I. The Peculiarities of Historical Development

The revolution in Russia came as a surprise to everyone except Social-Democracy. Marxism had long ago foretold the inevitability of the Russian revolution, which was bound to break out as a result of the collision between the forces of capitalist development and the forces of an ossified absolutism. Marxism had assessed the social content of the coming revolution in advance. In calling it bourgeois, it pointed out that the immediate objective tasks of the revolution consist in creating “normal” conditions for the development of bourgeois society as a whole.

Marxism has proved right, and there is no longer any need either to dispute or to prove it. Marxists now face a task of an entirely different kind: to discover the “possibilities” of the developing revolution by analysing its internal mechanics. It would be a gross mistake simply to identify our revolution with the events of 1789–93 or of 1848. Historical analogies, on which liberalism feeds and lives, cannot take the place of social analysis.

The Russian revolution has an entirely peculiar character, which is the result of the peculiarities of the whole of our social and historical development, and which in its turn opens up entirely new historical prospects.

If we compare the social development of Russia with that of the European countries, bracketing off what these latter have most in common with one another and what distinguishes their history from the history of Russia, we may say that the fundamental feature of Russian social development is its comparative primitiveness and slowness.

We shall not dwell here on the natural causes of this primitiveness, but the fact itself we regard as beyond doubt: Russian society took shape on a more primitive and meagre economic foundation.

Marxism teaches that the development of the productive forces lies at the basis of the social and historical movement. The formation of economic corporations, classes and estates is possible only at a certain level of this development. For the differentiation of estates and classes, which is determined by the development of the division of labour and the creation of more specialised social functions, it is necessary that the part of the population directly engaged in material production should create a surplus product, an excess over its own consumption: only by the alienation of this excess can the unproductive classes arise and take shape. Further, a division of labour within the productive classes themselves is conceivable only at a certain level of development of agriculture, one able to supply the non-agricultural population with the products of the land. These fundamental propositions of social development were already formulated precisely by Adam Smith.

From this it follows of itself that although the Novgorod period of our history coincides with the beginning of the medieval history of Europe, the slow tempo of economic development, caused by natural and historical conditions (a less favourable geographical environment and a sparse population), was bound to hold back the process of class formation and give it a more primitive character.

It is hard to say how the history of Russian society would have taken shape had it run its course in isolation, under the influence of internal tendencies alone. It is enough that this was not the case. Russian society, taking shape on a definite internal economic foundation, was constantly under the influence, and even the pressure, of its external social and historical environment.

In the collisions of this social and state organisation, as it took shape, with other, neighbouring ones, a decisive part was played on the one hand by the primitiveness of its economic relations, and on the other by the relatively high level of theirs.

The Russian state, taking shape on a primitive economic basis, entered into relations and came into collision with state organisations that had formed on a higher and more stable economic foundation. Two possibilities lay open here: either the Russian state would fall in the struggle with them, as the Golden Horde fell in its struggle with the Muscovite state; or the Russian state would have to outstrip the development of economic relations in its own development, and absorb far more of the country’s vital juices than would have been the case had it developed in isolation. For the first outcome the Russian state proved not primitive enough. The state did not break up, but began to grow, at the cost of a terrible strain on the forces of the national economy.

The point, then, is not that Russia was surrounded by enemies on all sides. That alone is not enough. In essence it is true of every other European state, except perhaps England. But in their mutual struggle for existence these states rested on an approximately uniform economic basis, and the development of their state organisation was therefore not subjected to such powerful external pressures.

The struggle with the Crimean and Nogai Tatars called for a great exertion of strength; but of course no greater than the age-long struggle of France with England. It was not the Tatars who forced Russia to introduce firearms and to create the standing regiments of streltsy; it was not the Tatars who later compelled the creation of a cavalry of reiters and an infantry of soldiers. Here it was the pressure of Lithuania, Poland and Sweden.

As a result of this pressure from Western Europe, the state absorbed a disproportionately large share of the surplus product; that is, it lived at the expense of the privileged classes then in formation, and thereby held back their development, slow enough as it was. But that is not all. The state fell upon the “necessary product” of the cultivator, tore from him his means of subsistence, and so drove him from places he had not yet had time to make warm, and thereby held back the growth of the population and retarded the development of the productive forces. Thus, in so far as the state absorbed a disproportionately large share of the surplus product, it held back the differentiation of estates, slow enough as it was; and in so far as it took a considerable share of the necessary product, it destroyed even those primitive productive foundations on which it rested.

But in order to exist, to function, and therefore above all to alienate the necessary part of the social product, the state needed a hierarchical organisation of estates. That is why, while undermining the economic foundations of its growth, it at the same time strives to force its development by measures of state, and, like every other state, strives to turn this process of the formation of estates to its own advantage. The historian of Russian culture, Mr Milyukov, sees in this the direct opposite of the history of the West. There is no opposition here.

The medieval monarchy of estates, which developed into bureaucratic absolutism, was a state form that consolidated definite social interests and relations. But this state form, in itself, once it had arisen and existed, had interests of its own (dynastic, courtly, bureaucratic…), which came into conflict with the interests of the estates, not only the lower but the higher ones as well. The ruling estates, which formed the socially necessary “partition” between the mass of the people and the state organisation, pressed upon the latter and made their interests the content of its state practice. But at the same time the state power, as an independent force, regarded even the interests of the higher estates from its own angle, and, putting up resistance to their claims, strove to subordinate them to itself. The actual history of the relations between the state and the estates moved along the resultant determined by the relation of forces.

A process fundamentally the same took place in Russia too.

The state strove to make use of the developing economic groups and to subordinate them to its specialised financial and military interests. The economically dominant groups as they arose strove to make use of the state to consolidate their advantages in the form of the privileges of an estate. In this play of social forces the resultant swung much further towards the side of the state power than was the case in the history of Western Europe. The exchange of services, at the expense of the working people, between the state and the upper social groups, which is expressed in the distribution of rights and duties, burdens and privileges, worked out with us less to the advantage of the nobility and the clergy than in the medieval states of estates of Western Europe. This is beyond doubt. And nevertheless it would be a monstrous exaggeration, a violation of all perspective, to say that while in the West the estates created the state, with us the state power created the estates in its own interests (Milyukov).

Estates cannot be created by the state, by legal means. Before one or another social group can, with the help of the state power, fledge into a privileged estate, it must have taken shape economically in all its social advantages. Estates cannot be manufactured according to a table of ranks drawn up in advance, or according to the statutes of the Légion d’honneur. All the state power can do is to come, with all its instruments, to the aid of the elementary economic process that brings the higher economic formations forward. The Russian state, as we have shown, absorbed a relatively great deal of the country’s strength and thereby held back the process of social crystallisation; but it itself had need of it. It is natural that, under the influence and pressure of the more differentiated Western environment, a pressure transmitted through the military organisation of the state, it in its turn strove to force social differentiation on a primitive economic basis. Further: since the very need to force it was caused by the weakness of the social and economic formations, it is natural that the state, in its tutelary efforts, strove to use the preponderance of its strength to direct the very development of the upper classes at its own discretion. But on the road to any great success in this direction the state ran up, first of all, against its own weakness, against the primitive character of its own organisation, which, as we already know, was determined by the primitiveness of the social structure.

Thus the Russian state, created on the basis of the Russian economy, was pushed forward by the friendly, and still more by the hostile, pressure of the neighbouring state organisations, which had grown up on a higher economic foundation. From a certain moment, especially from the end of the seventeenth century, the state strains every nerve to speed up the natural economic development. New branches of handicraft, machines, factories, large-scale production, capital appear, from a certain point of view, as it were an artificial graft upon the natural economic stem. Capitalism seems to be the offspring of the state.

From this point of view, however, one could say that the whole of Russian science is an artificial product of the efforts of the state, an artificial graft upon the natural stem of national ignorance.

Russian thought, like the Russian economy, developed under the direct pressure of the higher thought and more developed economy of the West. Since, with the natural-economic character of the economy, and therefore with a weak development of foreign trade, relations with other countries bore predominantly the character of relations between states, the influence of these countries, before it took the form of direct economic rivalry, found expression in the form of a sharpened struggle for the state’s existence. The Western economy influenced the Russian economy through the medium of the state. To exist in the midst of hostile and better-armed states, Russia was compelled to introduce factories, schools of navigation, textbooks of fortification and so on. But if the general course of the internal economy of the enormous country had not been moving in the same direction, if the development of this economy had not given rise to a need for applied and generalising knowledge, all the efforts of the state would have perished without fruit. The national economy, developing naturally from a natural economy to a money and commodity economy, responded only to those measures of the government that corresponded to this development, and only in so far as they agreed with it. The history of the Russian factory, the history of the Russian monetary system, the history of state credit, all bear the best possible witness in favour of the view we have expressed.

The learned panegyrist of industrial protectionism forgets to add that the government’s policy was dictated not by concern for the development of the productive forces but by purely fiscal, and partly military and technical, considerations. That is why the policy of protection often ran counter not only to the basic interests of industrial development but to the private interests of particular groups of entrepreneurs as well. Thus the cotton manufacturers pointed out bluntly that “the high duty on cotton is now kept in the tariff not for the encouragement of cotton-growing but exclusively in fiscal interests”. Just as in the “creation” of estates the government pursued first of all the purpose of the state’s levies, so in “implanting” industry it directed its chief concern to the needs of the state treasury. But there is no doubt all the same that the autocracy played no small part in transplanting factory production to Russian soil.

By the time the developing bourgeois society felt the need for the political institutions of the West, the autocracy proved to be armed with all the material might of the European states. It rested on a centralised bureaucratic apparatus, which was wholly useless for regulating the new relations but was capable of developing great energy in systematic repression. The enormous distances of the state had been conquered by the telegraph, which gives the actions of the administration assurance and a relative uniformity and speed (in the matter of repression), while the railways make it possible to move military forces in a short time from one end of the country to the other. The pre-revolutionary governments of Europe knew almost nothing of railways or the telegraph. The army at the disposal of absolutism is colossal; and if it proved good for nothing in the serious trials of the Russo-Japanese war, it is still good enough for internal rule. Not only the government of old France, but even the government of 1848, knew nothing like the present Russian army.

Exploiting the country to the utmost by means of its fiscal and military apparatus, the government brought its annual budget up to the colossal figure of two milliard roubles. Relying on its army and its budget, the autocratic government made the European stock exchange its treasurer, and the Russian taxpayer the hopeless tributary of the European stock exchange.

Thus in the eighties and nineties of the nineteenth century the Russian government stood before the world as a colossal military and bureaucratic, fiscal and stock-exchange organisation of invincible strength.

The financial and military might of absolutism overwhelmed and blinded not only the European bourgeoisie but Russian liberalism too, depriving it of all faith in the possibility of measuring itself against absolutism in an open trial of strength. The military and financial might of absolutism seemed to exclude any possibility whatever of a Russian revolution.

In reality the very opposite proved true.

The more centralised a state is, and the more independent of society, the sooner it turns into a self-sufficient organisation standing above society. The greater the military and financial forces of such an organisation, the longer and the more successful its struggle for existence can be. A centralised state with a budget of two milliards, a debt of eight milliards and an army of a million men under arms could hold out for a long time after it had ceased to satisfy the most elementary needs of social development: not only the need for internal administration but even the need for military security, for the protection of which it had originally taken shape.

The longer this situation dragged on, the greater became the contradiction between the needs of economic and cultural development and the policy of the government, which had developed its own mighty “milliard-rouble” inertia. Once the epoch of the great patchwork had been left behind, having not only failed to remove this contradiction but having for the first time laid it bare, an independent turn by the government on to the road of parliamentarism became both objectively ever more difficult and psychologically ever more out of reach. The only way out of this contradiction that society’s position indicated to it was to accumulate in the iron boiler of absolutism enough revolutionary steam to burst the boiler.

Thus the administrative, military and financial might of absolutism, which enabled it to exist in defiance of social development, not only did not exclude the possibility of revolution, as liberalism thought, but on the contrary made revolution the only way out; and what is more, this revolution was guaranteed in advance a character all the more radical the more the might of absolutism deepened the abyss between it and the nation.

Russian Marxism may truly be proud that it alone understood the direction of this development and foretold its general forms, while liberalism fed on the most utopian “practicality” and revolutionary Narodism lived on phantasmagorias and a belief in miracles.

All the preceding social development made revolution inevitable. What, then, were the forces of this revolution?