The Icon and the Axe

The leading spokesman for the "legal" or "revisionist" Marxists was Peter Struve, one of the most ranging minds of the late imperial period, who also participated in the new currents of liberalism and idealism. Grandson of the Danish-German first director of the Pulkovo Observatory, Struve spent much of his early life in Stuttgart, and brought to the study of Russian reality a deep grounding in the philosophical and economic thinking of the German universities and the German Social Democratic movement. His Critical Comments on the Economic Development of Russia, written in 1894 at the age of twenty-four, was the first full-length original Marxist work to be published in Russia, and it provided the guidelines for the general assault of economists in the late nineties on the populist contention that the capitalist phase of development might be avoided or bypassed in Russia. He also wrote a seminal philosophic critique of the shallow pro-gressivist ideology of Mikhailovsky and other populists in his long introduction, in 1901, to Nicholas Berdiaev's first book, Subjectivism and Individualism in Social Philosophy. This work also reflected his critical attitude toward rigid philosophical orthodoxy and revolutionary "Jacobinism" within Russian Marxism. His Marxist Theory of Social Evolution of 1899 had denied that there was a fundamental, dialectical opposition between capitalism and socialism, and foresaw a natural, continuing progression toward socialism along lines proclaimed in Eduard Bernstein's famous work of the same year, Evolutionary Socialism.51

All three of the new perspectives of the late imperial period came to

play a role in Struve's protean intellectual development. Although retaining an essentially Marxist approach to social and economic analysis, Struve became an active leader in the movement for constitutional liberalism, beginning with his founding of the semi-monthly journal Liberation in Stuttgart in June, 1902. His continuing interest in the Russian cultural and intellectual tradition brought him into increasingly sympathetic contact with philosophic idealists and neo-Orthodox thinkers. In his incisive contribution to their famous symposium, Landmarks, Strove blamed Bakunin and the modern tradition of "irreligious alienation from government" for the lack of constructive evolution in contemporary Russian social and political life.52

Plekhanov resented Struve's blurring of the revolutionary element in Marxism, and insisted on fidelity to the ideology of dialectical materialism and on the development of a working-class movement distinct from those of bourgeois liberals. The main body of Russian Social Democrats (who became known as Mensheviks after the split with Lenin's Bolsheviks at the Second Congress of the Social Democrats in 1903) remained faithful to Plekhanov's doctrine, looking to him for intellectual guidance and a continuing link with the Second Socialist International, which had come into being in 1889.

Plekhanov and the Mensheviks represented the rationalistic middle way in Russian Marxism. They rejected any accommodation with political liberalism or philosophic idealism. But at the same time they rejected as a reversion to the discredited tactics of earlier Russian Jacobins Lenin's call for a professional revolutionary elite in his What Is To Be Done? of 1902 and his speculations on the possibility of a proletarian alliance with the revolutionary peasantry in his Two Tactics of 1906. Only amidst the turmoil of the revolutionary period would these Bolshevik ideas gain widespread popularity in Russia-along with the even more un-Marxist idea advanced during the Revolution of 1905 by Trotsky that the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions might be compressed into one uninterrupted revolutionary transformation.

Plekhanov was unable to return to Russia until the collapse of tsardom in 1917, at which time he urged continuing the war and avoiding any premature proletarian bids for power. Ill and increasingly unnoticed amidst the rushing tide of events in the late summer of 1917, the father of Russian Marxism went, together with Vera Zasulich, his old friend and associate through the long years of emigration, on one last nostalgic climb up the Sparrow Hills, which were shortly to be renamed for Lenin. It was a melancholy reprise of the excited youthful climb of Herzen and Ogarev more than a century before, when they had sworn their oath to avenge the fallen Decembrists on the same spot. After the October Revolution, his house was