The Birth of Russian Marxism¶
Core Argument¶
Here, the chapter narrates the terminal crisis of Russian Narodnism and the birth of its Marxist successor. The core argument is that the heroic but strategically bankrupt tradition of individual terrorism, epitomised by Narodnaya Volya, had reached a dead end by the early 1880s, creating the objective conditions for the emergence of a Marxist current. The narrative thrust follows this transition from the spectacular but futile violence of the terrorists to the painstaking theoretical work of Plekhanov’s Emancipation of Labour Group.
The chapter presents the terrorist successes—the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, the daring Winter Palace bombing by Khalturin—as pyrrhic victories that contained the seeds of their own destruction. The state’s response, a reign of ‘iron and blood’ under Pobedonostsev, decimated the revolutionary ranks, executing 23 people in two years, including a 19-year-old for posting a proclamation. The evidence is stark: a cycle of repression-terrorism-repression consumed an entire generation without weakening the autocracy. The chapter draws on Kropotkin’s memoirs and Venturi’s Roots of Revolution to illustrate the tragic division within figures like Khalturin, torn between organising workers and the intellectuals’ thirst for immediate action. Lenin is cited approvingly, acknowledging the heroism of the Narodnovoltsy but criticising their failure to connect political struggle with socialism.
The theoretical context is the long-standing polemic between Marx and Engels and the Narodniks over Russia’s ‘special path’. The chapter argues that Narodnik ideology was a series of bankrupt improvisations—peasant messianism, Pan-Slavism, terrorism—lacking a coherent theoretical foundation. Plekhanov’s breakthrough came from studying Marxist philosophy in exile, which provided, in his words, “Ariadne’s thread” out of the “labyrinth of contradictions” inherited from Bakunin. The polemic is sharp: the chapter argues against the Narodnik establishment (Tikhomirov, Lavrov) who tried to stifle the Marxists bureaucratically, and against the scepticism of Western Social Democrats, including Engels himself, who privately viewed Plekhanov’s group as an eccentric sect. The chapter concludes by asserting that this tiny, isolated group, reduced to just three active members after Deutsch’s arrest and Ignatov’s death, was the embryo of the party that would lead the workers to power in 1917, vindicating its faith in theory against the prevailing current.