1. The Peculiarities of Russian Historical Development¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 1: The Peculiarities of Russian Historical Development
This opening chapter establishes the foundational paradox of Russian historical development: a state erected on a primitive economic base was compelled, by external military and political pressure from more advanced Western neighbours, to force the pace of social and economic differentiation. Trotsky insists that the primitiveness and slowness of Russian social life are not matters of national character but consequences of a poorer economic foundation, determined by less favourable geography and sparse population. Class and estate formation, he argues, presupposes a surplus product; Russia’s slow economic development therefore hampered this process.
The decisive factor, however, was not internal stagnation but the relentless pressure of the external social-historical milieu. The Russian state did not collapse under this pressure, as the Golden Horde had done, because its economy was just sufficiently developed to survive. Yet survival came at a terrible cost. To meet the military challenge of Lithuania, Poland, and Sweden—not the Tatars—the state was forced to absorb an inordinately large share of the social surplus, thereby starving the very privileged classes it needed for its own hierarchical organisation. Worse still, it seized part of the peasant’s necessary product, driving him from the land and undermining the productive forces on which the state itself depended. Trotsky thus presents a dialectical picture: the state simultaneously undermined the economic foundations of social differentiation and, by its own needs, strove to force that differentiation into existence through government measures.
Here Trotsky enters into explicit polemic with the historian Milyukov, who claimed that in Russia the state created the estates, in direct contrast to Western Europe where the estates created the state. Trotsky rejects this as a gross exaggeration. Estates cannot be manufactured by law or decree; they must first develop economically. The Russian state could only assist an elementary economic process, not conjure it from nothing. What was distinctive was the correlation of forces: the resultant of the struggle between state and estates tilted far more in favour of the state power in Russia than in Western Europe, but the fundamental process was identical.
This logic is extended to the development of capitalism itself. From the late seventeenth century, the state strove to accelerate economic development, grafting factories, machinery, and capital onto the natural economic stem. Trotsky cites Mendeleyev’s claim that most branches of Russian industry originated under direct government influence, but he sharply corrects the liberal interpretation: the state’s policy was dictated not by concern for industrial development but by fiscal and military-technical considerations, often opposed to the interests of businessmen themselves. The autocracy, armed with a centralised bureaucracy, railways, telegraphs, a colossal army, and a budget of two milliard roubles, confronted the world as an apparently invincible military-bureaucratic and fiscal organisation.
Yet it is precisely this apparent invincibility that, for Trotsky, guarantees the revolutionary outcome. The more centralised and independent of society the state became, the longer it could continue its struggle for existence after it had ceased to satisfy even the elementary needs of military security. The contradiction between economic and cultural development and the government’s “milliard-fold inertia” became insuperable. The only way out was revolution, and the very might of absolutism guaranteed that revolution would be all the more radical. Trotsky concludes by claiming that Russian Marxism alone understood this trajectory, while liberals wallowed in utopian “practicalism” and the Narodniki lived on phantasmagoria. The entire preceding development made revolution inevitable; the question now becomes what forces would accomplish it.