Alexander III died on the 1 November, 1894, and was succeeded by his son, Nicholas II. On the glittering occasion of the new sovereign’s marriage in January the following year, the Zemstvo liberals plucked up their courage and presented a petition – in the form of a congratulatory address: “We cherish the hope,” it said, “that the voice of the people’s needs will always be heard on the heights of the throne.” Nicholas’ cutting reply represents a veritable classic of a political demolition job:
I am glad to see representatives of all classes assembled to declare their loyal sentiments. I believe in the sincerity of those sentiments which have ever been proper to every Russian. But I am aware that of late, in some Zemstvo assemblies, there have been heard voices of persons who have been carried away by senseless dreams of the participation of Zemstvo representatives in the affairs of the internal administration. Let it be known to all that I, while devoting all my energies to the good of the people, shall maintain the principle of autocracy just as firmly and unflinchingly as my unforgettable father.
The assembled ranks of the Zemstvo gentry were forced to listen while this bucket of icy slops was poured over their heads. The message was not even read by the Tsar, who dispatched an underling to do it for him.
A little officer came out, in his hand he had a bit of paper; he began mumbling something, now and then looking at that bit of paper; then suddenly shouted out: “senseless dreams” – here we understood that we were being scolded for something. Well, why should one bark? (Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 22, no. 34, p. 350 in both quotes.)
In a scene worthy of a great artist, the young empress was said to have stood stiff and rigid, not bowing to the delegates as they crept past. Rodichev, the author of the ‘Tver petition’, was not even admitted to the reception and was forbidden to live in St. Petersburg for his pains. More than any amount of words, this amusing little cameo shows up the utter impotence and cowardice of the liberals of Zemstvo Russia on the eve of the twentieth century.
These were the years when the bourgeois intellectuals retreated into themselves, playing with spiritualism, mysticism, pornography, and ‘art for art’s sake’. Art and literature saw the rise of symbolism, with its mystical overtones, and the ‘decadent’ school. All this was merely a reflection, not just of a fin de siècle malaise of the intellectuals, but of the general feeling of impasse and helplessness which followed the shattering of Narodnaya Volya. As Marx once observed, history repeated itself – first time as tragedy, second time as farce. In a pathetic caricature of Narodnism, liberal youth would dress up in peasant clothes and become ‘Tolstoyans’, participating in welfare and charity schemes for the relief of famine, campaigns against illiteracy, and the like.
The growing influence of Marxist ideas among the intelligentsia produced a peculiar phenomenon. The striking successes of Marxist ideology in the struggle against Narodnism began to interest a layer of bourgeois intellectuals in the universities, who became fascinated with Marxism as a socio-historical theory, without ever really grasping its revolutionary class content. The young bourgeoisie was striving to find a voice of its own, to assert its own interests and provide a theoretical justification for the inevitability of capitalist development in Russia. Some of the ideas put forward by Marxism in the struggle against Narodnism were eagerly grasped by a section of the intellectual spokesmen of the bourgeoisie. For a short time, ‘Marxism’ in a bowdlerised, academic form, enjoyed a certain vogue among ‘left’ liberal professors.
In the initial stages, when the forces of Marxism were small and lacking in influence, and the socialist revolution was as yet the music of an apparently distant future, these well-to-do intellectual dilettantes seemed actually to represent a definite trend in Russian Marxism. Given the appalling difficulties of the illegal revolutionary movement, their services were readily accepted. They gave money, collaborated in the publication of Marxist literature and, in the absence of a real Marxist press, facilitated the appearance of Marxist views, albeit in a watered-down form, in the pages of all-Russian legal journals. This situation offered certain possibilities for the Marxists, who were permitted to write in the pages of legal bourgeois journals like Novoe Slovo, Nachalo (not to be confused with the Nachalo published by Trotsky in 1905), and Samarsky Vestnik – always provided they did not ‘go too far’, of course. In this way there arose the strange hybrid monstrosity of ‘Legal Marxism’, the main representatives of which were PB Struve, M.I. Tugan-Baranovsky, S.N. Bulgakov, and NA Berdyayev.
Because of the censorship, all the early works of Marxism in Russia had to come out in book form, which made it an expensive business. Struve met the cost of publishing his book out of his own pocket. Such was the thirst for Marxist ideas, even in a bowdlerised form, that it sold out in two weeks. Potresov, who had inherited a private fortune, used his money to finance the publication of Plekhanov’s Monist View of History. Given the immense difficulties of illegality, it was clearly necessary to exploit each and every legal opening to spread the ideas of Marxism. What could not be said openly in legal publications could be supplemented by the underground party press. Thus, for many years, the Russian Marxists could not call themselves ‘Social Democrats’, but had to use phrases like ‘Consistent Democrats’ instead. As Trotsky pointed out many years later, they did not get off scot-free from this. A number of people associated with the party turned out to be precisely ‘consistent democrats’ – and some not so consistent – but not at all Marxists! For the development of a healthy Marxist current it is necessary above all to be able to say what is. Only the development of a genuine illegal Marxist journal could serve to mend the damage done by the Legal Marxists and their shadow, the Economists. This was the great achievement of Lenin’s Iskra (The Spark).
Despite all the problems and overheads, the collaboration with the Legal Marxists was a useful and, in any case, unavoidable stage in the development of the movement in the early days. The great majority of those who flirted with Marxism in their youth later broke with the movement and passed over to the side of reaction. But at the time they played a useful role. Some, at least, appeared to have undergone a genuine conversion. But the majority soon recovered from their ‘socialist measles’. It was all too easy to explain away shortcomings in their mode of expression by the exigencies of legal work, the need to escape detection, arrest and so on. So long as the main tasks of the movement were of a more or less theoretical character, and directed mainly against the Narodnik enemies of the bourgeoisie, this collaboration, in fact, proceeded on a more or less satisfactory basis. It was a Legal Marxist – Struve – who wrote the manifesto of the first congress of the RSDLP!
Theirs was an anaemic and emasculated view of Marxism, a ‘decaffeinated’ Marxism, lacking life, struggle and revolutionary vitality. Not accidentally, the Legal Marxists rejected dialectics in favour of Neo-Kantian philosophy. Despite its appearance of uniqueness, and the somewhat special role it played in the early days of the movement in Russia, the same kind of abstract, undialectical and essentially non-revolutionary ‘Marxism’ regularly reappears in the rarefied atmosphere of the universities of all countries, at every stage in the development of the movement. They were, in fact, an early example of what later became known as ‘fellow travellers’. Despite their intellectual flirtation with Marxism, in their lifestyle and psychology they remained firmly rooted in an alien class. Many years later Struve was to sum up the mentality of the Legal Marxists in the following passage:
Socialism, to tell the truth, never aroused the slightest emotion in me, still less attraction… Socialism interested me mainly as an ideological force – which… could be directed either to the conquest of civil and political freedoms or against them. (Ibid.)
On the face of it, the ideas of the Legal Marxists may now appear to be of merely historical interest. Yet upon closer examination, one can already discern the outline of future and more portentous disputes. The basic idea underlying the argument of Struve and co. consisted in the following: the material conditions for socialism are absent in Russia, a backward, semi-feudal country; the struggle against tsarism is a struggle for bourgeois democracy, not socialism; the workers’ party should therefore set aside all impossible illusions and realistically rely upon the good offices of progressive bourgeois liberals to usher in the new order. Such, in essence, are the future theories (in reality, the same theory) of Menshevism and Stalinism. In an embryonic form the two fundamentally opposing conceptions of the revolution – reform or revolution, class collaboration or an independent proletarian policy – had already made their appearance in the polemics of Lenin and Plekhanov against the Legal Marxist and Economist trends in the second half of the 1890s. At this time, no one who considered themselves a Marxist questioned the idea that Russia was on the eve of a bourgeois-democratic revolution. This idea flowed from the entire objective, socioeconomic and historical situation. The main struggle was against the autocracy, against feudal barbarism and the heritage of “bureaucratic and serf culture”, as Lenin was later to describe it. The central plank of the Marxists’ argument against the Narodniks was precisely the inevitability of a capitalist phase of development and the impossibility of a special independent path of ‘peasant socialism’ in Russia.
For the Legal Marxists the prospect of a socialist revolution was reduced to a hazy theoretical prospect sometime in the dim and distant future. Such a perspective was quite safe, and basically committed them to nothing. To them, the revolutionary aspect of Marxism seemed quite unreal, whereas the economic arguments about the inevitable victory of capitalism in Russia seemed pre-eminently practical. Just how far these lifeless schemas stood from genuine revolutionary Marxism can be seen from the marvellously profound insights in the last writings of Engels’ old age, and in particular his correspondence with Vera Zasulich and other Russian Marxists. While underlining the impossibility of building socialism in a backward peasant country like Russia, old Engels laid heavy stress on the need for a revolutionary-democratic overthrow of the autocracy, which would then open the way for the socialist revolution in Western Europe. In the afterword to On Social Relations in Russia, written in 1894, Engels poses the question in this way:
The Russian Revolution will also give a fresh impulse to the labour movement in the West, creating for it new and better conditions for struggle and thereby advancing the victory of the modern industrial proletariat, a victory without which present-day Russia, whether on the basis of the [village] community or of capitalism, cannot achieve a socialist transformation of society. (K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, vol. 2, p. 410.)
By a brilliant application of dialectics, Engels shows how the victory of socialism in the West, in turn, would interact upon Russia, enabling it to proceed straight from semi-feudal conditions to communism. Here revolutionary dialectics are counterposed to the formal logic of ‘evolution’. Cause becomes effect and effect cause. The Russian Revolution, even on a bourgeois-democratic basis, would impel the all-European proletarian revolution, which in turn interacts upon Russia to produce a root-and-branch social transformation. The victory of the socialist revolution in the West enables the Russian workers and peasants to carry through the proletarian revolution in Russia and begin the socialist transformation of society. Under these circumstances it would not be theoretically excluded that the old Narodnik idea of the transformation of the village commune to communism might be possible.
Such a bold formulation never entered the heads of Struve or Tugan-Baranovsky, with their abstract formulas, which represented a lifeless and mechanical caricature of Marxism. In her memoirs, Krupskaya recalls that Struve “was himself a Social Democrat of a sort at that time”, but adds that “he was quite incapable of doing any work in the organisation, leave alone underground work, but it flattered him, no doubt, to be called on for advice”. (NK Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, pp. 29-30.) These few lines faithfully convey the essence of this layer of bourgeois and middle class intellectuals who ‘travelled’ with the Party, considering themselves to be of it, but never really being in it, and always with one foot in another camp. Through the medium of this layer the pressure of alien classes was, unconsciously or half-consciously brought to bear, with dire results upon the young and immature forces of Marxism.
Struve, for a time, veered to the left as a result of the general movement of the intelligentsia, under the pressure of the working class in the stormy period of the 1890s, in the direction of Marxism. The relentless ideological criticism from Lenin and Plekhanov also played a role. There is little doubt that the withering criticism of the Russian bourgeoisie in the Manifesto of the First Congress, written by Struve, echoed the fierce controversies with Lenin a couple of years earlier:
And what does the Russian working class not need? It is completely deprived of what its comrades abroad freely and peacefully make use of: participation in the running of the state, freedom of the written and spoken word, freedom of association and assembly – in a word, all those weapons and means by which the West European and American proletariat is improving its position while struggling for its ultimate emancipation, against private ownership and capitalism – for socialism. But the Russian proletariat can only conquer the political freedom it needs by itself alone.
The further you go to the East of Europe, the weaker, more cowardly and baser the bourgeoisie becomes in the political field, and the greater the cultural and political tasks which fall to the lot of the proletariat. On its own strong shoulders the Russian working class must and does bear the cause of winning political freedom. This is an indispensable, though only a first, step towards the realisation of the great historical mission of the proletariat, towards the creation of a social order in which there will be no room for the exploitation of man by man. (KPSS v rezolyutsiyakh i resheniyakh s’yezdov. Konferentsii y plenumov tsk, vol. 1, p. 15, my emphasis.)
Like many of the intellectual fellow travellers of Marxism, Struve never came to terms with dialectics. This fundamental theoretical weakness, alongside the usual middle-class hankering after the flesh-pots, the liking for an easy existence and an organic incapacity for personal sacrifice, serve to explain his subsequent development. Struve later broke with Marxism. In 1905 he joined the bourgeois Cadet Party and ended his days as a White émigré. Berdyayev ended up as an apologist for religious mysticism. The others underwent a similar transformation. Struve’s 1898 Manifesto, with its harsh condemnation of the Russian bourgeoisie, thus constitutes an ironically appropriate epitaph both on Struve and the phenomenon of Legal Marxism in general.