The Icon and the Axe

eighties to discover a new faith for the Russian intelligentsia. Each looked to the West-but to different Wests. Solov'ev, the partial model for Alyosha Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, was interested in religious and philosophic ideas. He went to the Catholic West in search of spiritual union and the regeneration of society through a new mystical and aesthetic attitude toward life. Plekhanov, who had led the first major demonstration of revolutionary populism in front of the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg in 1878, was interested in economic and social problems. He went to the West of the international working class movement and became the father of Russian Marxism.

Prior to Plekhanov's conversion Russians had known and venerated Marx, but had either neglected or misunderstood the main tenets of Marxism. Engels' Situation of the Working Class in England and Marx's Critique of Political Economy and Capital had been widely studied in Russia during the populist era. But populists tended to view Marx's works as.an eloquent argument for bypassing capitalism altogether. The populists insisted that the way to socialism in Russia lay in preventing rather than undergoing a capitalist stage of development; in relying on the moral idealism of the educated classes rather than the material forces of historical inevitability. Russian radicals remained close to Proudhon-Marx's original ideological foe in the European socialist movement-in their suspicion of the centralized state and of all dogma, and in their ideal of peasant simplicity and a "conservative revolution." Russian revolutionaries abroad sympathized almost to a man with the revolutionary anarchist Bakunin in his struggles with Marx in the First Socialist International (1864-76). Populist writers inside Russia looked on Marx's philosophy as a complicated Germanic theory with little application to Russian reality.

Marx himself disliked most Russians that he met, generally favored the extension of German over Russian influence in Europe, and consistently viewed Russian developments as a minor sideshow in a historical drama centered on the industrialized West. Nonetheless, he was flattered by the attention his writings received in Russia. Particularly after the failure of the French Commune in 1871, he became interested in the possibility that unrest in Russia might serve as a catalyst for a new wave of revolutionary risings in the West. He also began to study the economic development of Russia, suggesting that many Russian peasants would have to become urban workers but that the economic analysis of "capital is neither for nor against the peasant commune," which might well serve as a "point of support for social regeneration."39 Marx died in 1883 without leaving any clear analysis of Russian developments and possibilities. Engels, who was less interested in Russia than Marx, never took the time to make any detailed study of

Russian developments prior to his death in 1895; but he recognized that populism was related to the idealistic forms of socialism which he and Marx had long opposed within the international socialist movement. Shortly before bis death he wrote one of his Russian correspondents that "it is necessary to fight populism everywhere-be it German, French, English, or Russian."40

It fell on the shoulders of PlekhanoyJo conduct the Russian phase of the international struggle between authoritarian and libertarian socialism. It is curious that Marxism, which theoretically down-graded the role of the individual in history, was in practice extraordinarily dependent on the leadership of individuals. Plekhanov almost single-handedly introduced Marx-i ism into Russia as a serious alternative to the populist ideology; just as thei "three who made a revolution"-Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin-were responsible for enthroning it as a new state ideology after the unrest of 1917-21.

The essence of Plekhanov's Marxist position is contained in "Socialism and the Political Straggle" of 1883, his first major work published after his flight abroad in 1880. Plekhanov had strongly opposed the political terrorism of the People's Will while in Russia, forming his own splinter group, Black Redistribution, which attached priority to redistributing land among the dispossessed "black" elements of the population. After the failure of terrorism to produce anything but a swing to reaction, Plekhanov was in a position to claim vindication. Instead, he sought to conciliate the rival camp, to discard his own previous ultra-populist attachment to peasant ways and to federal dilution of power, and to provide a new outlook altogether for Russian radicalism.