There followed a decade of revolutionary quiescence. Russians who wanted to work for the common good now adopted the doctrine of “small deeds”—that is, pragmatic, unspectacular activities to raise the cultural and material level of the population through the zemstva and private philanthropic organizations.
Radicalism began to stir again in the early 1890s in connection with the spurt of Russian industrialization and a severe famine. The Socialists-Revolutionaries of the 1870s had believed that Russia would follow a path of economic development different from the Western because she had neither the domestic nor the foreign markets that capitalism required. The Russian peasantry, being poor and heavily dependent on income from cottage industries (estimated at one-third of the peasant total income), would be ruined by competition from the mechanized factories and lose that little purchasing power it still possessed. As for foreign markets, these had been preempted by the advanced countries of the West.* Russia had to combine communal agriculture with rural (cottage) industry. From these premises Socialist-Revolutionary theoreticians developed a “separate path” doctrine according to which Russia would proceed directly from “feudalism” to “socialism,” without passing through a capitalist phase.
This thesis was advanced with the help of arguments drawn from the writings of Marx and Engels. Marx and Engels initially disowned such an interpretation of their doctrine, but they eventually changed their minds, conceding that there might be more than one model of economic development. In 1877, in an exchange with a Russian, Marx rejected the notion that every country had to repeat the economic experience of Western Europe. Should Russia enter the path of capitalist development, he wrote, then, indeed, nothing could save her from its “iron laws,” but this did not mean that Russia could not avoid this path and the misfortunes it brought.40 A few years later Marx stated that the “historical inevitability” of capitalism was confined to Western Europe, and that because Russia had managed to preserve the peasant commune into the era of capitalism, the commune could well become the “fulcrum of Russia’s social rejuvenation.”* Marx and Engels admired the terrorists of the People’s Will, and, as an exception to their general theory, Engels allowed that in Russia a revolution could be made by a “handful of people.”41
Thus, before a formal “Marxist” or Social-Democratic movement had emerged in Russia, the theories of its founders were interpreted, with their sanction, when applied to an autocratic regime in an agrarian country, to mean a revolution brought about, not by the inevitable social consequences of matured capitalism, but by terror and coup d’état.
A few Russians, led by George Plekhanov, dissented from this version of Marxism. They broke with the People’s Will, moved to Switzerland, and there immersed themselves in German Social-Democratic literature. From it they concluded that Russia had no alternative but to go through full-blown capitalism. They rejected terrorism and a coup d’état on the grounds that even in the unlikely event that such violence succeeded in bringing down the tsarist regime, the outcome would be not socialism, for which backward Russia lacked both the economic and cultural preconditions, but a “revived tsarism on a Communist base.”
From the premises adopted by the Russian Social-Democrats there followed certain political consequences. Capitalist development meant the rise of a bourgeoisie committed, from economic self-interest, to liberalization. It further meant the growth of the industrial “proletariat,” which would be driven by its deteriorating economic situation to socialism, furnishing the socialist movement with revolutionary cadres. The fact that Russian capitalism developed in a country with a pre-capitalist political system, however, called for a particular revolutionary strategy. Socialism could not flourish in a country held in the iron grip of a police-bureaucratic regime: it required freedom of speech to propagate its ideas and freedom of association to organize its followers. In other words, unlike the German Social-Democrats, who, since 1890, were able to function in the open and run in national elections, Russian Social-Democrats confronted the prior task of overthrowing autocracy.
19. L. Martov (on the left) and T. Dan, two leading Mensheviks.
The theory of a two-stage revolution, as formulated by Plekhanov’s associate, Paul Akselrod, provided for the “proletariat” (read: socialist intellectuals) collaborating with the bourgeoisie for the common objective of bringing to Russia “bourgeois democracy.” As soon as that objective had been attained, the socialists would rally the working class for the second, socialist phase of the revolution. From the point of view of this strategy, everything that promoted in Russia the growth of capitalism and the interests of the bourgeoisie was—up to a point—progressive and favorable to the cause of socialism.
The decade of the 1890s witnessed intense debates between the two radical camps about the economic and, implicitly, the political future of Russia. One group, which in 1902 would form the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (SRs for short), adhered to the traditions of “separate path” and “direct” struggle—that is, terrorism.* Their Social-Democratic rivals believed in the inevitability of capitalism and the political liberalization of Russia. The two groups had many strategic and tactical disagreements, which we will describe below, but they shared an equal commitment to revolution. In the early 1900s, each had several thousand adherents, virtually all intellectuals, most of them university students and dropouts, a minority of whom formed a cadre of professional revolutionaries: persons whose sole occupation in life was promoting revolution. They diligently studied social and economic conditions favoring or hindering their objective, and engaged in continuous polemics from their foreign residences and even from prison and exile. The description of the professional revolutionary by the French political writer Jacques Ellul well fits the Russian representative of the genre. According to him, people of this type
spend their life on study, on formulating the theory of revolution, and, accidentally, on agitation. They live off the revolution—intellectually, but also materially … Marx was a typical example of such professional revolutionaries, perfect idlers, veritable rentiers of the revolution. They spend most of their lives in libraries and clubs. They do not directly prepare the revolution. They analyze the disintegration of society, they classify the conditions favorable to it. But when the revolution breaks out, then their preparation enables them to play a decisive role in it: they turn into its managers, organizers. They are not men who cause trouble, but men of order: once the disturbance is over, they reorganize the structures, they are intellectually prepared for this, and, above all, their names are known to the public as specialists in revolution. They thus naturally come to power.*
Russia’s political parties began to take shape at the turn of the century.
The Socialist-Revolutionary Party, formed in 1902, was, in word and deed, the most radical, with a penchant for anarchism and syndicalism and an abiding commitment to terrorism.42 The Social-Democrats founded their party at a clandestine congress in Minsk in 1898. The police, however, got wind. of the meeting and arrested the participants. The Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Rossiiskaia Sotsial-Demokraticheskaia Rabochaia Partiia, or RSDRP) came into existence five years later at its Second Congress, held in Belgium and England.