Among social democrats the key political thinkers were the classical Marxist and MenshevikGeorgii Valentinovich Plekhanov (1856-1918), the Legal Marxist Petr Berngardovich Struve (1870-1944), the internationalist Lev Davidovich Bronshtein (Trotsky) (1879-1940), the Bolshevik theoretician Vladimir Il'ich Ulianov (Lenin) (1870-1924) and the futurologist Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Malinovskii (Bogdanov) (1873-1928).
Plekhanov, the 'father of Russian Marxism', began his revolutionary career as a populist. In Sotsializm i politicheskaia bor'ba (Socialism and the Political Struggle, 1883) and Nashi raznoglasiia (Our Differences, 1885) he explained his break with that movement. Both books criticised Lavrov for not understanding that the overthrow of the Russian monarchy by a bourgeois constitutional regime would be a progressive step. They also criticised Tkachev for imagining that a revolutionary minority could initiate a socialist revolution in feudal Russia, and they warned that a premature socialist revolution would lead to monstrous dictatorship. For socialists the only realistic immediate goal was 'the conquest of free political institutions and making preparations for the formation of a future Russian workers' socialist party'.[128] Plekhanov assumed that skipping stages of historical development is impossible. Interpreting Marx as a historical determinist, he stressed the necessity of capitalism as a preliminary to socialism. Not surprisingly, he defined freedom as co-operation with the laws of history.
The Legal Marxists rejected Plekhanov's historical determinism and again unlike Plekhanov classified political freedoms as valuable in themselves, not just as stepping stones on the path to socialism. In the book Kriticheskie zametki k voprosu ob ekonomicheskom razvitii Rossii (Critical Observations on the Economic Development of Russia, 1894), Struve made the case against Marx's theory of the inevitable impoverishment ofthe working class and in favour of evolutionary socialism - a position that anticipated the conclusions of the German revisionists. In his article, 'Die Marxsche Theorie der sozialen Entwicklung' (Marx's Theory of Social Development, 1899), he endorsed Eduard Bernstein's idea that socialism may emerge from capitalism non-violently, by slow degrees. By the turn of the century, under pressure from Lenin, Struve had begun to turn away from Marxism. In his essay for the anthology Problemy idealizma (Problems of Idealism, 1902) Struve criticised social democrats for their simplistic historical determinism and dismissal of universal ethics - a conclusion that signalled his transition to liberalism.
Lenin came to Marxism under the influence of Chernyshevsky's elitism and Tkachev's Blanquism. These sources reinforced his innate wilfulness, contributing significantly to his subsequent historical voluntarism. In his earliest Marxist work Lenin attacked Struve's book on Russian economic development by insisting that Marxism is not just a sociological hypothesis but a theory of revolutionary struggle. In Zadachi russkikh sotsial-demokratov (Tasks of Russian Social Democrats, 1898) he endorsed Plekhanov's strategy of making alliances with bourgeois opponents of the autocracy but emphasised that Social Democrats must take advantage of these alliances for their own purposes. He was impatient with Plekhanov's necessitarian Marxism, which linked social democracy too closely to the pursuit of bourgeois freedoms. His most important early book, Razvitie kapitalizma v Rossii (Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1899), argued that, in rural Russia, capitalism had already led to the social differentiation of the peasantry. That simple conclusion was both a blow against neo-populists, who imagined that Russia might still avoid capitalism, and a theoretical basis for a future revolutionary alliance between the proletariat and poor peasants against the bourgeoisie.
Lenin's pivotal book Chto delat'? (What Is to Be Done?, 1902), laid out his theory of the vanguard party. He stated: 'the history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness'.[129] In his opinion, social democratic consciousness could only be brought to workers 'from without', by members of a tightly organised, centralised party of professional revolutionaries. Although other Marxists had advocated strong revolutionary leadership, Lenin was the first to contend that, absent the guidance of the revolutionary vanguard, the working class could develop only bourgeois consciousness. In the wake of What Is to Be Done?, Plekhanov accused Lenin of mocking Marx's belief in socialism's inevitability. Trotsky warned of the prospect that Lenin's theory of the party might lead Russia to permanent 'Jacobin' dictatorship: eventually, he wrote, the 'organization of the party takes the place of the party; the Central Committee takes the place of the organization; and finally the dictator takes the place of the Central Committee'.[130] Later it became clear that What Is to Be Done? was a first step toward a party ideocracy, a system of government in which the party, conceived as the source of historically privileged knowledge, imposed its will in all spheres of culture.
After he elaborated the theory of the vanguard party, Lenin developed two other crucial ideas. First, he moved toward a theory of nationality policy in which he opposed 'any attempt to influence national self- determination [among non-Russian peoples of the empire] from without by violence or coercion', and simultaneously limited the expression ofthe right to self-determination to those cases in which self-determination was in the interests of social democrats.[131] In effect, he made national self-determination contingent on permission from the party vanguard. Second, he incorporated into his own theory of socialist revolution Trotsky's idea of'permanent revolution', which held that, due to the weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie, the Russian proletariat would have to lead the bourgeois revolution and that, therefore, the bourgeois revolution could be transformed into a socialist revolution in one continuous process. According to Trotsky, the Russian proletariat was numerically too weak to hold power for long unless it received assistance from the West, but he felt that the revolution in Russia might provide a 'spark' to ignite a general revolution in Western Europe. When combined with Lenin's idea of contingent national self-determination, Trotsky's idea of permanent revolution produced the curious result that Russia was both a subordinate part of a universal process of historical change and the director/initiator of that process. In other words, revolutionary Russia could be understood simultaneously as 'of Europe' and as 'apart from Europe'.
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G. V Plekhanov,
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V I. Lenin,
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Trotsky's prophecy, from his pamphlet