11

Under the Cover of Reaction

The regime of Alexander III was at its highest point. The 1889 law on land captains had restored the administrative and judicial powers of the local nobility over the peasants. Like land-owners before the abolition of serfdom, the new land captains were given the right not only to arrest peasants at will, but to flog them as well. The zemstvo counter-reform of 1890 transferred local self-government, once and for all, into the hands of the nobility. Of course the zemstvo decree of 1864, by means of a property qualification specifying ownership of a minimum amount of land, had sufficiently protected the dominance of the landowners over local administration. But since the land was slipping out of the hands of the nobles, the property qualification had to be reinforced with a qualification based on social class. The bureaucracy was acquiring a degree of power such as it had had only in the days of Nicholas the Bludgeon. Revolutionary propaganda, becoming more and more rare, was certainly punished less severely now than under the ‘tsar-liberator’, usually with a few years of prison or exile. Forced labour and hanging were retained only for the terrorists. At the same time, as if to compensate for this, they began to select the most god-forsaken places for exile. Ferocious punishment of revolutionary prisoners for any manifestations of protest received the personal endorsement of the tsar. In March of 1889, thirty-five exiles who had locked themselves up in one of the houses in Yakutsk were showered with a hail of bullets. Six were killed, nine wounded, three were executed, the rest sent to forced labour. In November of the same year a woman named Sigida, condemned to forced labour, was given one hundred lashes for insulting the prison superintendent, and died the next day. Thirty convicts retaliated by taking poison; of these, five died at once. But the revolutionary circles had become so scattered, drowning in an ocean of indifference, that these bloody punitive actions not only failed to arouse active protest, but even remained unknown for a long time. It is doubtful, for example, whether the news of the tragedies in Yakutsk and on the Kara reached Vladimir Ulyanov in Samara until a year later.

After the assault on the universities, the morale of the students reached its lowest ebb. There was not a single attempt to answer the government's violence with terror. The affair of 1 March 1887 was the last convulsion of the period of People’s Will. ‘The courage of people such as Ulyanov and his comrades’, wrote the émigré Plekhanov, ‘reminds me of the courage of the ancient Stoics … Their untimely death served only to emphasize the impotence and senility of the society around them … Their courage is the courage of despair.'

1888 was the blackest year of that gloomy period. ‘The attempt of 1887', writes the Petersburg student Brusnev, ‘extinguished the last glimmer of free thought among the students … They all feared each other, and each one feared everybody in general.’ ‘Social reaction had reached its extreme limit,’ recalls the Moscow student Mitskevich. ‘Neither before nor after was there another year as dead … In Moscow I did not see a single illegal publication.’ Informing, treachery, renunciations followed each other in vile succession. Lev Tikhomirov, the leader and theoretician of People’s Will, who five years earlier had advocated the seizure of power for an immediate socialist revolution, proclaimed himself, early in 1888, a proponent of tsarist autocracy and published a pamphlet abroad entitled Why I Have Ceased To Be a Revolutionary. The mood of hopelessness impelled hundreds and thousands of turncoats to unite, no longer with the people, but with the propertied classes and the bureaucracy. The line written by the poet Nadson just before his death, ‘No, I no longer believe in your ideals’, sounded like the confession of an entire generation. Those less pliable shot or hanged themselves. Chekhov wrote to the author Grigorovich on the subject of suicide among young people: On the one hand… a passionate thirst for life and truth, a dream of activity, broad as the steppes…; on the other hand, an endless plain, a harsh climate, a grey austere people with its heavy chilling history, savagery, bureaucracy, poverty, and ignorance … Russian life weighs upon a Russian like a thousand-ton stone.

At the very beginning of this mist-shrouded decade of reaction, however, a momentous political event took place: Russian Social Democracy was born. True, for the first years it vegetated almost exclusively in Geneva and Zurich and appeared to be a rootless émigré sect whose members could be counted on one’s fingers. An acquaintance with its genealogy, however, demonstrates that Social Democracy was a natural outgrowth of Russia’s evolution and that it was no accident that at the beginning of the 1890s Vladimir Ulyanov merged his own life with that of this party.

From Ippolit Myshkin, the chief defendant at the trial of ‘the 193’, we learn that the revolutionary activities of the intelligentsia were an expression – an oblique reflection would be a more accurate term – of peasant unrest. Indeed, were it not for old Russia’s revolutionary peasant question, resulting in periodic famines, epidemics, and spontaneous revolts, there would never have arisen a revolutionary intelligentsia with its heroism and utopian programmes. The land of the tsars was pregnant with a revolution whose social basis was the contradiction between the survivals of feudalism and the requirements of capitalist development. The conspiracies and terrorist attempts of the intelligentsia were merely the first labour pains of bourgeois revolution. But while the immediate task of this revolution was the liberation of the peasantry, the proletariat was to become its decisive motive force. In the revolutionary activities of the intelligentsia, a direct and evident dependence on the unrest among the industrial workers may be discerned even in the opening pages of Russia’s revolutionary history.

The general turmoil in the country caused by the peasant reform of 1861 found expression in the cities in industrial strikes which confirmed the discontent of ‘the people’ and encouraged the first revolutionary circles. The year of Lenin’s birth was marked by the first large-scale strikes in Petersburg.

We shall not seek any mystic significance in this coincidence. But what a unique coloration this imparts to the words of Marx in his address to members of the Russian section of the First International in that same year, 1870: ‘Your country is also beginning to participate in the general movement of our age!’ By the second half of the 1870s, hundreds of workers had already been drawn into the revolutionary movement. It is true that, in accordance with prevailing views, they tried to see themselves as men temporarily separated from the communal plough. But in their energetic response to the peasant-loving gospel, to which the peasants themselves remained deaf, the advanced workers interpreted it in a way appropriate to their own social position, which often frightened their guardians among the intelligentsia. The prodigal sons of Populism established in the cities – both North and South – the first proletarian organizations; they raised demands for the right to strike and to unionise and called for freedom of assembly and the convocation of a representative assembly of the people. And their influence could be detected in the stormy disturbances among the industrial workers.

The Petersburg strikes of 1878 and 1879, which according to the testimony of an eye-witness and participant, Plekhanov, ‘came to be regarded as the foremost event of the period, capturing the attention of nearly all of the intelligentsia and thoughtful people of Petersburg generally’, greatly increased the feverish mood among the revolutionary circles and indirectly heralded the move of the Populists to positions of terrorist struggle. Members of People’s Will, in their turn, seeking combat reserves, occupied themselves, among other things, with propaganda among the workers. The revolutionary movements of the two social layers, the intelligentsia and the proletariat, although developing in close connection, each revealed a logic of its own. Even after People’s Will had itself been completely shattered, workers’ circles created by its members continued to exist, particularly in the provinces. But the ideas of Populism, although refracted by the workers in their own way, continued for a long time to hinder their search for the right path.

The Marxist struggle with exceptionalist views was made more difficult by the fact that the Populists themselves were by no means hostile to Marx. By virtue of a great theoretical misunderstanding, which had historic roots of its own, they sincerely counted him among their teachers. The Russian translation of Das Kapital, begun by Bakunin and continued by the Populist Danielson, was warmly received in radical circles when it appeared in 1872, and had an immediate circulation of three thousand copies. The second edition was stopped by the censor. There was irony in the fact that the seeming success of the book was explained by an actual failure to grasp the doctrine. Its scientific analysis of the capitalist system was understood by the intelligentsia – the followers of Bakunin and Lavrov alike – as an expose of the sins of Western Europe and as a warning against embarking on a false road. The Executive Committee of People’s Will wrote to Marx in 1880: ‘Citizen! The intellectual and progressive class in Russia … has reacted with enthusiasm to the publication of your scholarly works. They scientifically recognize the best principles of Russian life.’ Marx had no difficulty in guessing at the quid pro quo: the Russian revolutionaries had found in Das Kapital not what was there, i.e., a scientific analysis of the capitalist system, but a moral condemnation of exploitation, and hence scientific blessings bestowed on ‘the best principles of Russian life’, that is, the communes and the co-operatives. Marx himself saw in the village communes not a socialist ‘principle’, but a historic system of peasant enslavement and the economic foundation of tsarism. He did not spare his sarcasm at the expense of Herzen, whose eyes, like those of many others, had been opened to ‘Russian communism’ by a Prussian traveller, a conservative baron by the name of Haxthausen. The baron’s book appeared in Russian two years before Das Kapital, and the ‘intellectual and progressive class in Russia’ stubbornly insisted on reconciling Marx with Haxthausen. This is not surprising, for a combination of socialist aims with an idealization of the foundations of serfdom had indeed constituted the theoretical framework of Populism.

In 1879 the Land and Freedom group, as we remember, split into two organizations: the People’s Will, which represented a democratic political tendency and comprised in its ranks the more militant elements of the former movement, and the Black Redistribution (Chorny Peredel), which tried to preserve the pure Populist principles of a peasant socialist upheaval, Opposing the political struggle that was indicated by the whole course of the movement, the Black Redistribution lost all power of attraction. ‘The organization had no luck from the first days of its creation,’ complains Deutsch, one of its founders, in his memoirs. The best of the workers, such as Khaiturin, went over to People’s Will. The student youth also went that way. It was still worse among the peasants: ‘There we' had absolutely nothing.’ The Black Redistribution played no revolutionary role whatsoever, but it was destined to become a bridge between Populism and Social Democracy.

The leaders of the organization – Plekhanov, Zasulich, Deutsch, Akselrod – were compelled during the years 1880 and 1881 to emigrate from Russia, one after another. It was precisely these most stubborn Populists, who did not wish to lose themselves in the process of struggle for a liberal constitution, who sought with particular zeal for that part of the people to whom one might anchor. Their own experience, regardless of their intentions, had revealed with absolute certainty that only the industrial workers were receptive to socialist propaganda. At the same time, the Populist writings themselves, both literary and scholarly, in spite of their own bias had succeeded rather well in undermining a priori assumptions as to the harmoniousness of [co-operative] ‘manufacturing by the people’, which upon scrutiny proved to be a barbaric stage of capitalism. It remained ‘only’ to draw the necessary conclusions, but this amounted to an ideological revolution. The honour of re-examining the traditional notions and plotting out the new paths belongs unquestionably to the leader of the Black Redistribution, Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov. We shall meet him again more than once – first as a teacher, then as elder colleague, and finally as implacable opponent, of Lenin.

Russia was already on the road to capitalist development, and no intelligentsia was able to swerve her from that road. Bourgeois conditions would clash in ever more acute contradiction with autocracy, and at the same time create new forces for the struggle against it. Securing political freedom is a necessary precondition for the proletariat’s further struggle for socialism. Russian workers would have to support liberal society and the intelligentsia in their demands for a constitution, and the peasantry in its revolt against the survivals of serfdom. In its turn, if it wanted to gain a mighty ally, the revolutionary intelligentsia would have to adopt Marxist theoretical positions and devote its efforts to propaganda among the workers.

Such were the main outlines of the new revolutionary conception. While it seems now a mere string of commonplaces, in 1883 it sounded like a bold challenge to the most sacred of prejudices. The situation of the innovators was complicated in the extreme by the fact that while appearing in the role of theoretical heralds of the proletariat, they were at first forced to appeal directly to the social stratum to which they themselves belonged. Between the pioneers of Marxism and the awakening workers stood the traditional barrier of the intelligentsia. The old views were still so firm in their minds that Plekhanov and his friends had even decided to avoid the very name of Social Democracy, styling themselves the Group for the Emancipation of Labour.

Thus, in little Switzerland arose the nucleus of the future great party, the Russian Social Democracy, which then begat Bolshevism, the creator of the Soviet Republic. The world is constructed so improvidently that the birth of great historic events is not heralded by the blowing of trumpets, and celestial bodies do not exude omens. For the first eight or ten years, the birth of Russian Marxism seemed hardly a noteworthy event.

Afraid of scaring off the not overly numerous left-wing intelligentsia, the Emancipation of Labour Group avoided dealing with the dogma of terror for several years, They saw as the sole mistake of the People’s Will its failure to supplement terrorist activity with the ‘creation of the preconditions for a future workers’ socialist party in Russia’. Plekhanov tried, with good reason, to counterpose the terrorists as politicians with classical Populism, which rejected the notion of political struggle. ‘The People’s Will’, he wrote in 1883, ‘cannot find its justification, and ought not to seek it, outside of contemporary scientific socialism.’ But concessions to terrorism had no effect, and theoretical exhortations evoked no response.

The decline of the revolutionary movement in the second half of the 1880s affected all tendencies and created an intellectual stagnation that prevented any broad dissemination of Marxist ideas. The more the intelligentsia as a whole deserted the battlefield, the more stubbornly did individuals who remained loyal to the revolution stand by the traditions made holy by the heroic past. The adoption of Marxist ideas might have been facilitated by the example of revolutionary struggles on the part of the European proletariat. But in the West, too, the 1880s were years of reaction. In France the wounds of the Commune were not yet healed. Bismarck had driven the German workers underground. British trade unionism was saturated with conservative complacency. For reasons that were temporary in nature – they will be discussed later – the strike movement in Russia itself had also subsided. Little wonder that Plekhanov’s group found itself completely isolated. He was accused of artificially fanning class antagonisms instead of effecting a necessary union of ‘all creative forces’ against absolutism.

The programme of the Terrorist Faction, drawn up in haste by Alexander Ulyanov between the preparation of nitric acid and the stuffing of bullets with strychnine, announced, to be sure, some ‘very marginal’ differences with the Social Democrats. This said, it went on to express its hope for an ‘immediate transition of the national economy to a higher stage’, by skipping the capitalist stage of development and recognizing ’the great independent significance of the intelligentsia’ and its ability ‘to wage immediate political struggle with the government’. In practice, Alexander Ulyanov’s group stood farther from the workers than had the terrorists of the preceding generation.

Communications between the émigré Emancipation of Labour Group and Russia were haphazard and unreliable. 'We heard only confused rumours’, Mitskevich recalls, ‘of the founding in 1883 of Plekhanov’s Emancipation of Labour Group.’ In hostile émigré circles, stories were told with some glee about a group of radicals in Odessa who had solemnly burned Plekhanov’s Our Disagreement, and these rumours were believed because they corresponded to the mood, if not to actual facts. The few adherents of the group among the Russian émigré youth were far inferior to the revolutionaries of the preceding decade both in their breadth of vision and in their personal courage. Some called themselves Marxists in the hope that this would free them from revolutionary obligations. Plekhanov, whose sharp tongue spared nobody, dubbed these questionable adherents ‘wounded veterans who have never seen action’. By the beginning of the 1890s the leaders of the group were completely discouraged about any hope of winning over the intelligentsia. Akselrod explained its lack of receptivity to Marxist ideology by its bourgeois degeneration. Although correct on a broad historical scale and confirmed by the future course of events, this explanation was premature. The Russian intelligentsia was yet to pass through a phase of nearly universal enthusiasm for Marxism, and this phase was rapidly approaching.

In the meantime, without waiting for theoretical recognition, capitalism was carrying out, under the cover of reaction, its revolutionizing work. Government measures backing both serfdom and capitalism had consequences that refused to merge into a single harmonious pattern. Notwithstanding the generous financial aid of the government, the landed nobility went swiftly to ruin. During the three decades after the reform, the ruling social class let slip from its hands over 35 per cent of its land; thus, the reign of Alexander III, that period of aristocratic restoration, was pre-eminently the epoch of the nobility’s ruin. It was chiefly, of course, the lower and middle levels of the gentry who lost their land. As for industry, whose profits, protected by high tariffs, went as high as 60 per cent, it was continually on the rise, especially toward the end of the decade. Thus, in spite of aristocratic counter-reforms the capitalist transformation of the national economy was being accomplished. While pulling the knots of medievalism tighter and tighter, especially in the countryside, the government’s policy promoted the growth of urban forces that were destined to cut these knots. The reactionary reign of Alexander III became the hotbed of the Russian revolution.

One must now introduce an important correction to the general picture of the 1880s given earlier. Political prostration characterized various strata of educated society – liberal zemstvo members, the radical intelligentsia, the revolutionary circles – but at the same time, under the cover of reaction, the awakening of the industrial workers was taking place in the depths of the nation: there were stormy strikes, sometimes the destruction of factories and shops, clashes with the police, as yet without clear revolutionary goals, but already producing revolutionary martyrs. Together with the rising level of workers’ demands came growing solidarity; personality ceased to slumber within the mass; here and there local leaders came to the fore. In the history of the Russian proletariat, the 1880s are recorded as the beginning of the upward turn.

The strike wave that had begun in the last years of the reign of Alexander II but reached its height between 1884 and 1886 compelled the press of all shades of opinion to recognize with alarm the birth in Russia of a special ‘labour problem’. The tsarist administration, to do it justice, understood the revolutionary significance of the proletariat considerably earlier than did the left-wing intelligentsia. As early as the beginning of the 1870s, secret official documents began to single out the industrial workers as a very unreliable class – this at a time when Populist writers continued to regard the proletariat as part of the peasantry.

In addition to cruel repression against strikers, after 1882 new labour legislation was rapidly promulgated. There was prohibition of child labour, institution of factory inspection, some protective restrictions covering labour by women and adolescents. The law of 3 June 1886, immediately after a series of major strikes in the textile industry, made it mandatory for the bosses to pay wages at definite intervals and in general made the first breach in the wall of patriarchal arbitrariness. Thus, while complacently registering the surrender of all oppositional groupings among the educated classes, the tsarist government found itself compelled to surrender for the first time to the awakening working class. Without a correct appraisal of this fact, one cannot understand the subsequent history of Russia, up to and including the October Revolution.

Notwithstanding the continuation and even heightening of the agrarian crisis, the industrial depression, Populist theories to the contrary notwithstanding, was followed in the late 1880s by a boom. The number of workers grew rapidly. New factory laws and particularly the lower prices of consumer goods improved the condition of the workers, accustomed as they were to rural poverty. For the time being, the strikes subsided. During this interval the revolutionary movement declined to its lowest ebb in thirty years. Thus, a concrete study of the political zigzags of the Russian intelligentsia offers an extremely instructive chapter in sociology. Free ‘critical thought’ proves to be dependent at every step upon economic causes unknown to it. If a thistledown, whisked this way or that by each passing breeze, were endowed with consciousness, it would consider itself the freest thing in the world!

In the strike movement of the early 1880s the guiding role was played by workers nurtured in the revolutionary movement of the preceding decade. The strikes, in their turn, stimulated the more responsive workers of the new generation. To be sure, the mystic searches of the time were noticeable also among the workers. But whereas for the intelligentsia Tolstoyanism meant a renunciation of active struggle, for the workers it was often a first, still confused protest against social injustice. Thus the same ideas frequently fulfil opposite functions in different strata of society. Among the advanced workers, echoes of Bakuninism, traditions of the People’s Will, and the first Marxist slogans combined with their own strike experience and inevitably took on the coloration of class struggle. It was in 1887 that Leo Tolstoy gave himself up to grievous reflections on the results of revolutionary struggle over the course of the two preceding decades. ‘How much genuine goodwill and readiness for sacrifice has been expended by our young intelligentsia in order to arrive at the truth … And what has been accomplished? Nothing. Worse than nothing.’ This time, too, the great artist was wrong about politics. The wasted spiritual energies of the intelligentsia sank deeper in the soil in order soon to grow up again as the first shoots of a mass consciousness.

Abandoned by their former leaders, the workers’ circles continued to seek their roads independently. They read much and searched out in old and new magazines articles about the life of West European workers, trying to see whether these were applicable to themselves. One of the first Marxist workers, Shelgunov, recalls that in 1887-8, that is, the most terrible times, ‘workers’ circles were growing more and more … Progressive workers … were looking for books and buying them from second-hand dealers,’ These books had, undoubtedly, come into the hands of second-hand dealers from disenchanted members of the intelligentsia. Rare-book dealers charged forty to fifty roubles for a volume of Das Kapital. Still, Petersburg workers managed to get hold of that precious book. ‘I myself’, writes Shelgunov, ‘had to tear up Das Kapital into parts, into chapters, so that it could be read simultaneously in three or four circles.’ Another worker, Moiseyenko, organizer of the biggest textile strike, studied with fellow exiles both Das Kapital and the works of Lassalle. The seed did not fall on rocky ground.

In a salutation addressed to the old journalist Shelgunov (not to be confused with the above-mentioned worker of the same name) shortly prior to his death in 1891, a group of Petersburg workers thanked him especially for having shown the right path to Russian workers with his articles about the struggles of the proletariat of France and England. Shelgunov’s articles had been written for the intelligentsia. In workers’ circles they served as a premise for conclusions going beyond the intentions of their author. Shaken by the visit of the workers’ delegation, the old man carried with him to his grave a vision of newly awakening forces.

O. I. Uspensky, the most admirable of the Populist writers before the onset of mental illness, was able to learn that progressive workers valued and loved him, and he publicly congratulated Russian writers on the ‘new reader of the future’. Worker orators at a secret Petersburg May Day celebration in 1891 remembered with gratitude the preceding struggle of the intelligentsia, and at the same time expressed unequivocally their intention to take its place. ‘The youth of today’, said one of them, ‘does not think about the people. This youth is nothing but a parasitic element of society.’ The people will better understand propagandists who are workers, ‘because we stand closer to them than the intelligentsia’.

On the dividing line between the two decades, however, new trends began to arise among the intelligentsia, although, to be sure, very slowly. Students came into contact with workers and were infected with their energy. Social Democrats began to appear most often among the very young, whose voices were just breaking – as was their respect for the old authorities. Grigoryev, then a young man in Kazan, recalls, ‘In 1888 an interest in Marx began to appear more and more insistently among the youth of Kazan.’ The young revolutionary Fedoseyev begins to stand out in the centre of the first Kazan Marxist circles. Beginning with the winter of 1888-9 in Petersburg, according to Brusnev, 'there was a noticeable rise in interest in books on social and political problems. There arose a demand for illegal publications.’ Newspapers began to be read differently. Russkie Vedomosti, the organ of zemstvo liberalism, in those days published lengthy dispatches from Berlin with generous excerpts from the speeches of Bebel and other Social Democratic leaders. In this manner the liberal paper meant to tell the tsar and his advisers that freedom is not dangerous: the German emperor continued to sit firmly on his throne, and property and order were firmly protected. But revolutionary students read something else in those speeches. The propagandists dreamed of educating Russian Bebels from among the workers. New ideas were brought in by Polish students, the workers’ movement having developed earlier in Poland than in Russia. According to Brusnev, who in the coming months would assume a central position in the Social Democrat groupings of St Petersburg, a Marxist tendency prevailed among engineering students as early as 1889. Future engineers, trained for service to capitalism, found it particularly difficult to keep up any faith in a special destiny for Russia. Engineering students conducted reasonably active propaganda work in workers’ circles. At the same time, there was renewed lively activity in old and inactive groups. Members of People’s Will returning from exile attempted (for the time being, unsuccessfully) to resurrect the terrorist party.

Leonid Krasin with his brother German, who arrived in Petersburg from far-off Siberia, described their Marxist débuts somewhat jocularly: ‘Our lack of erudition was made up for by youthful fervour and healthy voices … By the end of 1889 the combat qualities of our circle were considered firmly established.’ Leonid was at that time nineteen years old. Mitskevich also observed a change of mood among Moscow students: gone was the feeling of hopelessness; more circles for self-education sprang up; an interest in the study of Marx had arisen. After a lull of three years, large-scale student demonstrations erupted, in the spring of 1890. As a result, the Krasin brothers, both of them engineering students, were exiled from Petersburg to Nizhni Novgorod. It was from their lips that Mitskevich, finding himself in Nizhni, too, first heard the living gospel of Marxism, and threw himself upon Plekhanov’s Our Disagreements. ‘A new world opened up before me; the key had been found to an understanding of surrounding reality,’ The Communist Manifesto, which he read soon thereafter, made an immense impression on Mitskevich; ‘I understood the bases of the great historical-philosophical theory of Marx. I became a Marxist – for life.’ During this time Leonid Krasin received permission to return to the capital and there began to propagandise among the weavers. Nevzorova, a university student in the early 1890s, tells what a revelation the first publications of the Emancipation of. Labour Group were for the students: ‘I still remember the overwhelming impression made by the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels.' Krasin, Mitskevich, Nevzorova, and their friends – these were the growing ranks of future Bolshevism.

The new moods among the Russian intelligentsia were also nourished by events in the West, where the workers’ movement was emerging from a period of decline. The famous strike of English dockers under the leadership of the future renegade John Burns led the way to a new militant unionism. In France the workers were recovering from the catastrophe, and the Marxist teachings of Guesde and Lafargue were making themselves heard. In the autumn of 1889 the first congress of the new International was held in Paris. At the congress, Plekhanov made his prophetic announcement: ‘The Russian revolution will conquer only as a workers’ revolution – there can be no other outcome.’ These words, passing in the hall of the congress almost unnoticed, reverberated in Russia in the hearts of several revolutionary generations. Finally, in the German elections of 1890 the illegal Social Democrats received almost one and a half million votes. Emergency laws directed against the Socialists that had remained in force for twelve years died an ignominious death.

How naive is the faith in the spontaneous generation of ideas! A whole series of objective material conditions, linked together moreover in a definite sequence in a particular combination, were necessary in order for Marxism to gain access to the brains of Russian revolutionaries. Capitalism had to achieve significant successes; the intelligentsia had to exhaust completely all other alternatives – Bakuninism, Lavrovism, propaganda among the peasants, colonizing in the villages, terror, peaceful educational activities, and Tolstoyanism. The workers had to launch their waves of strikes. The Social Democratic movement in the West had to assume a more active character. Finally, the catastrophic famine of 1891 had to lay bare all the sores of Russia’s national economy. Then, and only then, did the ideas of Marxism, which had received theoretical formulation almost half a century before and been disseminated in Russia by Plekhanov since 1883, begin finally to take root on Russian soil. Yet even that is not the entire story. The ideas, having gained wide currency among the intelligentsia, were immediately distorted to suit the character of this social stratum. Only with the appearance of a conscious proletarian vanguard did Russian Marxism finally stand firmly on its feet. Does this mean that ideas are unessential or impotent? No, this means only that ideas are socially conditioned; before becoming a cause of facts and events, an idea must first have been the result of them. Or, to put it more precisely: an idea does not tower above a fact like a court of higher appeal. The idea itself is a fact which can enter as a necessary link in a chain of other facts.

The personal evolution of Vladimir Ulyanov was closely linked with the evolution of the Russian intelligentsia and the formation of a thin layer of progressive workers. Here biography merges with history. The subjective sequence of his spiritual formation coincides with the objective sequence of the growth of a revolutionary crisis in Russia. Simultaneously with the appearance of the first Marxist cadres and the first Social Democratic circles, under the cover of reaction, the future leader of a revolutionary people was preparing himself and maturing.