The Russian Revolution полностью

The ranks of zemstvo constitutionalists were augmented in 1901 by a small but influential group of intellectuals, defectors from Social-Democracy who had found intolerable its partisanship and dogmatism. The most prominent among them was Peter Struve, the author of the founding manifesto of the Social-Democratic Party and one of its outstanding theoreticians. Struve and his friends proposed to forge a national front, encompassing parties and groupings from the extreme left to the moderate right, under the slogan “Down with the Autocracy.” Struve emigrated to Germany and with money provided by zemstvo friends founded there in 1902 the journal Osvobozhdenie (Liberation). The periodical carried information not permitted in censored publications, including secret government documents supplied by sympathizers within the bureaucracy. Issues smuggled into Russia helped forge a community of “Liberationists” (Osvobozhdentsy) from which, in time, would emerge the Constitutional-Democratic Party. In January 1904, its supporters founded in St. Petersburg the Union of Liberation (Soiuz Osvobozhdeniia) to promote constitutionalism and civil rights. Its branches in many towns attracted moderate elements as well as socialists, especially Socialists-Revolutionaries. (The Social-Democrats, insisting on their “hegemony” in the struggle against the regime, refused to collaborate.) These circles, operating semi-legally, did much to stimulate discontent with existing conditions.⁵⁶

The rank and file of the liberal movement was highly diversified. The Constitutional-Democratic Party, which in 1906 had 100,000 members—several times the combined membership of the socialist parties—rested on a broader social base than its rivals on the left, attracting many artisans, junior officials, salesmen, and tradesmen. The liberal intelligentsia consisted mainly of professionals, such as professors, lawyers, physicians, and editors, rather than the students who filled socialist ranks.⁵⁷

At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were in Russia thousands of men and women committed to fundamental change. A good part of them were “professional revolutionaries,” a novel breed who dedicated their lives to plotting political violence. They and their supporters might quarrel among themselves about strategy and tactics—whether to engage in terror, whether to “socialize” or “nationalize” the land, whether to treat the peasant as an ally or as an enemy of the worker. But they were at one on the central issue: that there was to be no accommodation, no compromise with the existing social, economic and political regime, that it had to be destroyed, root and branch, not only in Russia but throughout the world. So strong was the influence of these extremists that even Russia’s liberals came under their spell. Clearly, the limited political concessions spelled out in the October Manifesto satisfied none of them.

The existence of such an intelligentsia created, in and of itself, a high risk of permanent revolution. For just as lawyers make for litigation and bureaucrats for paperwork, so revolutionaries make for revolution. In each case, a profession emerges with an interest in promoting situations that demand its particular expertise. The fact that the intelligentsia rejected any accommodation with official Russia, that it exacerbated discontent and opposed reform, made it unlikely that Russia’s problems could be peacefully resolved.

*The history of this term in Western Europe and Russia is recounted by Otto Wilhelm Müller in Intelligencija: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte eines politischen Schlagwortes (Frankfurt, 1971). According to the author (p. 98n.), the word “intelligent” was applied in France to experts as early as the fifteenth century.

*The notion that the task of politics is to inculcate virtue and that virtue is attained by laws and education is as old as political theory, since it goes back to Plato. But the innovation of Helvétius is that to him politics, by creating a propitious environment, not only enables man to act virtuously but compels him to do so by remaking his personality.

*Francis G. Wilson has noted that even in early modern times, before the influence of science had made itself fully felt, intellectuals favored centralized authority and a powerful state: American Political Science Review, XLVIII, No. 2 (1954), 325, 335–38.

*Cochin fell in battle in 1916. His principal works are La Crise de l’Histoire Révolutionnaire (Paris, 1909) and the posthumously published Les Sociétés de pensée et la Démocratie (Paris, 1921). His ideas are summarized in François Furet’s Penser la Révolution Française (Paris, 1983).