Late Marx and the Russian Road. Теодор Шанин

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       Marx and revolutionary Russia

      Haruki Wada

      Introduction

      In Japan since the late 1960s Marx’s views of Russia in his later years have been a subject of repeated discussion. Indeed, they have been pursued with greater enthusiasm in Japan than elsewhere. Many papers have been written on the subject, and several books have appeared dealing exclusively with it, including my own, published in 1975.¹ Needless to say, the motives for taking up this matter differ from one writer to another. There have been all manner of motivations – a desire to understand the true image of the history of Russian social thought, an attempt to identify the place in this history occupied by Plekhanov, who introduced his version of ‘Marxism’ into Russia, a wish to discover in Marx’s studies of Russia in his later years a key to the structure of underdeveloped capitalist economies, an effort to re-evaluate Russian Populism on the basis of the similarities between Marx’s view of Russia in his later years and that of the Populists, a growing interest in Russian peasant communes, and even an attempt to find a recipe for rescuing the highly industrialized Japanese society from the depths of its contradictions. There has even been a heated controversy on the subject carried in the pages of non-academic magazines.

      However, even the enthusiasm of today’s Japanese is in no way equal to that with which the Russians at different times discussed this matter in an effort to find the best possible path of development for their own society. When we look at these debates in Russia in retrospect, we realize at the same time that Marx’s theory on Russia was expressed mostly in unpublished letters or drafts of letters, and that the complexity of circumstances under which these letters or drafts were made public has made it peculiarly difficult for one to see what really was Marx’s view of Russia. The writings of Marx himself from which we can infer his thesis on Russia in his later years are the ‘Letter to the Editor of Otechestvennye Zapiski’ and the ‘Letter of Zasulich’ and its four different drafts. Both of these manuscripts had surprisingly strange histories prior to their publication.

      To begin with, the so-called ‘Letter to the Editor of Otechestvennye Zapiski’ – the manuscript of a letter that was not completed and never sent – was discovered after Marx’s death by Engels who in March 1884 asked the Group for the Emancipation of Labour, which had been formed the year before, to publish it.² However, Zasulich and others in the group, in spite of their avowed desire to be the disciples of Marx in Russia, waited as long as seven months before responding to Engels with a promise that the letter, having been translated into Russian, would soon be printed;³ but the promise was never fulfilled. Bent on the publication of this letter, Engels tried through N.F. Danielson to have it published in a legal Populist magazine inside Russia but was unsuccessful.⁴ Finally the letter was published in Vestnik Narodnoi Voli, Volume 5, in December 1886, with this editorial note: ‘Although we obtained a copy of this letter much earlier, we have been withholding its publication because we were informed that Friedrich Engels handed the letter to other people for publication in the Russian language.’⁵ Two years later, in 1888, Marx’s letter was also printed in Yuridicheskii Vestnik, a legal magazine published inside Russia.

      The first response to the letter was made by Gleb Uspenskii, a novelist with Populist leanings, in the form of an essay entitled ‘A Bitter Reproof, in which he deeply lamented the incapability of the Russian intellectuals to respond faithfully to Marx’s reproof and advice.⁶ Thereafter, in the 1890s, Plekhanov, Lenin and other Marxists, in opposition to the Populists who found in this letter a strong support for their line, insisted that in this letter Marx did not say anything definite about the direction in which Russian society should proceed.⁷

      Somewhat similar conditions surrounded the ‘Letter to Zasulich’ and its draft manuscripts; that is, the recipient, Plekhanov and others close to her kept the letter’s contents to themselves, and even when asked about the letter kept replying that they knew nothing about it. The draft manuscripts of this letter were discovered in 1911 by D.B. Riazanov, who with the help of N. Bukharin succeeded in deciphering them in 1913. But then the manuscripts were left for a decade. In 1923, after the Revolution was over, B.I. Nikolaevskii, a Menshevik in exile, found the letter’s text in papers belonging to Aksel’rod and published it the following year. Upon reading the text, Riazanov also published the text in the same year as well as the drafts of the letter in Russian in the Arkhiv K. Marksa i F. Engel’sa, and in 1926, in the original French, in the Marx-Engels Archiv, Volume 1.⁸

      Neither of the discoverers of the letter attached any special theoretical or philosophical significance to the new material. Nikolaevskii regarded the letter as a political utterance of Marx only,⁹ while Riazanov said, in addition to a similar remark, that the letter and its drafts merely exemplified a decline in Marx’s scholastic capability.¹⁰ In marked contrast, Socialist-Revolutionaries in new exile enthusiastically welcomed the publication of these new materials. V. Zenzinov, for instance, insisted that the programme Marx delineated in this letter was in perfect accord with ‘what has been developed by Russian revolutionary Populism’ and it offered testimony to the fact that on the question of the future of peasant communes ‘Marx definitely was on the side of Populism’.¹¹ V.M. Chernov, too, wrote that the publication of the ‘letter to Zasulich which has been stored under a paperweight for more than 40 years’ had brought the debate to a conclusion and that ‘the programme described in this letter is exactly what forms the foundation of the S-Rs’ theory of peasant revolution, agrarian demands and rural tactics.’¹²

      The first person to support this letter inside the Soviet Union was A. Sukhanov who also strongly urged that the village commune should be used as a means for promoting collectivization in agriculture.¹³ Several other writers offered similar arguments in the Party organ Bol’shevik in early 1928,¹⁴ but in the world of historians no such opinion was heard.

      It was not until 1929, the year when the collectivization issue commenced, that the letter was discussed СКАЧАТЬ