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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.27: Coming Together, Drifting Apart

I forgot to mention this at the end of last week’s episode, so I must begin today’s episode with a scheduling head’s up: Saturnalia is upon us again, and this year for a variety of reasons, I am scheduled to take a three week break — that again is a three week break — so today’s episode, will be the last new episode until January the 19th, 2020. And when I get back, I will also have some further announcements about what the future holds in store for the Revolutions podcast. But what we’re going to do in this last episode before I go on holiday is carry ourselves forward to the end of the 19th century by rounding up the opposition to the tsarist regime, moderate and radical, reformist and revolutionary, as they start coming together and drifting apart. This process would give more coherent shape to what had been a very fluid and cross pollinated underground during the 1890s. And then, when we get back in January, we are going to take all of this and throw it at 1905 and see what happens.

So on the Marxist side of things, the exile of the leaders of the Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class — that is Lenin, Martov, and Krupskaya — had removed some of the most stridently radical voices from the social democratic scene. And their departure in 1897 happened to coincide with the arrival of new interpretations of Marxism that were well less stridently radical. There were now new currents of thought dubbed revisionism, and economism, and legal Marxism, and these new currents gave heartburn to the old guard Emancipation of Labor Group, who considered themselves to be the keepers of the one true faith, and they were annoyed they now had to fend off all these new personalities, promoting new ideas. But not everyone wanted to break with the one true faith, and the Emancipation of Labor Group would find allies in Lenin and Martov and Krupskaya, who though very far away, monitored these debates and contributed to them when they were able to. And when their exile finally ended in 1900, they would come back home, ready to wage a rhetorical war for the future of Russian Marxism against all these heretics.

The first new current we should talk about is economism, which I mentioned briefly in our discussion of the Vilna Program, since economism finds its roots in the same tactical shift towards labor agitation. Now economism was not a doctrine or an ideology so much as a term of abuse used by intra-party opponents to the new program, but for clarity sake, the way I’ll define it for you now is that economism took the move towards focusing on real working class grievances and said, right, this is the thing. The fight for the working classes against the exploitive bourgeois owners is the fight we should be focusing on. But remember this is a departure from the Vilna Program, which argued that agitation among the workers was a strategy to organize, recruit, and practice collective action without ever losing sight of that final goal: the political revolution. All this work must be done with an eye towards heightening the political consciousness of the workers and putting their struggle into a political context. The goal of a strike was not just winning concessions, but building solidarity, confidence, and unity so that the workers would be ready when the time came to overthrow the tsar.

But a new cadre of Russian Marxists saw in this strategy an end unto itself, especially in light of the 1896 St. Petersburg strikes. Class conflict was the thing, worker versus owner, proletariat verses bourgeoisie. To say nothing of the fact that conditions were in fact terrible in these factories, and focusing on real material gains over abstract political theory was a good and just change in focus. People were suffering; the political stuff can come later.

Back up in Switzerland, the Emancipation of Labor Group saw this trend developing and feared for its effect on their doctrine of two revolutions. For Georgi Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod, the lesson of historical materialism was that we must have a democratic bourgeois revolution, and then a proletarian socialist revolution. First one, then the next. And at this point here in the late 1890s, Russia had yet to undergo the necessary transition to democratic capitalism. Axelrod in particular argued that for now the next step for socialist revolutionaries had to be building and joining a broad anti-tsarist democratic alliance. Creating sharp, angry divisions between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie now would tend to inhibit the formation of the coalition that would be necessary to carry out the first democratic revolution. So the socialist must expect to fight alongside anyone who took aim at tsarist despotism, including the bourgeois commercial classes, because those bourgeois commercial classes were naturally seeking to end the last vestiges of medieval aristocratic privilege, to end arbitrary and capricious despotism. They would want a constitution and a parliament, which would give them political power commensurate with their growing economic power. And they would demand rights like freedom of speech and freedom of the press and freedom of association, rights that the socialist would need in order to form the coming dictatorship of the proletariat.

So in the eyes of the Emancipation of Labor Group, advocates of economism made one of two fundamental mistakes: they either focused all organizing energy on petty concerns like hours and wages while abandoning the bigger picture, or by prematurely engaging in a war against the bourgeoisie, they undermined the creation of the anti-tsarist coalition. So what the Emancipation of Labor Group really wanted was for working class organizers to emphasize their struggle as a struggle for democracy and democratic rights. First, we fight under the banner of democracy, then we fight under the banner of socialism. Don’t jump the gun!

Now, this is all fine in theory, but it’s a tough thing to tell a worker, hey, capitalism is evil and your boss is exploiting you, but also just be cool and endure it. And actually we might have to help your boss get political power because his time has to come before your time can come.

The other new current that entered the Marxist stream during these years often float in and out of economism. And this was quote unquote revisionism. Now, like the term economism, the term revisionism was mostly a pejorative used by rivals to discredit new theories on how to use and apply Marxian economic social and political theory. Now we are not going to go headlong into this, but the split between orthodox and revisionist Marxism really opened up after the death of Engels in 1895. In some cases, these were just disputes over emphasis and interpretation. But in some cases, the differences were quite large. And in particular, a German Marxist named Eduard Bernstein started making such drastic revisions to traditional interpretation that in the end he was accused of not really even being a Marxist anymore. He went so far as to abandon the Hegelian dialectical framework of Marxism in favor of rooting his approach in neo-Kantian philosophy. But we are not going to get into all of that.

Of more direct importance to our story, Bernstein started arguing that revolution wasn’t even necessary, that per historical materialism, capitalism would come along, do all of the transformative things Marx said capitalism had to do, but then, rather than necessarily leading to a proletarian revolution, that raw industrial capitalism could simply be reformed and improved and softened until voila! After a long and steady period of democratic regulation and reform, that the end state goal of socialism would be achieved — not by the proletariat rising up and violently overthrowing the bourgeois capitalist state, but by simply changing a piece here, and swapping out a piece there, until the mode of production had transformed from capitalist to socialist.

Now like I just said, this was revisionist heresy to the point where other Marxist said Bernstein is not just revisionist, he’s not even a Marxist anymore. But his argument gained a lot of adherents in the 1890s, especially among those creating these new labor political parties that would go out and contest and win elections. They were thinking, well, why not just do that? Go out, win elections, and then reform everything. There’s no need for violent revolution at all.

Now, ironically, these growing divisions were happening at the same time that the Russian Marxists were also trying to form a single unifying umbrella organization to house everybody. One of the main proponents for this push towards unification was the guy that I mentioned in passing an episode 10.23, but who deserves more of an introduction: that is, Arkadi Kremer.

Kremer was the leader of the Social Democrats organizing among the Jewish workers in Vilna, and was one of the principal authors of On Agitation, both the idea itself and the pamphlet that explained it. Kremer came from an observant Jewish family and had been living in Vilna since he was 12 years old. He briefly attended university in St. Petersburg in 1889, before his involvement with student radical groups earned him an expulsion from school and a ban from setting foot in St. Petersburg. So, he went back home to Vilna, where he started up a Marxist social democratic circle. And this is the circle that Martov joined when he arrived in Vilna in 1893 after his own arrest. And they would spend the next two years putting agitation into successful practice. But, while Martov was only passing through, Vilna was Kremer’s home, and after Martov left, he kept building the movement, and in a few years, the Vilna organization was, by number of members, the largest Marxist group in the whole Russian Empire.

Now, of course, the other unique feature about the Vilna in the organization was that it was Jewish. As we’ve discussed, Jews faced unique problems inside the Russian Empire that seemed to demand uniquely Jewish solutions. And Kremer naturally wanted that solution to run through social democratic Marxism, rather than the narodist socialist revolutionaries or the more nationalistic proto-Zionists who were also starting to organize and gain adherents inside of the Jewish working classes at the same time.

In September 1897, Kremer and his comrades got together and founded the general Jewish workers, union known colloquially, and historically, as the Bund — with Bund meaning something less than a rigid party, but more than just a loose group. The plan was for the Bund to become the umbrella group for all Jewish workers and socialists, to always make sure that their particular Jewish character and concerns were highlighted and represented inside of the larger movement. .

Now, a few points: Kremer was himself pretty assimilationist, and though he wanted to organize the Jews as Jews, he differed from a younger comrade named Mikhail Lieber, who was more strident in asserting the Jewishness of the Bund. And the subtle distinction here is between we are social democrats who are also Jews versus we are Jews who are also social democrats. Neither of them though were rigid Jewish nationalists, and they still saw things through Marx’s analysis of economic class conflict. So like, the Jewish bourgeoisie cannot be trusted to be our friends just because they are our fellow Jews.

So Kremer would himself always maintain good working relations with non-Jewish social Democrats. And even though he helped create this autonomous Jewish Bund organization, he did not believe that it could ever accomplish its goals without Gentile comrades. Isolation was death. So Kremer and the early leaders of the Bund were at the forefront of the first attempt to really unify all the Russian Marxist social democratic groups into a single party, which they managed to achieve, however inauspiciously. In March, 1898.

So this brings us to the inauspicious founding of an organization that would go on to become a fairly important entity in world history: the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Now it is entirely possible you’ve never heard of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. But just so you know, it is the precursor — through many twists and turns, changes in personnel, direction, factional splits, rebrandings and re-foundings — of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which you probably have heard of.

After a great deal of correspondence and communication, various Russian Marxist groups — the Jewish Bund, social democratic émigrés, what was left of the Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class — organized a congress in Minsk. Now the word congress is a bit of an overstatement, because exactly nine delegates were able to attend. These nine delegates spent March the first through March the third, 1898, together in a house on the outskirts of Minsk discussing how they could all merge under one shared set of principles. They elected a three man executive committee, which included Kremer, as he and the Bund were major sponsors of the initiative. But the reason this is such an inauspicious beginning was that, as usual, their organization was shot through with police spies and informants. The authorities knew that this was happening. They let the delegates come together to more properly identify them, but within a few weeks, most of them had been arrested, including Kremer, who would be thrown in jail and not be released until 1900. So this First Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was really hardly anything but a prelude to the much more important Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which was a far more momentous event in the history of the Russian revolution. Though, that Second Congress would have to wait until 1903, since everyone was now in jail or in exile.

Now once the RSDLP — that’s one of the ways it can be abbreviated — was founded, they tasked one of their most committed comrades to draft the parties first manifesto, and that committed comrade was Peter Struve. Now we must talk about Struvea because he represented yet another new, current in Marxism, a current that would soon be flowing over towards liberalism. This current is called legal Marxism.

Struve himself was born in 1870. He arrived in St. Petersburg in 1889, and got into student politics, but still managed to finagle a job as a librarian in the ministry of finance in 1893. But just a few months later, he was arrested for subversive activity, tossed in jail and fired from his job. Now through these early years, he was an excited convert to Marxism, and his first full length book in 1895 was an argument that Marxism was in fact applicable to the Russian situation, despite what the narodists and the anarchists might tell you. During these years, he also married a woman named Nina Gerd, who happened to be a gymnasium classmate of Nadya Krupskaya, in case you were wondering how small these revolutionary social circles are. Despite his Marxism, Struve tended to stay out of illegal radical politics, and so even before legal Marxism became a thing, Struve was was by temperament a legal Marxist. As was his friend and intellectual collaborator, Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky, a Ukrainian born political economist who also married one of Krupskaya’s classmates. The line that Struve and Tugan-Baranovsky followed emphasized the positive application of Marxist economic and social analysis to the Russian situation. They welcomed the arrival of modern capitalism as a forward step in the progress of historical materialism, and they argued against the narodists and the anarchists who were trying to stop that progression. But they wanted to do things above ground, not underground, and their arguments in papers and rhetoric were academic enough and tame enough to be legally published in journals that had gotten approval from the censors, which is where we get this term legal Marxism.

One of the places legal Marxism started to get a hearing was in an institution that we mentioned in Episode 10.20: on the Liberal Tradition — that is the Free Economic Society. Now remember, the Free Economics Society was an organization initially founded and patronized by Catherine the Great to import the latest in western economic theory and practice. But it turned into a social club in intellectual society for liberal minded discussion, as long as those discussions stayed away from politics. Well, in 1895, the society came under the direction of a liberal noble named Count Geiden, who wanted to expand the scope of the society to include cultural and political topics rather than narrow technocratic economics.

So in came people arguing, especially in the age of Witte’s industrialization practices, that politics and economics were actually inseparable. Among those who started taking part in these discussions were Struve and Tugan-Baranovsky, floating a Marxist take on Russian current events. And it was in the Free Economics Society that the moderate fringes of Marxism started to mingle with the radical fringes of liberalism.

Now, even the quote, unquote legal Marxism of Struve and Tugan-Baranovsky would eventually be too much for the authorities to take. And while they themselves were not arrested, the Free Economic Society would eventually find its doors shuttered in 1900 for fostering subversive thinking. Now Struve himself would continue to operate on the moderate edge of Marxism for the rest of the 1890s, and he was obviously still trusted enough to compose the official party manifesto for the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1898. But after Lenin returned from his exile in 1900, he and Struve attempted to find common ground between their two factions, but the common ground was getting very thin. And in 1905, we will find Struve and Tugan-Baranovsky not among the Marxist social Democrats, but among the liberal Kadets.

Now in the middle of all these debates about revisionism and orthodoxy, economism and legal Marxism, dropped an article called The Credo, written by a woman named Yekaterina Kuskova. Kuskova had gotten into radical student politics upon her arrival at the University of Moscow in 1890, but first she had fallen in with the narodists. But after her involvement in student politics got her exiled to Nizhny Novgorod, where upon arrival she converted to Marxism, and met her future husband, Sergei Prokopovich. Together, they would become the leaders in the move towards revisionist economism.

After getting married, the couple hung out in Russia until 1897, at which point they decided life would be better, easier, and less dangerous if they just emigrated to Germany. When the RSDLP was formed in 1898, they both joined as émigré members, but were already growing disenchanted with strict Marxist orthodoxy. And they liked the kind of revisionist line Bernstein was taking in Germany. In 1899, Kuskova wrote and published an article called The Credo, which argued in favor of the Social Democrats in Russia adopting revisionist economism. Not that she called it that. She was just arguing that socialism could be achieved by steadily reforming existing capitalism without the need for a catastrophic revolutionary break or a lot of bombings and assassinations. She went so far as to argue that a political party wasn’t even necessary at present, that they all needed to focus on worker organizing activity more in line with traditional labor unions than a labor political party.

The Credo went off like a bomb inside Social Democratic circles, and in particular it had the effect of bringing into closer alliance a group whose alliance would become very important: Plekhanov, Axelrod, and Zasulich in Switzerland; Lenin and Martov in Siberia. Through exchanges of letters in the wake of reading The Credo, they all denounced this revisionist heresy and agreed it was terrible and had to be fought. Kuskova was soon enough expelled from the party for her heresy, and her husband would resign along with her. And they too were now on the same path as Struve and Tugan-Baranovsky away from radical revolutionary Marxism towards liberalism, and they too would wind up among the liberal Kadets come 1905.

Now, so far today, we’ve only covered the Marxists, and the Marxists who were turning into liberals, but the late 1890s also saw important organization among the neo-narodists: the future SRs. They were making a lot of headway recruiting among those who were turned off by what these Marxists were calling for. You want us to embrace all the horrors of industrial capitalism as inevitable and even… good? You want us to rejoice and the destruction of the traditional rural village? Not just be indifferent, but to cheer the resulting dislocation in human suffering? To a lot of people, the whole Marxist program seemed unforgivably long-term, likely condemning two generations or more to urban capitalist hell before they were allowed to finally arrive at the promised land. If nothing else, this was simply morally unacceptable. The future SRs were also aided in their recruitment efforts because while the Marxists tended to put all agency and attention on the urban proletariat, the SRs allowed for different types of people to play real roles in the coming revolution, most especially peasants and the rural intelligentsia who might feel left out of Marx’s theory. The SRs also continued to emphasize their continuity with Russia’s more romantic revolutionary tradition, which celebrated heroism and élan and self-sacrifice and dramatic acts of valor, all of which was not without appeal to the young and the fed up. And it goes without saying that many who were young and fed up found the doctrine of two revolutions to be insane. There’s going to be one revolution, it is going to be a socialist revolutionary revolution, and it is going to be rooted in the traditional Russian village, which was right now today, ready to become the bedrock of Russian socialism. Why wait? We have everything we need.

So I know that I’ve already introduced a bunch of new people and concepts today, but we are going to end with one more guy who is about to emerge as the brain box of the SRs: Viktor Chernov. Now there were a lot of older narodist brain boxes out there, but they had all come of age during the glory days of the 1870s. And just as with the Marxists, a younger generation of narodists were now emerging, and of them, Victor Chernov would turn out to be the most influential. He was born in 1873, so he was a bit on the younger side of this newer generation. He encountered radical narodist ideas as a teenager in the 1880s, and then stayed on that line when he went off to the university in Moscow in 1892. And it was while in these Moscow narodist circles that he encountered Yekaterina Kuskova. But while she was moving from narodism to Marxism to revisionism to liberalism, Chernov stayed in the original narodist tradition. In 1894, he was arrested and spent nine months in prison, before being assigned to a five-year administrative exile in the city of Tambov in central Russia.

While in this exile, he continued his own radical education by reading the old guard narodist theorists, but he also started developing his own new ideas. Despite being under surveillance, he was able to engage in organizing activities, and he focused on the lower class peasant workers. He set up lending libraries and discussion circles, and was pleasantly surprised how eager they seem to be to engage with radical politics. So Chernov was among those major voices inside neo-narodism who found the peasants of the 1890s far more ready for radicalism than those peasants of the Going to the People era of the 1870s. Chernov came away a convinced yes on the controversial matter of whether the peasants had revolutionary potential. Chernov thought that they absolutely had revolutionary potential.

But he also learned quite a bit about how to talk to the peasants, how to go to the people. Much the same way that Kremer and Martov realized the importance of simply speaking Yiddish to Yiddish speaking workers. Chernov observed that the basic worldview of the peasant was shaped by religion and morality, that they encountered a world, not composed of economic classes or political ideologies, but of basic theological morality, right and wrong good and evil just and unjust. So Chernov now believed that the best way to connect with the peasants was to pitch socialism in moral terms. This wasn’t about abstract forces of history, or the necessity of economic transformation, or which constitutional theory of government worked best: it was about what was just and what was unjust, what was right and what was wrong, what was good and what was evil. And what are some things that are good? Generosity, sharing, honesty, mutual support. What is evil? Corruption, selfishness, cruelty, exploitation. So frame socialism versus tsardom in those terms, frame socialism versus capitalism in those terms. Chernov argued that his fellow comrades must think of themselves not as professors or political organizers, but as the apostles of a new religion.

After his term in official administrative exile ended in 1899, Chernov went abroad, where he encountered the old guard exiles, whose heads were, as. I said, still mostly in the 1870s, still clinging to a Jacobin-esque dismissal of the peasants as potential fellow comrades. Chernov first spent time in Switzerland, where I should mention he encountered the Marxist Social Democrats, who were embroiled in their own bitter debates about orthodoxy and revisionism and economism, but who all agreed that Chernov and his narodist buddies were trying to resurrect the past, not push forward into the future.

During his stay in Switzerland, Chernov and Plekhanov in particular came to enjoy a deep mutual and personal loathing that went beyond mere ideological disputes. After this, Chernov moved on to Paris, where he met with the most revered veteran narodists in exile who absolutely still considered themselves to be the leaders of this movement. Chernov made a pilgrimage to meet old Lavrov, and Lavrov revealed that his final dream was to unite all the different narodist parties and groups and unions, both inside and outside Russia, into a single party, not unlike what the Social Democrats were attempting with the RSDLP. And in fact, this would be Lavrov’s final contribution to a life of revolutionary theorizing and organizing, because in February 1900, Lavrov died. Since everyone in all walks of narodist life respected, admired, and acknowledged Lavrov’s importance, his funeral brought them all together. And it was literally while standing beside his grave at the funeral, that the leaders of the different émigré narodist groups hashed out the basis of what they came to call the Agrarian Socialist League. The Agrarian Socialist League would be held together by the idea that the peasant commune was still the basis of future Russian socialism. And it would bring together the old veterans of the 1870s and the younger radicals of the 1890s, and this Agrarian Socialist League would soon become the émigré pillar of the SRs when they finally fused with our domestic comrades in 1903.

So by the dawn of the 20th century, we see major differences being highlighted and widened among all of these different radical groups, while at the same time, they were trying to bring themselves together, to broaden their organizing capacity, their reach, their membership and their influence. And despite crackdowns by the authorities, their numbers on all sides only continued to grow. And that growth would be encouraged by the recession that would follow the end of the Witte Boom that had defined the 1890s. And this happened to coincide with the end of the three years exile in Siberia endured by the more radical Marxists who wanted nothing to do with revisionism and economism and legal Marxism, and who came back home in 1900, ready to take back control of the movement, only to find themselves pushed into foreign émigré life themselves. And it was in this new foreign exile that the youngsters like Lenin and Martov fused with the oldsters, Plekhanov, Axelrod, and Zasulich, to found a new newspaper called Iskra, the Spark.

But that spark is going to wait until I returned from my moderately prolonged absence of three weeks. But when we come back, it will be time to finally launch into the account of the revolution of 1905, which, given hindsight, is usually cast as a prologue or a dress rehearsal for 1917, but who everyone at the time, tsarists and Marxists,narodists and liberals, conservatives and radicals, anarchists and nationalists, thought was the revolution they had all been expecting.