2. The Towns and Capital¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter argues that the specific character of Russian urban development—its belatedness, its dependence on foreign capital, and the weakness of its native bourgeoisie—produced a revolutionary dynamic fundamentally different from that of Western Europe. Trotsky establishes that the Russian town, until the late nineteenth century, was not an economic centre but an administrative and military outpost, a “consumer” rather than a producer. Statistical evidence is marshalled to demonstrate this: the urban population stood at only 3 per cent under Peter I and remained below 8 per cent as late as 1850, before leaping to 13 per cent by 1897. This growth, however, was not a gradual evolution from medieval craft guilds. Trotsky insists that Russian capitalism did not develop organically out of urban handicraft production. Instead, large-scale industry was imported wholesale from the advanced capitalist countries, finding before it not a class of skilled urban artisans but four million village handicraftsmen still tied to the land and agriculture.
This structural peculiarity had immense political consequences. In the French Revolution, the urban petty bourgeoisie—craftsmen and shopkeepers—had formed the social base of bourgeois democracy. In Russia, that class was numerically insignificant and historically immature. The proletariat, by contrast, was concentrated in enormous masses from the outset, thrown together by the rapid implantation of factory industry. Trotsky further contends that the political weight of this proletariat was magnified by the foreign origin of Russian capital. Drawing on Kautsky, he argues that the growth of the working class outstripped the growth of a native liberal bourgeoisie. The tsarist autocracy, far from being an obstacle to capitalism, actively facilitated its introduction, converting the peasantry into a tributary of European finance through crushing taxation and usurious foreign loans. The European stock exchange, Trotsky notes, was directly interested in preserving absolutism, as no other regime could guarantee such exorbitant interest payments. The result was a paradox: European capital, which had mobilised the Russian working class, remained politically absent from Russia, exercising its influence through the parliaments of France and Belgium rather than through a domestic bourgeois opposition. The Russian bourgeoisie, small in numbers, half-foreign, and lacking historical traditions, stood isolated between the autocracy and the proletariat, incapable of leading a democratic revolution. The chapter thus lays the groundwork for Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development, arguing that Russia’s backwardness, far from delaying revolution, created the conditions for the proletariat to assume a leading role.