russia was by no means a ‘certain mysterious feature peculiar only to the Great Russian nature’, but was something that survived till that day as ‘a result of the unfavourable circumstances of historical development’ in Russia which were drastically different from those in Western Europe. But anything that has a negative side ought to have a positive side as well. Among ‘these harmful results of our immobility’ there are some which are ‘becoming extremely important and useful given the development of economic movements which exist in Western Europe’, and which ‘have created the sufferings of the proletariat.’28 Among these, thought Chernyshevskii, was the communal ownership of land.
When certain social phenomena in a certain nation reach an advanced stage of development, the evolution of phenomena up to this same stage in other backward nations can be achieved much faster than in the advanced nation…. This acceleration consists of the fact that the development of certain social phenomena in backward nations, thanks to the influences of the advanced nation, skips an intermediary stage and jumps directly from a low stage to a higher stage.29
On the basis of such a theoretical premise, Chernyshevskii thought that, given the development of the advanced West … it would be possible for Russia to leap from communal ownership of land directly to socialism. Chernyshevskii sums up his view in the following terms:
History is like a grandmother; it loves the younger grandchildren. To the latecomers (tarde venientibus) it gives not the bones (ossa) but the marrow of the bones (medullam ossium), while Western Europe has hurt her fingers badly in her attempts to break the bones.30
Marx was deeply impressed by this view.31 It is my contention that Marx went as far as to accept it as rational, and also to conceive it possible that, given the existence of the advanced West as a precondition, Russia could start out from its village commune and proceed immediately to socialism. Only by this inference can we reach a coherent understanding of his view in 1875.
That Marx was deeply interested in the question of the Russian village commune is evident from his letter to Danielson dated 22 March 1873, in which he asked for information on the origins of the village commune.32 Of the books which Danielson sent to Marx in response to this request, Materials About Artels in Russia (1873) and a book by Skaldin, In a Faraway Province and in the Capital (1870), were of importance, and Marx read these two volumes earnestly.33
II
The new view which Marx formulated on the basis of his studies up to that