Abstract
In March 1902 Karl Kautsky, who has already provided one keynote for this study, wrote that the ‘revolutionary centre is shifting from the West to the East’:
Russia, which has borrowed so much revolutionary initiative from the West, is perhaps herself ready to serve as a source of revolutionary energy for the West. The Russian revolutionary movement that is now flaring up will perhaps prove to be the most potent means of exorcising that spirit of flabby philistinism and temperate politics which is beginning to spread in our midst, and it may cause the thirst for battle and the passionate devotion to our great ideals to flare up in bright flames again.
Poetically (after all this was a newspaper article) he noted that in 1848, the last time revolution had become an actuality in Western Europe, ‘the Slavs were a black frost which blighted the flowers of the people’s spring. Perhaps they are now destined to be the storm that will break the ice of reaction and irresistibly bring with it a new and happy spring for the nations’.1
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Notes and References
Quotation from Lenin, 1953f, p. 343. The article was entitled ‘The Slavs and Revolution’ and originally appeared in Iskra, the paper controlled by Lenin.
These propositions follow from a reading of the four drafts of the 1881 letter to Vera Zasulitch, the letter itself and other documents reprinted in Part II of Shanin, 1983, and the discussions there by Shanin, Wada and Sayer and Corrigan. See also Bideleux, 1985, pp. 1–11, which presumably went to press before the delayed publication of Shanin’s edited volume (actually in 1984) since the latter is not cited. That collection is an extremely important collection of pieces by Marx, above all the four drafts of his letter to Vera Zasulitch written in 1881, and commentaries by Shanin and others. All Marxists need to come to terms with this material.
The final reply to Zasulitch was very short and therefore only covered a fraction of the ground spanned by its drafts. For the text see Shanin, 1983, pp. 123–4, and comments in Wada, 1983, pp. 41–2.
The basic text on these movements remains Venturi, 1960, but Billington, 1980, Chapter 14 adds further information.
Second draft, ibid., pp. 105–6. In this and other quotations from this source interpellated material that Marx had himself deleted is omitted. The drafts are very complex (and repetitive) in this respect.
Quoted in Wada, 1983, p. 54. The work quoted is ‘The Social Conditions in Russia’.
See Shanin, 1985, Table 3.3. My reliance on this source has been modified by the critique in Bushnell, 1988.
Löwy, 1981, Chapter 1, provides a useful discussion of this issue.
For a theorisation of moral violation and its place in consciousness, see Post, 1996, pp. 306–8.
On the peasant struggle, which has tended to be downplayed, see Shanin, 1986, Chapters 3 and 4. Generally, on the events of 1905 see Ascher, 1988, Engelsteen, 1983, and Surh, 1989.
Let me be the first to point out that this is a highly condensed and speculative piece of reasoning, requiring research not done by me. A major point by Gregory (1982) that price movements in the early twentieth century Russian economy paralleled those of more developed countries (pp. 139–40 and Fig. 6.1), seems to contradict me. However that phenomenon only shows the degree of Russia’s subordination to foreign capital, not a parallel autonomous development. My position is also different from that in Lenin’s 1899 work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia.
Trotsky, 1962, p. 212. It should be noted that, beginning in February 1904, this formulation of the concept of ‘permanent revolution’ had been anticipated by Trotsky’s associate Parvus (Aleksandr Gelfand), a Russian active in German socialist circles. In Iskra articles he further extended the concept on the international level, holding (like Kautsky in 1902) that a successful Russian revolution could trigger off others in Western Europe. For Trotsky’s intellectual relationship with Parvus see Deutscher, 1954, pp. 101–6.
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© 1997 K. W. J. Post
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Post, K. (1997). The Shift to Russia. In: Communists and National Socialists. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14514-0_2
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