The Icon and the Axe

Plekhanov brought into the light of day many of the inconsistencies and presumptions of populist thought: the romantic attachment to the idea of a special path for Russia, the exaggerated belief in the ability of individuals to change the course of history, and the palpably unscientific theories of history and "formulas of progress" advanced by populist writers. The rational cosmopolitanism of Plekhanov's Marxism had a particular appeal to leaders of some of the minority cultures within the Russian empire, whose peoples were subjected to new indignities by the Russification campaigns of the late imperial period. Even before the first Marxist circle was formed inside Russia proper in 1885, a Marxist circle and journal had appeared in Russian-occupied Latvia; and the rapidly growing Social Democratic movement of the nineties had particular strength among the more advanced and Westernized peoples of the Russian empire: Poles, Finns, and Georgians. Plekhanov's chief lieutenant, Paul Axelrod, was a Jew, and the Jewish Bund was one of the most important catalysts in bringing together the Social Democrats of the Russian Empire for their first national congress in 1898.

Plekhanov's Marxism also.had a more general appeal for the increasing number of thinking Russians who were becoming preoccupied with problems of material growth and economic analysis. Economic analysis became in the last two decades of the century a major subject of intellectual interest in Russia. There were sophisticated populist economists like Nicholas Dan-ielson (Marx's most regular Russian correspondent), liberal economists like Alexander Chuprov (a lecturer on political economy at the University of Moscow and a regular economic analyst for the daily newspaper Russkie Vedomosti-Russian Reports), and an increasing number of professional economists in the service of the central government and local zemstvos. The predominant influence on Witte and most government economists was Friedrich List's national system urging protective tariffs and state investment in order to develop a balanced and self-sufficient national economy.48 Also influenced by List was the great chemist Dmitry Mendeleev, who devoted much of his energy to devising the regional and industrial patterns and the necessary tariff structure for the development of a Russian national economy. He visited and admired America, but not the "politic-mongering"

(politikanstvo) of democratic politicians. As early as 1882 he advocated separating the ministry of industry from that of finance in order to stimulate economic growth; and he was active in the agitation that led to the founding in 1903 at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute of the first separate faculty of economics in a Russian institution of higher learning.49

Amidst all this interest in economic problems, Marxism with its unique and unequivocal insistence on the primacy of the economic factor to all of life and history was bound to have a strong intellectual appeal. So great was the infatuation with Marxist ideas in Russian intellectual circles of the nineties that Marxism rapidly became caught up in the factional debates that were simultaneously raging in the liberal camp. Some Russian Marxists, the so-called economists, accepted a Marxist analysis of economic development but wished to concentrate on improving the economic lot of the workers rather than working for a political revolution. Somewhat more radical were the "legal" Marxists, who built on Marxist economic analysis and accepted the need for a political struggle against autocracy but favored a merging of the socialist and liberal causes in a common struggle for the democratic liberties that were prerequisite for social democracy.50