The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  I do not believe in our intelligentsia—hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated, lazy. I do not believe in it even when it suffers and complains, because its oppressors come from its own inner depths.

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  Dissent in Russia first became open and endemic at the universities. Although the 1863 statutes gave them considerable autonomy, its main beneficiaries were the faculty: the students continued to be treated as minors, subject to strict discipline. They chafed under it and from time to time gave vent to their frustration by staging protests. The pretexts were often minor and usually not political. Under a more tolerant regime they would have been allowed to dissipate. But the Russian authorities knew only one way of dealing with “insubordination” and that was by repression. Students guilty of nothing worse than rowdyism or breaches of regulations were arrested and expelled, sometimes permanently. Such severity radicalized student bodies and helped transform institutions of higher learning into centers of opposition.

  In the latter part of the 1860s, students formed circles to discuss public questions and their role in society. These circles initially showed no political, let alone revolutionary, inclinations. Influenced by French positivism, they identified progress with science and enlightenment, and saw their mission as spreading the gospels of materialism and utilitarianism. At this time, thousands of Russian youths who had neither interest in nor talent for science enrolled at the scientific faculties in the belief that by peering into microscopes or dissecting frogs they were advancing the cause of human happiness.

  This naïve scientism soon ran its course: it was only the first of the enthusiasms a French visitor found characteristic of Russian intellectuals, who were quickly captivated by new ideas and just as quickly grew bored with them.36 The fresh ideas that penetrated the universities in the early 1870s already had activist and, in the Russian context of the time, revolutionary implications. The emancipation of the serfs, the centerpiece of the Great Reforms, had transformed twenty million Russians from chattel into subjects. This gave the students a mission: to carry the message of positivism and materialism to the rural masses. In the spring of 1874, hundreds of students left the lecture rooms and dispersed in the countryside. The majority were “propagandists,” followers of Peter Lavrov, who took it upon themselves to enlighten the peasants about the injustices of the regime, in the expectation that this knowledge would stir them into action. The smaller body of “agitators,” followers of Bakunin, believed the peasants were instinctive rebels and would turn to violence once they were told they had large company. For the major part, the young “socialists-revolutionaries” who participated in this first “going to the people” crusade were still committed to the idea of change through enlightenment. But the persecution to which the authorities, frightened of peasant unrest, subjected them turned many into full-time revolutionaries. By 1877, when the second “going to the people” movement took place, Russia had several hundred experienced radical activists. Supporting them were thousands of sympathizers at the universities and in society at large.

  Face-to-face contact with the “people” proved to be a bewildering experience for the radical youths. The muzhik turned out to be a very different creature from the one they had imagined: a “noble savage” steeped in communal life, an egalitarian, and a born anarchist who required only encouragement to rise against the Tsar, landlords, and capitalists. The following excerpt from the recollections of a “propagandist” of the 1870s reflects this bewilderment. A peasant is speaking:

  As far as land goes, we’ve got little. No place to put a chicken. But the Tsar will give. Absolutely. There is nothing doing without land. Who will pay taxes? How fill the treasury? And without the treasury, how can one rule? We will get the land! Ab-so-lute-ly! You will see.

  The author noted with dismay the effects of radical propaganda on the peasants:

  How curiously our speeches, our concepts were interpreted by the peasant mind!… their conclusions and comparisons utterly astonished me. “We have it better under the Tsar.” Something struck me in the head, as if a nail had been driven into it.… There, I said, are the fruits of propaganda! We do not destroy illusions but reinforce them. We reinforce the old faith of the people in the Tsar.

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  The disillusionment with the people pushed the most determined radicals to terrorism. While many of the disappointed Socialists-Revolutionaries abandoned the movement and a handful adopted the doctrines of German Social-Democracy, a dedicated minority decided to carry on by different means. In the fall of 1879 this minority formed a secret organization called the People’s Will (Narodnaia Volia). The mission of its thirty full-time members, banded in an Executive Committee, was to fight the tsarist regime by means of systematic terror: on its founding, it passed a “sentence” of death on Alexander II. It was the first political terrorist organization in history and the model for all subsequent organizations of this kind in Russia and elsewhere. Resort to terror was an admission of isolation: as one of the leaders of the People’s Will would later concede, terror

  requires neither the support nor the sympathy of the country. It is enough to have one’s convictions, to feel one’s despair, to be determined to perish. The less a country wants revolution, the more naturally will they turn to terror who want, no matter what, to remain revolutionaries, to cling to their cult of revolutionary destruction.

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  The stated mission of the People’s Will was to assassinate government officials, for the twin goal of demoralizing the government and breaking down the awe in which the masses held the Tsar. In the words of the Executive Committee:

  Terrorist activity … has as its objective undermining the fascination with the government’s might, providing an uninterrupted demonstration of the possibility of struggling against the government, in this manner lifting the revolutionary spirit of the people and its faith in the success of the cause, and, finally, organizing the forces capable of combat.

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  The ultimate political goal of the People’s Will was the convocation of a National Assembly through which the nation would express its wishes. The People’s Will was a highly centralized organization, the decisions of the Executive Committee being binding on all followers, known as “vassals.” Members were expected to dedicate themselves totally to the revolutionary cause, and if called upon, to sacrifice to it their properties and even their lives.

  The emergence of the People’s Will marked a watershed in the history of the Russian Revolution. For one, it established violence as a legitimate instrument of politics: enlightenment and persuasion were rejected as futile and even counterproductive. But even more important was the arrogation by the revolutionary intelligentsia of the right to decide what was good for the people: the name People’s Will was a deceptive misnomer, since the “people” not only did not authorize an organization of thirty intellectuals to act on their behalf but had made it unmistakably clear that they would have no truck with anti-tsarist ideology. When the terrorists defined as one of their tasks “lifting the revolutionary spirit of the people,” they were well aware that the real people, those tilling the fields and working in the factories, had no revolutionary spirit to lift. This attitude had decisive implications for the future. Henceforth all Russian revolutionaries, whether favoring terrorism or opposed to it, whether belonging to the Socialist-Revolutionary or the Social-Democratic Party, assumed the authority to speak in the name of the “people”—an abstraction without equivalent in the real world.

  The terrorist campaign launched by the People’s Will against a government entirely unprepared for it—the Third Department, in charge of state security, had about as many personnel as the Executive Committee—succeeded in its immediate objective: on March 1, 1881, Alexander II fell victim to a terrorist bomb. The political benefits of this outrage were nil. The public reacted with horror and the radical cause lost a great deal of popular support. The government responded with a variety of repressive measures and counterintellig
ence operations which made it increasingly difficult for the revolutionaries to function. And the “people” did not stir, unshaken in the belief that the land which they desired would be given them by the next Tsar.

  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.

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  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.

  The liberals formed their own Constitutional-Democratic Party (also known as the Party of National Freedom) in October 1905.

  All these parties were led by intelligenty, and although the socialists referred to the liberals as “bourgeois” and the Bolsheviks labeled their socialist opponents “petty bourgeois,” there was no discernible difference in the social background of the leaders of the three principal opposition parties. They competed for much the same constituency, and even though the liberals wanted to avoid the revolution which the socialists promoted, in their strategy and tact
ics they were not averse to employing revolutionary methods and benefiting from terrorism.

  Russian liberalism was dominated by intellectuals with a pronounced left-wing orientation: its complexion was radical-liberal. The Constitutional-Democrats, or Kadets as they were popularly known, espoused the traditional liberal values: democratic franchise, parliamentary rule, liberty and equality of all citizens, respect for law. But operating in a country in which the overwhelming majority of the population had little understanding of these imported ideas and the socialists were busy inciting revolution, they felt it necessary to adopt a more radical stance.

  The Socialist-Revolutionary Party was the elder of the two leading socialist parties, since it could trace its origins to the People’s Will. Its platform had three main planks: anti-capitalism, terrorism, and socialization of land. Following the Socialists-Revolutionaries of the 1870s and 1880s, the SRs espoused the theory of “separate path.” They could not entirely ignore the spectacular growth in Russia after 1890 of capitalism in its industrial and financial forms, but they argued that this was an artificial and transient phenomenon, that by its very success undermined itself, laying waste the rural economy, its principal market. They allowed the “bourgeoisie” some role in the revolutionary process; on the whole, however, they considered it loyal to the autocracy. Russia would be liberated by armed action of the masses in the cities and villages.