The Russian Revolution полностью

*Eric Hoffer sees in imperviousness to reality an essential feature of all fanaticism: “the effectiveness of a doctrine should not be judged by its profundity, sublimity or the validity of the truths it embodies, but by how thoroughly it insulates the individual from his self and the world as it is” (The True Believer, New York, 1951, 79).

*A. Volskii (Machajski), Umstvennyi rabochii (New York-Baltimore, 1968), 328. (Originally published in 1904–5.) In the preface (p. 14), Albert Parry notes that this work aroused the “fierce opposition” of virtually all revolutionary intellectuals of the time: “They at once mobilized the entire corps of their theoretical publicists, orators, and agitators. The whole propaganda apparatus of the Socialist movement, be it Bolshevik, Menshevik, or Socialist-Revolutionary, went into action against this new common enemy. The virulence of their attack was unprecedented.” Machajski’s writings have been placed on the Soviet Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

*Letter to Aleksei Suvorin, in Anton Chekhov, Pis’ma, V (Moscow, 1915), 352. Bernard De Voto in The Literary Fallacy (Boston, 1944) voices similar complaints about American writers of the interwar period, which indicates to what extent the problem that afflicted Imperial Russia had become international.

*This theory has recently received fresh support from a German scholar who argues that because of the poverty of her rural population, pre-revolutionary Russia lacked the conditions for the development of a market-based industrial economy: Jürgen Nötzold, Wirtschaftspolitische Alternativen der Entwicklung Russlands in der Ära Witte und Stolypin (Berlin, 1966), 193, 204.

*K. Marks, F. Engels’ i revoliutsionnaia Rossiia (Moscow, 1967), 443–44. According to N. Valentinov, The Early Years of Lenin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1969), 183, this letter was kept secret for many years, presumably because it ran contrary to the views of the Russian Social-Democratic establishment.

*In English, the adherents of this group are usually called either Social-Revolutionaries or Socialist-Revolutionaries. Both renditions are inaccurate. They called themselves Sotsialisty-Revoliutsionery—that is, Socialists-Revolutionaries.

*Jacques Ellul, Autopsie de la Révolution (Paris, 1969), 69. Ellul concedes that Lenin represented a new type of revolutionary activist.

*Ingeborg Fleischhauer (Cahiers du Monde Russe et Soviétique, XX, No. 2, 1979, 173–201) draws attention to the close similarities between the agrarian programs of the Kadets and the German Social-Democrats.

5

The Constitutional Experiment

The October Manifesto provided a framework within which the Russian state and Russian society should have found it possible to reduce the tension dividing them. This it failed to accomplish. A constitutional regime can function properly only if government and opposition accept the rules of the game: in Russia, neither the monarchy nor the intelligentsia was prepared to do so. Each regarded the new order as an obstacle, a deviation from the country’s true system, which for the monarchy was autocracy and for the intelligentsia, a democratic republic. As a result, the constitutional interlude, while not without achievements, was largely wasted—a missed opportunity that would not recur.

In affixing his signature to the manifesto, Nicholas vaguely realized that it meant “constitution,” but neither he nor his advisers were intellectually or psychologically ready to acknowledge that a constitution spelled an end to the autocracy. Although the manifesto pledged that henceforth no law would go into effect without the approval of a popularly elected legislature, the Court seemed unaware that this pledge entailed a constitutional charter. According to Witte, it was only two months later that Trepov broached the need for such a document.¹ And when a constitutional charter was issued in April 1906, its drafters studiously avoided the word “constitution,” designating it as “Fundamental Laws” (Osnovnye zakony), the name traditionally used for the first volume of the Code of Laws.