Friedrich Engels

Refugee Literature

Written May 1874 to April 1875.

The present reprint (Articles I-V) is based on the publication in the _Volksstaat_.

Articles I, II and V have been collated with the text of the re-publication in the pamphlet _Internationales aus dem 'Volksstaat' (1871-75)_, Berlin 1894. Substantial deviations from the original publication in the _Volksstaat_ are indicated in footnotes or notes.

Article V appeared in 1875 in Leipzig as a pamphlet under the title _Soziales aus Rußland_.

Contents:

I. A Polish Proclamation

II. Programme of the Blanquist Commune Refugees

III.

IV.

V. Social Relations in Russia

I

A Polish Proclamation

[_Der Volksstaat_, No. 69, June 17, 1874]

When the Emperor of Russia arrived in London, the entire police force there was already on the alert. It was said that the Poles wanted to shoot him, that a new Berezowski had already been found and was better armed than the one in Paris at that time. The houses of known Poles were surrounded by plain-clothes policemen; indeed, the police commissioner who had specially kept the Poles under surveillance in Paris under the Empire was sent for. The police precautions along the Tsar’s route from his residence to the City were arranged quite on strategic principles — and all this trouble was in vain! No Berezowski appeared, no pistol shot was fired, and the Tsar, trembling no less than his daughter, escaped with a fright. However, the trouble was not entirely in vain, for the Emperor gave every police superintendent who had been active for him five, and every inspector two, pounds sterling (33 and 14 talers {1} respectively) as a tip.

Meanwhile, the Poles had quite other things in mind than the murder of the noble Alexander. The society “The Polish People” issued an “Address of the Polish Refugees to the English People”, signed: General W. Wróblewski, President, J. Krynski, Secretary. This address was distributed in large numbers in London during the Tsar’s stay. With the exception of _Reynolds Newspaper_, the London press unanimously refused to print it: it would not do to insult the “guest of England”!

The address begins by pointing out to the English that the Tsar is not doing them an honour but an insult by visiting them at the very moment when he is preparing everything in Central Asia to overthrow British rule in India; and that if England, instead of listening to the blandishments of the Tsar, this alleged father of the peoples whom he oppresses, were less indifferent to the aspirations of the Poles for independence, both England and the rest of Western Europe could quietly suspend their colossal armaments. And this is quite correct. The background of the whole of European militarism is Russian militarism. Standing in reserve on the side of France in the war of 1859, and on the side of Prussia in 1866 and 1870, the Russian army enabled the leading military power of the day to defeat its adversary in isolation each time. Prussia, as the leading European military power, is the direct creation of Russia, even though it has since grown unpleasantly over the head of its patron.

The address continues:

“By virtue of its geographical position and its readiness to stand up at any moment for the cause of humanity, Poland has always been and will always be the foremost champion of right, civilisation and social development in the whole of north-eastern Europe. This Poland has irrefutably proved by its centuries of resistance to the incursions of the eastern barbarians on the one hand, and to the Inquisition, which at that time oppressed almost the entire West, on the other. How did it come about that the peoples of Western Europe were able, precisely in the most decisive epoch of modern times, to devote themselves undisturbed to the development of their social vital forces? Because, and only because, the Polish soldier stood on guard at the eastern frontiers of Europe, ever vigilant, ever ready to fire, ever prepared to stake his health, his possessions, his life. To the protection of Polish arms Europe owes the opportunity for its newly awakening life in art and science in the sixteenth century to continue its development, for commerce, industry and wealth to attain their present astonishing heights. What, for example, would have become of the heritage of civilisation acquired for the West by two hundred years’ labour, had not Poland, though itself threatened in the rear by Mongol hordes, brought aid to the centre of Europe against the Turks and broken the power of the Ottomans by its brilliant victory under the walls of Vienna?”

The address goes on to explain how even today it is essentially the resistance of Poland that prevents Russia from turning its forces against the West, and that has even succeeded in disarming the most dangerous allies of Russia, its Panslavist agents. The most celebrated Russian historian, Pogodin, says in a work printed by order and at the expense of the Russian government, that Poland, up to now the thorn in Russia’s flesh, must become its right hand by being re-established as a small, weak kingdom under a Russian prince — this would be the best way of catching the Turkish and Austrian Slavs:

“We shall announce this in a manifesto; England and France will bite their lips, and for Austria it is the death blow ... All Poles, even the most irreconcilable, will throw themselves into our arms; the Austrian and Prussian Poles will rejoin their brothers. All the Slav tribes are now oppressed by Austria, Czechs, Croats, Hungarians (!), down to the Turkish Slavs, they will all long for the moment when they can breathe as freely as the Poles will then. We shall be a race of a hundred millions under one sceptre, and then, you peoples of Europe, come and try your strength against us!”

Unfortunately, this fine plan lacked only the main thing: the consent of Poland. But

“to all these allurements — the world knows it — Poland answered: I will live, and must live, if I am to live at all, not as the tool of the world-conquering plans of a foreign Tsar, but as a free people among the free peoples of Europe.”

The address then goes on to show how Poland has confirmed this its unshakable resolve. At the critical moment of its existence, at the outbreak of the French Revolution, Poland was already mutilated by the first partition and divided among four states. Nevertheless it had the courage to raise the banner of the French Revolution on the Vistula by the Constitution of May 3, 1791 — a deed by which it placed itself far above all its neighbours. The old Polish economy was thereby destroyed; a few decades of peaceful development, undisturbed from without, and Poland would have become the most advanced and most powerful country east of the Rhine. But the partitioning powers could not tolerate the revival of Poland, and still less its revival through the naturalisation of the Revolution in north-eastern Europe. Its fate was sealed: the Russians achieved in Poland what the Prussians, Austrians and Reich troops had tried in vain to achieve in France.

“Kosciuszko fought simultaneously for the independence of Poland and for the principle of equality. And it is well known throughout the world that from the moment of the downfall of its national independence, and in spite of this downfall, Poland, by virtue of its patriotism and its solidarity with all peoples fighting for the cause of humanity, has been the foremost champion of violated right wherever this was violated, fighting on every battlefield where tyranny was combated. Unbroken by its own misfortunes, undaunted by the blindness and ill will of the European governments, Poland has not for a moment neglected the obligations imposed upon it by itself, by history and by regard for the future.”

At the same time, however, it has also developed the principles according to which this future, the new Polish republic, is to be organised; they are laid down in the manifestoes of 1836, 1845 and 1863.

“The first of these manifestoes proclaimed, alongside the inalienable national right of Poland, the
_equal rights of the peasants_
. The one of 1845, proclaimed on Polish soil, in the then still free city of Cracow, and confirmed by deputies from all parts of Poland, declared not only this equality of rights, but also the provision that
_the peasants should become the owners of the soil_
which they had tilled for centuries. — In the Muscovite share of the plunder
{2}
, the landowners, relying on the above manifestoes as the foundations of Polish national right, had resolved, long before the so-called imperial emancipation proclamation, to settle this internal affair, which weighed on their consciences, voluntarily and by agreement with the peasants (1859-1863). The Polish land question had been solved in principle by the Constitution of May 3, 1791; if the Polish peasant nonetheless remained oppressed, this was solely the fault of the despotism and
_Machiavellism_
of the Tsar, who based his rule on setting the landowners and peasants at enmity. And this resolution was adopted long before the imperial proclamation of February 18, 1861; and this proclamation, applauded by the whole of Europe, purporting to establish the equal rights of the peasants, was only the cloak for one of the constantly recurring attempts of the Tsar to appropriate other people’s property. The Polish peasantry is oppressed as before, but —
_the Tsar has become the owner of the soil!_
And as punishment for the bloody protest which Poland raised in 1863 against the treacherous barbarism of its oppressors, it has had to endure a series of brutal outrages such as must horrify even the tyranny of past centuries.”

“And yet neither the cruel yoke of the Tsar, though it has now weighed on it for a full century, nor the indifference of Europe has been able to kill Poland. We have lived and we shall live, by virtue of our own will, our own strength and our own social and political development, which places us high above our oppressors; for the first and last foundation of their existence is brutal force, the prison and the gallows, and their essential levers of action abroad are underground machinations, treacherous attacks, and finally violent conquest.”

Let us now leave the address, sufficiently characterised by the above extracts, in order to append some remarks on the importance of the Polish question for the German workers.

However much Russia had developed since Peter the Great, however much its influence in Europe had grown (to which Frederick II of Prussia, although knowing exactly what he was about, contributed no small part), it nevertheless remained essentially a power outside Europe, just like Turkey, for instance, until the moment when it seized Poland. 1772

was the first partition of Poland; as early as 1779 Russia demanded {3} in the Peace of Teschen the chartered right to interfere in German affairs. That should have been a lesson to the German princes; despite this, Frederick William II, he, the only Hohenzollern who ever put up serious resistance to Russian policy, and Francis II agreed to the total destruction of Poland. After the Napoleonic wars, Russia also took the lion’s share of the former Prussian and Austrian Polish provinces and now openly appeared as the arbiter of Europe, a role it continued uninterruptedly until 1853. Prussia was properly proud to be allowed to grovel before Russia; Austria followed reluctantly, but always yielding at the decisive moment out of fear of the revolution, against which the tsar always remained the last refuge. Thus Russia became the bastion of European reaction, without denying itself the pleasure of preparing further conquests in Austria and Turkey through Panslavist agitation. During the revolutionary years the crushing of the Hungarians by Russia was just as decisive a fact for Eastern and Central Europe as the June battle in Paris had been for the West; and when Emperor Nicholas soon afterwards sat in judgment in Warsaw over the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria, the domination of Russia sealed the domination of reaction over Europe. The Crimean War freed the West and Austria from the insolence of the tsar; Prussia and the small German states grovelled all the more willingly before him; but as early as 1859 he chastised the Austrians for their disobedience by ensuring that his German vassals did not take their side, and in 1866 Prussia completed the chastisement of Austria. We have already seen above that the Russian army constitutes the pretext and backbone of the whole of European militarism. Only because Nicholas in 1853, trusting in his million soldiers — admittedly, for the most part only existing on paper — challenged the West, did Louis Napoleon obtain through the Crimean War the pretext to turn the then fairly weakened French army into the strongest in Europe. Only because in 1870 the Russian army prevented Austria from taking sides with France was Prussia able to defeat France and complete the Prussian-German military monarchy. In all these principal and state actions we see the Russian army in the background. And even if — unless the internal development of Russia soon enters a revolutionary flow — the victory of Germany over France will just as surely engender a war between Russia and Germany as the victory of Prussia over Austria at Sadowa brought on the Franco-German war {1} — the Russian army will still always be at the service of the Prussians against a movement at home. Even today, official Russia is the bastion and shield of the whole of European reaction, its army the reserve of all the other armies that see to the suppression of the working class in Europe.

But it is precisely the German workers who are first exposed to the onslaught of this great reserve army of oppression, both in the so-called German Reich and in Austria. As long as the Russians stand behind the Austrian and German bourgeoisie and government, the point of the whole German workers’ movement is broken off. We above all therefore have an interest in ridding ourselves of Russian reaction and the Russian army.

And in this work we have only one reliable ally, reliable under all circumstances: the Polish people.

Poland is, to an even greater extent than France, faced by its historical development and its present situation with the choice: to be revolutionary or to perish. And with that all the silly chatter about the essentially aristocratic character of the Polish movement falls to the ground. There are enough people in the Polish emigration who have aristocratic aspirations; but as soon as Poland itself enters the movement, it becomes thoroughly revolutionary, as we saw in 1846 and 1863. These movements were not only national; they were at the same time directly aimed at the liberation of the peasants and the transfer of landed property to them. In 1871 the great mass of the Polish emigration in France entered the service of the Commune; was that the deed of aristocrats? Did that not prove that these Poles stood fully at the height of the modern movement? Since Bismarck introduced the *Kulturkampf* in Posen {4} and under the pretext of playing a trick on the Pope is hunting down Polish schoolbooks, suppressing the Polish language, and making every effort to drive the Poles into the arms of Russia, what is happening? The Polish aristocracy is attaching itself more and more to Russia in order to bring Poland together again at least under its rule; the revolutionary masses reply by offering their alliance to the German workers’ party and fighting in the ranks of the International.

That Poland is not to be killed off, it proved in 1863 and proves still every day. Its claim to independent existence in the European family of nations is undeniable. But its restoration is a necessity especially for two peoples: for the Germans and for the Russians themselves.

A people that oppresses another cannot emancipate itself. The power it needs to oppress the other finally turns against itself. As long as Russian soldiers are stationed in Poland, the Russian people can liberate themselves neither politically nor socially. But given the present state of Russian development, it is beyond doubt that on the day Russia loses Poland, the movement in Russia itself will become powerful enough to overturn the existing order of things. Poland’s independence and revolution in Russia condition each other reciprocally. And Poland’s independence and revolution in Russia — which, in view of the boundless social, political and financial disruption and the corruption pervading the whole of official Russia, is much closer than the surface indicates — mean for the German workers: the restriction of the bourgeoisie, the governments, in short the reaction in Germany to their own forces — forces with which we will then, in time, be able to cope.

II

Programme of the Blanquist Commune Refugees

[Der Volksstaat, No. 73, 26 June 1874]

After every failed revolution or counter-revolution, a feverish activity develops among the refugees who have escaped abroad. The various party shades form groups, accuse one another of having driven the cart into the mud, charge one another with treason and all manner of other mortal sins. In doing so, they remain in lively contact with the homeland, organise, conspire, print leaflets and newspapers, swear that things will start up again within twenty-four hours, that victory is certain, and with this in view they already distribute the government posts. Naturally, disappointment follows upon disappointment, and since these are not ascribed to the inevitable historical conditions, which they do not want to understand, but to the accidental mistakes of individuals, the mutual recriminations pile up, and the whole thing ends in a general squabble. This is the history of all refugee communities from the royalist *émigrés* of 1792 up to the present day; and whoever among the refugees has sense and insight withdraws from the barren bickering as soon as this can be done with decency, and does something better.

The French emigration after the Commune has likewise not escaped this inevitable fate. Compelled for a time by the European campaign of slander, which attacked them all equally, and in London especially by the common centre they found in the General Council of the International, to suppress their internal quarrels at least before the world, they were no longer able in the last two years to conceal the ever more rapidly advancing process of disintegration. Open strife broke out everywhere. In Switzerland, a section joined the Bakuninists, essentially influenced by Malon, who himself was one of the founders of the secret Alliance. Then in London the so-called Blanquists withdrew from the International and formed their own group under the title: The Revolutionary Commune. Later, a host of other groups sprang up besides, but they remain in a constant state of transformation and recasting and have also achieved nothing remarkable in manifestos, while the Blanquists have just now, in a proclamation to the “Communeux”, brought their programme to the knowledge of the whole world.

These Blanquists are not so called because they are a group founded by Blanqui — only a few of the 33 signatories of this programme have probably ever spoken to Blanqui — but because they want to be active in his spirit and according to his tradition. Blanqui is essentially a political revolutionary, a socialist only by sentiment, sympathising with the sufferings of the people, but he has neither a socialist theory nor definite practical proposals for social redress. In his political activity he was essentially a “man of action”, believing that a small, well-organised minority that attempts a revolutionary coup at the right moment can, through a few initial successes, sweep the mass of the people along with it and thus make a victorious revolution. Under Louis-Philippe he could naturally organise this nucleus only as a secret society, and then what usually happens with conspiracies occurred: the people, weary of being put off with empty promises that things would soon start, finally lost all patience, became rebellious, and so the only choice was either to let the conspiracy fall apart or to strike without any external occasion. They struck (12 May 1839) and were crushed in an instant. Incidentally, this Blanquist conspiracy was the only one in which the police could never gain a foothold; the blow came to them out of a clear sky. — From the fact that Blanqui conceives every revolution as the *coup de main* of a small revolutionary minority, the necessity of the dictatorship after success follows automatically: the dictatorship, be it well understood, not of the whole revolutionary class, the proletariat, but of the small number of those who carried out the coup and who are themselves already organised in advance under the dictatorship of one or a few individuals.

One can see that Blanqui is a revolutionary of the previous generation. These conceptions of the course of revolutionary events are, at least for the German workers’ party, long since antiquated and in France, too, they still find a hearing only among the less mature or more impatient workers.

can find. We shall also find that in the present programme they are subjected to certain limitations. But among our London Blanquists as well the basic principle prevails: that revolutions do not make themselves at all, but are made; that they are made by a relatively small minority and according to a plan drawn up beforehand; and finally, that it is always “about to start any moment”. With such principles one is of course irretrievably abandoned to all the self-deceptions of refugee-dom and must plunge from one folly into another. Above all, everybody wants to play Blanqui, the “man of action”. But good will is of little avail here; not everyone possesses Blanqui’s revolutionary instinct and quick decisiveness, and however much Hamlet may talk of energy, he remains Hamlet. And when our thirty-three men of action find absolutely nothing to do in the sphere of what they call action, our thirty-three Brutuses fall into a contradiction with themselves that is more comic than tragic, a contradiction whose tragic quality is by no means enhanced by the sombre air they assume, as if they were all “Moros, the dagger in their robe”—something that, incidentally, does not occur to them in the least. What can they do? They prepare the next “start” by drawing up proscription lists for the future, so that the ranks of the people who took part in the Commune may be purified (épuré), for which reason among the other refugees they are called
the Pure
(les purs). Whether they give themselves this title I do not know; it would also sit rather askew on several of them. Their meetings are closed and their resolutions are supposed to be kept secret, which by no means prevents the whole French quarter from resounding with them the next morning. And as invariably happens with such serious men of action where there is nothing to be done: they have become involved, first in a personal, then in a literary quarrel with a worthy opponent, one of the most disreputable characters of the petty Paris press, a certain Vermersch, who under the Commune published the “Père Dûchene”, a pitiful caricature of Hébert’s paper of 1793. This noble personage responds to their moral indignation by declaring them, in a pamphlet, all to be “scoundrels or accomplices of scoundrels” and covering them with a rare abundance of privy abuse:

Every word
Is a chamber pot, and not an empty one.

And with such an opponent our thirty-three Brutuses think it necessary to tussle about before the public!

If anything is certain, it is surely this: that the Paris proletariat, after the exhausting war, after the starvation of Paris and notably after the terrible bloodletting of the May days of 1871, needs a considerable period of rest in order to gather strength again, and that any premature attempt at an uprising can only result in a new, perhaps even more terrible defeat. Our Blanquists are of a different opinion. To them the disintegration of the monarchist majority in Versailles proclaims

“the fall of Versailles, the revenge of the Commune. For we are approaching one of those great historical moments, one of those great crises when the people, seeming to perish in its misery and to succumb to death, resumes its revolutionary onward march with new strength.”

So it will start again, and indeed right away. This hope of an immediate “revenge of the Commune” is no mere refugee illusion; it is a necessary article of faith for people who forcibly set their minds on playing “men of action” at a time when, in the sense they mean it—the sense of a revolutionary outbreak—there is absolutely nothing to do. No matter. Since it is about to start, “the moment seems to them to have come for everything in the refugee community that still has life in it to declare itself.” And thus the 33 declare to us that they are 1. atheists, 2. communists, 3. revolutionaries.

Our Blanquists have in common with the Bakuninists that they want to represent the most far-reaching, the most extreme trend. For which reason, incidentally, although opposed to those in aims, they often go together with them in means. The point, then, is to be more radical in regard to atheism than everyone else. Fortunately, being an atheist is nowadays no longer an art. Atheism is more or less a matter of course among the European workers’ parties, even if in certain countries it may often enough be of the kind of that Spanish Bakuninist who declared: to believe in God was contrary to all socialism, but to believe in the Virgin Mary was quite a different matter, in her a good socialist must naturally believe. Of the German Social-Democratic workers one can even say that among them atheism has already outlived itself; this purely negative word no longer has any application to them, since they no longer stand in a theoretical but only in a practical opposition to the belief in God: they are simply finished with God, they live and think in the real world and are therefore materialists. This is likely to be the case in France as well. But if it is not, nothing would be simpler than to see to it that the splendid French materialist literature of the last century be widely circulated among the workers, that literature in which the French spirit, in form and content, has so far achieved its highest, and which—considering the state of science at the time—in content still stands infinitely high today and in form has never been equaled again. But that will not do for our Blanquists. In order to prove that they are the most radical of all, God is abolished by decree, as in 1793:

“May the Commune free mankind forever from this spectre of past misery” (God), “from this cause” (the non-existent God a cause!) “of its present misery.—In the Commune there is no place for the priest; every religious manifestation, every religious organisation must be prohibited.”

And this demand, to transform people into atheists par ordre du mufti (by order from above), is signed by two members of the Commune who certainly had ample opportunity to learn, first, that one can order an immense deal on paper without it needing to be carried out, and secondly, that persecutions are the best means of promoting unpalatable convictions! This much is certain: the only service one can still do God today is to declare atheism a compulsory article of faith and to out-trump Bismarck’s Kulturkampf laws against the church by a general prohibition of religion.

The second point of the programme is communism. Here we find ourselves on much more familiar ground, for the ship aboard which we are sailing here is called: “Manifesto of the Communist Party”, published in February 1848. Already in the autumn of 1872 the five Blanquists who withdrew from the International had professed a socialist programme that was in all essential points that of present-day German communism, and they justified their withdrawal solely on the ground that the International refused to play at revolution after the fashion of these Five. Now the council of the Thirty-three adopts this programme with its whole materialist conception of history, even though its rendering into Blanquist French leaves a good deal to be desired, except in so far as the
“Manifesto” has been retained more or less verbatim, as occurs for example in the following sentence:

“As the ultimate expression of all forms of bondage, the bourgeoisie has denuded the exploitation of labour of the mystical veils that formerly concealed it: governments, religions, family, laws, institutions of the past and present have finally manifested themselves, in this society reduced to the simple antagonism of capitalists and wage-labourers, as the instruments of oppression by means of which the bourgeoisie upholds its rule—and keeps the proletariat down.”

Compare this with the
“Communist Manifesto”, Section I:

“The bourgeoisie has, in a word, substituted for exploitation veiled in religious and political illusions open, shameless, direct, arid exploitation. It has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto held honourable and looked upon with pious awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science into its paid wage-labourers. It has torn from the family relation its touchingly sentimental veil and transformed it into a pure money relation”, etc.

But as soon as we descend from theory into practice, the peculiarity of the Thirty-three shows itself:

“We are communists because we want to arrive at our goal without stopping at intermediate stations, at compromises which only postpone the victory and prolong slavery.”

The German communists are communists because they see the final goal clearly through all intermediate stations and compromises, which are created not by them but by historical development: the abolition of classes, the establishment of a society in which no private property in land and in the means of production exists any longer. The Thirty-three are communists because they imagine that as soon as they merely have the good will to skip the intermediate stations and compromises, the matter is settled, and if—as is firmly established—things “start” in these days and they only get to the helm, “communism will be introduced” the day after tomorrow. If that is not immediately possible, then they are also not communists. Childlike naivety, to cite impatience as a theoretically convincing ground!

And finally, our Thirty-three are “revolutionaries”. In this line, as far as high-sounding words go, the Bakuninists have notoriously already done all that is humanly possible; nevertheless, our Blanquists consider it their duty to outdo them. And how? As is well known, the whole of the socialist proletariat, from Lisbon and New York to Pest and Belgrade, immediately assumed responsibility en bloc for the actions of the Paris Commune. This does not suffice for our Blanquists:

“For our part, we claim our share of responsibility for those executions which” (under the Commune) “struck the enemies of the people” (there follows the enumeration of those shot), “we claim our share of responsibility for those acts of arson which destroyed the instruments of monarchist or bourgeois oppression or protected the combatants.”

In every revolution a mass of stupidities are inevitably committed, just as at any other time, and when finally one has collected enough calm again to be capable of criticism, one necessarily arrives at the conclusion: We have done many things which we would have done better to leave undone, and we have left undone many things which we would have done better to do, and therefore the affair went wrong. But what lack of criticism is it then to declare the Commune simply sacred, to pronounce it infallible, to assert that every house that was burned down, every hostage who was shot, got exactly and down to the dot over the i what was justly due to him? Does this not mean asserting that during the May week precisely those people were shot by the people, and no more, whom it was necessary to shoot, precisely those buildings burned, and no more, which had to be burned? Does this not mean the same as saying of the first French Revolution: Every single person beheaded got his just deserts, first those whom Robespierre had beheaded, and then Robespierre himself? Such childishness is what results when fundamentally quite good-natured people give free rein to the urge to appear hair-raising.

Enough. Despite all the emigrant follies and despite all the attempts, which tip over into the comic, to make the boy Karl (or Eduard?
{7}
) appear terrible, a significant advance cannot be overlooked in this programme. It is the first manifesto in which
French workers declare themselves for present-day German communism
. And what is more, workers of that tendency which regards the French as the chosen people of revolution, Paris as the revolutionary Jerusalem. To have brought them to this point is the indisputable merit of
Vaillant
, who has co-signed it and who, as is well known, has a thorough knowledge of the German language and German socialist literature. The German socialist workers, however, who in 1870 proved that they are completely free of all national chauvinism, will always be entitled to regard it as a good sign when French workers adopt correct theoretical principles, even though they come from Germany.

III

["Der Volksstaat" No. 117 of 6 October 1874]

A review appears in London in the Russian language and in occasional volumes under the title: “Vperëd!” (Forward). It is edited by a personally most estimable Russian scholar |P. L. Lawrow|, whose name the strict etiquette prevailing in Russian emigrant literature forbids us to mention. For even those Russians who give themselves out as formal revolutionary cannibals, who declare it a betrayal of the revolution to respect anything, respect in their polemics the semblance of anonymity with a scrupulousness that finds its equal only in the English bourgeois press; they respect it even where, as here, it becomes comical, because the entire Russian emigration and the Russian government know exactly what the man’s name is. It cannot occur to us to blab out a secret so carefully kept without any reason; but since the child must have a name, the editor of “Forward” will, we hope, forgive us if we designate him in this article, for brevity’s sake, by the favourite Russian name Peter.

Our friend Peter is in his philosophy an eclectic, who picks out the best from all the different systems and theories: prove all things and hold fast that which is good! He knows that everything has its good and its bad side, and that the point is to appropriate the good side of everything, without also taking on the bad side. Since every thing, every person, every theory has these two sides, a good and a bad one, in this respect every thing, every person, every theory is about as good and as bad as the other, and it would therefore, from this standpoint, be foolish to get worked up for or against the one or the other. From this point of view the struggles and quarrels of the revolutionaries and socialists among themselves must appear as pure absurdities, serving no other purpose than the delight of their opponents. And nothing is more understandable than that a man who holds this view should try to bring all these mutually contending people under one hat, and earnestly implore them no longer to offer reaction this scandalous spectacle, but to attack the common enemy exclusively. So much the more natural when one has just come from Russia, where, as is well known, the workers’ movement is so enormously developed.

“Forward” is accordingly full of exhortations to concord among all socialists, or at least to the avoidance of all
public
discord. When the attempts of the Bakuninists, by false pretences, by fraud and lies, to subject the International to their rule called forth the well-known split in the Association, it was again “Forward” that admonished for unity. This unity could, of course, only be preserved by immediately complying with the Bakuninists and delivering the International, bound hand and foot, to their secret conspiracy. People were not unscrupulous enough to do this; they took up the gauntlet; the Hague Congress decided, threw out the Bakuninists, and resolved on the publication of the documents justifying this expulsion.

Great was the lamentation in the editorial office of “Forward” that the whole workers’ movement was not sacrificed to dear “unity”. But still greater was the consternation when the compromising Bakuninist documents actually appeared in the commission report (see:
“A Plot against the International”
, German edition, Brunswick, Bracke). Let us hear “Forward” itself:

“This publication ... bears the character of bilious polemic against persons who stand in the foremost ranks of the federalists ... its content has been filled with private facts which could only have been collected by hearsay and whose credibility therefore could not be indisputable for the authors.”

And in order to prove to the people who carried out the decision of the Hague Congress what a colossal crime they had committed, “Forward” points to a feuilleton in the “Neue Freie Presse” by a certain Karl Thaler, which,

“having issued from the bourgeois camp, deserves particular attention because it most clearly proves what significance for the common enemies of the working class, for the bourgeoisie and the governments, the mutually accusing pamphlets of the fighters for supremacy in the ranks of the workers can have”.

Let us note, first of all, that here the Bakuninists are cited simply as
“federalists”
, as opposed to the alleged
centralists
, as if the author believed in this non-existent opposition invented by the Bakuninists. But that this is not really the case will be shown. Let us note, secondly, that from a commissioned feuilleton of such a venal bourgeois newspaper as the Vienna “Neue Freie Presse” he draws the conclusion that the
actual
revolutionaries must not drag the merely
pretended
revolutionaries into the light of day, because these mutual accusations amuse the bourgeois and the governments. I believe the “Neue Fr. Presse” and all this press rabble could write ten thousand feuilletons without this having the slightest influence on the attitude of the German workers’ party. Every struggle includes moments when a certain satisfaction cannot be denied the opponent, unless one is prepared to inflict positive damage on oneself. Fortunately, we have got so far that we allow the opponent this private pleasure, if by doing so we buy real successes.

The main accusation, however, is that the report is full of private facts whose credibility could not be indisputable for the authors because they could only have been collected by hearsay. How Friend Peter knows that a society like the International, which has its regular organs in the whole civilised world, can collect such facts only by hearsay is not stated. His assertion is in any case extremely frivolous. The facts in question are authenticated by authentic documents, and the persons concerned have taken good care not to dispute them.

But Friend Peter is of the opinion that private facts like private letters are sacred and must not be published in political debates. If one wishes to allow this to hold good so unconditionally, one thereby prohibits all historiography. The relationship of Louis XV to Du Barry or Pompadour was a private matter, but without it the whole prehistory of the French Revolution is unintelligible. Or, to come closer to the present time: if some innocent Isabella is married to a man who, according to the assertion of experts (Assessor Ulrichs, for example), cannot stand women and therefore falls exclusively in love with men – if in her neglect she takes up with men wherever she finds them, that is a purely private affair. But if the said innocent Isabella is Queen of Spain and one of the young men she keeps is a young officer named Serrano; if this Serrano, as a reward for his heroic deeds performed in private, is promoted to field marshal and prime minister, then is ousted and overthrown by another, thereupon drives his unfaithful sweetheart out of the country with the help of other comrades of fate, after various adventures finally becomes dictator of Spain himself and such a great man that Bismarck moves heaven and earth to get the Great Powers to recognise him – then the private history between Isabella and Serrano becomes a piece of Spanish history, and anyone who wanted to write about modern Spanish history and knowingly conceal this little piece from his readers would indeed be falsifying history. And when one describes the history of a band like the Alliance, in which, alongside the duped, such a mass of swindlers, adventurers, crooks, police spies, rogues and cowards are to be found, is one to falsify this history by knowingly concealing the individual villainies of these gentlemen as “private facts”? Friend Peter may be horrified at this, but he may rely upon it that we are far from finished with these “private facts”. The material is piling up more and more.

But when “Forward” describes the report as a bungling concoction essentially composed of private facts, it commits an act that is difficult to characterise. The man who could write such a thing either had not read the publication in question at all; or he was too limited or too prejudiced to understand it; or else he wrote something which he must have known was not true. No one can read “The Plot against the International” without convincing himself that the private facts interspersed in it are the most inessential part, illustrations for the closer characterisation of the characters then occurring, and that they can all be struck out without the main purpose of the work suffering thereby. The organisation of a secret society, with the sole purpose of subjecting the European workers’ movement to the hidden dictatorship of a few adventurers, the infamies committed for this purpose, especially through Nechayev in Russia – that is what the book revolves around, and to assert that it revolves only around private matters is, to put it mildly, irresponsible.

To be sure, it may have been embarrassing for many a Russian to see the dirty side – and it is indeed very dirty – of the Russian movement suddenly laid bare before Western Europe without any consideration.

Who is to blame for this? Who else but those Russians themselves who represent this dirty aspect, who, not content with swindling their own countrymen, dared to try to make the entire European workers’ movement subservient to their personal ends? Had Bakunin and consorts restricted their exploits to Russia, hardly anyone in Western Europe would have considered it worth the trouble to single them out for attack. The Russians themselves would have attended to that. But once those gentlemen, who do not understand even the first elements of the conditions and the course of development of the West European workers’ movement, try to play the dictator among us, the joke stops: one simply gives them a piece of one’s mind.

Incidentally, the Russian movement can easily bear such exposures. A country that has produced two writers of the stature of Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky, two socialist Lessings, does not perish because it suddenly produces a humbug like Bakunin and a few immature little students who puff themselves up like frogs with big words and end up devouring one another. And among the younger Russians, too, we know people of outstanding theoretical and practical talent and high energy, people who, by virtue of their knowledge of languages, have the advantage over the French and English of intimate acquaintance with the movement in different countries, and over the Germans that of worldly savoir-faire. Those Russians who understand and take part in the workers’ movement can only regard it as a service rendered to them that they have been freed from joint responsibility for the Bakuninist knaveries. All of which does not prevent the *Vorwärts* from concluding its report with the words:

“We do not know what the authors of this brochure think of the results achieved thereby. The majority of our readers would probably share the oppressive feeling with which we have read it and with which, in fulfilment of our duty as chroniclers, we record these sad phenomena in our pages.”

With this oppressive feeling of friend Peter’s, the first part of our narrative closes. The second begins with the following sentence from the same volume of the *Vorwärts*:

“We gladden our readers with yet another piece of news of a similar kind. With us, in our ranks, there is also the well-known writer Pyotr Nikitich Tkatschow; after four years’ imprisonment, he has succeeded in escaping from the place where he was interned and condemned to inactivity, and in strengthening our ranks.”

Who the well-known writer Tkatschow is, we learn from a Russian brochure: “The Tasks of Revolutionary Propaganda in Russia,” which he himself published in April 1874 and which marks him out as a green schoolboy of rare immaturity, so to speak, as the Karlchen Mißnick of the Russian revolutionary youth. He tells us that he had been invited from many quarters to take part in the *Vorwärts*; he had known that the editor was a reactionary; nevertheless, he considered it his duty to take the *Vorwärts* under his wing—which, it should be noted, had not asked for him at all. Scarcely arrived, he finds to his astonishment that the editor, friend Peter, presumes to make the final decision on the acceptance or rejection of articles. Such an undemocratic procedure naturally outrages him; he draws up a lengthy document in which he, for himself and all the other contributors (who, it should be noted, had not asked for this at all) “in the name of justice, on the basis of purely theoretical considerations … claims equality of rights and obligations” (with the editor-in-chief) “with regard to everything concerning the literary and economic side of the undertaking.”

[*Der Volksstaat* No. 118, October 8, 1874]

Here the immaturity that, though not predominant in the Russian émigré movement, is nevertheless tolerated to a greater or lesser degree, at once manifests itself. A Russian scholar, who enjoys a considerable reputation in his country, becomes a refugee and procures the means to found a political journal abroad. Hardly has he come this far when, uninvited, some more or less enthusiastic youth turns up and offers his collaboration, on the more than childish condition that he shall have an equal, decisive voice with the founder of the journal in all literary and financial matters. In Germany he would simply have been laughed at. But the Russians are not so coarse. Friend Peter takes every pains, likewise “in the name of justice and on the basis of purely theoretical considerations,” to convince him of his wrong, naturally in vain. The offended Tkatschow withdraws like Achilles into his tent and from there fires off his brochure against friend Peter, whom he labels a “Philistine philosopher.”

With an overwhelming heap of eternally repeated Bakuninist phrases about the nature of true revolution, he accuses friend Peter of the crime of wanting to *prepare* the people for the revolution, to bring them to a “clear understanding and awareness of their needs.” Whoever wants that, however, is no revolutionary, but a man of peaceful progress, i.e., a reactionary, a friend of “bloodless revolutions in the German taste.” The true revolutionary “knows that the people are always ready for revolution”; whoever does not believe this does not believe in the people, and faith in the people “constitutes our strength.” For anyone to whom this does not become clear, the author quotes a saying of Netchayev, that “typical representative of our modern youth.” Friend Peter says we should wait until the people are ready for revolution – “but we cannot and we will not wait”; the true revolutionary distinguishes himself from the Philistine philosopher by “arrogating to himself the right to call upon the people to revolution at any time.” And so forth.

Among us, in the European West, one would crush all these childish pranks simply with the answer: If your people are always ready for revolution, if you arrogate to yourselves the right to call upon them to revolution at any time, and if you then flatly cannot wait, why do you still bore us with your twaddle; why, damn it all, don’t you strike?

But among our Russians, the matter does not settle itself so simply. Friend Peter finds that the childish, tedious, contradictory, eternally circle-ridden reflections of Mr. Tkatschow could exert upon the Russian youth the seductive attraction of a Venusberg, and, as the faithful Eckart of this youth, he issues a warning admonitory pamphlet of sixty closely printed pages against them. Here he sets forth his own views on the nature of revolution, investigates in all earnestness whether the people are ready for revolution or not, whether and under what conditions the revolutionaries have the right to call upon them for revolution or not, and similar subtleties which, in this generality, possess about as much value as the investigations of the Scholastics on the Virgin Mary. “The Revolution” thereby itself becomes a sort of Virgin Mary, theory a faith, the activity in the movement a cult, and the whole discussion proceeds not on level ground, but in a cloud heaven of general phrases.

In so doing, however, friend Peter falls into a tragic contradiction with himself. He, the preacher of unity, the opponent of all polemics, of all “mutually accusing pamphlets” within the revolutionary party, naturally cannot fulfil his Eckart duty without likewise entering into polemics, cannot reply to the accusations of his opponent without also accusing him. With what “oppressive feeling” this “sad phenomenon” takes place, friend Peter will tell us himself.

His work begins as follows:

“Of two evils one must choose the lesser.

I know very well that all that refugee literature of mutually accusing brochures, of polemics as to who is a true friend of the people and who is not, who is honest and who is not, and who especially is a true representative of the Russian youth, of the true revolutionary party – that all that literature about the personal filth of the Russian emigration is both repulsive to readers and meaningless for the revolutionary struggle, and can only be gratifying for our enemies – I know this and yet I find that it is *necessary* for me to write these lines, necessary, with my own hand, to increase the mass of these pitiful writings by one piece, to the boredom of the readers, to the delight of the enemies – necessary, because of two evils one must choose the lesser.”

Excellent. But how is it that friend Peter, who displays so much truly Christian forbearance in the *Vorwärts* and demands the same from us for the swindlers exposed by us—swindlers whom, as will be seen, he knows just as well as we do—that he did not have even that little bit of forbearance left for the authors of the report, to ask himself whether they too had to choose the lesser of two evils? That the fire had to burn on his own fingernails first before he comes to the insight that there can be still greater evils than a little sharp polemics against people who, under the cloak of allegedly revolutionary activity, sought to falsify and destroy the entire European workers’ movement?

Let us be indulgent, meanwhile, with friend Peter; fate has dealt with him harshly enough. Scarcely has he, with a full consciousness of guilt, had to do what he reproaches us for, when Nemesis drives him further and compels him to supply Mr. Karl Thaler with fresh material for possible feuilletons in the *Neue Freie Presse*.

“Or,” he asks the ever-ready loose striker Tkatschow, “‘has your agitation already accomplisht its work? Is your organisation perhaps finished? Finished? Really finished? And do we not have that famous secret committee of “typical” revolutionaries, the committee that consists of two men and sends around decrees? Our youth has been lied to so much, swindled so often, its confidence so shamefully abused, that it will not all at once believe in the completeness of the revolutionary organisation.’”

That the “two men” are called Bakunin and Netchayev naturally need not be added for the Russian reader.

Furthermore:

“But there are people who claim to be friends of the people, adherents of the social revolution, and who at the same time bring into their activity those lying—”

the greed and insincerity which I have described above as a belch of the old society ... These people exploited the embitterment of the adherents of the new social order against the injustice of the old society and set up the principle: in the struggle every means is usable. Among these
usable
means they counted the deception of their fellow-workers, the deception of the people, whom they yet pretended to serve. They were ready to lie to one and all, only to organise a sufficiently strong party, as if a strong Social-Revolutionary party could be formed without sincere solidarity of its members! They were on hand to inflame among the people the old passions of brigandage and of enjoyment without labour ... They were on hand to exploit their friends and comrades, to make them tools of their plans; they were on hand to defend in words the most complete independence and autonomy of persons and sections, while at the same time they organised the most resolute secret dictatorship and trained their followers to the most sheep-like, thoughtless obedience, as if the social revolution could be made by an association of exploiters and exploited, by a group of people whose actions at every step slap in the face everything that their words preach!”

It is incredible, but it is true: these lines, which bear as close a resemblance to an excerpt from the “Komplott gegen die Internationale” as one egg does to another, were written by the same man who, a few months earlier, had portrayed that same work—because of its attacks on the same people, which correspond exactly with the above lines—as a crime against the common cause. Well, we may be satisfied.

And if we now look back at Mr Tkatschow with his great pretensions and absolutely worthless achievements, and at the little mishap which befell our friend Peter on this occasion, then it would be our turn to say:

“We do not know what the authors think of the results obtained. The majority of our readers will probably share the ‘cheering’ feeling with which we have read them and with which, in fulfilment of our duty as chroniclers, we register these ‘peculiar’ phenomena in our columns.”

Joking apart. Many strange phenomena in the Russian movement up to now are explained by the fact that for a long time every Russian publication was a closed book to the West, and that consequently it was easy for Bakunin and his consorts to hide from the West their doings, which had long been known among the Russians. They zealously spread the assertion that even the dirty sides of the Russian movement had to be concealed from the West—in the interest of the movement itself; whoever communicated to the rest of Europe anything of a Russian character, in so far as it was of an unpleasant nature, was a traitor. That has now ceased. Knowledge of the Russian language—a language which richly repays study, both for its own sake, as one of the most powerful and richest of living languages, and on account of the literature which it opens up—is no longer such a rarity, at least among German Social-Democrats. The Russians will have to resign themselves to the inevitable international fate that henceforth their movement proceeds under the eyes and the control of the rest of Europe. No one has had to pay so dearly for the former isolation as they themselves. Without this isolation, they could never have been so disgracefully bamboozled for years as happened through Bakunin and his consorts. It is the Russians themselves who will derive the greatest benefit from the criticism of the West, from the international interaction of the various West European movements on the Russian and vice versa, from the fusion of the Russian movement with the general European movement that is at last being accomplished.

IV

[“Der Volksstaat” No. 36, 28 March 1875]

A misfortune has befallen the readers of the “Volksstaat”. Some of them may perhaps recall that in my last article on “Flüchtlingsliteratur” (Nos. 117 and 118) I dealt with some passages from the Russian journal “Vorwärts” and with a pamphlet by its editor. Quite incidentally, mention was made there of a certain Mr Peter Tkatschow, who had issued a little work against the said editor, and with whom I concerned myself only as much as was absolutely necessary. I described him, according to the form and content of his immortal work, “as a green schoolboy of rare immaturity, so to speak, the Karlchen Mißnick of the Russian revolutionary youth”, and I commiserated the editor of “Vorwärts” for considering it necessary to bandy words with such an opponent. How soon I was to learn that the lad Karl was beginning to become terrible also to me and to embroil me in polemics with him. He issues a work:
“Offener Brief an Herrn
Friedrich
Engels” by Peter Tkatschow,
Zurich, Typographie der “Tagwacht”, 1874. That all sorts of little matters are pinned on me in it, of which Mr Tkatschow must know that I never maintained them, would be a matter of indifference to me; but that he gives the German workers a completely false presentation of the state of affairs in Russia, in order thereby to justify the activity of the Bakuninists in relation to Russia, makes a reply necessary.

Throughout his “Open Letter” Mr Tkatschow poses as the representative of the Russian revolutionary youth. He asserts that I had “given the Russian revolutionaries ... advice, ... admonished them to enter into an alliance with

me (!)”; at the same time I had, according to him, “depicted them, ‘the representatives of the Russian revolutionary party abroad’, their aspirations and their literature in the ‘most unfavourable colours before the German working-class world’”; he says: “You express to us
Russians
your deepest contempt, because
we
are so ‘stupid’ and ‘immature’,” etc. “ ... ‘green schoolboys’ (as you deign to call us)”—and finally comes the inevitable trump: “By mocking
us
you have done a good service to our common enemy, the Russian state.” Against him, Mr Tkatschow himself, I had “practised every possible kind of abuse”.

Now nobody knows better than Peter Nikititsch Tkatschow that there is not a word of truth in all this. In the first place, in the article in question I held no one responsible for the pronouncements of Mr Tkatschow but Mr Tkatschow himself. It never occurred to me to regard him as the representative of the Russian revolutionaries. If he appoints himself as such and shifts the green schoolboy and other pleasantries from himself to their shoulders, I must decidedly protest. Among the Russian revolutionary youth there are naturally, as everywhere, people of very different moral and intellectual calibre. But certainly, on average, even after full allowance for the difference in time and the essentially different environment, they still stand far higher than our German student youth ever stood, even in its best period, at the beginning of the thirties. No one but himself gives Mr Tkatschow the right to speak in the name of the whole of these young people. Indeed, although this time he emerges as a true Bakuninist, I doubt for the present whether he has the right to pose as the representative of those few Russian Bakuninists whom I characterised as “some immature students who puff themselves up frog-like with big words and finally devour one another”. But even if that were the case, it would only be a new edition of the old story of the three tailors in Tooley Street in London, who issued a proclamation: “We, the people of England, declare” etc.
(2)
First of all, therefore, it must be stated that the “Russian revolutionaries” remain out of the question now as before, and that instead of Tkatschow’s “we” we have to substitute “I” everywhere.

I am supposed to have given him “advice”! I am not aware of a single syllable of it. Some blows may have fallen on that occasion, Peter Nikititsch, but
advice
? Please oblige me with a polite proof.

I am supposed to have admonished him or his like to enter into an alliance with me, and moreover at the close of my last article. I will pay Mr Tkatschow ten marks in Bismarckian imperial coin if he can prove that.

I am supposed to have asserted that he is “stupid”, and he puts the word in quotation marks. Now while I do not wish to deny that in both literary products he has placed the light of his talent—insofar as there can be any question of it—under a considerable bushel, yet everyone can ascertain that in my article the word “stupid”
does not occur one single time
. But when there is no other way, Messrs. Bakuninists help themselves out with false quotations.

Furthermore, I am supposed to have “mocked” him and presented him “in a ridiculous light”. Herr Tkatschow will certainly never be able to force me to take his pamphlet seriously. We Germans stand strongly in the odour of tediousness and have surely deserved it often enough. But that does not lay upon us the obligation to be just as tedious and solemn as the Bakuninists on all occasions. The German workers’ movement has acquired a peculiarly humorous character through the skirmishing struggle with police, public prosecutors, and prison warders; why should I disown it? Herr Tkatschow has full permission to mock me as severely and to make me appear in a ridiculous light as he can manage, without foisting untruths upon me.

[“Der Volksstaat” No. 37, 2 April 1875]

And now the incomparable charge: By presenting Mr Tkatschow in the light corresponding to him and his works, I have thereby “done a good service to our common enemy, the Russian state”! Similarly, elsewhere he says: By describing him as I have described him, I violate “the basic principles of the programme of the International Working Men’s Association”! Here we have the genuine Bakuninist. The gentlemen, as true revolutionaries, permit themselves everything towards us, especially in the dark; but if they are not treated with the utmost deference, if their doings are dragged into the light,

if they are criticised and their claptrap is exposed, then one is serving the Emperor of Russia and violating the basic principles of the International. The exact opposite is the case. No one else than Mr Tkatschow has rendered a service to the Russian government. If the Russian police had any wit, they would distribute this gentleman’s pamphlet in masses in Russia. On the one hand, they could hardly find a better means of bringing the Russian revolutionaries, whose representative the author claims to be, into discredit with all sensible people. On the other hand, a few honest but inexperienced young people might possibly be led into foolhardy acts by it and thus deliver themselves into the trap.

But, says Herr Tkatschow, I have “practised every possible form of abuse” against him. Now, a certain amount of abuse, the so-called invective, is one of the most effective rhetorical forms, which all great orators have employed when necessary, and in which the most powerful English political writer, William Cobbett, possessed a mastery that is still admired and serves as an unsurpassed model. Herr Tkatschow, too, “uses abusive language” quite heartily in his pamphlet. So if I had used abusive language, that in itself would by no means be a wrong on my part. But since I never adopted a rhetorical tone towards Herr Tkatschow, since I never took him seriously at all, I cannot possibly have abused him. Let us see what I said of him.

I called him “a green grammar-school boy of rare immaturity”. Immaturity can refer to character, intellect and knowledge. As far as the immaturity of character is concerned, I had recounted the following from Herr Tkatschow’s own story: “A Russian scholar, who has a considerable reputation in his own country, becomes a fugitive and obtains the means to found a political journal abroad. He has hardly got that far when an unknown, more or less enthusiastic youngster comes to him, uninvited, and offers his collaboration, on the more than childish condition that he have an equal and decisive voice with the founder of the journal in all literary and financial matters. In Germany he would simply have been laughed at.” After that, I need hardly adduce further proof of immaturity of character. The immaturity of intellect is sufficiently proved by the further quotations from Herr Tkatschow’s pamphlet that follow below. As for knowledge, the dispute between the “Vorwärts” and Herr Tkatschow largely revolves around the following:

The editor of the “Vorwärts” demands that the Russian revolutionary youth should learn something, enrich themselves with serious and thorough knowledge, acquire the power of critical thought according to regular methods, work in the sweat of their brow at their own self-development and self-education. Such advice Tkatschow rejects with disgust:

“I must repeatedly voice the feeling of deep indignation which they have always stirred in me … Get learning! Get education! Oh God, and a living person can say that to living people! Wait! Study and get educated! But have we the right to wait” (with the revolution, that is)? “Have we the right to waste time on education?” (p. 14.) “Knowledge is indeed a necessary precondition of peaceful progress, but it is by no means necessary for the revolution” (p. 17).

If, then, Herr Tkatschow develops deep indignation at the mere demand to study, if he declares all knowledge superfluous for a revolutionary, and if, in addition, his whole writing betrays not the slightest trace of knowledge, he thereby issues himself a certificate of immaturity, and I have merely stated that. Now, someone who issues himself such a certificate can, by our standards, be at most on the educational level of a grammar-school boy. By assigning him to this highest possible level, I have thus done him perhaps too much honour, instead of abusing him.

Further, I said that Herr Tkatschow’s reflections were childish (the quotations in this article provide the proof), boring (the author himself will hardly deny this), contradictory (as the editor of the “Vorwärts” demonstrated to him), and forever going round in circles (which is also true). Then I speak of his great pretensions (which I have recounted from his own story) and absolutely worthless achievements (which the present article more than sufficiently demonstrates). Where, then, is the abuse? That I compared him to Karlchen Mißnick, the most popular grammar-school boy in Germany and one of the most popular German writers, is certainly not abusive. But wait! Did I not claim that he had retired to his tent like Achilles and from there fired off his pamphlet against the “Vorwärts”? There’s the rub. With a man who is already put in a rage by the mere word study, who could boldly take as his motto Heine’s lines:

And all his ignorance
He has acquired himself,

one can assume that the name Achilles occurs to him here for the first time. And since I bring Achilles into connection with “tent” and “fired off”, Herr Tkatschow may imagine that this Achilles is a Russian corporal or a Turkish bashi-bazouk, and that it is therefore contrary to regulations to call him an Achilles as an insult. But I can assure Herr Tkatschow that the Achilles of whom I speak was the greatest hero of Greek legend, and that his withdrawal to his tent provided the subject-matter for the most magnificent heroic epic of all time, the Iliad, a fact which even Herr Bakunin will confirm for him. Should this conjecture of mine be correct, I should indeed be obliged to declare that Herr Tkatschow is *not* a grammar-school boy.

Further, Herr Tkatschow says:

“Despite all that, I nevertheless took the liberty of expressing the conviction that the social revolution is easy to call into being. ‘If it is so easy to call it into being,’ you remark, ‘why do you not do it, instead of talking about it?’ – It strikes you as a ridiculous, childish behaviour … I and my like-minded comrades are convinced that the feasibility of the social revolution in Russia presents no difficulties, that at any moment it is possible to move the Russian people to a general revolutionary protest (!). This conviction certainly commits us to a certain degree of practical activity, but it does not speak in the slightest against the usefulness and necessity of literary propaganda. It is not enough that *we* are convinced of it; we want others to share this conviction with us. The more like-minded comrades we have, the stronger we shall feel, and the easier it will be for us to solve the task practically.”

That really beats the Dutch. It sounds so nice, so reasonable, so well-mannered, so plausible. It sounds exactly as though Herr Tkatschow had written his pamphlet only to prove the usefulness of literary propaganda, and I, an impatient greenhorn, had answered him: To the devil with literary propaganda, now is the time to strike! – And what is the real situation?

Herr Tkatschow begins his pamphlet by giving a vote of no confidence in journal propaganda (and that is surely the most effective literary propaganda), saying that “not too many revolutionary forces should be expended on it”, for “if improperly used it causes far more harm than it does good when properly used”. That is how enthusiastic our Tkatschow is about literary propaganda in general. But in particular, if one wants to carry on such propaganda, to win like-minded comrades, mere declamation is of no avail; one must enter into reasons, that is, treat the matter theoretically, and in the last resort scientifically. On this point Herr Tkatschow says to the editor of the “Vorwärts”:

“Your philosophical struggle, that purely theatrical, scientific propaganda to which your journal has devoted itself, … is from the standpoint of the interests of the revolutionary party not only useless, it is even harmful.”

We see, the more we examine Herr Tkatschow’s views on literary propaganda, the more we get bogged down, the less we find out what he wants. What does he really want, then? Let us hear more:

“Can you not grasp that the revolutionary always and must always claim the right to call the people to insurrection; that he distinguishes himself from the philistine philosopher by not waiting until the course of historical events indicates the moment, but by choosing this moment himself; that he knows the people are always ready for revolution (p. 10) … He who does not believe in the possibility of revolution in the present, does not believe in the people, does not believe in the people’s readiness for revolution (p. 11) … This is why we cannot wait, why we maintain that in Russia the revolution is urgently necessary, and necessary precisely at the *present time*; we permit no hesitation and no delay. Now or very late, perhaps never (p. 16)! … Every people delivered up to arbitrary rule, toiled to death by exploiters … every such people (and *all* peoples are in this situation) is, by virtue of the very conditions of its social circumstances – revolutionary; it can always, it *always wants* to make the revolution; it is always ready for revolution (p. 17) … But we cannot and we will not wait (p. 34) … Now is no time for lengthy preparations and endless preliminaries – let each pack up his belongings and set out in haste. The question of what is at stake must no longer occupy us. That was settled long ago. It is to make the revolution. – How? In whatever way each can and understands.” (p. 39.)

This seemed clear enough to me. I therefore asked Karlchen Mißnick: If it absolutely cannot be helped, if the people are ready for revolution and so are you, if you really will not and cannot wait any longer and have no right to wait, if you claim the right to choose the moment to strike, and if, finally, it is: Now or never! – then, dearest Karlchen, do what you can’t help doing, make the revolution this very day and smash the Russian state into a thousand pieces, or else you will end by causing an even greater disaster!

And what does Karlchen Mißnick do? Does he strike? Does he destroy the Russian state? Does he free the Russian people, “this unhappy people, streaming with blood, with the crown of thorns, nailed to the cross of slavery”, for whose sufferings he can wait no longer?

Not a bit of it. Karlchen Mißnick, with tears of injured innocence on his face, steps before the German workers and says: Look what the reprobate Engels is attributing to me: I had spoken of striking immediately; but that is not at all what it is about; it is about making literary *propaganda*, and this Engels, who himself does nothing but literary propaganda, is not ashamed to give the impression that he does “not understand the usefulness of literary propaganda”.

Wait! Make literary propaganda! But have we the right to wait, have we the right to waste time on literary propaganda? For every minute, every hour by which the revolution is delayed costs the people a thousand victims (p. 14)! Now is no time for literary propaganda; the revolution must be made now or perhaps never – we permit no hesitation and no delay. And now we are supposed to make literary propaganda! Oh God, and a living person can say that to living people, and this person is called Peter Tkatschow!

Was I wrong to describe those strike-making rodomontades, now so infamously disavowed, as “childish”? They are so childish that one would think the author had done all he could in this respect. And yet he has even surpassed himself. The editor of the “Vorwärts” quotes a passage from a proclamation to the Russian peasants written by Herr Tkatschow. In it Herr Tkatschow describes the state of affairs after the completed social revolution as follows:

And then the little peasant, with song and music, would begin a merry life... his pouch would be full, not of copper groschen, no, of gold ducats. He would have all sorts of livestock and poultry in the yard, as much as he wanted. On the table he would have all sorts of meat, besides holiday cakes, besides sweet wines, and it would not be cleared from morning till evening. And he would eat and he would drink as much as a belly can hold, but work only as much as he pleased. And no one would dare compel him: go, eat! — go, lie down on the stove!

And the man who was capable of uttering this proclamation still complains when I restrict myself to calling him a green schoolboy of rare immaturity!

Furthermore, Herr Tkatschow says:

“Why do you reproach us with conspiracies? If we were to renounce conspiratorial, secret, underground activity, we should have to renounce all revolutionary activity whatsoever. But you also chastise us for refusing here, in the European West, to abandon our conspiratorial habits, and thereby disturbing the great international working-class movement…”

Firstly, it is false that the Russian revolutionaries have no means left other than pure conspiracy. Why, Herr Tkatschow has just now emphasised the importance of literary propaganda, infiltrated from abroad into Russia! Within the country, too, the path of oral propaganda, even among the people, especially in the towns, can never be entirely closed, whatever Herr Tkatschow may find it in his interest to say on the subject. The best proof of this is that in the recent mass arrests in Russia the majority consisted not of the educated or of students, but of workers.

Secondly, I undertake to fly to the moon before Tkatschow liberates Russia, as soon as the latter proves to me that I have ever declared, anywhere and at any time in my political career, that conspiracies are to be rejected altogether and under all circumstances. I undertake to bring him back a souvenir from the moon as soon as he proves to me that my article speaks of any plots other than the one against the International, the Alliance. Indeed, if only the Russian Bakuninist gentlemen really and seriously conspired against the Russian government! If, instead of basing fraudulent conspiracies upon lies and deceit against their fellow-conspirators, like the Netschayev affair — this, according to Tkatschow, “typical representative of our present-day youth” — instead of plots against the European workers’ movement like the Alliance, which was fortunately exposed and thereby destroyed, if they, the “doers” (deyateli), as they boastfully call themselves, would finally accomplish a deed that furnished proof that they really possess an organisation and that they are occupied with something other than the attempt to form a dozen! Instead, they shout out to all the world:

We are conspiring, we are conspiring! just like the conspirators in the opera, who bellow in four-part chorus: Hush, hush! Not a sound! And the whole glitter of far-flung conspiracies serves only as a cloak behind which nothing more is concealed than revolutionary inactivity with respect to governments and ambitious coterie intrigue within the revolutionary party.

And it is precisely because we ruthlessly exposed this whole swindle in the “Plot against the International” that these gentlemen are so indignant. That was “tactless”. When we exposed Herr Bakunin, we were supposedly seeking “to besmirch one of the greatest and most self-sacrificing representatives of the revolutionary epoch in which we live”, and with “filth” at that. The filth that came to light on that occasion was, down to the last ounce, Herr Bakunin’s own manufacture, and by no means his worst. The pamphlet in question still depicted him far too cleanly. We merely quoted §18 of the “Revolutionary Catechism”, the paragraph which prescribes how one is to behave towards the Russian aristocracy and bourgeoisie, how one is “to get possession of their dirty secrets and thereby make them our slaves, so that their wealth, etc., becomes an inexhaustible treasure and a precious support in all sorts of undertakings”. We have not yet related how this paragraph was translated into practice. But on that subject there is a long and broad tale to tell, which in due course will indeed be told.

It thus turns out that all the reproaches Herr Tkatschow has levelled at me, with that virtuous air of injured innocence which is so becoming to all Bakuninists, are based on assertions of which he not only knew that they were false, but which he himself had invented, fabricated, and lied into existence. With this we take our leave of the personal part of his “Open Letter”.

V

Social Relations in Russia

Prefatory Remarks to the Pamphlet “Social Relations in Russia”

Afterword (1894) [to “Social Relations in Russia”]

[“Der Volksstaat” No. 43, April 16, 1875]

Coming to the point, Herr Tkatschow informs the German workers that, with regard to Russia, I possess not even “scanty knowledge” but rather nothing but “ignorance”, and consequently feels impelled to explain the true state of affairs to them, and particularly the reasons why a social revolution is to be made in Russia just now with childlike ease, much more easily than in Western Europe.

“It is true that with us there is no urban proletariat; but then we also have no bourgeoisie… our workers will only have to struggle with political power — the power of capital is still in embryo with us. And you, my dear sir, will surely know that the struggle with the former is much easier than with the latter.”

The revolution aspired to by modern socialism is, briefly stated, the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie and the reorganisation of society by the abolition of all class distinctions. For this, not only a proletariat is needed to carry out the revolution, but also a bourgeoisie in whose hands the social productive forces have developed to such an extent that they permit the definitive abolition of class distinctions. Even among savages and semi-savages there are frequently no class distinctions, and every people has passed through such a condition. It cannot enter our heads to restore that condition, for it is precisely from it, with the development of the social productive forces, that class distinctions necessarily arise. Only after a certain degree of development of the social productive forces — for our present time even a very high degree — does it become possible to raise production to such a level that the abolition of class distinctions can be a real advance and can be lasting, without bringing about a standstill or even a regression in the social mode of production. This degree of development the productive forces have attained, however, only in the hands of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, therefore, is from this standpoint also just as necessary a precondition of the socialist revolution as the proletariat itself. Hence a man who can say that this revolution is easier to carry out in a country because, although it has no proletariat, it also has no bourgeoisie, thereby only proves that he has yet to learn the ABC of socialism.

Thus the Russian workers — and these workers are, as Herr Tkatschow himself says, “agricultural labourers, and as such not proletarians, but proprietors” — have it easier because they have to struggle not with the power of capital, but “merely with political power”, with the Russian state. And this state

“appears as a power only from a distance… It has no root in the economic life of the people; it does not embody in itself the interests of any order whatsoever… With you, the state is no mere apparent power. It rests with both feet on capital; it embodies in itself (!!) certain economic interests… With us, the matter is exactly the reverse — our social form owes its existence to the state, to the state that hangs, so to speak, in the air, which has nothing in common with the existing social order, which has its root in the past, but not in the present.”

Let us not waste time on the confused notion that economic interests need the state, which they themselves create, in order to receive a body; or on the bold assertion that the Russian social form (to which, after all, the communal property of the peasants belongs) owes its existence to the state; or on the contradiction that this same state “has nothing in common” with the existing social order, which is supposed to be its very own creation. Let us rather examine straightway this state “hanging in the air”, which represents the interests of not even a single order.

In European Russia, the peasants possess 105 million dessiatins, the nobles (as I shall briefly call the great landowners) 100 million dessiatins of land, of which roughly half belongs to 15,000 nobles, who consequently own on average 3,300 dessiatins each. The peasant land is thus only a trifle larger than the land of the nobles. The nobles, as we see, have not the slightest interest in the existence of the Russian state, which protects them in the possession of half the land.

Furthermore. On their half, the peasants pay 195 million roubles land tax annually, the nobles — 13 million! The lands of the nobles are on average twice as fertile as those of the peasants, because, at the settlement in connection with the redemption of the corvée, the state not only took from the peasants the greater part, but also the best part, of the land and assigned it to the nobles, and moreover the peasants had to pay the nobles the price of the best land for this worst land.(3) And the Russian nobility has no interest in the existence of the Russian state!

The peasants — the great mass of them — have been placed, by the redemption, in a most wretched, completely untenable position. Not only has the largest and best part of their land been taken from them, so that in all the fertile regions of the empire the peasant land — for Russian agricultural conditions — is far too small to live on. Not only was an exorbitant price charged them for it, which the state advanced to them and on which they now have to pay interest and gradually repay principal to the state. Not only is almost the whole burden of land tax shifted onto them, while the nobility gets off practically scot-free — so that the land tax alone devours the entire ground-rent value of the peasant land and more, and all further payments that the peasant has to make, of which we shall speak directly, are direct deductions from that part of his income which represents wages. No. To the land tax, to the interest and repayment instalment of the state advance, are added the provincial and district taxes since the newly introduced local administration. The most essential consequence of this “reform” was a new tax burden for the peasants. The state kept its revenues on the whole, but shifted a large part of its expenditures onto the provinces and districts, which therefore imposed new taxes; and in Russia it is the rule that the higher orders are almost free of taxes and the peasant pays almost everything.

A situation such as this is as if made for the usurer, and, given the Russians’ almost unparalleled talent for trade on a low level, for the exploitation of favourable business situations and for the cheating inseparable from it – Peter I already said that one Russian gets the better of three Jews – the usurer is never absent. When the time approaches at which the taxes fall due, the usurer, the kulak – frequently a rich peasant of the same commune – appears and offers his ready cash. The peasant must have the money under all circumstances and must accept the usurer’s terms

without a murmur. As a result he gets ever deeper into the mire and needs more and more ready money. At harvest-time the corn merchant comes; the need for money compels the peasant to part with a portion of the corn that he and his family need to live on. The corn merchant spreads false rumours to depress prices, pays a low price, and often pays even this partly in all sorts of goods charged at exorbitant rates; for the truck system, too, is highly developed in Russia. The great export of corn from Russia, one can see, rests quite directly on the starvation of the peasant population. – Another mode of exploiting the peasants is this: a speculator leases domain land from the government for a number of years, cultivates it himself as long as it yields good returns without manure, then divides it into plots and sublets the exhausted land at a high rent to neighbouring peasants who cannot make do with their own share of the land. As we had the English truck system above, so here we have exactly the Irish middlemen [Mittelsmänner (large tenants who sublet in small parcels)]. In short, there is no country in which, for all the forest-like primitiveness of bourgeois society, capitalist parasitism is as developed, covers the whole country, the whole mass of the people with its net, and entangles it, as precisely in Russia. And would all these exploiters of the peasants have no interest in the existence of the Russian state, whose laws and courts protect their nice and profitable practices?

Would the big bourgeoisie of St. Petersburg, Moscow and Odessa, which has developed at an unheard-of pace in the last ten years, particularly through the railways, and has merrily “crashed along” in the recent years of swindle, the corn, hemp, flax and tallow exporters, whose whole business is built upon the misery of the peasants, the whole of Russian large-scale industry, which exists only under the protective tariff granted to it by the state – would all these important and rapidly growing elements of the population have no interest in the existence of the Russian state? To say nothing of the countless army of officials that overruns and robs Russia and forms a veritable estate there. And when Mr Tkatschow assures us that the Russian state “has no root in the economic life of the people, does not embody in itself the interests of any estate whatever”, that it hangs “in the air”, we cannot help feeling that it is not the Russian state that hangs in the air, but rather Mr Tkatschow.

["Der Volksstaat" No. 44, 18 April 1875]

That the situation of the Russian peasants since their emancipation from serfdom has become unbearable and in the long run untenable, that for this reason alone a revolution is brewing in Russia, is clear. The only question is, what can be, what will be the result of this revolution? Mr Tkatschow says it will be a social one. That is pure tautology. Every real revolution is a social one, in that it brings a new class to power and allows it to reshape society after its own image. But he means to say it will be a socialist one; it will introduce in Russia the form of society striven for by West European socialism, even before we in the West attain it – and this under social conditions where proletariat and bourgeoisie occur only sporadically and at a low level of development. And this is supposed to be possible because the Russians are, so to speak, the chosen people of socialism, and possess the artel and communal property in the land.

The artel, which Mr Tkatschow mentions only in passing, but which we take up here because it has played a mysterious role among certain Russians ever since Herzen’s time, is a widespread form of association in Russia, the simplest form of free co-operation, such as occurs in hunting among hunting peoples. Both word and thing are not Slavonic but Tartar in origin. They are found among the Kirghiz, Yakuts, etc., on the one hand, as among the Lapps, Samoyeds and other Finnish peoples on the other.
(4)
Hence in Russia the artel originally develops in the north and east, in contact with Finns and Tartars, not in the south-west. The harsh climate makes industrial activity of various kinds necessary, the lack of urban development and of capital being then replaced as far as possible by that form of co-operation. – One of the most characteristic features of the artel, the joint and several liability of the members for one another vis-à-vis third parties, rests originally on a blood relationship, like the Gewere among the old Germans, the blood feud, etc. – Incidentally, in Russia the word artel is used for every kind not only of communal activity but also of communal institution. Even the stock exchange is an artel.
{9}
– Among the workers’

artels a headman (starosta, elder) is always elected, who acts as treasurer, bookkeeper, etc., and, where necessary, as general manager, and receives a special salary. Such artels are found:

1. for temporary undertakings, dissolving after these are completed;

2. for the members of one and the same trade, e.g. porters, etc.;

3. for properly industrial, continuous undertakings.

They are formed by a contract signed by all the members. If, however, these members cannot scrape together the necessary capital, which very often happens, e.g. in cheese-dairies and fisheries (for nets, boats, etc.), the artel falls to the usurer, who advances what is lacking at high interest and from then on pockets the greater part of the yield of labour. Even more hideously exploited, however, are those artels that hire themselves out en bloc to an employer as wage-labour personnel. They direct their industrial activity themselves and thereby save the capitalist the costs of superintendence. He rents the members huts for living quarters and advances them provisions, the most hideous truck system again developing in the process. So among the woodcutters and tar-burners in the Government of Archangel, in many trades in Siberia, etc. (see Flerovsky, “Polozenie rabocago klassa v Rossiji”. The Condition of the Working Class in Russia, Petersburg 1869). Here, therefore, the artel serves to substantially facilitate
the capitalist’s exploitation of the wage labourers. On the other hand, there are also artels that themselves in turn employ wage labourers who are not members of the association.

One can see, the artel is a co-operative society that has arisen in a natural, spontaneous way and is therefore still very undeveloped, and as such is by no means exclusively Russian or even Slavonic. Such societies form wherever the need exists. Thus in Switzerland in dairies, in England among fishermen, where they are even of very varied kinds. The Silesian navvies (Germans, not Poles) who built many a German railway in the forties were organised into full artels. The preponderance of this form in Russia proves, to be sure, the existence of a strong impulse to associate among the Russian people, but it by no means proves that this people is capable of leaping abruptly from the artel into the socialist social order with the aid of this impulse. For this it is necessary above all that the artel itself become capable of development, shed its naturally arisen form, in which, as we have seen, it serves capital more than the workers, and at least raise itself to the standpoint of the West European co-operative societies. If, however, we may believe Mr Tkatschow for once (which after all that has gone before is more than hazardous), this is by no means the case. On the contrary, he assures us with a pride highly characteristic of his standpoint:

“As regards the co-operative and credit associations artificially transplanted into Russia of late on the German (!) model, they have been received with complete indifference by the majority of our workers and have been a fiasco almost everywhere.”

The modern co-operative society has at least proved that it can carry on large-scale industry on its own account with profit (spinning and weaving in Lancashire). The artel so far is not only incapable of this; it even necessarily perishes in face of large-scale industry unless it develops further.

["Der Volksstaat" No. 45, 21 April 1875]

The communal property of the Russian peasants was discovered about the year 1845 by the Prussian Privy Councillor Haxthausen and trumpeted to the world as something quite marvellous, although Haxthausen could still find plenty of remnants of it in his Westphalian homeland and as a government official was even obliged to know them precisely. It was from Haxthausen that Herzen, himself a Russian landowner, first learned that his peasants held the land in common, and took the opportunity to present the Russian peasants as the true bearers of socialism, as born communists, as against the workers of the aged, decaying European West, who must first toil and moil artificially towards socialism. From Herzen this knowledge came to Bakunin, and from Bakunin to Mr Tkatschow. Let us hear him:

“Our people … in its great majority … are imbued with the principles of common possession; they are, if one may so express oneself, instinctively, traditionally communist. The idea of collective property is so deeply interwoven with the whole world outlook” (we shall soon see how far the world of the Russian peasant reaches) “of the Russian people that now, when the government is beginning to understand that this idea is incompatible with the principles of a ‘well-ordered’ society, and in the name of these principles wishes to imprint the idea of individual property on the popular consciousness and the people’s life, it can achieve this only with the aid of bayonets and the knout. From this it is evident that our people, in spite of its ignorance, stands much closer to socialism than the peoples of Western Europe, although the latter are more educated.”

In reality, communal property in land is an arrangement which we find at a low stage of development among all Indo-Germanic peoples from India to Ireland, and even among the Malays developing under Indian influence, e.g., on Java. As late as 1608, in the newly conquered north of Ireland, the legally existing communal property{10} in the land served the English as a pretext for declaring the land ownerless and, as such, confiscating it for the benefit of the Crown. In India, a whole series of forms of communal property{11} exists to this day. In Germany it was general; the communal lands still occurring here and there are a remnant of it, and often, especially in the mountains, clear traces are still to be found, such as periodic divisions of the common land, etc. The more precise evidence and details concerning ancient German communal property may be read in the various works of Maurer, which are classic on this point. In Western Europe, including Poland and Little Russia, this communal property became at a certain stage of social development a fetter, a brake on rural production, and was more and more eliminated. In Great Russia, on the other hand (i.e., Russia proper), it has survived to this day, thereby furnishing in the first place proof that rural production and the rural social conditions corresponding to it are still at a very undeveloped stage here, which is in fact the case. The Russian peasant lives and moves only in his commune; the entire rest of the world exists for him only in so far as it interferes with this commune of his. So much is this the case that in Russian the same word “mir” means on the one hand “the world”, and on the other “peasant commune”. “Ves’ mir” – “the whole world” – means for the peasant the assembly of the commune members. Thus, when Herr Tkatschow speaks of the “world outlook” of the Russian peasants, he has evidently mistranslated the Russian mir. Such a complete isolation of the individual communes from one another, which creates throughout the country identical interests, but precisely the opposite of common interests, is the natural basis for oriental despotism; and from India to Russia this form of society, wherever it predominated, has always produced it and always found its complement in it. Not only the Russian state in general, but even its specific form, the tsarist despotism, far from hanging in the air, is a necessary and logical product of Russian social conditions, with which, according to Herr Tkatschow, it has “nothing in common”! – The further development of Russia in a bourgeois direction would gradually destroy communal property here as well, without the Russian government needing to intervene with “bayonets and knout”. And this the more so, as the common land in Russia is not cultivated by the peasants in common and only the product divided, as is still the case in some parts of India; on the contrary, the land is distributed from time to time among the individual family heads, and each cultivates his share for himself. A very great difference in prosperity among the commune members is therefore possible, and it actually exists. Almost everywhere there are among them a few rich peasants – here and there millionaires – who act as usurers and suck the mass of the peasants dry. No one knows this better than Herr Tkatschow. While he imposes on the German workers the story that the Russian peasants, these instinctive, traditional communists, could have the “idea of collective property” driven out of them only by knout and bayonet, he himself relates in his Russian pamphlet, p. 15:

“In the midst of the peasants a class of usurers (kulakov), of buyers-up and leaseholders of peasant and noble lands is working its way up – a peasant aristocracy.”

These are the same sort of bloodsuckers that we have described in greater detail above. What again dealt the heaviest blow to communal property was the commutation of the labour services. The noble was assigned the largest and best part of the land; for the peasants there remained barely enough, often not enough to live on. At the same time, the forests were awarded to the nobles; the fuel, tool and building timber which the peasant had previously been free to fetch there he must now buy. Thus the peasant now has nothing left but his house and the bare land, without the means to cultivate it, and on average not land enough to support him and his family from one harvest to the next. Under such conditions and under the pressure of taxes and usury, communal property in land is no longer a boon, it becomes a fetter. The peasants frequently run away from it, with or without their families, to earn a livelihood as itinerant labourers, leaving their land at home.
(5)

One can see that communal property in Russia has long since passed its zenith and, to all appearances, is heading for its dissolution. Nevertheless, the possibility undeniably exists of transforming this social form into a higher one, if it lasts long enough until the circumstances are ripe for it, and if it shows itself capable of developing in such a way that the peasants no longer cultivate the land separately but in common(6); to transform it into this higher form without the Russian peasants having to pass through the intermediate stage of bourgeois parcel property. This, however, can only happen if, before the complete disintegration of communal property, a proletarian revolution is successfully carried out in Western Europe, furnishing the Russian peasant with the preconditions for this transformation, in particular also the material ones he needs in order to carry through the revolution of his entire agricultural system that is necessarily bound up with it. It is therefore pure humbug when Herr Tkatschow says that the Russian peasants, although “proprietors”, stand “closer to socialism” than the propertyless workers of Western Europe. Quite the opposite. If anything can still save Russian communal property and give it the opportunity to transform itself into a new, truly viable form, it is a proletarian revolution in Western Europe.

Just as lightly as with the economic revolution, Herr Tkatschow deals with the political one. The Russian people, he tells us, “protest unceasingly” against slavery, now in the form of “religious sects … refusal of taxes … robber bands” (the German workers will congratulate themselves that, according to this, Schinderhannes is the father of German Social-Democracy) “… incendiarism … uprisings … and therefore the Russian people can be called an instinctive revolutionary”. And thus Tkatschow is convinced “that it is only necessary to awaken the accumulated feeling of bitterness and discontent that … always boils in the breast of our people, simultaneously in several localities”. Then “the union of the revolutionary forces will come about of its own accord, and the struggle … must turn out favourably for the people’s cause. The practical necessity, the instinct of self-
preservation” then quite automatically brings about “a firm and indissoluble alliance among the protesting communes”.

It would be impossible to imagine a revolution in an easier and more pleasant manner. One strikes out in three or four places at the same time, and the “instinctive revolutionary”, the “practical necessity”, the “instinct of self-preservation” do everything else “of their own accord”. Why, given this playful ease, the revolution has not long since been made, the people liberated, and Russia transformed into the model socialist country, is simply impossible to comprehend.

In reality the matter is quite different. The Russian people, this instinctive revolutionary, has indeed carried out countless isolated peasant uprisings against the nobility and against individual officials, but never against the tsar, unless a false tsar placed himself at their head and claimed the throne. The last great peasant uprising under Catherine II was only possible because Jemeljan Pugatschow pretended to be her husband Peter III, who had not been murdered by his wife but dethroned and imprisoned, and had now escaped. The tsar, on the contrary, is the earthly god of the Russian peasant: Bog vysok, Car daljok – God is high and the tsar is far away – is his cry of distress. That the mass of the peasant population, particularly since the commutation of the labour services, has been placed in a situation which forces it more and more into struggle also against the government and the tsar, there is no doubt; but Herr Tkatschow may look for some other place to palm off his fairy-tale of the “instinctive revolutionary”.

And then, even if the mass of the Russian peasants were as instinctively revolutionary as possible, even if we were to imagine that revolutions can be made to order like a piece of flowered calico or a teakettle – even then I ask, is anyone over twelve years of age allowed to imagine the course of a revolution in so excessively childish a manner as is done here? And now consider that this was written after the first revolution manufactured according to this Bakuninist model – that of 1873 in Spain – had failed so brilliantly. There, too, they struck out in several places at the same time. There, too, they counted on the practical necessity, the instinct of self-preservation, bringing about of its own accord a firm and indissoluble alliance among the protesting communes. And what happened? Each commune, each town, defended only itself, there was no talk of mutual support, and with only 3,000 men Pavía put down one town after another in a fortnight
and put an end to the whole anarchic glory (see my “Bakunisten an der Arbeit”, where this is described in detail).

No doubt, Russia stands on the eve of a revolution. The finances are shattered to the extreme. The tax screw fails to do its work, the interest on the old state debts is paid with new loans, and each new loan encounters greater difficulties; indeed, money can now only be obtained under the pretext of railway construction! The administration, corrupt through and through from time immemorial; the officials living more from theft, bribery and extortion than from their salaries. The whole of rural production – by far the most essential for Russia – thrown completely into disorder by the redemption of 1861; the big landed property without sufficient labour-power, the peasants without sufficient land, crushed by taxes, drained dry by usurers; the agricultural production
{12}
declining from year to year. The whole thing laboriously and outwardly held together by an Oriental despotism, of whose arbitrariness we in the West are quite incapable of forming any idea; a despotism that not only comes into ever more glaring contradiction from day to day with the views of the enlightened classes and particularly those of the rapidly growing metropolitan bourgeoisie, but that has also, under its present bearer, lost faith in itself#, that today makes concessions to liberalism, only to withdraw them again tomorrow in alarm, and that thereby increasingly discredits itself. Meanwhile, among the more enlightened strata of the nation concentrated in the capital, a growing recognition that this situation is untenable, that an upheaval is impending, and the illusion of being able to channel this upheaval into a quiet constitutional bed. Here all the conditions of a revolution are united, a revolution that, initiated by the upper classes of the capital, perhaps even by the government itself, must be carried further by the peasants and driven rapidly beyond the first constitutional phase; a revolution that will be of the highest importance for the whole of Europe for the very reason that it will at one stroke destroy the last, hitherto intact reserve of all-European reaction. This revolution is surely approaching. Only two events could postpone it longer: a successful war against Turkey or Austria, for which money and reliable alliances are necessary, or else – a premature attempt at insurrection that would drive the propertied classes back into the arms of the government.

F. Engels

(1)
This was already stated in the
“Second Manifesto of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association on the Franco-Prussian War”
(dated 9 Sept. 1870).

(2)
What is the wager that Herr Tkatschow will say that, by the above anecdote, I have committed a betrayal of the proletariat, by making the tailors as
such
appear “in a ridiculous light”.

(3)
An exception took place only in Poland, where the government wanted to ruin the nobility hostile to it, but to win over the peasants.
{13}

(4)
On artels and other matters compare: “Sbornik materialov ob Arteljach v Rossiji” (Collection of Materials on the Artels in Russia), St. Petersburg 1873, 1st instalment.

(5)
On the situation of the peasants, compare, among others, the official report of the Government Commission on Rural Production (1873), further Skaldin, “W Zacholusti i w Stolice” (In the Remotest Provincial Corner and in the Capital), Petersburg 1870; the latter work by a liberal conservative.

(6)
In Poland, especially in the government of Grodno, where the nobility was largely ruined by the uprising of 1863, the peasants now frequently buy or lease noble estates and cultivate them undivided and
on joint account
. And these peasants have for centuries had no communal property and are not Great Russians, but Poles, Lithuanians and White Russians.