1. F. Engels. Refugee Literature
Signed: F. Engels
I. A Polish Proclamation
When the Tsar of Russia arrived in London, the entire police force there was already astir. It was claimed that the Poles wanted to shoot him, the new Berezowski had already been found and was better armed than before, in Paris.[3] The houses of well-known Poles were surrounded by plain-clothes policemen, and the police inspector with special responsibility for surveillance of Poles under the Empire was even summoned from Paris. The police precau-tions along the Tsar's route from his residence into the City were organised according to positively strategic principles — and all this trouble for nothing! No Berezowski showed up, no pistol shots were fired, and the Tsar, who was trembling quite as much as his daughter, got off with a fright. All this trouble was not, however, entirely in vain, for the Tsar awarded a tip of £5 to every police superintendent and £2 to every police inspector (33 and 14 talers[3]
respectively) who had been on duty for his sake.
Meanwhile, the Poles had other things on their minds than murdering the noble Alexander. The society called "The Polish People" [4] issued an "Address of the Polish Refugees to the English People", signed: General W. Wrôblewski, President, J. Krynski, Secretary. This address was distributed in large numbers in London during the Tsar's visit. With the exception of Reynolds's Newspaper^ the London press unanimously refused to publish it: "England's guest" should not be insulted!
The address starts by pointing out to the English that it was no honour, but an insult, for the Tsar to visit them at the very moment he was making preparations in Central Asia to overthrow English rule in India, and that if England, instead of lending a willing ear to the blandishments of the Tsar, this ostensible father of the peoples he oppresses, were to be less indifferent to the Poles' aspirations to independence, England, as well as the rest of Western Europe, could quietly stop their colossal armaments. And this is quite correct. The background to all European militarism is Russian militarism. As a reserve in the war of 1859 on the side of France, in 1866 and 1870 on the side of Prussia,[5] the Russian army enabled the leading military power of the day to vanquish its enemy in isolation. As the leading European military power, Prussia is a direct creation of Russia, although she has since grown too large for her patron's liking. The address continues:
"By her geographical situation and by her readiness at any moment to fight in the cause of humanity, Poland always was, and in future always will continue to be, the foremost champion of justice, civilisation and social development in all North Eastern Europe. Poland has incontestably proved this by her centuries of resistance to the invasions of Eastern Barbarians [6] on the one hand, and to the inquisition, then oppressing nearly the entire West, on the other. How was it that the Nations of Western Europe were enabled peaceably to occupy themselves with the development of their social vitality precisely in the most decisive epoch of modern times? Merely because on the Eastern frontier of Europe the Polish soldier stood sentry, always watchful, always ready to charge, always prepared to sacrifice his health, his property, his life. It was owing to the shelter of Polish arms, that on Europe's awakening to a new life in die sixteenth century, the arts and sciences could flourish afresh, that commerce, industry and wealth could attain their present wonderful extension. What, for instance, would have become of the legacy of civilisation left to the West by the labour of two centuries, had not Poland, herself threatened by Mongolian hordes at her back, come to the rescue of Central Europe threatened by the Turks, and broken the Ottoman power by the brilliant victory under the walls of Vienna [7]?" [3]
The address goes on to argue that even today it is essentially Poland's resistance that prevents Russia from turning her forces on the West and that has even managed to disarm the most dangerous allies of Russia, her pan-Slavist agents. The most renowned Russian historian, Pogodin, says, in a work printed by the order and at the expense of the Russian government,b that Poland, hitherto the most painful sore on Russia's body, must become her right hand by restoring her as a small, weak kingdom under the sway of some Russian Prince — that would be the strongest bait for the Turkish and Austrian Slavonians:
"We shall [...] proclaim this in a manifesto, England and France will bite their lips, and as for Austria it will be her death-blow.... All the Poles, even the most irreconcilable, will fly to our embrace; the Austrian and Prussian Poles will reunite with their brothers. All Slavonic races now oppressed by Austria, Czechs, Croats, Hungarians (!), even the Slavonians of Turkey, will long for the hour when they shall be able to breathe as freely as the Poles. We shall be a race of a hundred millions- under one sceptre, and then, ye nations of Europe, come and try your strength with us!" [8]
Unfortunately, this beautiful plan lacked only the main thing: the consent of Poland. But
"to all those allurements — the world knows it — Poland replied: I will live and must live, if I am to live at all, not as the tool of a foreign Tsar's plans for world conquest, but as a free nation among the free nations of Europe".[3]
The address then explains in further detail how Poland has confirmed this unshakeable decision of hers. At the critical moment of her existence, at the outbreak of the French Revolution, Poland was already crippled by the first partition and divided between four states.[9] Yet she had the courage to raise the banner of the French Revolution on the Vistula — by the Constitution of the 3rd of May, 1791[10]—a deed that earned her a place high above all her neighbours. The old Polish economy was thus destroyed; given a few decades of peaceful development, undisturbed from outside, and Poland would have become the most advanced and most powerful country east of the Rhine. It would not, however, suit the partition powers for Poland to rise once again, and even less for her to rise through the naturalisation of revolution in north-eastern Europe. Her fate was sealed: the Russians imposed on Poland what Prussians, Austrians and Imperial troops attempted in France in vain.[11]
"Kosciuszko fought simultaneously for Polish independence and the principle of equality. [...] And it is notorious that from the moment of the loss of her national independence and in spite of it, Poland, in virtue of her innate patriotism and of her solidarity with all nations struggling for the rights of humanity, became the most active champion of justice outraged, no matter in what country, fighting on whatever battlefield tyranny was resisted. Unbroken by her own disasters, unshaken by the blindness and ill will of European governments, Poland has not for one moment been unmindful of the duties imposed upon her by herself, by history and by regard for the future."(1)
At the same time, she has also developed the principles on which this future, the new Polish republic, will be organised: they are laid down in the manifestoes of 1836, 1845 and 1863.[12] "The first of those manifestoes, while asserting the unshakeable national rights of Poland, proclaims at the same time the equality of rights of the peasantry.[3] That of 1845, issued on Polish soil, in the then free city of Cracow,[13] and sanctioned by delegates from all parts of Poland, proclaims not only this equality of rights, but also the principle that the soil, cultivated by the peasantry for centuries, shall become their property.[3]—In the part of Poland stolen by the Muscovites, the landlords, accepting the above manifestoes as part and parcel of Polish national law, had long before the imperial so-called Emancipation Proclamation resolved to settle this internal matter, which troubled their consciences, voluntarily and by agreement with the peasantry (1859-1863). The Polish land question was resolved, in principle, by the Constitution of May 3rd, 1791 ; if since then the Polish peasantry have been oppressed it was solely in consequence of the despotism and Machiavellism(2) of the Tsar who based his domination upon the mutual antagonism of landlords and peasants. The resolution was taken long before the imperial proclamation of February 19th, 1861; and this proclamation, applauded by the whole of Europe and pretending to establish equal rights for the peasants, is merely a cloak for one of the ever-repeated attempts of the Tsar to take unto himself other people's property. The Polish rural populace is just as oppressed as before, but—the soil has become the property of the Tsarl And as a punishment for the bloody protest raised in 1863 against the treacherous barbarism of her oppressors,[14] Poland has had to undergo a. series of brutal persecutions such as would shake with horror even the tyranny of past centuries. [...]
"And yet neither the cruel yoke of the Tsar, though it has now weighed on her for a full century, nor the indifference of Europe, have been able to kill Poland.
"We have lived and we shall live by virtue of our own will, our own strength and our own social and political development, which renders us superior to our oppressors; for their existence is based, from beginning to end, upon brute force, prisons and the gallows, and their chief means of action abroad are clandestine machinations, treacherous surprises and, finally, conquest by force. " (3)
Let us, however, leave the address, which has been adequately characterised by the above extracts, in order to append to it some observations on the importance of the Polish question for the German workers.
No matter how much Russia had developed since Peter the Great, no matter how much her influence had grown in Europe (to which Frederick II of Prussia contributed more than a little, even though he knew full well what he was doing), she nevertheless remained essentially just as non-European a power as, for example, Turkey, until the moment she seized Poland. The first partition of Poland was in 1772; in 1779 in the Peace of Teschen(4) Russia was already demanding(5) the attested right to interfere in German affairs.[15] That should have taught the German princes a lesson; yet Frederick William II, the only Hohenzollern ever to offer serious resistance to Russian policy, and Francis II agreed to the complete break-up of Poland. After the Napoleonic wars, Russia took, in addition, the lion's share of the previously Prussian and Austrian Polish provinces and now appeared openly as Europe's arbiter, a role she continued to play, without interruption, until 1853. Prussia was evidently proud of being allowed to crawl before Russia; Austria followed reluctantly, but always gave way at the crucial moment for fear of revolution, against which the Tsar remained the last bulwark. Thus, Russia became the stronghold of European reaction, without denying herself the pleasure of preparing further conquests in Austria and Turkey with pan-Slavist rabble-rousing. During the years of revolution, the crushing of the Hungarians by Russia[16] was just as decisive an event for Eastern and Central Europe as was the June battle in Paris for the West[17]; and when Tsar Nicholas shortly afterwards sat in judgment on the King of Prussia[3] and the Emperor of Austria(6) in Warsaw, Russia's domination set the seal on the domination of reaction in Europe.[18] The Crimean War liberated the West and Austria from the Tsar's insolence[19]; Prussia and the small states of Germany were all the more willing to crawl before him; but, in 1859, he was already chastising the Austrians for their disobedience by ensuring that his German vassals did not side with them,[20] and in 1866 Prussia completed the punishment of Austria.[21] We have already seen above that the Russian army constitutes the pretext for and the reserve of all European militarism. Only the fact that Nicholas had challenged the West in 1853, relying on his million soldiers (who, admittedly, existed largely on paper only), provided Louis Napoleon with an excuse in the Crimean War to turn the then rather enfeebled French army into the strongest in Europe. Only because the Russian army prevented Austria from siding with France in 1870[22] was Prussia able to defeat France and to complete the Prusso-German military monarchy. Behind all these grand performances of state[23] we see the Russian army. And even if the victory of Germany over France will just as surely produce a war between Russia and Germany— unless Russia's internal development soon enters a revolutionary flux — as the victory of Prussia over Austria at Sadowa(7) entailed the Franco-German War,(8) the Russian army will always be prepared to oppose any movement in the interior of Prussia. Even today, official Russia is the stronghold and bulwark of all European reaction, her army the reserve of all other armies, ensuring the suppression of the working class in Europe.
Yet it is the German workers who are first exposed to the onslaught of this large reserve army of oppression, both in the so-called German Empire and in Austria. As long as the Russians stand behind the Austrian and German bourgeoisie and governments, the sting is taken out of the entire German labour movement. So we, more than any others, have an interest in ridding ourselves of Russian reaction and the Russian army.
Moreover, in doing this we have only one reliable ally, which will remain reliable in all circumstances: the Polish people.
Through her historical development and her present position, Poland is faced, far more than France is, with the choice of either being revolutionary or perishing. And this scotches all the silly talk concerning the essentially aristocratic nature of the Polish movement. There are plenty of Polish refugees who have aristocratic cravings; but once Poland herself enters the movement it becomes revolutionary through and through, as we have seen in 1846[25] and 1863. These movements were not simply national; they were also aimed directly at liberating the peasants and transferring landed property to them. In 1871 the great mass of Polish refugees in France entered the service of the Commune[26]; was this an act of aristocrats? Did that not prove that these Poles were at the very apex of the modern movement? Since Bismarck introduced the Kulturkampf[27] in Posen(9) and, on the pretext of striking a blow against the Pope,(10) searches out Polish textbooks, suppresses the Polish language and does his utmost to drive the Poles into the arms of Russia, what happens? The Polish aristocracy is increasingly siding with Russia to at least reunify Poland under Russian rule; the revolutionary masses reply by offering to ally themselves with the German workers' party and fighting in the ranks of the International.
In 1863, Poland showed that she could not be done to death, and continues to show this every day. Her claim to an independent existence in the European family of nations is irrefutable. Her restoration, however, is a necessity for two nations in particular: for the Germans and for the Russians themselves. A people that oppresses others cannot emancipate itself. The power it needs to oppress others is ultimately always turned against itself. As long as there are Russian soldiers in Poland, the Russian people cannot liberate itself politically or socially. At the present stage of development in Russia, however, it is beyond dispute that the day Russia loses Poland, the movement will become strong enough in Russia herself to bring down the existing order. The independence of Poland and revolution in Russia imply each other. Meanwhile, Polish independence and revolution in Russia — which is far closer than it would appear on the surface, given the complete social, political and financial breakdown and the corruption that pervades the whole of official Russia — mean for the German workers that the bourgeoisie, the governments, in short, reaction in Germany, will be reduced to their own forces, forces that we shall, in time, overcome.
il
II. Programme of the Blanquist Commune Refugees[28]
After every unsuccessful revolution or counter-revolution, fever-ish activity develops among the émigrés who escaped abroad. Party groups of various shades are formed, which accuse each other of having driven the cart into the mud, of treason and of all other possible mortal sins. They also maintain close ties with the homeland, organise, conspire, print leaflets and newspapers, swear that it will start over again within the next twenty-four hours, that victory is certain and, in the wake of this expectation, distribute government posts. Naturally, disappointment follows disappointment, and since this is attributed not to inevitable historical conditions, which they do not wish to understand, but to accidental mistakes by individuals, recriminations accumulate and result in general bickering. Such is the history of all refugee societies, from the royalist émigrés of 1792[29] to those of today; and those among the émigrés who have common sense and reason give up this fruitless squabbling as soon as this can properly be done, and turn to something more useful.
The French emigration after the Commune has not escaped this inevitable fate either. Owing to the European smear campaign, which attacked all equally, and especially in London, where the French emigration had its common centre in the General Council of the International, for some time it was compelled to conceal its internal squabbles at least from the outside world. In the last two years, however, it was no longer able to hide the process of disintegration that is progressing rapidly in its ranks. An open quarrel flared up everywhere. In Switzerland some of the refugees joined the Bakuninists, notably under the influence of Malon, who was one of the founders of the secret Alliance.[30] Then, in London, the so-called Blanquists split off from the International and formed a group that called itself the Revolutionary Commune.[31]
Later, a number of other groups emerged that were, however, constantly fusing and reorganising, and did not produce anything worthwhile even as regards manifestoes, whereas the Blanquists have just issued the proclamation to the "Communeux",(1) calling the world's attention to their programme.
They are called Blanquists not because they are a group founded by Blanqui — of the 33 signatories to the programme only a few may ever have spoken to Blanqui — but because they want to act in his spirit and in accordance with his tradition. Blanqui is essentially a political revolutionary, a socialist only in sentiment, because of his sympathy for the sufferings of the people, but he has neither socialist theory nor definite practical proposals for social reforms. In his political activities he was essentially a "man of action", believing that, if a small well-organised minority should attempt to effect a revolutionary uprising at the right moment, it might, after scoring a few initial successes, carry the mass of the people and thus accomplish a victorious revolution. Naturally, under Louis Philippe he was able to organise this nucleus only in the form of a secret society, and it met the fate usually reserved for conspiracies: the people, fed up with the constant proffering of empty promises that it would soon begin, finally lost all patience, became rebellious, and there remained only the alternative of letting the conspiracy collapse or of striking without any external cause. They struck (May 12, 1839), but the insurrection was immediately suppressed.[32] This Blanqui conspiracy, by the way, was the only one in which the police never succeeded in gaining a foothold; for the police, the insurrection came like a bolt from the blue.—Since Blanqui regards every revolution as a coup de main by a small revolutionary minority, it automatically follows that its victory must inevitably be succeeded by the establishment of a dictatorship — not, it should be well noted, of the entire revolutionary class, the proletariat, but of the small number of those who accomplished the coup and who themselves are, at first, organised under the dictatorship of one or several individuals.
Obviously, Blanqui is a revolutionary of the old generation. These views on the course of revolutionary events have long since become obsolete, at least as far as the German workers' party is concerned, and in France, too, they meet the approval only of the less mature or more impatient workers. We shall also find that, in the programme in question, definite limitations have been imposed on these views. However, our London Blanquists too are guided by the principle that revolutions do not generally occur by themselves, but are made; that they are made by a relatively small minority and according to a plan worked out in advance; and, finally, that at any time it may "soon begin". With such principles people naturally become irretrievable victims of all the self-deceptions of the refugees and plunge from one folly into another. Most of all they want to play the role of Blanqui — the "man of action". But little good can be accomplished here by good will alone; Blanqui's revolutionary instinct, his ability to reach quick decisions are not, however, given to all, and no matter how much Hamlet may speak of action, he still remains Hamlet. Moreover, when our thirty-three men of action find that there is absolutely nothing to be done in the field they call action, our thirty-three Brutuses fall into a contradiction with themselves, which is comical rather than tragic, a contradiction wherein the tragedy is not heightened by the gloomy appearance they assume, as though they are a lot of "Moros, of the cloak and dagger",(2) which, by the way, does not even enter their heads. What can they do? They are preparing for the next "outburst", by drawing up proscription lists for the future, to cleanse (épuré) the ranks of the people who took part in the Commune, which is why the other refugees call them the pure (les purs). Whether or not they have themselves assumed that title I do not know; it would ill fit some of them. Their meetings are closed, their decisions are kept secret, but this does not prevent their being echoed throughout the whole French Quarter the following morning. As always happens with such serious men of action, when they have nothing to do — they have picked first a personal, then a literary quarrel with a worthy opponent, one of the most notorious members of the Paris petite press, a certain Vermersch, who under the Commune published the Père Duchêne, a miserable caricature of Hébert's newspaper of 1793. In reply to their moral indignation, this gentleman published a pamphlet in which he branded them as "rogues or accomplices of rogues" (3) and poured a veritable stream of abusive invectives at them:
Each word a night-pot and not an empty one at that.(4) And our thirty-three Brutuses find it worthwhile to pick a public quarrel with such an opponent!
If one thing is certain it is that, after the exhausting war, after the hunger in Paris and, notably, after the awful blood-letting of the May days in 1871,[33] the Paris proletariat needs a long rest to recuperate, and that every premature attempt at an insurrection can only end in a new, perhaps still more horrible defeat. Our Blanquists hold a different view. In their opinion, the disintegration of the monarchic majority in Versailles[34] ushers in
"the fall of Versailles, the revanche for the Commune. This is because we are approaching a great historical moment, one of the great crises when the people, apparently succumbing in wretchedness and condemned to death, resume their revolutionary advance with renewed force".[8]
So, it starts all over again, and what is more, immediately. This hope for an immediate "revanche for the Commune" is not merely an émigré illusion; it is an essential article of faith for people who have taken it into their heads to play "men of action" at a time when absolutely nothing can be done in their sense, that is, in the sense of precipitating a revolution. All the same, since it is to begin, they feel that "the time has come for all refugees who still have a spark of life left in them to define their position".(5)
And thus the thirty-three tell us that they are 1) atheists, 2) Communists, 3) revolutionaries.
Our Blanquists have a basic feature in common with the Bakuninists, in that they want to represent the most far-reaching, most extreme trend. It is for this reason, incidentally, that the Blanquists, while opposing the Bakuninists over aims, often agree with them over means. It is, therefore, a question of being more radical than all others as regards atheism. Luckily, it is easy enough these days to be an atheist. In the European workers' parties atheism is more or less self-understood, even though in some countries it is quite often similar to that of the Spanish Bakuninist who declared: to believe in God is against all socialism, but to believe in the Virgin Mary is something quite different, and every decent Socialist should naturally do so. As regards the German Social-Democratic workers,(6) it can be said that atheism has already outlived its usefulness for them; this pure negation does not apply to them, since they no longer stand in theoretical, but only in practical opposition to all belief in God: they are simply through with God, they live and think in the real world and are, therefore, materialists. The same probably applies to France. If not, there could be nothing simpler than to organise the mass distribution among the workers of the splendid French materialist literature of the last century, of the literature in which the French spirit has attained its sublime expression as regards both form and content, and which, considering the level of science that existed then, even today stands exceedingly high as regards content, and still unexcelled as regards form. This, however, does not suit our Blanquists. To prove that they are the most radical of all, God, as in 1793,[35] is decreed out of existence:
"Let the Commune forever deliver mankind from this spectre of past misery" (God), "of this cause" (non-existent God a cause!) "of their present misery.—There is no room for priests in the Commune; every religious service, every religious organisation must be banned."[3]
And this demand to transform the people par ordre du mufti(7)
into atheists is signed by two members of the Commune,(8) who surely must have had sufficient opportunity to discover, first, that anything can be decreed on paper but that this does not mean that it will be carried out; second, that persecution is the best way of strengthening undesirable convictions! This much is certain: the only service that can still be rendered to God today is to make atheism a compulsory dogma and to surpass Bismarck's anticlerical
Kulturkampf laws by prohibiting religion in general.
The second point of the programme is communism. Here we find ourselves on more familiar ground for the ship we are sailing here is called the Manifesto of the Communist Party, published in February 1848. Already in the autumn of 1872 the five Blanquists who had left the International embraced a socialist programme that, in all its essential features, was that of present-day German communism, and based their withdrawal solely on the refusal of the International to play at revolution after the fashion of those five.[36] Now the council of the thirty-three has adopted this programme, with all its materialist view of history, even though its translation into Blanquist French leaves much to be desired where the wording of the Manifesto was not kept almost verbatim, as for example, in this phrase:
"The bourgeoisie has removed the mystic veils from the exploitation of labour in which this last expression of all forms of slavery was formerly shrouded: governments, religions, the family, laws, institutions of both the past and present are finally revealed in this society, resting on the simple opposition of capitalists and wage-workers, as the instruments of oppression, with whose help the bourgeoisie upholds its rule and suppresses the proletariat."(9)
Let us compare this with the Communist Manifesto, Section I: "In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation," etc.(10)
Yet as soon as we leave theory aside and get down to practice, the peculiar stand of the thirty-three becomes evident:
"We are Communists because we want to arrive at our aim without stop-overs at intermediate stations, without entering into compromises, which only put off victory and prolong slavery."(11)
The German Communists are Communists because, through all intermediate stations and compromises, created not by them but by historical development, they clearly perceive(12) the ultimate aim: the abolition of classes, the establishment of a society in which there will be no private ownership of land and means of production. The thirty-three are Communists because they imagine that, as soon as they have only the good will to jump over intermediate stations and compromises, everything is assured, and if, as they firmly believe, it "begins" in a day or two, and they take the helm, "communism will be introduced" the day after tomorrow. And they are not Communists if this cannot be done immediately. What childish naïveté to advance impatience as a convincing theoretical argument!
Finally, our thirty-three are "revolutionaries".(13) As regards the bandying of big words, the Bakuninists are known to have done everything humanly possible in this respect. But our Blanquists feel obliged to outdo them. But how? It will be remembered that the whole socialist proletariat, from Lisbon and New York to Budapest and Belgrade, immediately adopted responsibility for the actions of the Paris Commune en bloc. But that is not enough for our Blanquists:
"As far as we are concerned, we claim our share of the responsibility for the executions" (under the Commune) "of the enemies of the people" (a list of the executed is appended), "we claim our share of the responsibility for the arson that destroyed the instruments of monarchic or bourgeois oppression or protected those engaged in struggle."(14)
A lot of follies are unavoidably committed in every revolution, as they are indeed at all other times, and when at last people calm down sufficiently to be able to review events critically, they inevitably draw the following conclusion: we have done many things that it would have been better to leave undone, and have failed to do many things that it would have been better to do, and that is why things took a bad turn. But what a lack of critical attitude is needed to declare the Commune impeccable and infallible and to assert that, every time a house was burned down or a hostage shot, this was a case of retributive justice, right down to the dot on the "i". Is this not tantamount to asserting that, during the week in May, the people shot precisely the number of people, and no more, than was necessary, that exactly those buildings were burned down, and no more, than had to be burned down? Is that not tantamount to saying of the first French revolution: each one beheaded got his deserts, first those whom Robespierre beheaded, and then Robespierre himself? Such childish patter results when essentially quite good-natured people give in to the urge to appear savagely brutal.
Enough. In spite of all the foolish actions taken by the refugees and the droll attempts to make boy Karl (or Eduard?)(15) appear awe-inspiring, some definite progress can be noted in this programme. It is the first manifesto in which French workers rally to the cause of present-day German communism. Moreover, these workers are of a trend that regards the French as the chosen people of the revolution, and Paris the revolutionary Jerusalem. To have brought them this far is to the indisputable credit of Vaillant, who is one of the signatories and who, as is widely known, has a good knowledge of the German language and of German socialist writing. The German socialist workers who, in 1870, proved that any national chauvinism is absolutely alien to them, may consider it a favourable omen that the French workers are adopting correct theoretical principles, even though these come from Germany.
III
m 37
In London a review entitled Vperyod! (Forward)(1) is appearing in the Russian language and at irregular intervals. It is edited by a personally most respectable scholar,(2) whom the prevailing strict etiquette in Russian refugee literature prevents me from naming. For even those Russians who pose as out-and-out revolutionary ogres, who dub it a betrayal of the revolution to respect anything at all — in their polemics even they respect the appearance of anonymity with a conscientiousness only equalled in the English bourgeois press; they respect it even when it becomes comical, as it does here, because all the Russian refugees and the Russian government know perfectly well what the man's name is. It would never occur to us to let out such a carefully kept secret without good reason; but since the child must have a name, let us hope that the editor of the Forward will excuse us if, for the sake of brevity, in this article we call him by the popular Russian name Peter.
In his philosophy, Friend Peter is an eclectic who selects the best from all the different systems and theories: try everything and keep the best! He knows that everything has a good side and a bad side, and that the main thing is to appropriate the good side of everything without being saddled with the bad, too. Since every thing, every person, every theory has these two sides, a good and a bad, every thing, every person, every theory is as good and as bad as any other in this respect, hence, from this vantage point, it would be foolish to become impassioned for or against one or the other. From this point of view, the struggles and disputes of the revolutionaries and socialists amongst themselves are bound to appear sheer fatuous absurdities that serve no better purpose than to please their opponents. Moreover, nothing could be more understandable for a man of this opinion than to attempt to bring all of these mutually hostile factions together and earnestly enjoin them no longer to treat reaction to this scandalous spectacle, but exclusively to attack the common adversary. All the more natural, of course, if one comes from Russia, where the labour movement is, as we know, so extremely highly developed.
The Forward is, then, full of exhortations urging concord on all socialists or urging them, at least, to avoid all public discord. When the Bakuninists' attempts to subjugate the International to their rule under false pretences, by lies and deceit, occasioned the well-known split in the Association, again it was the Forward that exhorted us to unity. This unity could, of course, only be attained by immediately letting the Bakuninists have their way and delivering the International up to their secret conspiracies, tied hand and foot. One was not unprincipled enough to do so; one accepted the challenge; the Hague Congress came to its decision, threw out the Bakuninists and resolved to publish the documents justifying this expulsion.[38]
There was a great deal of lamentation on the editorial board of the Forward over the fact that the entire labour movement had not been sacrificed to dear "unity". Yet even greater was the horror when the compromising Bakuninist documents really did appear in the commission's report (see "Ein Komplott gegen die Internationale",[39] German edition, Brunswick, Bracke). Let us hear from the Forward itself:
"This publication ... has the character of caustic polemics against persons who are in the foremost ranks of the Federalists, ... its contents are topped up with private matters which could only have been collected by hearsay, and the credibility of which could consequently not have been indisputable for the authors."(3)
In order to prove to the people who implemented the decision of the Hague Congress what a colossal crime they had committed, the Forward refers to a feuilleton in the Neue Freie Presse by a certain Karl Thaler,(4) which,
"having emerged from the bourgeois camp, merits particular attention because it proves most clearly the importance for the common enemies of the working class, contenders for supremacy among the ranks of the workers".(5)
First let us remark that the Bakuninists are here presented simply as "Federalists", as opposed to the alleged Centralists, as if the author believed in this non-existent opposition invented by the Bakuninists. That this was not, in fact, the case will become evident. Second, let us remark that from this feuilleton, written to order for such a venal bourgeois sheet as the Vienna Neue Freie Presse, the conclusion is drawn that genuine revolutionaries should not expose merely ostensible revolutionaries because these mutual accusations provide amusement for the bourgeois and governments. I believe that the Neue Freie Presse and all this press rabble could write ten thousand articles without having the slightest effect on the stance of the German workers' party. Every struggle has moments when one cannot deny one's opponent a certain satisfaction, if one is not to inflict positive damage on oneself. Fortunately, we have got so far that we can allow our opponents this private pleasure if we thereby achieve real successes.
The main charge, however, is that the report is full of private matters the credibility of which could not have been indisputable for the authors, because they could only have been collected by hearsay. How Friend Peter knows that a society like the International, which has its official organs throughout the civilised world, can only collect such facts by hearsay is not stated. His assertion is, anyway, frivolous in the extreme. The facts in question are attested by authentic evidence, and those concerned took good care not to contest them.
But Friend Peter is of the opinion that private matters, such as private letters, are sacred and should not be published in political debates. To accept the validity of this argument on any terms is to render the writing of all history impossible. The relationship between Louis XV and Du Barry or Pompadour was a private matter, but without it the whole pre-history of the French Revolution is incomprehensible. Or, to take a step towards the present: if an innocent girl called Isabella(6) is married to a man(7)
who, according to experts (assessor Ulrichs, for example) cannot stand women and hence only falls in love with men — if, finding herself neglected, she takes men wherever she finds them, then that is purely a private matter. But if the said innocent Isabella is Queen of Spain and one of these young men kept by her is a young officer called Serrano(8); if this Serrano is promoted field marshal and prime minister in recognition of the heroic deeds he has performed behind closed doors, is then supplanted and overthrown by another,(9) subsequently throws his faithless sweetheart out of the country with the help of other companions in misfortune, and after a variety of adventures eventually himself becomes dictator of Spain and such a great man that Bismarck does his utmost to persuade the Great Powers to recognise him — then this private affair between Isabella and Serrano becomes a piece of Spanish history, and anyone wishing to write about modern Spanish history and knowingly concealing this titbit from his readers would be falsifying history. Again, if one is describing the history of a gang like the Alliance, among whom there is such a large number of tricksters, adventurers, rogues, police spies, swindlers and cowards alongside those they have duped, should one falsify this history by knowingly concealing the individual villainies of these gentlemen as "private matters"? Much as it may horrify Friend Peter, he may rely on it that we are not done with these "private matters" by a long chalk. The material is still mounting up.
When, however, the Forward describes the report as a clumsy concoction of essentially private facts, it is committing an act that is hard to characterise. Anyone who could write such a thing had either not read the report in question at all; or he was too limited or prejudiced to understand it; or else he was writing something he knew to be incorrect. Nobody can read the "Komplott gegen die Internationale" without being convinced that the private matters interspersed in it are the most insignificant part of it, are illustrations meant to provide a more detailed picture of the characters involved, and that they could all be cut without jeopardising the main point of the report. The organisation of a secret society, with the sole aim of subjecting the European labour movement to a hidden dictatorship of a few adventurers, the infamies committed to further this aim, particularly by Nechayev in Russia[40]—this is the central theme of the book, and to maintain that it all revolves around private matters is, to say the least, irresponsible.
To be sure, it may be extremely painful for some Russians suddenly to see the dirty side — and it certainly is very dirty — of the Russian movement ruthlessly exposed to Western Europe. But who is to blame? Who else but those Russians themselves who represent this dirty side, who, not satisfied with deceiving their own compatriots, attempted to subordinate the whole European labour movement to their personal ends? If Bakunin and company had restricted their heroic deeds to Russia, people in Western Europe would hardly have troubled to train their sights on them. The Russians themselves would have done that. But as soon as those gentlemen, who do not even understand the rudiments of the conditions and development of the West European labour movement, seek to play the dictator with us, it ceases to be amusing: one simply fires at them pointblank.
Anyway, the Russian movement can take such revelations with equanimity. A country that has produced two writers of the stature of Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky, two socialist Lessings, will not be destroyed because, all at once, it spawns a humbug like Bakunin and a few immature little students, who inflate themselves with big words like frogs, and finally gobble one another up. Even among the younger Russians we know people of first-class theoretical and practical talents and great energy, people who have the advantage over the French and the English, thanks to their knowledge of languages, in their intimate acquaintance with the movement in different countries, and over the Germans in their cosmopolitan versatility. Those Russians who understand and participate in the labour movement can only regard it as a service rendered to have been relieved of complicity in the Bakuninists' acts of villainy. All this does not, however, prevent the Forward from concluding its account with the words:
"We do not know what the authors of this pamphlet think of the results it has achieved. The majority of our readers would probably share the feeling of depression with which we have read it and with which we record these sorry phenomena in our pages, in pursuance of our duty as chroniclers."(10)
With this feeling of depression on the part of Friend Peter we conclude the first section of our tale. The second begins with the following paragraph from the same volume of the Forward:
"Our readers will be pleased to receive another piece of news in a similar vein. With us, in our ranks, we also have the well-known writer Peter Nikitich Tkachov; after four years' detention he has succeeded in escaping from the place where he was interned and condemned to inactivity, to reinforce our ranks." (11) We learn who the well-known writer Tkachov is from a Russian pamphlet, The Tasks of Revolutionary Propaganda in Russia, which he himself published in April 1874 and which depicts him as a green grammar-school boy of singular immaturity, the Karlchen Missnick, as it were, of Russian revolutionary youth. He tells us that many people have asked him to collaborate in the Forward; he knew the editor was a reactionary; nevertheless, he considered it his duty to take the Forward under his wing, although — it should be noted — it had not asked for him. On arriving he finds, to his astonishment, that the editor, Friend Peter, presumes to make the final decision on the acceptance or rejection of articles. Such an undemocratic procedure naturally infuriates him; he composes a detailed document claiming, for himself and the other staff (who — it should be noted — had not asked for it), "in the name of justice, on the basis of purely theoretical considerations ... equality of rights and obligations" (with the editor-in-chief) "with regard to everything affecting the literary and economic side of the enterprise".(12)
Here we see straightaway the immaturity that, while it does not dominate the Russian refugee movement, is, nevertheless, more or less endured. A Russian scholar, who has a considerable reputation in his own country, becomes a refugee and acquires the means to found a political journal abroad. Scarcely has he managed to do this, when some more or less enthusiastic youth comes along, unasked, and offers to take part, on the more or less childish condition that he should have an equal voice with the founder of the journal in all literary and financial matters. In Germany he would have been laughed at. But the Russians are not so coarse. Friend Peter goes to great pains to convince him that he is wrong, both "in the name of justice and on the basis of purely theoretical considerations"—naturally in vain. Tkachov, offended, withdraws like Achilles to his tent[41] and fires off his pamphlet against Friend Peter, whom he calls a "philistine philosopher".(13)
With a stifling heap of eternally repeated Bakuninist phrases about the nature of true revolution, he accuses Friend Peter of the crime of preparing the people for revolution, of seeking to bring them to a "clear understanding and awareness of their needs". Anyone, however, who wishes to do that is no revolutionary, but a man of peaceful progress, i.e., a reactionary, a supporter of "bloodless revolution in the German taste".(14) The true revolutionary "knows that the people are always ready for revolution"(15); anyone who does not believe this does not believe in the people, and faith in the people "constitutes our strength". To anyone who does not realise this, the writer quotes a pronouncement by Nechayev, this "typical representative of our modern youth". Friend Peter says we must wait until the people are ready for revolution—"but we cannot and will not wait"(16); the true-revolutionary differs from the philistine philosopher in that he "assumes the right to summon the people to revolution at any time".(17) And so on.
Here in Western Europe we would simply dismiss all this childish nonsense with the answer: "If your people are ready for revolution at any time, if you assume the right to summon them to revolution at any time, and if you simply cannot wait, why do you go on boring us with your prattle, why, for goodness sake, don't you go ahead and strike now?"
But our Russians do not view matters quite so simply. Friend Peter thinks that Mr. Tkachov's childish, tedious and contradictory observations, which revolve in an eternal circle, may exert the seductive attraction of a mons veneris[42] on Russian youth, and, as the faithful Eckart of this youth, he issues an admonitory exhortation of sixty closely printed pages against them.(18) In this he sets out his own views on the nature of revolution, investigating in deadly earnest whether or not the people are ready for revolution and in what circumstances revolutionaries have the right to summon them to revolution or not and similar niceties, which at this level of generality have about as much value as the scholastics' studies of the Virgin Mary. In the process, "the Revolution" itself becomes a sort of Virgin Mary, theory becomes faith, activity in the movement becomes a religion, and the whole debate takes place not on terra firma, but in a cloudy sky of generalities.
Here, however, Friend Peter becomes involved in a tragic contradiction with himself. He, the preacher of unity, the opponent of all polemics, of all "mutually accusatory pamphlets" within the revolutionary party, cannot, of course, do his duty as Eckart, without also engaging in polemics; he cannot reply to his opponent's accusations without similarly accusing him. Friend Peter will himself testify to the "feeling of depression" that accompanies this "sorry phenomenon". His pamphlet begins as follows:
"Of two evils, one must choose the lesser. "I know full well that all this refugee literature of mutually accusatory pamphlets, of polemics about who is the genuine friend of the people and who is not, who is honest and who is not, and, in particular, who is genuine representative of Russian youth, of the true revolutionary party — that all this literature about the personal dirt of the Russian emigration is as repugnant to the reader as it is insignificant for the revolutionary struggle, and can only gratify our enemies — this I know, and yet I find it necessary to pen these lines, necessary with my own hand to swell the number of these wretched writings by one more, to the tedium of our readers and the delight of our enemies — necessary, because of two evils, one must choose the lesser."(19)
Splendid. But why is it that Friend Peter, who evinces so much Christian tolerance in the Forward and demands the same of us towards the tricksters we have exposed — tricksters whom, as we shall see, he knows as well as we do,—that he did not even have the modicum of tolerance towards the writers of the report to ask himself whether they, too, were obliged to choose the lesser of two evils? Why must the fire first burn his own fingers before he realises that there might be even greater evils than a little harsh polemics against people who, in the guise of ostensibly revolutionary activity, were endeavouring to debase and destroy the entire European labour movement?
Let us, however, be indulgent towards Friend Peter; fate has been rather hard on him. No sooner has he done, in full consciousness of his own guilt, what he reproaches us with doing, than Nemesis drives him on and forces him to supply Mr. Karl Thaler with new material for several more articles in the Neue Freie Presse.
"Or," he asks the ever-ready madcap Tkachov, "has your agitation already done its work? Is your organisation perhaps ready? Ready? Really ready? Or have we here that notorious secret committee of 'typical' revolutionaries, the committee that consists of two men and circulates decrees?[43] Our young people have been told so many lies, they have been so often deceived, their trust so shamefully abused, that they will not, all at once, believe in the readiness of the revolutionary organisation." (20)
For the Russian reader it is, of course, unnecessary to add that the "two men" are Bakunin and Nechayev. Further:
"But there are those who claim to be friends of the people, supporters of the social revolution, and who, at the same time, bring to their activity that mendaciousness and dishonesty that I have described above as a belch of the old order against the injustice of the old society, asserting the principle that, in war, every means is allowable. Among these allowable means they included the deception of their collaborators, the deception of the people whom they, nevertheless, claimed to serve. They were prepared to lie to everyone and anyone solely in order to organise a sufficiently strong party, just as if a strong social-revolutionary party could be produced without the honest solidarity of its members! They were ready to arouse in the people the old passions of banditry and enjoyment without work.... They were ready to exploit their friends and comrades, to make them tools of their plans; they were ready verbally to defend the most complete independence and autonomy of persons and sections, while at the same time organising the most pronounced secret dictatorship and training their supporters in the most sheep-like and thoughtless obedience, as if the social revolution could be carried out by a union of exploiters and exploited, by a group of people whose actions are, at every turn, a slap in the face for everything their words preach!"[3]
It is incredible, but true: these lines, which resemble an extract from the "Komplott gegen die Internationale" as closely as one egg does another, were written by the very man who, a few months before, had described that pamphlet as a crime against the common cause, because of its attacks on the very same people, attacks that were in complete agreement with the above lines. Well, let us be satisfied with this.
If, however, we now look back on Mr. Tkachov, with his great pretensions and utterly insignificant achievements, and at the little
malheur that befell our Friend Peter on this occasion, we might well consider it our turn to say:
"We do not know what the authors think of the results achieved. The majority of our readers would probably share the feeling of 'amusement' with which we have read it and with which we record these 'strange' phenomena in our pages, in pursuance of our duty as chroniclers."
Joking aside, however. Many peculiar phenomena in the Russian movement to date are explained by the fact that, for a long time, every Russian publication was a closed book to the West, and that it was, therefore, easy for Bakunin and his consorts to conceal from it their goings-on, which had long been known to the Russians. They zealously spread the assertion that even the dirty sides of the Russian movement should — in the interests of the movement itself — be kept secret from the West; anyone who communicated Russian matters to the rest of Europe, in so far as they were of an unpleasant nature, was a traitor. That has now ceased. Knowledge of the Russian language — a language that, both for its own sake, as one of the richest and most powerful living languages, and on account of the literature thereby made accessible, richly deserves study — is no longer a great rarity, at any rate among the German Social-Democrats. The Russians will have to bow to the inevitable international fate: their movement will henceforth develop in full view and under the surveillance of the rest of Europe. Nobody has had to pay so dearly for their earlier isolation than they themselves. But for this isolation, it would never have been possible to cheat them so disgracefully for years on end, as Bakunin and his consorts did. Those who will derive the greatest benefit from the West's criticism, from the international interaction of the various West European movements on the Russian movement and vice versa, from the eventual fusion of the Russian movement with the all-European movement, are the Russians themselves.
IV
The readers of the Volksstaat have suffered a misfortune. Some of them may still remember that, in my last article on "refugee literature" (Nos. 117 and 118),a I dealt with some passages from the Russian periodical Forward and a pamphlet by its editor.b
Quite by chance I happened to mention a Mr. Peter Tkachov, who has published a little pamphlet attacking the aforementioned editor,0 and with whom I had only concerned myself as little as was absolutely necessary. I described him, to judge by the form and content of his immortal work, "as a green grammar-school boy of singular immaturity, the Karlchen Missnick, as it were, of Russian revolutionary youth"d and pitied the editor of the Forward for deeming it necessary to bandy words with such an adversary. I was soon to learn, however, that the boy Karl is beginning to get cross with me e and entangling me, too, in polemics with him. He publishes a pamphlet: Offener Brief an
Herrn Friedrich Engels by Peter Tkachov, Zurich, typography by
Tagwacht, 1874. The fact that, in it, I have all sorts of things foisted on to me that Mr. Tkachov must know I have never maintained would be a matter of indifference to me; but the fact that he gives the German workers quite a false picture of the situation in Russia, in order to justify the activities of the Bakuninists in relation to Russia, makes a reply necessary.
In his open letter, Mr. Tkachov consistently sets himself up as a representative of Russian revolutionary youth. He maintains that I "dispensed advice to the Russian revolutionaries ... urging them to enter into an alliance with me (!)"a; at the same time I had depicted them, "the representatives of the Russian revolutionary party abroad", their efforts and their literature in the "most unfavourable colours to the German labour world"; he says: "You express your utter contempt for us Russians because we are so 'stupid' and 'immature'," etc. "...'green grammar-school boys', as you please to call us"—and finally there follows the inevitable trump-card: "By mocking us you have done our common enemy, the Russian state, a valuable service." I have subjected him, Mr. Tkachov claims, "to every conceivable kind of abuse".b
Now, nobody knows better than Peter Nikitich Tkachov that there is not a single grain of truth in all this. First, in the article in question, I held no one responsible for Mr. Tkachov's utterances other than Mr. Tkachov himself. It never occurred to me to see him as a representative of the Russian revolutionaries. If he appoints himself as such, thereby transferring the green grammar-school boy and other pleasantries from his shoulders on to theirs, then I must definitely protest. Among Russian revolutionary youth there are, of course, as everywhere, people of widely differing moral and intellectual calibre. Yet its general level, even after taking full account of the time difference and the essentially different milieu, is undoubtedly still far higher than our German student youth has ever attained, even during its best period in the early 1830s. Nobody but Mr. Tkachov himself gives him the right to speak on behalf of these young people in their entirety. Indeed, even though he reveals himself as a true Bakuninist on this occasion, I nevertheless doubt at the moment whether he has the right to conduct himself as the representative of the small number of Russian Bakuninists whom I described as "a few immature little students, who inflate themselves with big words like frogs, and finally gobble one another up".c But even if this were the case, it would only be a new version of the old story of the three tailors of Tooley Street in London, who issued a proclamation that started, "We, the people of England, declare" [45] etc.(1) Thus, the main point that needs to be made is that the "Russian revolutionaries" do not come into it, now any more than before, and that for Tkachov's "we" it is necessary to substitute "I", throughout.
I am supposed to have given him "advice". I haven't the faintest idea what he is talking about. I may have let fly a few blows, Peter Nikitich, but advice*? Be so kind as to furnish proof.
At the end of my last article, I am supposed to have urged him or his ilk to enter into an alliance with me. I will pay Mr. Tkachov ten marks in Bismarck's coin of the realm[46] if he can demonstrate that.
I am supposed to have maintained that he is "stupid", and he puts the word in quotation marks. Although I would not deny that he has hidden his talents — if that is the appropriate word here — under a bushel of considerable size in both these works, it is open to anyone to ascertain that the word '.'stupid" does not occur once anywhere in my article. But if all else fails, the Bakuninists resort to bogus quotations.
Further, I am supposed to have "mocked" him and portrayed him in a "ridiculous light". Granted, Mr. Tkachov will never be able to force me to take his pamphlet seriously. We Germans are widely reputed to be boring, and must have richly deserved this reputation on many an occasion. That does not, however, oblige us in all circumstances to be as boring and pompous as the Bakuninists. The German labour movement has acquired a singularly humorous character from its skirmishes with police, state prosecutors and prison-warders; why should I deny it? Mr. Tkachov has full permission to mock me and depict me in a ridiculous light, if he can manage it without imputing any lies to me.
Now the incomparable accusation: by portraying Mr. Tkachov in a light befitting him and his works, I have "done our common enemy, the Russian state, a valuable service"! Similarly, he says at another point: by describing him as I have, I am breaching "the basic principles of the programme of the International Working Men's Association"! Here we see the true Bakuninist. These gentlemen, as true revolutionaries, shun no means against us, particularly in the dark; but if one fails to treat them with the greatest respect, if one drags their antics into the light, criticises them and their ringing phrases, then one is serving the Tsar of Russia and breaching the basic principles of the International. Precisely the opposite is the case, in fact. The one who has done the Russian government a service is no other than Mr. Tkachov. If the Russian police had any sense, it would spread this gentleman's pamphlet throughout Russia in large numbers. On the one hand, it could hardly find a better means of discrediting the Russian revolutionaries, whom the writer claims to represent, in the eyes of all sensible people. On the other hand, it is always possible that some worthy but inexperienced young people would allow it to provoke them to rash acts, thus delivering themselves into a trap.
But, says Mr. Tkachov, I have subjected him to "every conceivable kind of abuse". Now a certain kind of abuse, the so-called invective, is one of the most effective forms of rhetoric, employed by all great orators when necessary; the most powerful English political writer, William Cobbett, possessed a supreme command of it that is still admired to this day and serves as an unsurpassed model. Mr. Tkachov himself also indulges in a good deal of "abuse" in his pamphlet. So, if I had indulged in abuse, that would not in itself have been wrong of me at all. But as I did not become rhetorical with regard to Mr. Tkachov, as I did not take him seriously at all, I cannot have used abuse to attack him. Let us examine what I said about him.
I called him "a green grammar-school boy of singular immaturity". Immaturity may refer to character, mind or knowledge. As far as immaturity of character is concerned, I made the following addition to Mr. Tkachov's own account:
"A Russian scholar, who has a considerable reputation in his own country, becomes a refugee and acquires the means to found a political journal abroad. Scarcely has he managed to do this, when some more or less enthusiastic youth comes along, unasked, and offers to take part, on the more or less childish condition that he should have an equal voice with the founder of the journal in all literary and financial matters. In Germany he would have been laughed at."(2)
I hardly think I need adduce any further evidence of immaturity of character. Immaturity of mind is sufficiently demonstrated by the further quotations from Mr. Tkachov's pamphlet that follow below. As far as knowledge is concerned, the dispute between the Forward and Mr. Tkachov largely concerns this: the editor of the Forward demands that the Russian revolutionary youth should learn something, should enrich themselves with serious and thorough information, should acquire critical faculties in accordance with accepted methods, should work at their self-development and self-education by the sweat of their brow. Tkachov rejects such advice with disgust:
"Again and again I must express the feeling of profound indignation that it has always aroused in me... Learn! Educate yourselves! Oh God, how can a living human being say such a thing to another living human being! Wait! Study and finish your education! But have we the right to wait" (with revolution to wit)? "Have we the right to waste time on education?" (p. 14). "Knowledge is probably a necessary precondition for peaceful progress, but it is not necessary at all for the revolution" (p. I7).(3)
So, if Mr. Tkachov evinces profound indignation at the very injunction to study, if he declares all knowledge superfluous for a revolutionary, if, in addition, he does not betray even the slightest trace of knowledge in his entire pamphlet, he himself writes out the testimony to his own immaturity, and I have but ascertained the fact. Yet anyone who makes out this testimony himself can, in our opinion, aspire at most to the educational level of a grammar-school boy. Thus, by attributing the highest possible level to him, rather than abusing him, I was perhaps doing him even too much credit.
Furthermore, I said that Mr. Tkachov's observations were childish (for examples of this, see the quotations in this article), tedious (surely even the writer himself would not deny this), contradictory (as the editor of the Forward has demonstrated) and revolving in an eternal circle (which is also true). I then go on to speak of his great pretensions (which I have simply related in his own terms) and his utterly insignificant achievements (which the present article demonstrates more than adequately). Where, then, is all the abuse? Surely, it cannot be abuse to compare him with Karlchen Missnick, Germany's favourite grammar-school boy and one of the most popular German writers. But stay! Did I not say of him that he had retired like Achilles to his tent and from there fired off his pamphlet against the Forward?(4) That must be the crux of the matter. In the case of a man whose hackles rise at the mere mention of studying, who can boldly take Heine's words:
And all his ignorance He acquired himself,(5)
as his motto, I dare say one may assume that it is the first time he has come across the name Achilles. And as I link Achilles with "tent" and "firing", perhaps Mr. Tkachov imagines that this Achilles is a Russian N.C.O. or a Turkish bashibazouk[47] and it must, therefore, be a breach of etiquette to call him an Achilles. Let me, however, assure Mr. Tkachov that the Achilles of whom I speak was the greatest hero of Greek legend, and that the said retreat to his tent provided the material for the greatest heroic epic of all time, the Iliad, which even Mr. Bakunin will confirm for him. If my assumption should be correct I would then, of course, be forced to declare that Mr. Tkachov is not a grammar-school boy at all.
Mr. Tkachov goes on to say:
"Despite all this I ventured, however, to express the conviction that the social revolution can be easily called into life. 'If it is so easy to call it into life,' you remark, 'why do you not do so, instead of talking about it?'—It seems to you to be ridiculous, childish behaviour... I and those who think as I do are convinced that the practicability of the social revolution in Russia presents no problems, that it is possible at any moment to induce the Russian people to make a general revolutionary protest (!). True, this conviction commits us to a certain amount of practical activity, but it does not militate in the least against the usefulness and necessity of literary propaganda. It is not enough that we are convinced; we want others, too, to share our conviction. The more like-minded comrades we have, the stronger we shall feel, the easier it will be for us to achieve a practical solution to the task."(6)
That really does take the cake. It sounds so nice, so sensible, so cultivated, so reasonable. It quite sounds as though Mr. Tkachov had only written his pamphlet(7) to demonstrate the usefulness of literary propaganda, and I, the impatient greenhorn, had answered him: "The devil take literary propaganda, let's get cracking!" Now, what is the true state of affairs?
Mr. Tkachov commences his pamphlet by straightaway giving newspaper propaganda (and that is surely the most effective form of literary propaganda) a vote of no confidence, saying that one should not "expend too much revolutionary energy on it", for "it does far more harm through inappropriate use, than it does the good through appropriate use".(8) So enthusiastic is our Tkachov about literary propaganda in general. In particular, though, if one wishes to engage in such propaganda and recruit like-minded comrades, mere rhetoric is no good; one must examine causes, and treat the matter theoretically, i.e., in the final analysis, scientifically. On this point, Mr. Tkachov tells the editor of the Forward:
"Your philosophical struggle, that purely theoretical, scientific propaganda to which your journal is devoted, ... is, from the point of view of the interests of the revolutionary party, not merely useless; it is even harmful."(9) It is evident that the more we investigate Mr. Tkachov's views on literary propaganda, the more bogged down we become, and the further we are from discovering what he wants. So what does he really want? Let us listen to a little more:
"Do you not realise that the revolutionary always assumes and must assume the right to summon the people to revolt; that he differs from philistine philosophers in that, without waiting until the course of historical events announces the moment, he himself chooses this moment, in that he knows that the people are always ready for revolution (p. 10) ... Whoever does not believe in the possibility of the revolution in the present does not believe in the people, does not believe in the people's readiness for revolution (p. 11) ... That is why we cannot wait, why we maintain that revolution is an urgent necessity in Russia, and particularly necessary at the present time; we permit no hesitation, no delay. Now or very late, perhaps never (p. 16)! ... Every people exposed to despotism, enslaved by exploiters ... any such people (and all peoples are in this position) is by virtue of the very conditions of its social order — revolutionary; it is always capable, it is always willing to make revolution; it is always ready for revolution (p. 17)... But we cannot and will not wait (p. 34)... Now is no time for long, protracted arrangements and eternal preparations — let everyone pack his possessions and hasten on his way. The question of what is to be done [4 8] must no longer concern us. It has long since been settled. It is to make revolution.— How? To the best of one's ability" (p. 39[-40]).
This seems clear enough to me. So I asked Karlchen Missnick: If nothing else will do, if the people are ready for revolution, and you are too; if you are simply unwilling and unable to wait any longer, and have no right to wait; if you claim the right to choose the moment to strike, and if it is, at last, "now or never!"—well, dear Karlchen, do what you cannot refrain from doing, make revolution today and smash the Russian state into a thousand pieces, otherwise you will end up by bringing about an even greater misfortune!
And what does Karlchen Missnick do? Does he strike? Does he destroy the Russian state? Does he liberate the Russian people, "this unfortunate people, streaming in blood, with the crown of thorns, nailed to the cross of slavery",(10) whose suffering prevents him from waiting any longer?
Not a bit of it. Karlchen Missnick, with tears of injured innocence in his eyes, appears before the German workers saying: See what lies that depraved Engels is imputing to me! He claims I spoke of striking immediately; yet it is not a question of that, but of making literary propaganda, and this Engels, who does nothing more himself than make literary propaganda, has the effrontery to pretend that he does not understand "the usefulness of literary propaganda".(11) But stay! Make literary propaganda! But have we the right to wait, have we the right to waste time on literary propaganda? After all, every minute, every hour the revolution is delayed costs the people a thousand victims (p. 14)!(12) Now is no time for literary propaganda; the revolution must be carried out now, or perhaps never — we permit no hesitation, no delay. And we are supposed to make literary propaganda! Oh God, how can a living human being say such a thing to another human being, and this human being's name is Peter Tkachov!
Was I wrong when I described these impetuous rodomontades, now so basely denied, as "childish"? They are so childish that one would think the writer had gone as far as was humanly possible in this respect. And yet he has since surpassed himself. The editor of the Forward quotes a passage from a proclamation to the Russian peasants, penned by Mr. Tkachov. In it Mr. Tkachov describes the state of affairs after a completed social revolution as follows:
"And then the peasant would embark on a merry life with song and music ... his pockets would be full, not of coppers but of gold ducats. He would have all kinds of beasts and poultry in the farmyard, as many as he desired. On the table he would have every kind of meat, and festive cakes, and sweet wines, and the table would be laid from morn to night. And he would eat and drink as much as his belly would hold, but he would work no more than he had a mind to. And there would be no one who dared to force him: go, eat!—go, lie down on the stove! " (13)
And the person capable of perpetrating this proclamation complains when I confine myself to calling him a green grammar-school boy of rare immaturity!
Mr. Tkachov continues:
"Why do you reproach us with conspiracies? If we were to renounce conspiratorial, secret, underground activities, we would have to renounce all revolutionary activity. But you also castigate us for not wanting to depart from our conspiratorial ways here in the European West and thus disturbing the great international labour movement."(14)
First, it is untrue that the Russian revolutionaries have no other means at their disposal than pure conspiracy. Mr. Tkachov himself has just stressed the importance of literary propaganda, from abroad into Russia! Even within Russia oral propaganda among the people themselves, particularly in the cities, can never be quite excluded as a method, whatever Mr. Tkachov may find it in his interest to say about it. The best proof of this is that, in the latest mass arrests in Russia, it was not the educated nor the students, but the workers who were in the majority.[49]
Second, I undertake to fly to the moon, even before Tkachov liberates Russia, as soon as he proves that I have ever, anywhere, at any time in my political career, declared that conspiracies were to be universally condemned in all circumstances. I undertake to bring him back a souvenir from the moon as soon as he proves that any other plots are mentioned in my article but the one against the International by the Alliance. Indeed, if only the Russian Bakuninists really were to conspire seriously against the Russian Government! If only, instead of fraudulent conspiracies based on lies and deceit against their co-conspirators, like that of Nechayev,[50] this "typical representative of our present-day youth" according to Tkachov,(15) instead of plots against the European labour movement like the Alliance, fortunately exposed and thus destroyed — if only they, the "doers" (dejateli), as they boastfully call themselves, would at last, for once, perform a deed proving that they really possess an organisation and that they are concerned with something else apart from the attempt to form a dozen! Instead, they cry out loud to all and sundry: We conspire, we conspire!—just like operatic conspirators roaring in four parts: "Silence, silence! Make not a sound!"*(16) And all the tales about far-reaching conspiracies only serve as a cloak to hide nothing more than revolutionary inactivity vis-à-vis governments and ambitious cliquishness within the revolutionary party.
It is precisely our ruthless exposure of this entire fraud in the Komplott gegen die Internationale that causes these gentlemen to wax so indignant. It was "tactless". In exposing Mr. Bakunin we were seeking "to besmirch one of the greatest and most selfless representatives of the revolutionary epoch in which we live", and with "dirt", at that. The dirt that came to light on this occasion was, to the very last particle, of Mr. Bakunin's own making, and not his worst by any means. The pamphlet in question made him out to be far cleaner than he really was. We simply quoted § 18 of the "Revolutionary Catechism", the article stipulating how to behave vis-à-vis the Russian aristocracy and bourgeoisie, how "to seize hold of their dirty secrets and thereby make them our slaves, so that their wealth, etc., becomes an inexhaustible treasure and a valuable support in all kinds of undertaking".[51] We have not yet related how this article has been translated into practice. This is a story that would be long in the telling, but it will, in due course, be told.
It thus turns out that all the accusations Mr. Tkachov has made against me, with that virtuous mien of injured innocence that becomes all Bakuninists so well, are all based on claims he not only knew to be false, but were also a pack of lies that he himself had concocted. Whereupon we take our leave of the personal part of his "Open Letter".
V. On Social Relations in Russia[52]
On the subject matter, Mr. Tkachov tells the German workers that, as regards Russia, I possess not even a "little knowledge",(1)
possess nothing but "ignorance", and he feels himself, therefore, obliged to explain the real state of affairs to them, particularly the reasons that, just at the present time, a social revolution could be accomplished in Russia with the greatest of ease, much more easily than in Western Europe.
"We have no urban proletariat, that is undoubtedly true; but, then, we also have no bourgeoisie; ...our workers will have to fight only against the political power—the power of capital is with us still only in embryo. And you, sir, are undoubtedly aware that the fight against the former is much easier than against the latter." (2)
The revolution that modern socialism strives to achieve is, briefly, the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie and the establishment of a new organisation of society by the destruction of all class distinctions. This requires not only a proletariat to carry out this revolution, but also a bourgeoisie in whose hands the social productive forces have developed so far that they permit the final destruction of class distinctions. Among savages and semi-savages there likewise often exist no class distinctions, and every people has passed through such a state. It could not occur to us to re-establish this state, for the simple reason that class distinctions necessarily emerge from it as the social productive forces develop. Only at a certain level of development of these social productive forces, even a very high level for our modern conditions, does it become possible to raise production to such an extent that the abolition of class distinctions can constitute real progress, can be lasting without bringing about stagnation or even decline in the mode of social production. But the productive forces have reached this level of development only in the hands of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, therefore, in this respect also is just as necessary a precondition for the socialist revolution as is the proletariat itself. Hence a man who says that this revolution can be more easily carried out in a country where, although there is no proletariat, there is no bourgeoisie either, only proves that he has still to learn the ABC of socialism.
The Russian workers — and these workers are, as Mr. Tkachov himself says, "tillers of the soil and, as such, not proletarians but owners"*—have, therefore, an easier task, because they do not have to fight against the power of capital, but "only against the political power", against the Russian state. And this state
"appears only at a distance as a power... It has no roots in the economic life of the people; it does not embody the interests of any particular estate... In your country the state is no imaginary power. It stands four square on the basis of capital; it embodies in itself" (!!) "certain economic interests... In our country the situation is just the reverse — our form of society owes its existence to the state, to a state hanging in the air, so to speak, one that has nothing in common with the existing social order, and has its roots in the past, but not in the present. " b
Let us waste no time over the confused notion that the economic interests need the state, which they themselves create, in order to acquire a body, or over the bold contention that the Russian form of society (which, of course, must also include the communal property of the peasants) owes its existence to the state, or over the contradiction that this same state "has nothing in common" with the existing social order, which is supposed to be its very own creation. Let us rather examine at once this "state hanging in the air", which does not represent the interests of even a single estate.
In European Russia, the peasants possess 105 million dessiatines,0
the nobility (as I shall here term the big landowners for the sake of brevity)—-100 million dessiatines of land, of which about half belong to 15,000 nobles, each of whom consequently possesses, on average, 3,300 dessiatines.d The area belonging to the peasants is, therefore, only a trifle bigger than that of the nobles. So, you see, the nobles have not the slightest interest in the existence of the Russian state, which protects them in the possession of half the country. To continue: the peasants pay 195 million rubles land tax annually for their half, the nobles — 13 million! The lands of the nobles are, on average, twice as fertile as those of the peasants, because during the settlement(3) for the redemption of the corvée?* the state not only took the greater part, but also the best part of the land from the peasants and gave it to the nobles, and for this worst land the peasants had to pay the nobility the price of the best.* And the Russian nobility has no interest in the existence of the Russian state!
The peasants — taken in the mass — have been put by the redemption into a most miserable and wholly untenable position. Not only has the greatest and best part of their land been taken from them, so that, in all the fertile parts of the empire, the peasant land is far too small — under Russian agricultural conditions — for them to be able to make a living from it. Not only were they charged an excessive price for it, which was advanced to them by the state and for which they now have to pay interest and instalments on the principal to the state. Not only is almost the whole burden of the land tax thrown upon them, while the nobility escapes almost scot-free — so that the land tax alone consumes the entire ground rent value of the peasant land and more, and all further payments which the peasant has to make and wThich we will speak of immediately are direct deductions from that part of his income which represents his wages. Then, in addition to the land tax, to the interest and depreciation payments on the money advanced by the state, since the recent introduction of local administration there are the provincial and district imposts as. well.[55] The most essential consequence of this "reform" was fresh tax burdens for the peasants. The state retained its revenues in their entirety, but passed on a large part of its expenditures to the provinces and districts, which imposed new taxes to meet them, and in Russia it is the rule that the higher estates are almost tax exempt and the peasants pay almost everything.
Such a situation is as if specially created for the usurer, and with the almost unequalled talent of the Russians for trading on a lower level, for taking full advantage of favourable business situations and the swindling inseparable from this — Peter I long ago said that one Russian could get the better of three Jews — the usurer makes his appearance everywhere. When taxes are about to fall due, the usurer, the kulak—frequently a rich peasant of the same village community — comes along and offers his ready cash. The peasant must have the money at all costs and is obliged to accept the conditions of the usurer without demur. But this only gets him into a tighter fix, and he needs more and more ready cash. At harvest time, the grain dealer arrives; the need for money forces the peasant to sell part of the grain he and his family require for their subsistence. The grain dealer spreads false rumours, which lower prices, pays a low price and often even part of this in all sorts of highly priced goods; for the TRUCKSYSTEM [6] is also highly developed in Russia. It is quite obvious that the great corn exports of Russia are based directly on starvation of the peasant population.—Another method of exploiting the peasant is the following: a speculator rents domain land from the government for a long term of years, and cultivates it himself as long as it yields a good crop without manure; then he divides it up into small plots and lets out the exhausted land at high rents to neighbouring peasants, who cannot manage on the income from their allotment. Here we have precisely the Irish MIDDLEMEN,[57] just as above the English TRUCK SYSTEM. In short, there is no country in which, in spite of the pristine savagery of bourgeois society, capitalistic parasitism is so developed, so covers and entangles the whole country, the whole mass of the population with its nets, as in Russia. And all these bloodsuckers of the peasants are supposed to have no interest in the existence of the Russian state, the laws and law courts of which protect their sleek and profitable practices!
The big bourgeoisie of Petersburg, Moscow, and Odessa, which has developed with unprecedented rapidity over the last decade, chiefly owing to the railways, and which cheerfully "went smash" along with the rest during the last swindle years, the grain, hemp, flax and tallow exporters, whose whole business is built on the misery of the peasants, the entire Russian large-scale industry, which only exists thanks to the protective tariffs granted it by the state — have all these important and rapidly growing elements of the population no interest in the existence of the Russian state? To say nothing of the countless army of officials, which swarms over Russia and plunders her, and here constitutes a real social estate. And when Mr. Tkachov assures us that the Russian state has "no roots in the economic life of the people", that "it does not embody the interests of any particular estate", that it hangs "in the air", methinks it is not the Russian state that hangs in the air, but rather Mr. Tkachov.
It is clear that the condition of the Russian peasants, since the emancipation from serfdom, has become intolerable and cannot be maintained much longer, and that for this reason alone, if for no other, a revolution is in the offing in Russia. The question is only: what can be, what will be the result of this revolution? Mr. Tkachov says it will be a social one. This is pure tautology. Every real revolution is a social one, in that it brings a new class to power and allows it to remodel society in its own image. But he wants to say it will be a socialist one; it will introduce into Russia the form of society at which West European socialism aims, even before we in the West succeed in doing so — and that under the conditions of a society in which both proletariat and bourgeoisie appear only sporadically and at a low stage of development. And this is supposed to be possible because the Russians are, so to speak, the chosen people of socialism, and have artels and communal ownership of the land.
The artel, which Mr. Tkachov mentions only incidentally, but with which we deal here because, since the time of Herzen, it has played a mysterious role with many Russians[58]; the artel in Russia is a widespread form of association, the simplest form of free co-operation, such as is found for hunting among hunting tribes. Word and content are not of Slavic but of Tatar origin. Both are to be found among the Kirghiz, Yakuts, etc., on the one hand, and among the Lapps, Samoyeds[59] and other Finnish peoples, on the other.(4) That is why the artel developed originally in the North and East, by contact with Finns and Tatars, and not in the South-West. The severe climate necessitates industrial activity of various kinds, and so the lack of urban development and of capital is replaced, as far as possible, by this form of co-operation.—One of the most characteristic features of the artel, the collective responsibility of its members for one another to third parties, was originally based on blood relationship, like the mutual liability [Gewere] of the ancient Germans, blood vengeance, etc.— Moreover, in Russia the word artel is used for every form not only of collective activity, but also of collective institution. The Bourse is also an artel.(5) In workers' artels, an elder (starosta, starshina) is always chosen who fulfils the functions of treasurer, bookkeeper, etc., and of manager, as far as necessary, and who receives a special salary. Such artels are formed:
1. for temporary enterprises, after the completion of which they dissolve;
2. for the members of one and the same trade, for instance, porters, etc.;
3. for permanent enterprises, industrial in the proper sense of the word.
They are established by a contract signed by all the members. Now, if these members cannot bring together the necessary capital, as very often happens, such as in the case of cheeseries and fisheries (for nets, boats, etc.), the artel falls prey to the usurer, who advances the amount lacking at a high interest rate, and thereafter pockets the greater part of the income from the work. Still more shamefully exploited, however, are the artels that hire themselves in a body to an employer as wage-labourers. They direct their industrial activity themselves and thus save the capitalist the cost of supervision. The latter lets to the members huts to live in and advances them the means of subsistence, which in turn gives rise to the most disgraceful TRUCK SYSTEM. Such is the case with the lumbermen and tar distillers in the Archangel gubernia, and in many trades in Siberia, etc. (Cf. Flerovsky,
Polozenie rabocago klassa v Rossiji. "The Condition of the Working Class in Russia", St. Petersburg, 1869).[60] Here, then, the artel serves to facilitate considerably the exploitation of the wage-worker by the capitalist. On the other hand, there are also artels which themselves employ wage-workers, who are not members of the association.
It is thus seen that the artel is a co-operative society that has arisen spontaneously and is, therefore, still very undeveloped, and as such neither exclusively Russian, nor even Slavic. Such societies are formed wherever there is a need for them. For instance, in Switzerland among the dairy farmers and in England among the fishermen, where they even assume a great variety of forms. The Silesian navvies (Germans, not Poles), who built so many German railways in the forties, were organised in fully fledged artels. True, the predominance of this form in Russia proves the existence in the Russian people of a strong impulse to associate, but is far from proving their ability to jump, with the aid of this impulse, from the artel straight into the socialist order of society. For that, it is necessary above all that the artel itself should be capable of development, that it shed its primitive form, in which, as we saw, it serves the workers less than it does capital, and rise at least to the level of the West European co-operative societies. But if we are to believe Mr. Tkachov for once (which, after all that has preceded, is certainly more than risky), this is by no means the case. On the contrary, he assures us with a pride highly indicative of his standpoint:
"As regards the co-operative and credit associations on the German" (!) "model, recently artificially transplanted to Russia, these have met with complete indifference on the part of the majority of our workers and have been a failure almost everywhere."(6)
The modern co-operative society has at least proved that it can run large-scale industry profitably on its own account (spinning and weaving in Lancashire). The artel is so far not only incapable of doing this; it must of necessity even be destroyed by big industry if it does not develop further.
The communal property of the Russian peasants was discovered in 1845 by the Prussian Government Councillor Haxthausen and trumpeted to the world as something absolutely wonderful, although Haxthausen could still have found survivals enough of it in his Westphalian homeland and, as a government official, it was even part of his duty to know them thoroughly. It was from Haxthausen that Herzen, himself a Russian landowner, first learned that his peasants owned the land in common, and he made use of the fact to describe the Russian peasants as the true vehicles of socialism, as born communists, in contrast to the workers of the aging, decayed European West, who would first have to go through the ordeal of acquiring socialism artificially. From Herzen this knowledge came to Bakunin, and from Bakunin to Mr. Tkachov. Let us listen to the latter:
"Our people ... in its great majority ... is permeated with the principles of common ownership; it is, if one may use the term, instinctively, traditionally communist. The idea of collective property is so closely interwoven with the whole world outlook of the Russian people" (we shall see immediately how far the world of the Russian peasant extends) "that today, when the government begins to understand that this idea is incompatible with the principles of a 'well-ordered' society, and in the name of these principles wishes to impress the idea of individual property on the consciousness and life of the people, it can succeed in doing so only with the help of the bayonet and the knout. It is clear from this that our people, despite its ignorance, is much nearer to socialism than the peoples of Western Europe, although the latter are more educated."(7) In reality, communal ownership of the land is an institution found among all Indo-Germanic peoples at a low level of development, from India to Ireland, and even among the Malays, who are developing under Indian influence, for instance, on Java. As late as 1608, in the newly conquered North of Ireland, the legally established communal ownership of the land served the English as a pretext for declaring the land to be ownerless and, as such, escheated to the Crown. In India, a whole series of forms of communal ownership has been in existence down to the present time. In Germany it was general; the communal lands still to be found here and there are a relic of it; and often still distinct traces of it, temporary divisions of the communal lands, etc., are also to be found, especially in the mountains. More exact references and details with regard to old German communal ownership may be consulted in the various writings of Maurer, which are classic on this question.(8) In Western Europe, including Poland and Little Russia, at a certain stage in social development, this communal ownership became a fetter, a brake on agricultural production, and was increasingly eliminated. In Great Russia (that is, Russia proper), on the other hand, it persists until today, thereby proving, in the first place, that here agricultural production and the social conditions in the countryside corresponding to it are still very undeveloped, as is actually the case. The Russian peasant lives and has his being only in his village community; the rest of the world exists for him only in so far as it interferes with his community. This is so much the case that, in Russian, the same word "wir" means, on the one hand, "world" and, on the other, "peasant community". "Ves' mir", the whole world, means to the peasant the meeting of the community members. Hence, when Mr. Tkachov speaks of the "world outlook" of the Russian peasants,(9) he has obviously translated the Russian "wir" incorrectly. Such a complete isolation of individual communities from one another, which creates throughout the country similar, but the very opposite of common, interests, is the natural basis for oriental despotism; and from India to Russia this form of society, wherever it has prevailed, has always produced it and always found its complement in it. Not only the Russian state in general, but even its specific form, tsarist despotism, instead of hanging in the air, is a necessary and logical product of Russian social conditions with which, according to Mr. Tkachov, it has "nothing in common"! — Further development of Russia in a bourgeois direction would here also destroy communal ownership little by little, without any need for the Russian government to intervene with "bayonet and knout". And this especially since the communally owned land in Russia is not cultivated by the peasants in common, so that the product may then be divided, as is still the case in some districts in India; on the contrary, from time to time the land is divided up among the various heads of families, and each cultivates his allotment for himself. Consequently, very great differences in degree of prosperity are possible and actually exist among the members of the community. Almost everywhere there are a few rich peasants among them — here and there millionaires — who play the usurer and suck the blood of the mass of the peasants. No one knows this better than Mr. Tkachov. While he wants the German workers to believe that the "idea of collective ownership" can be driven out of the Russian peasants, these instinctive, traditional communists, only by bayonet and knout, he writes on page 15 of his Russian pamphlet(10):
"Among the peasants a class of usurers (kulakov) is making its way, a class of people who buy up and rent the lands of peasants and nobles — a muzhik aristocracy."
These are the same kind of bloodsuckers as we described more fully above.
The severest blow to communal ownership was dealt again by the redemption of the corvée. The greater and better part of the land was allotted to the nobility; for the peasant there remained scarcely enough, often not enough, to live on. In addition, the forests were given to the nobles; the wood for fuel, implements and building, which the peasant formerly might fetch there for nothing, he now has to buy. Thus, the peasant has nothing now but his house and the bare land, without means to cultivate it and, on average, without enough land to support him and his family from one harvest to the next. Under such conditions and under the pressure of taxes and usurers, communal ownership of the land is no longer a blessing; it becomes a fetter. The peasants often run away from it, with or without their families, to earn their living as migratory labourers, and leave their land behind them.(11) It is clear that communal ownership in Russia is long past its period of florescence and, to all appearances, is moving towards its disintegration. Nevertheless, the possibility undeniably exists of raising this form of society to a higher one, if it should last until the circumstances are ripe for that, and if it shows itself capable of developing in such manner that the peasants no longer cultivate the land separately, but collectively(12); of raising it to this higher form without it being necessary for the Russian peasants to go through the intermediate stage of bourgeois small holdings. This, however, can only happen if, before the complete break-up of communal ownership, a proletarian revolution is successfully carried out in Western Europe, creating for the Russian peasant the preconditions requisite for such a transition, particularly the material things he needs, if only to carry through the revolution, necessarily connected therewith, of his whole agricultural system. It is, therefore, sheer bounce for Mr. Tkachov to say that the Russian peasants, although "owners", are "nearer to socialism" than the propertyless workers of Western Europe. Quite the opposite. If anything can still save Russian communal ownership and give it a chance of growing into a new, really viable form, it is a proletarian revolution in Western Europe.
Mr. Tkachov treats the political revolution just as lightly as he does the economic one. The Russian people, he relates, "protests incessantly" against its enslavement, now in the form of "religious sects ... refusal to pay taxes ... robber bands" (the German workers will be glad to know that, accordingly, Schinderhannes(13) is the father of German Social-Democracy) "... incen-diarism ... revolts ... and hence the Russian people may be termed an instinctive revolutionist". Therefore, Mr. Tkachov is convinced that "it is only necessary to evoke an outburst in a number of places at the same time of all the accumulated bitterness and discontent, which ... is always seething in the breast of our people". Then "the union of the revolutionary forces will come about of itself, and the fight ... must end favourably for the people's cause. Practical
W Zacholusti i w Stolice (In the Backwoods and in the Capital), St. Petersburg, 1870; the latter publication by a liberal conservative.
necessity, the instinct of self-preservation", will then achieve, quite of themselves, "a firm and indissoluble alliance among the protesting village communities".(14)
It is impossible to conceive of a revolution on easier and more pleasant terms. One starts shooting, at three or four places simultaneously, and the "instinctive revolutionist", "practical necessity" and the "instinct of self-preservation" do the rest "of themselves". Being so dead easy, it is simply incomprehensible why the revolution has not been carried out long ago, the people liberated and Russia transformed into the model socialist country.
Actually, matters are quite different. The Russian people, this instinctive revolutionist, has, true enough, made numerous isolated peasant revolts against the nobility and against individual officials, but never against the tsar, except when a false tsar put himself at its head and claimed the throne. The last great peasant rising,[61]
under Catherine II, was only possible because Yemelyan Pugachov claimed to be her husband, Peter III, who allegedly had not been murdered by his wife, but dethroned and clapped in prison, and had now escaped. The tsar is, on the contrary, the earthly god of the Russian peasant: Bog vysok, Car daljok—God is on high and the tsar far away, is his cry in hour of need. There is no doubt that the mass of the peasant population, especially since the redemption of the corvée, has been reduced to a condition that increasingly forces on it a fight also against the government and the tsar; but Mr. Tkachov will have to try to sell his fairy-tale of the "instinctive revolutionist" elsewhere.
Then again, even if the mass of the Russian peasants were ever so instinctively revolutionary, even if we imagined that revolutions could be made to order, just as one makes a piece of flowered calico or a teakettle — even then I ask, is it permissible for anyone over twelve years of age to imagine the course of a revolution in such an utterly childish manner as is the case here? And remember, further, that this was written after the first revolution made on this Bakuninist model — the Spanish one of 1873 — had so brilliandy failed.[62] There, too, they let loose at several places simultaneously. There, too, it was calculated that practical necessity and the instinct of self-preservation would, of themselves, bring about a firm and indissoluble alliance between the protesting communities. And what happened? Every village community, every town defended only itself; there was no question of mutual assistance and, with only 3,000 men, Pavia overcame one town after another in a fortnight and put an end to the entire anarchist glory (cf. my Bakuninists at Work, where this is described in detail).
Russia undoubtedly is on the eve of a revolution. Her financial affairs are in extreme disorder. Taxes cannot be screwed any higher, the interest on old state loans is paid by means of new loans, and every new loan meets with greater difficulties; money can now be raised only on the pretext of building railways! The administration, corrupt from top to bottom as of old, the officials living more from theft, bribery and extortion than on their salaries. The entire agricultural production — by far the most essential for Russia — completely dislocated by the redemption settlement of 1861; the big landowners, without sufficient labour power; the peasants without sufficient land, oppressed by taxation and sucked dry by usurers; agricultural production(15) declining by the year. The whole held together with great difficulty and only outwardly by an Oriental despotism the arbitrariness of which we in the West simply cannot imagine; a despotism that, from day to day, not only comes into more glaring contradiction with the views of the enlightened classes and, in particular, with those of the rapidly developing bourgeoisie of the capital, but, in the person of its present bearer, has lost its head, one day making concessions to liberalism and the next, frightened, cancelling them again and thus bringing itself more and more into disrepute. With all that, a growing recognition among the enlightened strata of the nation concentrated in the capital that this position is untenable, that a revolution is impending, and the illusion that it will be possible to guide this revolution along a smooth, constitutional channel. Here all the conditions of a revolution are combined, of a revolution that, started by the upper classes of the capital, perhaps even by the government itself, must be rapidly carried further, beyond the first constitutional phase, by the peasants; of a revolution that will be of the greatest importance for the whole of Europe, if only because it will destroy at one blow the last, so far intact, reserve of the entire European reaction. This revolution is surely approaching. Only two events could still delay it: a successful war against Turkey or Austria, for which money and firm alliances are necessary, or — a premature attempt at insurrection, which would drive the possessing classes back into the arms of the government.
Endnotes
[4] 4 The Polish People (Zwia.zek Ludu Polskiego)—a revolutionary-democratic society set up in September 1872 on the initiative of Walery Wroblewski, Ludwik Oborski and Jan Krynski. The society included a number of Polish revolutionaries, members of the Paris Commune, and supported the line pursued by the General Council of the International Working Men's Association. It drew on the best traditions of the society Lud Polski of the 1840s, and linked the national and social emancipation of the Polish people with the international working-class movement. Its newspaper was the Wici
[5] 5 Engels is referring to the war between the Kingdom of Sardinia (Piedmont) and France, on the one hand, and Austria, on the other, which lasted from April 29 to July 1859. Before the war Russia and France signed a secret treaty in Paris (on March 3, 1859) whereby Russia undertook to observe benevolent neutrality in the case of a Franco-Italian war against Austria. The Austro-Prussian war of 1866 for supremacy in Germany was a major stage in the unification of Germany "from above" under Prussian hegemony, while the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 between France, on the one hand, and Prussia, Bavaria and Saxony, on the other, completed Germany's national unification under the aegis of the Prussian monarchy.
[7] 7 The reference is to the Polish-Turkish wars of the 17th century (1620-21, 1672-76 and 1683-99). On September 12, 1683, Polish troops led by Jan Sobieski, in collaboration with the Austrian army and the armies of the German principalities, smashed the Turkish army at Vienna. In 1699 the last war with Turkey ended with the Karlowitz Peace Treaty and the Turks' pledge to cease warring with Poland.
[9] 9 On February 6 (17), 1772, on the initiative of Prussia, a convention was signed in St. Petersburg, soon joined by Austria, defining preliminary terms for the partition of Poland. The final version was signed on July 25 (August 5) of the same year. This partition undermined the national independence of Poland, which was in a state of deep social and political crisis (see Note 72). By the fourth state, Engels probably meant Rzecz Pospolita, which was left with about two-thirds of its territory (on the role of the Polish nobility in these events, see this volume, p. 55).
[10] 10 The Polish Constitution -of May 3, 1791 (Ustawa Rzadowa. Prawo Uchwalone) conveyed the aspirations of the progressive sections of the nobility and the urban bourgeoisie. It abolished the liberum veto and the elective monarchy (see Note 72). To consolidate the central authority and put an end to anarchy, it introduced hereditary monarchy and granted the urban bourgeoisie certain political and economic rights. Having removed some of the drawbacks of the state system of Rzecz Pospolita and crippled the political position of the big feudal aristocracy, the Constitution left virtually intact the feudal mode of production. The peasantry was still in bondage to the feudal aristocracy and the szlachta. But the Constitution alleviated to some extent the position of peasant serfs by recognising the legal force of commutation agreements between landowners and peasants (see also Engels' article "The Frankfurt Assembly Debates the Polish Question", present edition, Vol. 7, p. 351).
[11] 11 A reference to the opposition of the Polish magnates to the introduction of the Constitution of May 3, 1791. They summoned troops from Russia which smashed the resistance of the Polish army and overthrew the government. Simultaneously, Prussia renounced its allied treaty with Poland under the pretext of its having been concluded prior to the Constitution of May 3. These events eventually led to a second partition of Poland between Russia and Prussia on January 12 (23), 1793. Soon after the second partition a resistance movement against the invaders gained strength in Poland, and in March 1794, an uprising headed by Tadeusz Kosciuszko flared up. It led to the establishment of a provisional Polish government, on which Russia and Prussia declared war. The defeat of the uprising resulted in the third partition of Poland on the basis of the St. Petersburg Convention of October 13 (24), 1795, signed by Russia, Prussia and Austria. This partition put an end to Polish statehood.
[12] 12 The Manifesto of December 4, 1836 was issued in Paris by the refugee organisation Towarzystwo Demokratyczne Polskie. As a whole it was of a bourgeois-democratic character. The Manifesto, drawn up in late 1845 and published on February 22, 1846, was issued by the revolutionary government in Cracow. The Manifesto of January 22, 1863 was a programme of action published by the provisional committee Rzad Narodowy (Komitet Centralny) on the day when the Polish uprising began (see Note 14). The Manifesto and the decrees published at the same time outlined the insurgents' programme and called on the Polish people to take up arms. They also demanded that the estates' privileges and distinctions be abolished, and land be turned over to the peasants.
[13] 13 The free city of Cracow (the Cracow Republic) was set up in 1815 by decision of the Congress of Vienna (1814-15). The formation of the Cracow Republic was a compromise reached by the governments of Russia, Austria and Prussia which laid claims to Cracow. This independence was purely nominal since in practice the Republic's constitution, which was determined by the above states or "guardians" and consolidated the rule of the landowners and bigger merchants, was limited by the residents of these states. After the suppression of the anti-feudal uprising of 1846 the Cracow Republic was abolished (see Note 25).
[14] 14 A reference to the national uprising of 1863-64 in the Kingdom of Poland, the territory annexed to Russia by decision of the Vienna Congress of 1815. The uprising, which was directed against the tsarist autocracy, was provoked by the crisis of feudal relations within the Kingdom of Poland. The uprising began in January 1863. Its principal motive forces were the urban masses: artisans, workers and students. From the summer of 1863 a substantial part of the insurgent detachments was made up of peasants. However, the National Central Committee, which headed the uprising (see Note 12) and consisted mostly of the representatives of the petty-bourgeoisie and lesser nobility, did not dare encroach on the privileges of big landowners, and this isolated the movement from the majority of peasants. This was one of the main reasons for the defeat of the uprising. The governments of West European states, on whose interference the conservative leaders of the uprising pinned their hopes, did not go beyond diplomatic démarches and in fact betrayed the insurgents. The uprising was, by and large, crushed by the Tsarist government by the autumn of 1863, though some units of the insurgents continued the struggle until the end of 1864. The Polish uprising of 1863-64 met with warm support and sympathy in Russian and European revolutionary-democratic quarters. The solidarity of the European workers with the Polish national liberation movement played a certain part in organising the International Working Men's Association (the First International).
[15] 15 The Peace of Teschen was signed on May 13, 1779 on the conclusion of the war between Prussia and Austria for the Bavarian succession (1778-79). Russia was initially a mediator between the belligerents and after the signing of the treaty was, together with France, declared the guarantor state.
[16] 16 On April 21, 1849, Francis Joseph of Austria appealed for help to Nicholas I, and in May 1849 the Russian army entered Hungary to take part in the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848-49. The capitulation of the Hungarian revolutionary army at Vilâgos on August 13, 1849 sealed the defeat of the revolution in die European countries.
[17] 17 The reference is to the uprising of the Paris proletariat (June 23-26, 1848), which was brutally suppressed by the French bourgeoisie. It was the climax of the 1848 revolution in France and had an impact on revolutionary events in other European countries. Marx and Engels appraised the uprising and its historic significance in a series of articles published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and in The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 (see present edition, Vol. 7, pp. 130-49; Vol. 10, pp. 67-70).
[18] 18 In May and October 1850 Warsaw was the scene of conferences in which representatives of Russia, Austria and Prussia were involved. They were convened on the initiative of the Russian Tsar in view of the mounting struggle between Austria and Prussia for mastery in Germany. The Tsar acted as arbiter in the dispute between Austria and Prussia and used his influence to make Prussia abandon its attempts to form a political confederation of German states under its own aegis. On November 28, 1850 in Olmütz (Olomouc), an agreement was signed between Prussia and Austria under which Prussia was forced to temporarily renounce its claims to hegemony in Germany (see also this volume, p. 103).
[19] 19 The Crimean war (1853-56), or the Eastern war, was waged by Russia against the allied forces of Britain, France, the Kingdom of Piedmont and Turkey for supremacy in the Near East. It ended with the signing of the Paris Peace Treaty (1856). The war is described by Marx and Engels in the articles included in volumes 13-15 of the present edition.
[20] 20 During the Austro-Italo-French war of 1859 (see Note 5), the Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Gorchakov issued a circular on May 27, 1859, which effectively prevented the intervention of the small German states in the conflict.
[21] 21 Engels is referring to the Austro-Prussian war of 1866 (see Note 5).
[22] 22 Probably a hint at the Declaration of Neutrality issued by the Russian government and carried by Pravitelstvenniy vestnik (The Government Herald), No. 148, July 11 (23), 1870. For Austria-Hungary, the Russian stand was virtually a warning not to get involved into the war between France and Prussia.
[23] 23 Engels uses the term Haupt- und Staatsaktionen (principal and spectacular actions), which has several meanings. In the 17th and the first half of the 18th century it meant plays performed by German touring companies. The plays, which were rather formless, presented tragic historical events in a bombastic and at the same time coarse and farcical way. Secondly, the term can be used to denote major political events. It was used in this sense by a trend in German historical science known as "objective historiography". Leopold Ranke was one of its chief representatives. He regarded Haupt- und Staatsaktionen as the main subject-matter of history.
[25] 25 The reference is to the national liberation and anti-feudal uprising in the city of Cracow (Galicia). The insurgents seized power on February 22, 1846 and set up a National Government which issued a manifesto abolishing feudal services. The uprising was put down in early March 1846. In November 1846 Austria, Prussia and Russia signed a treaty incorporating Cracow in the Austrian Empire. On the uprising of 1863-64 see Note 14.
[26] 26 In the days of the Paris Commune about 400 Polish revolutionary refugees fought side by side with the Paris workers. The best-known among them were Walery Wroblewski and Jaroslaw Dabrowski. General Wröblewski commanded one of the three Commune's armies. In early May 1871 General Dabrowski was appointed commander-in-chief of all the Commune's armed forces.
[27] 27 Kulturkampf (struggle for culture)—the name given by bourgeois liberals to a system of measures implemented in the 1870s by Bismarck's government under the banner of a campaign for secular culture. It was directed against the Catholic Church and the Party of the Centre (see Note 292). Under the pretext of the anti-Catholic struggle Bismarck's government also intensified the national oppression of the Polish lands which had fallen under Prussia's sway. With this end in view it passed laws restricting the rights of the Catholic clergy. The law of March 1872 stripped the clergy of the right to supervise school education, thus undermining the influence of the Polish clergy in this field. Education was now controlled by the Empire's officials. Additionally, by the edicts of October 26, 1872 and October 27, 1873, all schools in Posen were to use German.
[28] 28 Article II in Engels' Refugee Literature series was prompted by the pamphlet Aux Communeux (To Communards), which was published in London in June 1874 on behalf of a group of Paris Commune refugees. It was a kind of programme of the Blanquists, members of La Commune révolutionnaire (see Note 31). Engels' article appeared in Der Volksstaat, No. 73, June 26, 1874, under the heading "Flüchtlings-Literatur". Engels changed it to "Programm der Blanquistischen Kommune-Flüchtlinge" when reprinting this article in 1894 in the collection Internationales aus dem Volksstaat (1871-75). It was published in English for the first time in the collection: K. Marx, The Civil War in France. Enlarged edition. Chicago, Kerr, 1934, pp. 133-44, under the title "The Program of the Blanquist Fugitives from the Paris Commune".
[29] 29 A reference to the emigration of royalists at the time of the French Revolution. 40-1317 It grew sharply after the uprising of August 10, 1792 in Paris and the overthrow of Louis XVI.
[30] 30 By the "secret Alliance" Engels calls here the Alliance of Socialist Democracy. Central Section which was founded by Bakunin in Geneva in May 1869, and in fact guided the activities of the Alliance of Socialist Democracy. It was dissolved in 1871 and in place of it the Section of Propaganda and Revolutionary Action was founded in Geneva on September 6, 1871. The Section of Propaganda was organised by the former members of the Central Section, Nikolai Zhukovsky, Charles Perron and others, and some French refugees, Jules Guesde and Benoit Malon in particular. On September 8, October 4 and 20, 1871, the section applied to the General Council with the request to be admitted to the International. The General Council refused to comply because it had received a negative opinion on the matter from the Romance Federal Committee in Geneva. The Alliance of Socialist Democracy was founded by Bakunin in Geneva in October 1868 as an international organisation of the anarchists. In 1869 the Alliance approached the General Council of the International Working Men's Association with a request to be admitted to the International. The General Council agreed to admit individual sections of the Alliance provided the latter dissolved as an independent organisation. On entering the International Bakunin did not actually comply with this decision and incorporated the Alliance into it under the guise of a section (called the "Alliance of Socialist Democracy. Central Section"). Marx, Engels and the General Council vigorously fought the Alliance exposing it as a sect hostile to the working-class movement (for details see present edition, Vol. 23). The Hague Congress of the International (1872) dealt a severe blow to the Bakuninists and expelled the Alliance's leaders from the International (see Note 38).
[31] 31 Late in 1872 the French Blanquist refugees withdrew from the International as a protest against the decision of the Hague Congress to transfer the seat of the General Council to New York. They set out their position in the pamphlet Internationale et Révolution. A propos du Congrès de la Haye par des Réfugiés de la Commune. Ex-membres du Conseil Général de l'Internationale, London, 1872. The Blanquists also accused the International of "escaping from revolution". In 1873 they set up the society called La Commune révolutionnaire.
[32] 32 Engels is referring to the uprising of May 12-13, 1839 in Paris prepared by the Society of the Seasons (La Société des Saisons), a secret republican socialist organisation that existed in Paris in 1837-39. It was founded by Auguste Blanqui and Armand Barbes for the purpose of overthrowing Louis Philippe's bourgeois monarchy, establishing a republic and implementing revolutionary egalitarian ideas. As a result of its conspiratorial tactics the society was suppressed when it attempted to stage the uprising.
[33] 33 A reference to the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, the siege of Paris and the suppression of the Communards between May 21 and 28, 1871.
[34] 34 The monarchists had an absolute majority in the French National Assembly which began its work in Versailles in 1871, but the supplementary elections of 1873 showed that the republicans' influence was increasing.
[35] 35 An allusion to the "de-Christianisation" policy pursued with particular vigour in the autumn of 1793 by the Left Jacobins. The campaign was spearheaded against the counter-revolutionary sections of the clergy. However, the mass of the population, particularly the peasantry, opposed the closing down of churches. In late November, the Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre condemned this policy, and on December 5-8, 1793, the Convention passed a decree on the freedom of worship.
[36] A reference to the former members of the International's General Council Arthur Arnaud, Edouard Vaillant, Frédéric Cournet, Constant Martin, Edouard Marguerittes and Gabriel Ranvier (see Note 31). Speaking about "those five", Engels probably excluded Ranvier from this group (see Engels' letter to Sorge of November 16, 1872, present edition, Vol. 44).
[38] When discussing the mandates at the Hague Congress of the First International (September 2-7, 1872), the question arose of the Bakuninist Alliance of Socialist Democracy (see Note 30) as a secret sectarian organisation whose existence within the framework of the International went against its Rules. On the suggestion of Marx and some other delegates, a commission was set up to investigate the Alliance's clandestine activities. On September 5, 1872 it discussed Engels' report (see present edition, Vol. 23, pp. 228-38) and the reports of other Congress delegates concerning the Alliance. Having examined the materials, the commission arrived at the conclusion that the Alliance's activities were incompatible with the line of the International, and at the Congress meeting of September 7 it proposed that Bakunin and Guillaume, as well as a number of other members of the secret Alliance, be expelled from the International Association. The Congress approved as a whole the proposal of the commission and decided to make public the documents it had at its disposal which pertained to the Alliance. In pursuance of this decision, in April-July 1873, Marx and Engels in collaboration with Paul Lafargue wrote The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men's Association, which was published as a pamphlet in French in August 1873 (see present edition, Vol. 23).
[39] The German translation of the work by Marx and Engels, The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men's Association (see Note 38), appeared in 1874 under the title: "Ein Complot gegen die Internationale Arbeiter-Association. Im Auftrage des Haager Congresses verfaßter Bericht über das Treiben Bakunin's und der Allianz der socialistischen Demokratie. Deutsche Ausgabe von 'L'alliance de la démocratie socialiste et l'association internationale des travailleurs'. Uebersetzt von S. Kokosky. Braunschweig. Druck und Verlag von W. Bracke, 1874". Kokosky's translation was edited by Engels (see Engels' letter to Friedrich Adolf Sorge, November 25, 1873, present edition, Vol. 44).
[40] 40 Sergei Nechayev, a Russian revolutionary, conspirator and anarchist, set up an underground organisation Narodnaya rasprava (People's Judgment) in Moscow in late 1869, consisting mostly of students of the Agricultural and Forestry Academy (see Note 527). Blackmail, mystification and deceit practised by Nechayev provoked a protest by student Ivan Ivanov, a member of the organisation. Fearing exposure, Nechayev staged his assassination and fled abroad. In Geneva, he tried to justify the assassination in the People's Judgment magazine, No. 2, 1870, and to print a programme of the organisation which, in Marx's and Engels' definition, was "a beautiful model of barrack-room communism" (see present edition, Vol. 23, p. 543). With the exception of individual Bakuninists and Pyotr Tkachov, the various trends in the Russian liberation movement unanimously condemned Nechayev's methods.
[41] 41 Engels is referring to the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, the Greek leader in the Trojan War. It is described in Book I of Homer's Iliad, p. 24
[42] 42 Mons veneris—literally the Mountain of Venus. Situated between Sonabe and Thiiringe the mountain was, according to medieval German legends, the place where Venus lived. There, she held her court with heathen splendour and revelry. None of those who, charmed by music and sensuous allurements, entered her abode ever returned except Tannhäuser.
[43] 43 Lavrov probably hints at the fictitious World Revolutionary Alliance, on behalf of which Bakunin and Nechayev published, in 1869, a number of leaflets and pamphlets urging immediate revolution.
[45] 45 This story is ascribed to Canning. He mentions three London tailors from Tooley Street who addressed a petition to the House of Commons opening with the words "We, the people of England!"
[46] 46 An ironical allusion to the law of July 9, 1873, which introduced a single monetary system in Germany, including a 10-mark coin.
[47] 47 Bashibazouks—irregular detachments of the Turkish army in the 18th and 19th centuries; the name was also given to troops noted for cruelty, plunder and lack of discipline.
[48] 48 A hint at Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? written in 1862 at the time of his imprisonment at the Peter and Paul Fortress (St. Petersburg). The novel was a kind of programme of action for the more aware sections of Russia's young people. It had great impact on public consciousness and an important formative influence upon many revolutionaries.
[49] 49 The 1870s saw a new period in the development of Narodism (Russian populism), a movement of the intelligentsia, representatives of all strata of the population, at the bourgeois-democratic stage of the emancipation struggle in Russia (1861-95). Thousands of revolutionaries, as well as representatives of the democratic intelligentsia, began propaganda work in the countryside ("going into the thick of the people") in order to prepare a peasant revolution. In the spring and summer of 1874 the Narodniks launched large-scale mass action. In the autumn of 1874 mass arrests began, which Engels mentions in this article. He probably took the information about them, including the arrests of workers, from the editorial in Vperyod! headed "Panic in the Government" (written by Lavrov). "Going into the thick of the people" had been stopped by the government by late 1875.
[50] 50 See Note 40.
[51] 51 Marx believed that the Revolutionary Catechism was written by Bakunin in the summer of 1869 (see K. Marx and F. Engels, The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men's Association, present edition, Vol. 23, pp. 544-45). The real author of the Catechism was, most probably, Nechayev. The text was coded and several copies of it were printed in Geneva.
[52] 52 Article V from Engels' Refugee Literature was printed by Der Volksstaat, Nos. 43, 44 and 45 on April 16, 18 and 21, 1875, and as a separate pamphlet in Leipzig in late June-early July 1875 under the title Soziales aus Rußland (On Social Relations in Russia). In the second half of May Engels wrote an introduction to the pamphlet (see this volume, pp. 100-04), which was reproduced together with the article in the 1894 edition: F. Engels, Internationales aus dem "Volksstaat" (1871-75). This article was printed in English for the first time in: K. Marx, F. Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Volume Two, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1969, pp. 387-98.
[55] 55 A reference to the reform of 1864 in Russia, which introduced Zemstvos— elective bodies for administering local matters (the building of roads and bridges, the organisation of schools, supplies of hospitals, expert agricultural assistance).
[57] 57 Engels is referring to the sub-lease system in Ireland, under which middlemen, whose number could be up to a dozen, stood between the big landowner and the peasant working on the leased plot of land.
[58] 58 A reference to the Russian version of Utopian socialism developed in the early 1850s by Alexander Herzen, a founder of revolutionary Narodism (see Note 49). Herzen believed that Russia would pass on to socialism in an "original" way thanks to the village commune, emancipation of peasants with land, peasant self-government, and the traditional right of the peasants to land.
[59] 59 Samoyeds—an old Russian name for a number of Siberian minor nationalities (Nentsi, Entsi, Nganasani and Selkups), which spoke Uralic languages, p. 43
[60] 60 Marx read Flerovsky's book in 1870. In a letter to the committee members of the Russian Section of the International of March 24, 1870 he expressed his appreciation of the book (see present edition, Vol. 21, pp. 110-11). Later Engels too read the book.
[61] 61 A reference to the Peasant War (1773-75) headed by Yemelyan Pugachov.
[62] 62 Engels is referring to the uprising which was launched in July 1873 by petty-bourgeois republicans and the Bakuninists in Andalusia and Valencia. It undermined the position of the left-republican government of Francisco Pi y Margall which came into office in 1873 as a result of the declaration of the first republic in Spain during the revolution of 1868-74. For more details, see Engels' The Bakuninists at Work (present edition, Vol. 23, pp. 585-95). p. 49
[3] 3 A reference to the assassination attempt on the Russian Emperor Alexander II made by Antoni Berezowski in Paris in 1867. Berezowski was sentenced to twenty years of hard labour.
[6] 6 Engels is referring to the invasions of the Huns in the 5th century, of the Avars in the 6th century, and of the Mongols and Tartars in 1241, 1259 and 1287.
[8] 8 Engels gives this quotation according to the Address of the Polish Refugees to the English People, p. 3, which differs from the corresponding passage in Pogodin's book (see M. n . IToro^HHt, TIOA^CKOÜ eonpocr», Moscow, 1867, pp. 54-55).