The revolutionary movement in Russia can triumph only as a revolutionary movement of the workers. For us there is no other way out, nor can there be.
– Plekhanov, speech to the International Socialist Congress, Paris 1889
Hegel once remarked that “When we want to see an oak with all its vigour of trunk, its spreading branches, and mass of foliage, we are not satisfied to be shown an acorn instead.” (GWF Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, p. 75.) Yet within the embryo of a healthy plant or animal is contained all the genetic information necessary for its future development. It is no different with the development of a revolutionary tendency. The ‘genetic information’ here is represented by theory, which contains within itself a rich store of generalisations based upon past experience. Theory is primary: all subsequent development stems from this. Despite the smallness of its size, the primitiveness of its organisation, and rather amateur methods, the great contribution of the Emancipation of Labour Group was to lay down the theoretical roots of the movement. Of necessity, the initial work of the group was confined to winning the ones and twos, of educating and training cadres, of hammering home the fundamental principles of Marxism.
“With all our hearts,” wrote Plekhanov, “we seek to work for the creation of a literature which is accessible to the understanding of the whole peasant-worker masses; we, nevertheless are obliged for the time being to confine our popular literary efforts to the narrow circle of more or less ‘intellectual’ leaders of the working class.” (Quoted in Istoriya KPSS, vol. 1, p. 132, my emphasis.)
The writings of Plekhanov during this period served to lay the theoretical basis for the building of the party. Many of them remain classics to the present time, although they do not receive sufficient attention by students of Marxism. Not by chance, Lenin strongly recommended the republication of Plekhanov’s philosophical writings after the revolution, when the two men had long been political enemies. Socialism and the Political Struggle, Our Differences, and, above all, Plekhanov’s masterpiece, On the Development of the Monist View of History are masterly restatements of the fundamental ideas of dialectical and historical materialism.
Plekhanov’s onslaught threw the Narodnik leaders into disarray. Unable to provide a coherent answer to the Marxist case, they resorted to bitter complaints and spiteful allegations about the new group. Vestnik Narodnoi Voli (no. 2, 1884) alleged that “for them [the Marxists] the polemic with Narodnaya Volya is more topical than the struggle with the Russian government and with other exploiters of the Russian people”. (Ibid., p. 136.)
How often have Marxists heard such allegations throughout our history! For the crime of insisting on theoretical clarity, for attempting to draw a clear line of demarcation between itself and other political tendencies, Marxism is always accused of the sin of ‘sectarianism’, of being against ‘left unity’ and so on and so forth. It is one of the great ironies of history that one of Plekhanov’s main Narodnik critics, Tikhomirov (‘NV’), who accused the group of disrupting revolutionary unity and submissively accepting the yoke of capital, himself later went over to the camp of monarchist reaction. Not for the first or last time, the advocator of unprincipled ‘unity’ ended up by uniting with the enemies of the working class!
The work of penetrating the movement in Russia, however, proceeded with painful difficulty. The illegal transportation of literature posed enormous problems. Professional people and students studying abroad were enlisted to carry illegal literature when going back home on holiday. At various times, members of the group were sent into Russia to establish contacts. Such journeys were extremely hazardous and frequently ended in arrests. People from the interior who managed to establish direct contact with the Group were few and far between, and cherished like gold nuggets. In 1887-88, there was an attempt to set up a Union of Russian Social Democrats abroad, headed by the student Rafail Soloveichik, who had left Russia in 1884. But he clashed with the Group, went back to Russia, was arrested in 1889 and sentenced to a long term of imprisonment, during which he became mentally deranged and committed suicide. Another member of the same group, Grigor Gukovsky, a young student in Zurich, was arrested in Aachen and handed over to the tsarist government. Sentenced to prison, he also committed suicide. There were many such cases. The arm of the tsarist authorities was long. The Group constantly faced the danger of infiltration by police spies and provocateurs. One such spy was Christian Haupt, a worker who was engaged by the police to infiltrate the Russian Social Democratic organisations in exile. Unmasked by the German Social Democrats as a police spy, Haupt was expelled from Switzerland.
Worst of all was the sensation of complete political isolation, aggravated by the inevitable rows and squabbles of exile life. The émigré Narodniks, stung by Plekhanov’s criticism, gave vent to their hurt feelings by heated protests at being called ‘Bakuninists’ and demands for public apologies. The overwhelming majority of the exiles were Narodniks, and implacably hostile to the new group which they regarded as traitors and splitters. Years later, Plekhanov’s wife recalled that “the Narodnaya Volya people and NK Mikhailovsky at that time controlled the hearts and minds of the Geneva émigrés and the Russian students”. (GV Plekhanov, Perepiska GV Plekhanova i PB Aksel’roda, p. 87.)
After the murder of Alexander II, a period of rigid hopelessness overcame the whole of Russia… The lead roofs [prisons] of Alexander III’s government contained the silence of the grave. Russian society fell into the grip of hopeless resignation, faced as it was by the end of all hopes for peaceful reform, and the apparent failure of all revolutionary movements. In such an atmosphere, there could only emerge metaphysical and mystical tendencies. (J.P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, vol. 1, p. 44.)
This is how Rosa Luxemburg recalled this bleak decade of reaction. The new Tsar, Alexander III, was a giant of a man, strong enough to bend a horseshoe in his hand, but an intellectual pygmy. The real ruler of Russia was Pobedonostsev, the Tsar’s former tutor, Procurator of the Holy Synod, who believed that Western democracy was rotten, that only the Russian patriarchal system was sound, that the press must be silenced, that schools must be under Church control, and that the Tsar’s rule must be absolute. Village priests were expected to report any politically suspect parishioners to the police, and even their sermons were subject to censorship. All non-Orthodox and non-Christian religions were persecuted. Tolstoyans were regarded as particularly dangerous to church and state. Tolstoy himself was excommunicated. All student protest was ruthlessly put down.
These were hard times. On all sides there was retreat, ideological backsliding, and cowardly apostasy. The old Narodnik trend was in a complete impasse. Having burned their fingers with terrorism, the ‘extreme revolutionaries’ effected another 180° somersault and eventually ended up in the camp of the liberal philistines, preaching a cowardly policy of ‘small deeds’ and harmless cultural-educational work. Commenting on the decay of Narodnism, Martov wrote:
The fall of the revolutionary People’s Freedom was at the same time the collapse of Populism as a whole. Broad circles of the democratic intelligentsia were profoundly demoralised and disappointed in ‘politics’ and their own heroic mission. A modest ‘cultivation’ in the service of the liberal segments of the possessing classes: this was the sign under which the part of the intelligentsia that had remained loyal to Populism entered the grey epoch of the 1880s. (Quoted in F. Dan, The Origins of Bolshevism, p. 141.)
For the first ten years or so of its existence, the Emancipation of Labour Group was forced to fight a weary battle against the stream. In order to find a road to the young generation, Plekhanov was obliged to seek collaboration with all kinds of confused and semi-Narodnik elements. One such group published a small journal, Svobodnaya Rossiya (Free Russia) which, in the leading article of its first issue, argued the impossibility of “organising the workers and peasants around revolutionary action” and argued against putting forward ideas which might frighten liberal sympathisers. Contact with Russia resembled a game of blind man’s buff. The situation with the exiles could hardly have been worse. The frustrations of the Group are shown in the correspondence of Plekhanov with his closest collaborators. Even the literary activity of the Group was fraught with difficulties. The Emancipation of Labour Group lived in an atmosphere of continuous financial crisis. Being small in number, and with limited scope for raising cash, they usually depended on what are known in the American theatrical world as ‘angels’, wealthy sympathisers prepared to finance their literary ventures. Sometimes, these people were not even socialists, such as Guryev who put up the cash for the ‘three-monthly’ Sotsial Demokrat. In general, the publications of the group came out on a very irregular basis. At times, the task must have seemed well-nigh hopeless. In the summer of 1885, Plekhanov wrote to Axelrod in terms verging on desperation: “But really we are standing over an abyss of all sorts over debts, and don’t know and cannot think what to catch hold of to stop ourselves falling in. Things are bad.” (Perepiska GV Plekhanova i PB Aksel’roda, p. 66 and p. 21.)
Throughout the dark days of the 1880s, Plekhanov and his family lived in extreme poverty. At times he gave private lessons in Russian literature for a small salary, living in the cheapest ‘pension’ owned by a butcher who fed him exclusively on soup and boiled meat! Bad food and living conditions undermined his health. For a while he was dangerously ill with pleurisy, the effect of which lasted the rest of his life. Working under enormous difficulties, suffering remorseless pressure from all sides, the Emancipation of Labour Group was held together by faith in its ideas, but also by the colossal moral and political authority of Plekhanov. Within the Group, Plekhanov reigned supreme. Their very isolation made the members rally round in a closely knit circle, welded together by strong political and personal ties. Not for nothing did they later acquire the nickname of ‘The Family’. And Plekhanov was the indisputable head of the ‘household’ – intellectually, he towered above the others, and yet there existed between them a strong sense of mutual dependence born of years of struggle and sacrifice in a common cause. In such circumstances it was hardly surprising that personal and political questions should become intermixed. Plekhanov was a tower of strength to the others, giving them moral support in times of doubt and personal crises.
The tragedy of people like Axelrod and Zasulich had a two-fold character. Under different historical conditions, these talented individuals could have played a far bigger role in the shaping of events. Long years of isolation in exile had a disastrous effect upon their psychological and intellectual development. Working under Plekhanov’s shadow, their evolution became stultified to the extent that, when conditions changed, they were unable to adapt and were lost to the revolution. Due to the conditions in which the Group was compelled to work for decades, traces of a narrow propaganda circle mentality would almost inevitably tend to creep in. Such factors did not have a fundamental significance in the early years, the long, slow period of theoretical preparation and tiny propaganda circles. Only at a later date, when the Russian Marxist movement was faced with the necessity of stepping over the limitation of the propaganda phase did the negative features of the Emancipation of Labour Group emerge.
For two decades, the membership of the Emancipation of Labour Group stayed virtually the same. Of its founders, V.N. Ignatov died too early to leave much of an imprint. Lev Deutsch was the heart and soul of the organisational side of the work, such as the arrangements for printing and distribution of literature. Pavel Axelrod was a talented propagandist who made a big impression on the young Lenin and Trotsky. His name was for a long time inseparable from that of Plekhanov. Vera Zasulich, a sincere, warm-hearted and impulsive person, suffered more than most from the trauma of exile. Ever impatient to close the gap between the Emancipation of Labour Group and the new generation of revolutionaries in Russia, she was forever taking up the cudgels on behalf of the youth, overcoming the resistance of Plekhanov and encouraging new initiatives – usually unsuccessful – with the youth groups in exile.
The patient work of the Marxists eventually bore fruit. The real reason for the whimpering of the Narodniks about ‘sectarianism’ and ‘splitters’ was the effect which the ideas of Marxism were having on their own followers. It is difficult to overestimate the impact which works like Our Differences (1885) had on the young revolutionaries inside Russia who were avidly looking for a way out of the impasse of Narodnism, which was now in a phase of self-evident decadence. The rightward shift of the Narodnik leaders reached its culminating point with the open renegacy of Tikhomirov – the target of many of Plekhanov’s polemics – who in 1888 published a pamphlet with the title Why I Ceased to Be a Revolutionary.
The collapse of the old revolutionary Narodnism had a profound effect among the youth inside Russia, producing a polarisation between the pro-liberal reformist elements and the best elements of the youth, striving to find a road to revolution. Towards the end of 1887, S.N. Ginsburg, having recently returned from Russia, wrote in a worried tone to the Narodnik leader PL Lavrov:
Our Political Differences and Socialism and the Political Struggle have had their influence, and a strong one, which we must come to terms with… The importance of the individual, the importance of the intelligentsia in the revolution, are completely destroyed by them, and I have personally seen people who have been crushed by his theories. And the main thing is his tone, bold as if he was convinced of his rightness, his negation of all that has gone before, the reduction of all predecessors to a nil – all this is definitely having an influence. (Ibid., p. 61.)
Ginsburg’s letter shows how, unbeknownst to the exiled Marxists, new groupings were crystallising in the interior, discussing the failures of the past, drawing up a balance sheet and seeking a new way. Here the ideas of Plekhanov fell upon fertile ground. By the 1890s, the Group began to enjoy an enormous authority in the eyes of the increasing numbers of Marxist youth, and the name of Plekhanov was known in every underground propaganda circle and every police station in Russia.