Russia. A History полностью

By increasing the size and concentration of the working class, Witte’s policies expanded the arena of radical activity and opened the door to a Marxist perspective on the left. By the eve of 1905 the left included competing revolutionary strategies, each eventually embodied in a ‘party’: the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (PSR, or simply the SRs, formally constituted in 1901) and two rival factions of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP), the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (products of the party’s schism in 1903). ‘Party’ is placed in quotation marks to emphasize that none was a party in the traditional West European political sense, that is, an organization that existed for the competitive pursuit of national elective office: there was no such office before 1906. Instead, these parties were underground organizations, seeking to overthrow the existing system and—here came some monumental disagreements—replace it either temporarily, with a liberal-democratic, constitutional polity and market economy (a ‘bourgeois phase’), or permanently, with a ‘socialist’ order (in any case a clearly non-capitalist socioeconomic system). Among European Marxists, nowhere was the issue of the succession of revolutionary ‘phases’ more hotly debated than in Russia, yet another expression of the reworking of West European experience into a relatively backward socioeconomic context.

The SRs, identifying strongly with populist traditions of the 1870s and the terrorism of People’s Will, welcomed signs of worker rebelliousness, but treated workers as but another component part of the larger ‘people’, whose centre of gravity remained in the huge peasant majority. Both workers and peasants, from the SR perspective, were victims of state-sponsored capitalism, a system that lacked a broad social base or other redeeming feature and could still be short-circuited either by revolutionary action or reversal of government policy. Most SRs were of the ultra-revolutionary persuasion. They were often high-energy revolutionary performers, and their patience with any schemes for a ‘transitional’ or temporary phase, postponing socialism to some more distant point in time, was, for the moment, very thin. There was, to be sure, a handful of populist-oriented publicists in the 1890s who believed in peaceful persuasion and other lawful means, but these ‘Legal Populists’ had lost much of their influence by the end of the century.

Some Marxists, those who became the Mensheviks, did not believe Russia ready for ‘proletarian’ or ‘socialist’ revolution and set as their proximate goal a ‘bourgeois’ revolution, whereby not workers—their ostensible constituency—but the enemy camp of capitalists would be the immediate beneficiary. Strictly speaking, the Mensheviks were following the logic of Orthodox Marxism, or that, at least, was their own perception. Capitalism was evil, of course, but a necessary evil, which carried the seeds of a socialist future in its womb. Rapid economic growth was therefore a sign of progress, auguring a liberal, bourgeois revolution (though one that the working class might have to lead!) in the near term, a proletarian revolution sometime thereafter. This complex analysis led some ‘Legal Marxists’ (Peter Struve, despite his early misgivings about the ‘cowardice’ of the Russian bourgeoisie, is the most illustrious example) away from socialism and all the way into the liberal, non-revolutionary camp. It was an analysis, however, that would not necessarily appeal to workers, even those who eschewed revolutionary rhetoric and practice.

Finally, there were the Bolsheviks, who, like the Mensheviks, claimed to spurn much of the populist legacy—glorification of the commune, rejection of a capitalist phase, terrorism. But the Bolsheviks shared the populists’ thoroughgoing impatience with intermediary, liberal-type solutions, their almost personal contempt for liberals, and even for revolutionaries who tolerated them (Lenin best embodied this contempt), and their furious rejection of any form of attentisme. As Marxists they had no choice but to share the Menshevik belief that the growth of capitalism in Russia was secure and augured progress; this indeed had been the central argument in Lenin’s huge, statistically burdened book The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899). But as Russian revolutionary maximalists they would seek every possible way to drive their insurrectionary train past the capitalist station with, at most, the shortest of stops.