Abstract
“Bloody Sunday,” January 9, 1905, IN ST. Petersburg initiated the “Russian Spring”—the beginning of the end of the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty. Like Frederick IV in Prussia, or the military regime that replaced the dethroned Hosni Mubarak, Nicholas II was forced in October after months of near nationwide mass protests to grant the semblance of representative democracy. While Marx and Engels had mistakenly thought that Russia’s bourgeois revolution would come sooner, they were right that Europe’s last remaining absolute monarchy was on life-support. They did all they could to influence its expected death in the interests of the toilers through their writings and collaboration with Russia’s nascent Marxist movement.
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Notes
On his biography, Leon Trotsky’s The Young Lenin (New York: Doubleday, 1972) is particularly useful.
V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), p. 540.
Philip Pomper, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia and Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 32–33.
Lars Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done in Context (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 377–84, correctly disputes the frequent charge that Lenin never got over the Narodnik influence but misses an opportunity to show how Marx himself found Chernyshevsky attractive.
Lars Lih’s claim that Lenin was essentially an offspring of the German Social Democratic Party, Kautsky specifically, was the target of my critique, “A Return to Lenin—But without Marx and Engels?” Science and Society 73, no. 4 (October 2009): 452–73.
Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life, vol. 1 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 61–62.
Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. 3: The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (New York: Monthly Review, 1986).
For the complete wording of the two demands in the Erfurt Program, see Gary Steenson, After Marx, Before Lenin: Marxism and Socialist Working Class Parties in Europe, 1884–1914 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), pp. 298–99.
See Natal’ia Borisovna Selunskaia and Rolf Torstendahl, The Birth of Democratic Cultures in Late Imperial Russia: Reforms and Elections to the First Two National Legislatures, 1905–1907 (Stockholm: Altus History, 2012).
On how it came about and how it was organized, see Richard Pipes, Social Democracy and the St. Petersburg Labor Movement, 1885–1897 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 83–86.
Chapter 3 in Israel Getzler’s Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1967) is also useful.
Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Industrial Democracy (London: Longmans, Green, 1897);
Karl Kautsky, Der Parlamentarismus, die Volksgesetzgebung und die Sozialdemokratie (Stuttgart: J. H.W.Dietz, 1893).
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© 2014 August H. Nimtz
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Nimtz, A.H. (2014). Revolutionary Continuity. In: Lenin’s Electoral Strategy from Marx and Engels through the Revolution of 1905. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137389961_2
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