The special attraction of Marxism stemmed from the importance it gave to the role of the working class and to the idea of progress. The popular Marxist pamphlets of the late 1890s, which for the first time attracted large numbers of workers like Kanatchikov to the cause, drove home the lessons of the famine crisis of 1891: that the peasants were doomed to die out as a result of economic progress; that they were a relic of Russia’s backward past who would be swept away by industry; and that the Populists’ belief in the commune (to which many of the peasant-workers still adhered) was no longer tenable. Only Marxism could explain to workers why their peasant parents had become so poor, and why they had been forced into the cities. There was thus a close link between Kanatchikov’s attachment to the Marxist exaltation of industrialization and progress and his own psychological rejection of his peasant past. Like many workers from the countryside, Kanatchikov invested much of his own personality in the ideal of liberation through industry. He found ‘poetry’ in ‘the rumblings and the puffings’ of the factory. To workers like him Marxism appeared as a modern ‘science’ that explained in simple black-and-white terms why their world was structured the way that it was, and how it could be transformed.
Many people have argued that Marxism acted like a religion, at least in its popular form. But workers like Kanatchikov believed with the utmost seriousness that the teachings of Marx were a science, on a par with the natural sciences; and to claim that their belief was really nothing more than a form of religious faith is unfair to them. There was, however, an obvious dogmatism in the outlook of many such workers, which could easily be mistaken for religious zealotry. It manifested itself in that air of disdain which many workers, having reached the uplands of Marxist understanding, showed towards those who had not yet ascended to such heights. One ‘comrade’, for example, arrogantly told a police officer, who was in the process of arresting him, that he was a ‘fool’ because he had ‘never read Marx’ and did ‘not even know what politics and economics [were]’.55 This dogmatism had much to do with the relative scarcity of alternative political ideas, which might at least have caused the workers to regard the Marxist doctrine with a little more reserve and scepticism. But it also had its roots in the way most of these workers had been educated in philosophy. When people learn as adults what children are normally taught in schools, they often find it difficult to progress beyond the simplest abstract ideas. These tend to lodge deep in their minds, making them resistant to the subsequent absorption of knowledge on a more sophisticated level. They see the world in black-and-white terms because their narrow learning obscures any other coloration. Marxism had much the same effect on workers like Kanatchikov. It gave them a simple solution to the problems of ‘capitalism’ and backwardness without requiring that they think independently.
For a worker to commit himself to the militant labour movement was to invite persecution. Once the local police got wind of his activities he would soon find himself dismissed from his factory as a troublemaker. Yet because of the huge demand for skilled labour during the industrial boom, workers like Kanatchikov were easily able to find jobs again. They roamed from factory to factory, organizing illegal workers’ clubs and associations, until the police caught up with them and again forced them to move on. Faced with a life on the run, the weak-willed militant might have chosen to return to the security of his native village. But for workers like Kanatchikov this was unthinkable. They had already committed themselves to the revolutionary movement, and their identity was invested in it. To return to the backwardness of the village would undermine their hard-won sense of themselves. The only alternative was to join the revolutionary movement underground. The comradeship which they found there partly compensated for the rootlessness which many of them must have felt as they moved from town to town. The party organization became the worker’s ‘family home and hearth’, as Kanatchikov put it. His ‘comrades in struggle’ took ‘the place of his brothers, sisters, father and mother’. Belonging to this secret community, moreover, had its own romantic appeal, as another Bolshevik worker explained: ‘The constant danger of arrest, the secrecy of our meetings and the awareness that I was no longer just a grain of sand, no longer just another one of the workers, but a member of an organization that was dangerous and threatening to the government and to the rich — all this was new and exciting.’56
