Leon Trotsky: Gart, Why has Russia begun to waver?

St. Petersburg. 230 pp. Price 1.25 roubles (In Russian.)

[My own translation of the German text in "Die Neue Zeit", 29th volume, 2nd part, No. 44 (4 August, 1911), pp. 643-645. Corrections by English native speakers would be extremely welcome]

This book represents the interesting work of a thoughtful Octobrist. The author was an eminent writer of that party which had gained the leading position in the Duma by the coup d'état of 3/16 June, 1907. But even before the Stolypin government had decided on the direction of its policy, and had unceremoniously turned away from the big-capitalist Octobrist party and towards the party of the feudal-bureaucratic "nationalists", doubts began to rise in Mr. Gart's mind about the fate of Russia. He began to gain the clear conviction that Russia had "begun to totter". Under the slogan of order and a strong state power, the gradual disintegration of the basic supports of the state was in fact going on. Plundering of state assets, bureaucratic brigandage, arbitrariness that knows no bounds have eaten away at the administrative machine from top to bottom and from the periphery to its innermost core during these "calming" years. In the owning classes, in the intelligentsia, in the army, in the people, in social life as well as in literature - everywhere the author sees the threatening moral rot. Where are the causes? he asks himself. And he finds them in the fact that the crisis of 1904-1905 for Russia "was not only a crisis of political form, but above all a crisis of that centuries-old state and life morality by means of which Russia grew, stood firm and flourished, maintained itself and - collapsed ... after this fateful crisis, a new morality has not yet arisen, neither in the lower social strata, nor in the middle and highest ..." (p. 16). (S. 16).

The old Russia lived for the most part, in its popular strata, by the "heteronomous" morality, that is, the impersonal, the non-individualised, by the bee morality, by precisely that morality which Tolstoy embodied in the idealised figure of the peasant Karatayev ("War and Peace"). Of this barbaric morality, which at the same time found its expression in communal property, in serfdom, in tsarist despotism and in the automat-like ceremonial of the church, Mr. Gart speaks in a tone of heartfelt regret, as one speaks of lost innocence. But he who yesterday was the spokesman for the party of big business, he cannot but realise that we have been driven forever from the paradise of primeval times. The West was our serpent of temptation. And the Russian intelligentsia was the thought transmitter of these temptations. Under the banner of "autonomy", that is, of the freedom and happiness of the human personality, it opened an irreconcilable struggle against the old mystical heteronomy which allowed the Cheops pyramid of tyranny to be built on the bones of millions of "personalities" who had not become conscious of themselves, But absolutely autonomous in principle, the intelligentsia was in reality morally disciplined by the discipline of its cultural-revolutionary apostleship. Gart admits that the moral "autonomy" of the intelligentsia was the direct opposite of moral licentiousness. Indeed, in Gart's opinion, the intelligentsia even put the reins of shame on the possessing classes and the bureaucracy by restraining and limiting their desires. It was precisely through this psychological cement that the old Russia was held together, through the mystical heteronomy of the people and the revolutionary autonomy of the intelligentsia. But this only worked up to a certain point. The "peasant liberation" of 19 February 1861, the fiftieth anniversary of which was recently celebrated by official Russia, had already dealt an irreparable blow to the old servile Karatayev truth. The critical period of 1861 to 1905 finally undermined heteronomous Asiatism. The people threw off the yoke of all the old "moral" restraints and, under the leadership of the intelligentsia, embarked on social conquests and possessive conquests. The propertied classes rallied round Tsarism and the revolution was suppressed. "At the same time as the intelligentsia(!) revolution, the centuries-old intelligentsia morality had also come to an end and earlier the morality of the people had ceased to exist – and Russia had now all at once become an impossibility" (p. 149). Unheard-of brigandage in the directorate and in the city administrations began, in the army the inner coherence has been lost, in the countryside the hooligan rules, the intelligentsia has turned its back on asceticism and surrenders to unbridled pleasure. So where does the root of all evil lie – in Garts' opinion? In short, in the fact that the intelligentsia, which rose up against the outer gendarme, did not know how to inculcate an inner gendarme in the people. "While the intelligentsia was striving for a constitution for Russia," says the author, "it should not have kept quiet about the categorical imperative, but should have promoted the raising of consciousness of it among the people and in society" (p. 133). It is in precisely this correction that Gart now seeks salvation. An inner discipline is necessary, to be achieved by adapting the hard German categorical imperative to the broad Russian soul. In short, we need a – "Slavic Kant".

That the peasants who chased the landowners from their farms with the help of the red rooster, that the workers who sometimes interrupted railway traffic with their bare weapons, that the sailors who tied up their officers with rope and raised the red flag – that all of these did not always first ask for the categorical imperative, that's true. But that can no longer be made up for anymore. However, one must doubt the saving mission of the "Slavic Kant" for the future as well. It is undoubtedly the case that the popular masses, and not only the peasant but also the proletarian masses, who have been torn out of the idiocy of "heteronomy" by the revolution, have by far not yet worked out a "new consciousness". By inhibiting this working out by all means, the counter-revolution brings about the process of moral rot that so terrifies Gart. The shaping of a new consciousness, however, proceeds inexorably, and, of course, not under the sign of a categorical imperative, which in its general-obligatory nature is entirely pointless, but in the real trajectories of irreconcilable class struggle. And that is why the Octobrists reasonably do not trust the internal gendarme and give their vote of confidence to the external one. And that is why their way no longer suited their spokesman, Mr. Gart, as soon as he began to philosophise; he is for a "Slavic Kant," they are for Stolypin.

n. t.