This passage tells us that Ulyanov’s goal was ‘free institutions’, that is, replacing tsarist absolutism with a constitutional regime and guaranteed political freedoms. But this passage also reveals a certain ambivalence about a merely ‘political struggle’. Ulyanov rather apologetically explains why a good socialist, someone whose primary goal is economic liberation, must ‘temporarily’ devote energy to goals espoused by the despised liberals.
Even this grudging acceptance of political struggle (= ‘the struggle for free institutions’) was the result of a hard-fought internal evolution of Russian socialist radicalism. In the 1860s and 1870s the first wave of Russian socialist revolutionaries saw little that was attractive about political freedom. Such things as freedom of the press were an irrelevant luxury for the largely illiterate peasantry. Indeed, political freedom was actively harmful, serving only to consolidate the rule of the up-and-coming bourgeoisie and to befuddle the masses. The Russian revolutionaries pointed to the eloquent writings of the learned German socialist Karl Marx, who showed just how devastating capitalism could be. Why do anything that would expedite the triumph of this disastrous system?
It followed that the coming Russian revolution could not aim at installing liberal checks and guarantees, thus handing over power to an unpleasant new elite. As the prominent Russian revolutionary Pëtr Lavrov explained, a truly social revolution would ‘overthrow at once the economic foundations of the present social order’.7 Perhaps the peasantry’s communal traditions endowed it with socialist instincts that would ensure an immediate transition to socialism, as Mikhail Bakunin argued. Or, if not, perhaps a determined minority could seize power and then use an undemocratic state to mould the peasantry – the ‘Jacobin’ solution of Pëtr Tkachev.
But these dreams of immediate socialist revolution were crushed by the problem pointed out by Sasha Ulyanov in his manifesto: ‘Without freedom of speech, propaganda that is in any way effective is impossible.’ By the end of the 1870s frustrating failures in making contact with the narod had persuaded many of the revolutionaries that the uncongenial task of a merely political revolution really was part of their job description. Perhaps paradoxically, the new interim goal of political freedom was the reason that the revolutionaries turned to terror as a method. Since the current lack of political freedom meant that a mass movement was not yet possible, the only way forward was for a ‘handful of daring people’ (the self-description of the terrorists) to force the autocratic government to make the necessary concessions. This new strategy upset many revolutionaries (including the future Marxist leader Georgy Plekhanov), not so much because of terror as a method as because of political freedom even as an interim goal.
In 1881 this new strategy led to the first ‘first of March’: the assassination of Alexander II by Narodnaya volya. But even this second wave of Russian socialist radicalism clung to hopes of using the political revolution as a launching pad for immediate socialism. They still could not resign themselves to the long-term existence of bourgeois economic and political institutions. As a result, they still had no plausible strategy for using political freedom, once attained, in the cause of socialist revolution.
Many socialists in Western Europe shared the distrust and disdain for ‘bourgeois’ political freedoms exhibited by their Russian comrades. One prominent strand of European socialism, however, did have a long-term strategy for using political freedom in the cause of socialist revolution. This was Social Democracy, a movement that seemed to combine a mass base with genuine revolutionary fervour (and so the connotations of ‘Social Demo cracy’ during this period were almost the opposite of what the term means today). The Social Democratic strategy was inspired by Marx’s teaching that the working class as a whole had a world-historical mission to win political power in order to introduce socialism. If working-class rule was the only way to get to socialism, then (as Marx put it, writing in English) the job of the socialists was to make sure that the workers were ‘united by combination and led by knowledge’ – that is, to help the workers organize and to imbue them with socialist ideology.8
This project would only be successful if undertaken on at least a national scale. The implications of Marx’s approach were described by a perceptive non-socialist English scholar, John Rae, in 1884, the year after Marx’s death:
The socialists ought to make use of all the abundant means of popular agitation and intercommunication which modern society allowed. No more secret societies in holes and corners, no more small risings and petty plots, but a great broad organization working in open day, and working restlessly by tongue and pen to stir the masses of all European countries to a common international revolution.9
This strategy was implied by Marx’s whole outlook, but it took on institutional flesh only through the determined efforts of more than one generation of activists, starting with Ferdinand Lassalle in the 1860s and continuing with German party leaders such as Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, along with unnumbered and anonymous agitators and propagandists. In this way was built the mighty German Social Democratic party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands or SPD), a source of inspiration for socialists around the world.
Alexander Ulyanov represented a third stage in the internal evolution of Russian socialist radicalism: overthrow the tsar in order to be able to adopt the Social Democratic strategy of ‘a great broad organization working in open day, and working restlessly by tongue and pen’. Nevertheless, Alexander considered it obvious that the Social Democratic strategy could only be adopted in the future, after political freedom had been won. For the present, terror still seemed to be the only possible method of obtaining political freedom in the absence of political freedom. The use of terror, claimed Ulyanov, was forced on ‘an intelligentsia that has been deprived of any possibility of peaceful, cultural influence on social life’. Under the present repressive circumstances, the workers could do no more than provide support for a preliminary political revolution that would be led by the terror-wielding intelligentsia.
This reasoning led Alexander to throw away his life with no result other than a hardening of government repression. Russian socialist radicalism had arrived at a dead end. The Social Democratic strategy of educating workers by mass campaigns was perceived as the only realistic way to get to socialism, but it could not be applied without political freedom – and there seemed to be no way to obtain the requisite political freedom. The Social Democratic strategy itself was inapplicable under tsarist absolutism, while terrorism had been tried and found wanting. This was the strategic dilemma facing Russian socialist radicalism, and it was presented to Vladimir Ulyanov in the most devastatingly personal terms.
Vladimir’s search in the years following his brother’s execution led him to the conclusion that a stripped-down, bare-bones version of the Social Democratic strategy could be applied even under tsarism as a way of obtaining the political freedom required for a full and unadulterated application of the same strategy. But, as we shall see, Vladimir’s ‘other way’ to achieving his brother’s goal was based on a heroic scenario shot through with optimistic assumptions about the inspiring power of class leadership.
Lenin never mentioned his brother in public. Nevertheless, he often invoked the Russian revolutionary tradition as a whole and pictured himself as fulfilling its long-held aims. In 1920, addressing himself to newly-minted communists from around the world, he said that the Russian revolutionary tradition had ‘suffered its way’ to Marxism.10 He meant the evolution that I have just described, in which the frustrations and martyrdom of people like Alexander Ulyanov led ultimately to the rise of Russian Social Democracy. Lenin’s emotional investment in his heroic scenario arose in large part from his hope that it would make all these sacrifices meaningful.