1. Correction.

Created on 04.03.1999

Friedrich Engels

Refugee Literature

Written May 1874 to April 1875.

The present printing (Articles I-V) is based on the publication in the *Volksstaat*.

Articles I, II and V have been compared with the text of the re-publication in the pamphlet *Internationales aus dem "Volksstaat" (1871-75)*, Berlin 1894. Significant deviations from the first publication in the *Volksstaat* are indicated in footnotes or annotations.

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 Communard Refugees

III.

IV.

V. Social Relations in Russia

I

A Polish Proclamation

[*Der Volksstaat* No. 69, 17 June 1874]

When the Emperor of Russia arrived in London, the entire police force there was already in motion. It was said the Poles intended 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 police in plain clothes; indeed, the police commissioner who had specially watched over the Poles in Paris under the Empire was summoned from there. The police precautions along the Tsar’s route from his residence into the City were drawn up literally on strategic principles – and all this trouble in vain! No Berezowski appeared, no pistol shot rang out, and the Tsar, who was trembling no less than his daughter, got away with no more than a fright. The trouble was not entirely in vain, however, for the Emperor gave every police superintendent who had been active on his behalf a tip of five pounds sterling, and every inspector two pounds (33 and 14 thalers respectively{1}).

In the meantime the Poles were thinking of quite different things 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 presence. With the exception of *Reynolds’s Newspaper*, the London press unanimously refused to print it: one must not insult the “guest of England”!

The address begins by pointing out to the English people that the Tsar is doing them not an honour but an insult when he visits them at the very moment when, in Central Asia, he is preparing everything to overthrow English rule in India; and that if England, instead of listening to the enticements of the Tsar, this supposed father of the peoples he oppresses, were less indifferent to the independence aspirations of the Poles, England as well as the rest of Western Europe could quietly suspend its colossal armaments. And this is perfectly correct. The background of the whole of European militarism is Russian militarism. Serving as a reserve on the side of France in the war of 1859, and on the side of Prussia in 1866 and 1870, the Russian army made it possible for the leading military power of the moment to beat its opponent in isolation each time. Prussia as the foremost military power in Europe is directly a creature of Russia, although it has since grown unpleasantly over the head of its patron.

The address continues:

“By virtue of its geographical position and its readiness at every moment to stand up for the cause of humanity, Poland has always been, and will always be, the foremost champion of law, civilisation and social development in all of North-Eastern Europe. Poland has demonstrated this incontrovertibly through its centuries of resistance against the invasions of the eastern barbarians on the one hand, and against 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 to devote themselves undisturbed to the development of their social vital forces precisely in the most decisive epoch of modern times? Because, and only because, the Polish soldier stood guard on the eastern marches of Europe, ever vigilant, ever ready to fire, ever prepared to stake his health, his property, his life. To the protection of Polish arms Europe owes the possibility that its newly awakening life in art and science, in the sixteenth century, could continue to develop, that trade, industry and wealth could attain their present astonishing heights. For example, what would have become of the heritage of civilisation acquired by the West through two hundred years of labour, had not Poland, although 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 through the brilliant victory beneath the walls of Vienna?”

The address goes on to develop 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 famous Russian historian, Pogodin, says in a work printed on the orders and at the expense of the Russian government that Poland, hitherto the thorn in Russia’s flesh, must become its right hand, by being restored as a small, weak kingdom under a Russian prince – this being the best way to catch 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 Slav tribes are now oppressed by Austria, Czechs, Croats, Hungarians (!), down to the Turkish Slavs, will yearn for the moment when they can breathe just as freely as the Poles will then do. We shall be a race of a hundred million under one sceptre, and then, come, ye peoples of Europe, and try your strength against us!”

Unfortunately, the only thing lacking in this fine plan was the principal thing: the consent of Poland. But

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

The address then develops further how Poland has confirmed this its unshakeable 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, through the Constitution of 3 May 1791, to raise the banner of the French Revolution on the Vistula – an act by which it placed itself far above all its neighbours. The old Polish management was thereby destroyed; a few decades of quiet development, undisturbed from outside, and Poland would have become the most advanced and powerful country east of the Rhine. But the partitioning powers could not tolerate Poland’s rising again, and even less its rising through the naturalisation of the revolution in North-Eastern Europe. Its fate was sealed: the Russians carried through in Poland what Prussia, Austrians and imperial troops vainly attempted in France.

“Kościuszko fought simultaneously for the independence of Poland and for the principle of equality. And it is world-known that from the moment of the downfall of its national independence, and despite this downfall, Poland, by virtue of its love of country as by virtue of its solidarity with all peoples struggling for the cause of humanity, has been the foremost champion of violated law, wherever that might be, fighting on every battlefield where tyranny was combated. Unbroken by its own misfortunes, undeterred by the blindness and ill will of the European governments, Poland has not for one moment neglected the duties imposed upon it by itself, by history, and by respect for the future.”

At the same time 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 manifestos of 1836, 1845 and 1863.

“The first of these manifestos proclaims, alongside the unshakeable national right of Poland, at the same time 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 delegates from all parts of Poland, expresses not only this equal rights but also the proposition that the peasants shall become proprietors of the soil which they have cultivated for centuries. – In the Muscovite plunder share{2}, the landowners, relying on the above manifestos as the foundations of the Polish national right, decided long before the imperial so-called emancipation proclamation to settle this internal affair, which weighed on their conscience, voluntarily and by agreement with the peasants (1859-1863). The Polish agrarian question was in principle solved by the Constitution of 3 May 1791; if the Polish peasant nevertheless remained oppressed, this was solely the fault of the despotism and Machiavellianism of the Tsar, who based his rule on the enmity between landowners and peasants. And this decision was taken long before the imperial proclamation of 18 February 1861; and this proclamation, applauded by all Europe and allegedly establishing the equal rights of the peasants, was only the cloak for one of the Tsar’s ever-recurring attempts to appropriate the property of others. The Polish peasantry is oppressed as before, but – the Tsar has become proprietor of the soil! And as punishment for the bloody protest which Poland raised in 1863 against the insidious barbarity of its oppressors, it has had to endure a series of brutal outrages before which even the tyranny of past centuries would shudder.”

“And yet neither the cruel yoke of the Tsar, although it has now weighed upon 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 their existence has as its first and last foundation brute force, the prison and the gallows, and their essential levers of action abroad are underground machinations, treacherous surprise attacks and, ultimately, violent conquest.”

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

However much Russia had developed since Peter the Great, however much her influence in Europe had grown (to which Frederick II of Prussia, though knowing perfectly well what he was about, contributed no small part), she remained essentially a power as extra-European as, for example, Turkey, right up to the moment when she seized Poland. 1772 was the first partition of Poland; as early as 1779, at the Peace of Teschen, Russia ³ already demanded the certified right of interference in German affairs. That ought to have been a lesson to the German princes; despite this, Frederick William II, he, the only Hohenzollern who ever offered serious resistance to Russian policy, and Francis II agreed to the total annihilation of Poland. After the Napoleonic wars, Russia on top of that took the lion’s share of the former Prussian and Austrian Polish provinces and now stepped forward undisguised as the arbiter of Europe, a role she continued uninterruptedly until 1853. Prussia was thoroughly proud to be allowed to grovel before Russia; Austria followed reluctantly, but at the decisive moment always gave way out of fear of the revolution, for which the tsar remained after all the last refuge. Thus Russia became the bastion of European reaction, without denying herself the pleasure of preparing further conquests in Austria and Turkey by means of Pan-Slavist incitements. During the years of revolution, the crushing of the Hungarians by Russia was a fact as decisive for Eastern and Central Europe as the June battle of Paris had been for the West; and when, soon afterwards, Emperor Nicholas sat in judgment in Warsaw over the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria, the domination of reaction over Europe was sealed along with the domination of Russia. The Crimean War freed the West and Austria from the insolence of the tsar; Prussia and the small German states grovelled before him all the more willingly; but already in 1859 he chastised the Austrians for their disobedience by seeing to it that his German vassals did not take their part, and in 1866 Prussia completed the chastisement of Austria. We have seen above that the Russian army provides the pretext and the backing for the whole of European militarism. Only because, in 1853, Nicholas, relying on his million soldiers – which, to be sure, existed for the most part only 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 France’s part was Prussia able to defeat France and complete the Prussian-German military monarchy. In all these great affairs of state we see the Russian army in the background. And even if – unless the internal development of Russia soon enters a revolutionary ferment – the victory of Germany over France will just as surely beget a war between Russia and Germany as the victory of Prussia over Austria at Sadowa brought the Franco-German war in its wake (1) – the Russian army will nevertheless always be at the service of the Prussians against a movement at home. To this very day, official Russia is the bastion and shield of all European reaction, its army the reserve of all the other armies that see to the keeping down of the working class in Europe.

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

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

Poland, far more even than France, is placed by its historical development and its present situation before the choice: to be either revolutionary or to perish. And with that falls all the foolish chatter about the essentially aristocratic character of the Polish movement. There are people enough in the Polish emigration who have aristocratic aspirations; but as soon as Poland itself enters the movement, it becomes revolutionary through and through, 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 completely at the height of the modern movement? Since Bismarck introduced the Kulturkampf in Posen ⁴ and, under the pretext of dealing the Pope a blow thereby, hunts down Polish schoolbooks, suppresses the Polish language, and bends every effort to drive the Poles into the arms of Russia, what happens? The Polish aristocracy attaches itself more and more to Russia, so as at least to reunite Poland under her rule; the revolutionary masses reply by offering their alliance to the German workers’ party and fighting in the ranks of the International.

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

A people that oppresses others cannot emancipate itself. The power it needs to oppress the others always turns in the end against itself. As long as Russian soldiers stand in Poland, the Russian people can liberate itself neither politically nor socially. But at the present stage of Russian development, there can be no doubt that on the day Russia loses Poland, the movement within Russia itself will become powerful enough to overthrow the existing order of things. The independence of Poland and revolution in Russia condition each other reciprocally. And the independence of Poland and revolution in Russia – which, given the boundless social, political and financial disruption and the corruption pervading the whole of official Russia, is far nearer than the surface indicates – mean for the German workers: confinement of the bourgeoisie, the governments, in short, reaction in Germany, to their own forces – forces with which we will, in time, be able to cope.

II

Programme of the Blanquist Communard 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 shadings group themselves together, accuse one another of having put the cart in the ditch, charge each other with treason and all possible other mortal sins. Meanwhile, lively connection is maintained with the homeland; they organise, conspire, print leaflets and newspapers, swear that things will start up again within twenty-four hours, that victory is certain, and, with that in view, already distribute the government posts. Naturally, disappointment follows disappointment, and since these are ascribed not to the inevitable historical conditions, which they refuse to understand, but to accidental mistakes of individuals, mutual accusations pile up, and the whole affair ends in a general uproar. That is the history of all groups of refugees, from the royalist émigrés of 1792 down to the present day; and whoever among the refugees has sense and insight withdraws from the sterile squabbling as soon as it can be done with decency, and does something better.

The French emigration after the Commune has likewise not escaped this inevitable fate. For a time compelled, by the European campaign of calumny which attacked all equally, and in London, specifically, by the common centre which it found in the General Council of the International, to suppress their internal dissensions at least before the world, they have in the last two years been no longer able to conceal the ever more rapidly progressing process of decomposition. Open strife broke out everywhere. In Switzerland, a part joined the Bakuninists, essentially influenced by Malon, who was himself one of the founders of the secret Alliance. Then, in London, the so-called Blanquists withdrew from the International and formed a separate group under the title: The Revolutionary Commune. Alongside this, a host of other groups arose later, which, however, remain in a state of continual transformation and fusion and have produced nothing noteworthy even in the way of manifestoes, whereas the Blanquists have just, in a proclamation to the “Communeux,” brought their programme to the attention of all the world.

These Blanquists are so called not as a group founded by Blanqui – only a couple of the 33 signatories of this programme have probably ever spoken with Blanqui – but because they wish to be active in his spirit and after his tradition. Blanqui is essentially a political revolutionary; a socialist only through sentiment, sympathising with the sufferings of the people, but he has neither a socialist theory nor definite practical proposals for social remedies. In his political activity he was essentially a “man of action,” believing that a small, well-organised minority, which attempts a revolutionary coup de main at the right moment, can, by a few initial successes, carry the mass of the people with it and thus make a victorious revolution. Under Louis-Philippe, he could, of course, only organise this nucleus as a secret society, and then what usually happens in conspiracies happened: the people, weary of the eternal put-offs with empty promises that things would soon start, at last lost all patience, became rebellious, and so the only choice remained: either let the conspiracy fall apart or strike without any external occasion at all. They struck (12 May 1839) and were crushed in an instant. By the way, this Blanquist conspiracy was the only one in which the police were never able to gain a footing; the blow came to them like a bolt from the blue. – From Blanqui’s conception of every revolution as the coup de main of a small revolutionary minority, there follows of itself the necessity of dictatorship after success: of the dictatorship, be it understood, not of the whole revolutionary class, of the proletariat, but of the small number of those who have carried out the coup de main and who are themselves already organised in advance under the dictatorship of one or a few persons.

One can see that Blanqui is a revolutionary of the previous generation. For the German workers’ party at least, these ideas about the course of revolutionary events have long been obsolete, and even in France they will be able to find an echo only among the less mature or the more impatient workers. We shall also find that, in the programme before us, they are subjected to certain limitations. But among our London Blanquists, too, it is a fundamental tenet: that revolutions are not something that make themselves, but are made; that they are made by a comparatively small minority, and according to a plan drawn up in advance; and finally, that the thing is always ‘on the point of breaking out’ at any moment. With such tenets one is, of course, delivered up irredeemably to all the self-deceptions of exile-dom and must plunge from one folly into the next. Above all, they want to play at being Blanqui, the ‘man of action’. But good will is of little help here; not everyone, after all, possesses Blanqui’s revolutionary instinct and swift decisiveness, and however much Hamlet may prate about 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 then fall into a contradiction with themselves that is more comic than tragic, a contradiction whose tragic quality is in no way heightened by the grim demeanour with which they surround themselves, as though they were nothing but ‘Moors with the dagger in the robe’, a pose, incidentally, that never even occurs to them. What can they do? They prepare the next ‘break-out’ by drawing up proscription lists for the future, so that the ranks of those who took part in the Commune may be purified (épurée), which is why they are called the pure ones (les purs) among the other exiles. Whether they bestow this title on themselves I do not know; it would sit rather badly on various of them. Their meetings are closed and their decisions are supposed to be kept secret, which by no means prevents the whole French quarter from resounding with them the next morning. And as always happens with such serious men of action when there is nothing to do: they have got involved in a dispute, at first personal, then literary, with a worthy opponent, one of the most disreputable men of the little Paris press, a certain Vermersch, who published under the Commune the Père Dûchene, a pitiful caricature of Hébert’s paper of 1793. This fine fellow answers their moral indignation by declaring them all, in a pamphlet, to be ‘rogues or accomplices of rogues’, and heaping upon them a rare abundance of privy-vault swear-words:

Every word

Is a chamber-pot, and not an empty one.

And our thirty-three Brutuses find it necessary to scuffle in public with such an opponent!

If anything is certain, it is surely this: that the Paris proletariat, after the exhausting war, after the starving out of Paris and, especially, after the terrible bloodletting of the May days of 1871, needs a considerable period of quiet in which to gather strength again, and that any premature attempt at an uprising can only lead to a new, perhaps even more terrible, defeat. Our Blanquists are of a different opinion. The disintegration of the monarchist majority at Versailles announces to them

‘the fall of Versailles, the revenge of the Commune. For we are coming to one of those great historical moments, one of those great crises, when the people, while seeming to go under in its misery and to fall prey to death, resumes its revolutionary march forward with new strength.’

So the thing is about to break out again, and forthwith. This hope of an immediate ‘revenge of the Commune’ is no mere exile’s illusion; it is a necessary article of faith for people who obstinately set their minds on playing the ‘men of action’ at a time when, in their sense – the sense of the revolutionary strike – there is absolutely nothing to do. No matter. Since it is about to break out, the moment seems to them to have come ‘for everything in the emigration that still has any life in it to declare itself’. And accordingly, the thirty-three declare to us that they are 1. atheists, 2. communists, 3. revolutionaries.

Our Blanquists have this in common with the Bakuninists, that they want to represent the most far-reaching, the most extreme tendency. For which reason, incidentally, although they are at opposite poles in their aims, they often go along with them in their methods. It is a question, therefore, of being more radical than all the others on the subject of atheism. Fortunately, to be an atheist is no longer an art nowadays. Atheism is pretty much a matter of course among the European workers’ parties, although in certain countries it may often enough be like that of the Spanish Bakuninist, who declared: to believe in God is against all socialism, but to believe in the Virgin Mary is something quite different; every decent socialist must of course believe in her. In the case of the German Social-Democratic workers {5} one can even say that atheism has already outlived its usefulness with them; this purely negative word no longer has any application to them, since they stand in opposition to belief in God no longer in a theoretical sense, but only in a practical one: they have simply finished with God, they live and think in the real world and are therefore materialists. In France this will probably also be the case. But if not, nothing would be simpler than to see to it that the splendid French materialist literature of the last century is disseminated in large quantities among the workers – that literature in which the French spirit, in respect of both form and content, has achieved its highest so far, and which, given the state of science at that time, still stands infinitely high in content even today, and has never been equalled in form. But that cannot suit 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 humanity forever from this spectre of past wretchedness’ (God), ‘from this cause’ (the non-existent God a cause!) ‘of its present wretchedness. – 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 (instruction from above) is signed by two members of the Commune, who certainly had enough opportunity to learn: first, that one can order an immense amount on paper without its necessarily having to be carried out; and second, that persecution is the best means of promoting unpopular convictions! So much is certain: the only service one can still do God today is to declare atheism a compulsory article of faith and to outbid Bismarck’s Church Kulturkampf laws by prohibiting religion altogether.

The second point of the programme is communism. Here we already find ourselves on much more familiar ground, for the ship on which we sail here is called: Manifesto of the Communist Party, published in February 1848. As early as the autumn of 1872, the five Blanquists who seceded from the International had professed a socialist programme that was, in all essential points, that of present-day German communism, and had based their withdrawal solely on the fact that the International refused to play at revolution in the manner of these five. Now the council of the thirty-three adopts this programme with its whole materialist conception of history, even though the rendering of it into Blanquist French leaves a good deal to be desired – except where the Manifesto has been retained almost literally, as, for example, in the following sentence:

‘As the ultimate expression of all forms of bondage, the bourgeoisie has stripped the exploitation of labour of the mystic veils that formerly concealed it: governments, religions, family, laws, institutions of the past as well as of the present have finally presented themselves, in this society reduced to the simple antagonism of capitalists and wage-labourers, as the instruments of oppression with whose aid the bourgeoisie upholds its rule and keeps down the proletariat.’

Compare with this the Communist Manifesto, Section I:

‘The bourgeoisie has, in a word, replaced exploitation veiled in religious and political illusions by open, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. It has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science into its paid wage-labourers. It has torn the touchingly sentimental veil from the family relation and transformed it into a purely money relation,’ etc.

But as soon as we descend from theory into practice, the peculiarity of the thirty-three emerges:

‘We are communists because we want to reach our goal without stopping at intermediate stations, at compromises which only postpone victory and prolong slavery.’

The German communists are communists because they see clearly through all intermediate stations and compromises, which are created not by them but by historical development, the final goal: the abolition of classes, the establishment of a society in which no private property in land and in the means of production any longer exists. The thirty-three are communists because they imagine that as soon as they have the good will to skip intermediate stations and compromises the matter is settled, and that if – as is firmly established – it ‘breaks out’ in these days and they simply get hold of the helm, then the day after tomorrow ‘communism will have been introduced’. If that is not immediately possible, then they are simply not communists. What childish naivety – to cite impatience as a theoretically convincing reason!

Finally, our thirty-three are ‘revolutionaries’. In this field, as far as ranting high-flown words go, the Bakuninists have, as is well known, already accomplished everything humanly possible; nonetheless, our Blanquists have a duty to outdo even them. And how? As is well known, the entire socialist proletariat, from Lisbon and New York to Pest and Belgrade, immediately assumed collective responsibility for the actions of the Paris Commune. This is not enough for our Blanquists:

‘For our part, we claim our share of responsibility for those executions that struck the enemies of the people’ (during the Commune) (there follows the enumeration of those who were shot); ‘we claim our share of responsibility for those burnings that 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 people have finally calmed down enough to become capable of criticism, they necessarily conclude: We did much that we would have done better to leave undone, and we left undone much that we would have done better to do, and that is why things went wrong. But what a lack of criticism it is then to canonise the Commune outright, to declare it infallible, to claim that every house that was burned down, every hostage that was shot, received precisely what was due to them, down to the dot over the i! Does that not amount to maintaining that during the May week the people shot exactly those persons—and no more—who needed to be shot, burned exactly those buildings—and no more—that needed to be burned? Is that not the same as saying of the first French Revolution: every individual who was beheaded got his just deserts, first those whom Robespierre had beheaded, and then Robespierre himself? Such childishness results when fundamentally quite good-natured people give free rein to the urge to appear hair-raising.

Enough. Despite all the refugee follies and all the attempts, turning into the comic, to make the boy Karl (or Eduard?) appear frightful, a substantial advance in this programme is unmistakable. It is the first manifesto in which French workers declare for present-day German communism. And, moreover, workers of that tendency which holds the French to be the chosen people of the revolution, Paris to be the revolutionary Jerusalem. To have brought them to this point is the undisputed merit of Vaillant, who co-signed and who, as is well known, has a thorough knowledge of the German language and German socialist literature. The German socialist workers, however, who proved in 1870 that they are completely free of all national chauvinism, may certainly regard it as a good sign when French workers adopt correct theoretical principles, even though they come from Germany.

III

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

A review in the Russian language, in occasional volumes, appears in London under the title: "Vperëd!" (Forward!). It is edited by a personally highly respectable Russian scholar, P. L. Lawrow, whom the strict etiquette prevailing in Russian refugee literature forbids us to name. For even those Russians who give themselves out to be formal revolutionary cannibals, who declare any respect for anything to be a betrayal of the revolution, respect, in their polemics, the semblance of anonymity with a conscientiousness 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 perfectly well what the man’s name is. It cannot occur to us to blab a secret so well kept without any reason; but since the child must have a name, the editor of "Forward!" will, we hope, forgive us if, in this article and for brevity’s sake, we designate him by the popular Russian name of Peter.

Friend Peter is, in his philosophy, an eclectic who selects the best from all the different systems and theories: Prove all things; hold fast that which is good! He knows that everything has its good and its bad side and that the important thing is to appropriate the good side of everything without also taking on the bad side. Since, now, every thing, every person, every theory has these two sides, a good and a bad one, every thing, every person, every theory is, in this respect, about as good and as bad as every other, and it would therefore, from this standpoint, be foolishness to get heated for or against one or the other. From this point of view, the struggles and disputes among revolutionaries and socialists must appear as sheer insipidities, serving no further purpose than the enjoyment of their opponents. And nothing is more understandable than that a man who holds this view should attempt to bring all these mutually warring parties under one hat and earnestly implore them to stop giving the reaction this scandalous spectacle and instead to attack exclusively the common enemy. All the more natural when one has just come from Russia, where the workers’ movement is, as we know, so enormously developed.

The "Forward!" is, accordingly, full of admonitions to concord among all socialists, or at least to the avoidance of all public discord. When the attempts of the Bakuninists to subject the International to their rule by false pretences, fraud and lies brought about the well-known split in the Association, it was again the "Forward!" that exhorted unity. This unity could, of course, only be obtained by promptly submitting to the Bakuninists and handing the International over, 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 the Bakuninists out, and resolved to publish the documents justifying this expulsion.

Great was the lamentation at the editorial office of the "Forward!" that dear “unity” had not had the whole workers’ movement sacrificed to it. But even greater was the horror when the compromising Bakuninist documents actually appeared in the commission’s report (see: L’Alliance de la Démocratie Socialiste et l’Association Internationale des Travailleurs, German edition, Brunswick, Bracke). Let us hear the "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 gathered by hearsay and whose credibility consequently could not be incontestable for the authors."

And to prove to those who carried out the decision of the Hague Congress what a colossal crime they have committed, the "Forward!" points to a feuilleton in the "Neue Freie Presse" by a certain Karl Thaler, which,

"coming from the bourgeois camp, merits special attention because it most clearly proves the significance which the mutually accusing pamphlets of the fighters for supremacy within the ranks of the workers can have for the common enemies of the working class, for the bourgeoisie and the governments."

We note, first of all, that here the Bakuninists are simply cited as “Federalists,” in contrast to the alleged Centralists, as if the writer believed in this non-existent contrast invented by the Bakuninists. That this, however, is not the case in reality will be shown. We note, secondly, that from a feuilleton written to order in so venal a bourgeois paper as the Vienna "Neue Freie Presse," he draws the conclusion that real revolutionaries must not drag merely putative revolutionaries into the light, because these mutual accusations amuse the bourgeois and the governments. I believe the "Neue Freie Presse" and all that press riff-raff could write ten thousand feuilletons without this having the slightest influence on the stance of the German workers’ party. Every struggle includes moments in which one cannot deny the opponent a certain satisfaction if one does not want to do oneself positive harm. Among us, fortunately, things have reached the point where we grant the opponent this private pleasure if we thereby purchase real successes.

The main accusation, however, is that the report is full of private facts, whose credibility for the authors was bound not to be incontestable because they could only have been gathered by hearsay. How Friend Peter knows that a society like the International, which possesses its regular organs throughout the civilised world, can only gather such facts by hearsay is not stated. His assertion is, in any case, highly frivolous. The facts in question are authenticated by authentic documentary evidence, 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 wants to allow this to hold unconditionally, one thereby forbids all historiography. Louis XV’s relationship with Du Barry or Pompadour was a private affair, but without it the whole prehistory of the French Revolution is incomprehensible. Or, to come closer to the present: if some innocent Isabella is married to a man who, according to experts (Assessor Ulrichs, for example), cannot stand women and therefore falls exclusively in love with men—if, in her neglect, she takes men where 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, in reward for his heroisms performed à huis clos, is advanced to field marshal and prime minister, then displaced and overthrown by another, then drives out his unfaithful sweetheart with the help of other companions in misfortune, and, after all kinds of adventures, finally becomes dictator of Spain and so great a 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 would write about modern Spanish history and knowingly conceal this little episode from his readers would be falsifying history. And when one describes the history of a band like the Alliance, in which, alongside the deceived, there is such a mass of swindlers, adventurers, rogues, police spies, fraudsters and cowards, is one to falsify this history by knowingly concealing the individual knavish tricks of these gentlemen as “private facts”? Friend Peter may be horrified at this, but he can rest assured that we are by no means finished with these “private facts.” The material is piling up more and more.

When, however, the "Forward!" depicts the report as a botched work essentially composed of private facts, it commits an act that is hard to characterise. The man who could write such a thing had either not read the publication in question at all; or he was too limited or too biased to understand it; or he wrote something that he must have known was not correct. No one can read the “Complot contre l’Internationale” without convincing himself that the private facts sprinkled into it are the very least essential part, illustrations for the closer characterisation of the characters that appear later, and that they could all be struck out without the main purpose of the publication suffering in any way. The organisation of a secret society whose sole aim was to subject the European workers’ movement to the hidden dictatorship of a few adventurers, the infamies committed for this purpose, particularly by Netschajew in Russia—that is what the book revolves around, and to maintain that it revolves around merely private matters is, to put it mildly, irresponsible.

To be sure, it may have been awkward for many a Russian to see the dirty side—and it is very dirty indeed—of the Russian movement so suddenly and mercilessly laid bare to Western Europe. But whose fault is that? Whose, if not that of those very Russians who represent this dirty side, who, not content with deceiving their own countrymen, ventured to attempt to make the entire European working-class movement subservient to their personal ends? Had Bakunin and his consorts confined 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 seen to that. But the moment those gentlemen, who do not understand even the rudiments of the conditions and the course of development of the West European working-class movement, seek to play the dictator among us, the joke comes to an end: one simply gives them a piece of one's mind.

Besides, the Russian movement can calmly 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 throws up a humbug like Bakunin and a few immature students who puff themselves up like frogs with big words and end up devouring one another. And even among the younger Russians we know people of outstanding theoretical as well as practical talent and high energy, people who, by virtue of their knowledge of languages, are ahead of the French and English in their intimate acquaintance with the movement in the various countries, and ahead of the Germans in their worldly savoir-faire. Those Russians who understand and take part in the working-class movement can only regard it as a service rendered to them that they have been freed from co-responsibility for the Bakuninist villainies. All of which does not, however, prevent the *Vorwärts* from concluding its report with the words:

“We do not know what the authors of this pamphlet think of the results achieved by it. 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 columns.”

With this oppressive feeling of our friend Peter’s the first section of our tale concludes. The second begins with the following sentence from the same volume of the *Vorwärts*:

“We delight our readers with yet another piece of news of a similar kind. With us, in our ranks, 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 reinforcing our ranks.”

Who the well-known writer Tkatschow is we learn from a Russian pamphlet: “The Tasks of Revolutionary Propaganda in Russia”, which he himself published in April 1874 and which characterizes him as a callow schoolboy of rare immaturity, the Charlie Mischief, as it were, of the Russian revolutionary youth. He tells us that he was invited from many quarters to take part in the *Vorwärts*; that he knew the editor to be a reactionary; nevertheless he considered it his duty to take the *Vorwärts* under his wing—which, be it noted, had not asked him to do so at all. Scarcely arrived, he finds to his astonishment that the editor, friend Peter, arrogates to himself the final decision on the acceptance or rejection of articles. Such an undemocratic procedure naturally arouses his indignation; he draws up a lengthy document in which, for himself and all the other contributors (who, be it noted, had not asked for this at all), “in the name of justice, on the ground of purely theoretical considerations... claims equality of rights and obligations” (with the chief editor) “in relation to everything concerning the literary and economic side of the enterprise”.

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

Here at once the immaturity that, while not predominant in the Russian refugee movement, is nevertheless more or less tolerated, reveals itself. A Russian scholar, who enjoys a considerable reputation in his own country, becomes a refugee and procures the means to found a political journal abroad. Hardly has he got so far, when any more or less enthusiastic youth turns up, uninvited, and offers his collaboration on the more than infantile condition that he have an equally decisive voice in all literary and financial questions with the founder of the journal. In Germany he would simply have been laughed at. But the Russians are not so rude. Friend Peter does his utmost to convince him, likewise “in the name of justice and on the ground of purely theoretical considerations”, of his error, naturally in vain. The offended Tkatschow retires like Achilles to his tent, and from there fires off his pamphlet against friend Peter, whom he labels a “philistine philosopher”.

With an oppressive heap of eternally repeated Bakuninist phrases on the nature of the 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 consciousness of its needs”. But whoever wants that, he says, 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 is 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 is not self-evident, the author quotes an utterance of Nechayev, that “typical representative of our modern youth”. Friend Peter says we must wait until the people is ready for revolution—“but we cannot and we will not wait”; the true revolutionary is distinguished from the philistine philosopher by the fact that he “arrogates to himself the right to call the people to revolution at any time”. And so forth.

With us, in the European West, one would simply crush all these puerilities with the retort: if your people is ready for revolution at any time, if you arrogate to yourselves the right to call it to revolution at any time, and if you absolutely cannot wait, then why do you still bore us with your twaddle, why, the devil take it, do you not strike out?

But the matter is not so simple with our Russians. Friend Peter finds that the puerile, tedious, contradictory, ever circling reflections of Mr. Tkatschow might exert upon the Russian youth the seductive attraction of a Venusberg, and, as the faithful Eckart of that youth, issues a warning admonition of sixty closely printed pages against them. Here he sets forth his own views on the nature of the revolution, examines in all seriousness whether the people is ready for revolution or not, whether and under what conditions the revolutionaries have the right to call it to revolution or not, and similar sophistries which, in such general terms, are worth about as much as the investigations of the Scholastics concerning the Virgin Mary. “The revolution” itself thereby becomes a sort of Virgin Mary, the theory a faith, activity in the movement a cult, and the whole discussion proceeds not on solid ground but in a cloud-cuckoo-land of general phrase-mongering.

In the process, 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 himself entering into polemics, cannot answer the accusations of his opponent without himself accusing the latter. With what an “oppressive feeling” this “sad phenomenon” takes place, friend Peter will himself tell us.

His writing begins as follows:

“Of two evils one must choose the lesser.

I know very well that all that refugee literature of mutually accusing pamphlets, of polemics as to who is a true friend of the people and who is not, who is sincere and who is not, and who, in particular, is a true representative of the Russian youth, of the genuine revolutionary party—that all that literature about the personal filth of the Russian emigration is both repugnant to readers and insignificant for the revolutionary struggle, and can only be gratifying to our enemies—I know this, and yet I find it necessary for me to write these lines, necessary to add one more piece with my own hand to the heap of these deplorable writings, to the boredom of readers and the delight of 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 we have exposed—swindlers whom, as will be shown, he knows just as well as we do—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 must first burn on his own fingernails before he realises that there may be still greater evils than a little sharp polemics against people who, under the cover of allegedly revolutionary activity, strive to falsify and destroy the entire European working-class movement?

But let us be indulgent with friend Peter; fate has handled him roughly enough. Hardly has he been obliged, with full consciousness of guilt, to do what he reproaches us for, than Nemesis drives him further and compels him to supply Mr. Karl Thaler with new material for possible feuilletons in the *Neue Freie Presse*.

“Or”, he asks the ever ready striker Tkatschow, “has your agitation already completed its work? Is your organisation perhaps ready? Ready? Really ready? And have we not then that famous secret committee of ‘typical’ revolutionaries, the committee that consists of two men and sends round decrees? Our youth has been told so many lies, been cheated so often, had its trust so shamefully abused, that it will not believe in the readiness of the revolutionary organisation all at once.”

That the “two men” are called Bakunin and Nechayev need not, of course, be added for the Russian reader.

“But there are people who pretend to be friends of the people, adherents of the social revolution, and at the same time introduce into their activity that mendacity and double-dealing which I have characterised above as a belching up of the old society. … These people took advantage of the bitterness of the adherents of the new order of society 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 deception of their co-workers, deception of the people they professed to serve. They were ready to lie to one and all, simply to organise a sufficiently strong party, as if a strong social-revolutionary party could be created without the sincere solidarity of its members! They were at hand to stir up among the people the old passions of robbery and enjoyment without labour … They were at hand to exploit their friends and comrades, to make them tools of their plans; they were at hand to defend, in words, the completest independence and autonomy of individuals and sections, while at the same time organising the most emphatic secret dictatorship and training their adherents to the most sheep-like, most thoughtless obedience, as if the social revolution could be made by an union of exploiters and exploited, by a group of people whose actions, at every step, slap in the face everything their words preach!”

It is incredible but true: these lines, which resemble an excerpt from the “Complot against the International” as closely as one egg resembles another, were written by the same man who, a few months earlier, had portrayed that work, because of its attacks on these very same people—attacks matching exactly the lines above—as a crime against the common cause. Well, we may be content.

And if we now look back at Herr Tkatschow with his great pretensions and absolutely nil achievements, and at the little mishap that befell our friend Peter on this occasion, 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 read them and with which, in fulfilment of our duty as chroniclers, we record these ‘peculiar’ phenomena in our pages.”

But joking apart. A mass of strange phenomena in the Russian movement up to now is explained by the fact that for a long time every Russian writing was a book with seven seals to the West, and that it was therefore easy for Bakunin and his consorts to conceal from the West their doings, long familiar among the Russians. Zealously they spread the assertion that even the dirty sides of the Russian movement had to be kept secret from the West—in the interest of the movement itself; whoever communicated to the rest of Europe anything Russian, in so far as it was of an unpleasant nature, was a traitor. That has now ceased. The knowledge of the Russian language—a language which richly repays study both on its own account, as one of the most vigorous and richest of living languages, and on account of the literature it unlocks—is at least no longer such a rarity among the German Social-Democrats. The Russians will have to resign themselves to the inevitable international destiny that their movement henceforth 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 that isolation they could never have been swindled for years as shamefully as happened through Bakunin and his consorts. Those who will draw the most benefit from the criticism of the West, from the international interaction of the various West European movements upon the Russian one and vice versa, and from the finally accomplished merging of the Russian movement into the all-European one—are the Russians themselves.

IV

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

A misfortune has befallen the readers of the “Volksstaat”. Some of them may perhaps recall that in my last article on “Refugee Literature” (Nos. 117 and 118) I dealt with several passages from the Russian journal “Vorwärts” as well as with a pamphlet by its editor. In the process, quite incidentally, mention was made of a certain Herr Peter Tkatschow, who had issued a little tract against the said editor, and with whom I concerned myself only as far as was absolutely necessary. I characterised him according to the form and content of his immortal work “as a green schoolboy of rare immaturity, so to speak, as the little Karl Mischief of the Russian revolutionary youth”, and I commiserated the editor of “Vorwärts” for deeming it necessary to tangle with such an opponent. How soon was I to learn that the boy Karl is beginning to become frightful to me as well, and is involving me, too, in polemics with him. He issues a writing: “Open Letter to Herr Friedrich Engels” by Peter Tkatschow, Zurich, Typography of the “Tagwacht”, 1874. That all sorts of little trifles are pinned on me in it, which Herr Tkatschow must know I have never asserted, would be a matter of indifference to me; but that he gives the German workers a totally false presentation of the state of affairs in Russia, in order thereby to justify the activity of the Bakuninists in relation to Russia—that makes a reply necessary.

Herr Tkatschow, in his “Open Letter”, purports throughout to be the representative of the Russian revolutionary youth. I had, he claims, “given the Russian revolutionaries ... advice, ... exhorted them to enter an alliance with me (!)”; at the same time I had depicted them, “the representatives of the Russian revolutionary party abroad”, their strivings and their literature “in the most unfavourable colours before the German working-class world”; he says: “You give expression to your deepest contempt for us Russians because we are so ‘stupid’ and ‘immature’”, etc. “ ... ‘green schoolboys’ (as you deign to call us)”—and finally follows the inevitable trump: “In mocking us you have rendered a good service to our common enemy, the Russian state.” Against him, Herr Tkatschow himself, I have “exercised myself in all possible kinds of abuse”.

Now, nobody knows better than Pyotr Nikitich Tkatschow that there is not a true word in all this. In the first place, in the article in question I made nobody responsible for the pronouncements of Herr Tkatschow except Herr Tkatschow. 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 his own shoulders onto theirs, I must decidedly protest. Among the Russian revolutionary youth there are, of course, as everywhere, people of very different moral and intellectual calibre. But certainly it stands on average, even after full allowance for the difference in time and the essentially different environment, still far higher than our German student youth ever stood, even in its best period, at the beginning of the thirties. No one but he himself gives Herr Tkatschow the right to speak in the name of the whole body of these young people. Indeed, although this time he turns out to be a true Bakuninist, I doubt for the time being whether he has the right to set himself up as the representative of those three or four Russian Bakuninists whom I designated as “a few immature little students who blow themselves up frog-fashion with big words and finally devour each other”. But even if this should be the case, it would only be a new edition of the old story of the three tailors of Tooley Street in London, who issued a proclamation: “We, the people of England, declare” etc. (2) Above all, then, it is to be established that the “Russian revolutionaries”, as before, so now, remain out of the question, and that instead of Tkatschow’s “we” we have everywhere to put “I”.

I am supposed to have “given” him “advice”! I do not know a single, solitary syllable of it. Blows, Pyotr Nikitich, may have been dealt out on the occasion, but advice? Pray kindly provide evidence.

I am supposed to have exhorted him or his kind to enter an alliance with me, and this at the close of my last article. I pay Herr Tkatschow ten marks in Bismarckian imperial coin if he proves it.

I am supposed to have said that he is “stupid”, and he puts the word in quotation marks. Although I will not deny that he has hidden the light of his talent—as far as there can be any question of it—under a fair-sized bushel in both his writings, anyone can satisfy himself that in my article the word “stupid” does not occur even once. But where there is no other recourse, the Bakuninists gentlemen help themselves with false quotations.

Furthermore, I am supposed to have “mocked” him and to have presented him “in a ridiculous light”. That I take his pamphlet seriously, Herr Tkatschow will certainly never be able to force me to do. We Germans stand strongly under the imputation of tediousness and have surely earned it honestly often enough. But that does not impose on us the obligation to be just as tedious and solemn, under all circumstances, as the Bakuninists. The German workers’ movement has taken on a peculiarly humouristic character through the guerrilla warfare with police, state prosecutors and prison warders; why should I disown it? Herr Tkatschow has full leave to mock me as sorely and to make me appear in a ridiculous light as he may manage, without imputing untruths to me.

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

And now the incomparable accusation: In making Herr Tkatschow appear in the light corresponding to him and his works, I thereby “rendered a good service to our common enemy, the Russian state”! In another passage it runs: In depicting him as I have depicted him, I violate “the fundamental principles of the programme of the International Working Men’s Association”! Here we have the true Bakuninist. These gentlemen, as true revolutionaries, allow themselves everything in their dealings with us, especially in the dark; but if one does not treat them with the highest reverence, if one drags their doings into the light, criticises them and their tinkling phrases, then one is serving the Emperor of Russia and violating the fundamental principles of the International. The matter stands exactly the reverse. Whoever has rendered a service to the Russian government is none other than Herr Tkatschow. If the Russian police had any wit, they would circulate the pamphlet of this gentleman in masses in Russia. On the one hand, they could hardly find a better means of bringing the Russian revolutionaries, whose representative the author purports to be, into discredit with all people of sense. On the other hand, a few good but inexperienced young people might possibly be seduced thereby into rashnesses and would thus deliver themselves into the net.

But, says Mr Tkatschow, I have “practised all possible kinds of abuse” against him. Now a certain amount of abuse, so-called invective, is one of the most effective rhetorical forms, employed by all great orators 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. In his pamphlet, Mr Tkatschow himself “abuses” quite thoroughly. If, then, I had abused him, that would still by no means have been any wrong on my part. But since I was not at all rhetorical towards Mr Tkatschow, since I did not take him seriously at all, I cannot have abused him at all. Let us see what I said about him.

I called him “a green schoolboy of rare immaturity”. Immaturity can relate to character, intellect, and knowledge. As for immaturity of character, I had, following Mr Tkatschow’s own account, repeated the following: “A Russian scholar, who has a considerable reputation in his country, becomes a fugitive and obtains the means to found a political journal abroad. Hardly has he got that far, when an uninvited, more or less enthusiastic youth turns up and offers his collaboration, under the more than childish condition of having an equal decisive voice with the founder of the journal in all literary and financial questions. In Germany, they would simply have laughed at him.” I need hardly adduce further proof of immaturity of character after this. The immaturity of his intellect is amply proved by the further quotations from Mr Tkatschow’s pamphlet below. As for knowledge, the dispute between *Vorwärts* and Mr Tkatschow largely revolves around this: the editor of *Vorwärts* demands that the Russian revolutionary youth should learn something, enrich themselves with serious and thorough knowledge, acquire critical thinking power by regular methods, work by the sweat of their brow on their self-development and self-education. Tkatschow rejects such advice with disgust:

“I have again and again to express the feeling of deep indignation which they have always aroused in me... Educate yourselves! Train yourselves! O God, and a living person can say that to living people! Wait! Study and undergo thorough training! But do we have the right to wait” (with the revolution, that is)? “Do we have the right to waste time on training?” (p. 14.) “Knowledge is perhaps a necessary precondition for peaceful progress, but by no means necessary for the revolution” (p. 17).

If, then, Mr Tkatschow develops a deep indignation at the mere call to study, if he declares all knowledge superfluous for a revolutionary, and if in his entire writing he betrays not the slightest trace of knowledge, then he thereby himself issues himself the certificate of immaturity, and I have merely stated this. Someone, however, who issues this certificate to himself can, according to our notions, at most stand at the educational level of a schoolboy. By assigning him to this highest possible level, therefore, instead of abusing him, I have perhaps done him too much honour.

Furthermore, I said that Mr Tkatschow’s reflections are childish (proof of this the quotations in this article), boring (the author himself will probably not deny it), contradictory (as the editor of *Vorwärts* has proved to him), and eternally going round in circles (which is also correct). Then I speak of his great pretensions (which I have repeated after him) and absolutely nugatory performances (which the present article more than sufficiently demonstrates). Where, now, are the abuses? That I compared him with little Karl Mißnick, the most popular schoolboy of Germany and one of the most popular German writers, is certainly not abusive. But stop! Did I not say after him that he had withdrawn like Achilles into his tent and from there fired his pamphlet against *Vorwärts*? That is probably where the rub lies. With a man who gets excited just by the mere word study, who could boldly take Heine’s words:

And his whole ignorance
He has himself acquired,

as his motto, one can well assume that the name Achilles appears to him here for the first time. And since I connect Achilles with “tent” and “firing”, Mr Tkatschow might imagine that this Achilles is a Russian non-commissioned officer or a Turkish bashi-bazouk, and that it is therefore contrary to regulations to abuse him by calling him an Achilles. But I can assure Mr Tkatschow that the Achilles I speak of was the greatest hero of Greek legend, and that that withdrawal into his tent supplied the material for the greatest heroic epic of all time, the *Iliad*, which even Mr Bakunin will confirm to him. Should this my supposition be correct, I would indeed have to declare that Mr Tkatschow is no schoolboy.

Further, Mr Tkatschow says:

“In spite of all that, I however took the liberty of expressing the conviction that the social revolution can easily be brought about. ‘If it is so easy to bring it about,’ you remark, ‘why don’t you do it instead of talking about it?’ – That seems to you 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 it is possible at any moment to induce the Russian people to a general revolutionary protest (!). Admittedly, this conviction commits us to a certain practical activity, but it speaks not 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, the easier it will be for us to solve the task practically.”

That really beats everything. It sounds so nice, so sensible, so well-behaved, so plausible. It sounds quite as if Mr 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 it’s time to strike! – And how does it stand in reality?

Mr Tkatschow begins his pamphlet right away by giving a vote of no confidence to journal propaganda (and that is surely the most effective literary propaganda), saying that one should “not use too many revolutionary forces on it,” for “when used inappropriately, it does incomparably more harm than it does good when used appropriately.” So much does our Tkatschow rave for literary propaganda in general. In particular, if one wants to carry on such propaganda, win like-minded comrades, mere declamation is of no help; one must go into reasons, therefore treat the matter theoretically, i.e., in the final analysis, scientifically. On this point Mr Tkatschow says to the editor of *Vorwärts*:

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

It can be seen, the more we examine Mr Tkatschow’s views on literary propaganda, the more we get stuck, the less we learn what he wants. What does he really want? Let us listen further:

“Do you not grasp that the revolutionary always claims and must claim the right to call the people to insurrection; that he distinguishes himself from philistine philosophers by, without waiting until the course of historical events indicates the moment – choosing this moment himself, that he knows the people always ready for revolution (p. 10) ... Whoever does not believe in the possibility of revolution in the present, does not believe in the people, does not believe in the readiness of the people for the 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 wavering. Now or very late, perhaps never (p. 16)! ... Every people abandoned to caprice, worn down 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 eternal preliminaries – let every one pack up his belongings and set out in haste. The question what is at stake must occupy us no longer. That has long been settled. What matters is to make revolution. – How? As each one can and understands.” (p. 39.)

This seemed clear enough to me. So I asked little Karl Mißnick: If then it absolutely cannot be otherwise, if the people is ready for revolution and you too, if you absolutely no longer want and cannot wait and have no right to wait, if you claim the right to select the moment to strike, and if finally the word is: Now or never! – well, dearest little Karl, then do what you cannot help but do, make the revolution today and smash the Russian state into a thousand pieces, or else you will end by causing an even greater calamity!

And what does little Karl Mißnick do? Does he strike? Does he destroy the Russian state? Does he liberate the Russian people, “this unfortunate people, streaming with blood, with the crown of thorns, nailed to the cross of slavery,” on account of whose sufferings he cannot wait any longer?

He thinks not of it. Little Karl Mißnick, with tears of injured innocence on his face, steps before the German workers and says: Look what that depraved Engels is imputing to me: I am supposed to have spoken of striking immediately; but it is not at all a question of that, but of carrying on literary propaganda, and this Engels, who himself does nothing but literary propaganda, does not blush to give the appearance of not understanding “the usefulness of literary propaganda”.

Wait! Carry on literary propaganda! But do we have the right to wait, do we have the right to waste time on literary propaganda? Does not every minute, every hour by which the revolution is delayed cost 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 wavering. And now we are supposed to carry on literary propaganda! O 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-mongering rodomontades, now so shamefully disavowed, as “childish”? They are so childish that one might think the author had, in this respect, done everything possible here. And yet he has even surpassed himself. The editor of *Vorwärts* communicates a passage from a proclamation to the Russian peasants written by Mr Tkatschow. In it Mr Tkatschow describes the condition after the completed social revolution as follows:

"And then the little peasant would begin a merry life with music and song ... his pocket would be full, not of copper groschen, but of golden ducats. He would have all manner of cattle and poultry in the yard, as much as he wanted. On the table he would have all sorts of meat, and holiday cakes, and sweet wines, and the table would not be cleared from morning till night. And he would eat and drink as much as his belly could hold, but work only as much as he pleased. And no one would dare to compel him: go, eat! – go, lie down on the stove!"

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

Moreover, Mr. Tkachev 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 whatever. But you also castigate us for being unwilling, even here in the European West ... to give up our conspiratorial habits, and for thereby disturbing the great international labour movement ...”

In the first place, it is false that no other means remains to the Russian revolutionaries than pure conspiracy. Has Mr. Tkachev himself not just now stressed the importance of literary propaganda, carried into Russia from abroad! Within the country too, the path of oral propaganda, even among the people, particularly in the towns, can never be wholly closed, whatever Mr. Tkachev 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 were not educated people or students, but workers.

In the second place, I undertake to fly to the moon before Tkachev liberates Russia, as soon as the latter shows me that at any time or in any place in my political career I declared that conspiracies are to be rejected in general and under all circumstances. I undertake to bring him back a keepsake from the moon, as soon as he shows me that in my article the talk is of other plots than the one against the International, the Alliance. If only the Russian Bakuninist gentlemen really and seriously conspired against the Russian government! If, instead of fraudulent sham conspiracies, founded on lies and deceit against fellow-conspirators, like those of the Nechayev affair – this “typical representative of our present-day youth”, according to Tkachev – instead of plots against the European labour movement, like the Alliance, which was fortunately exposed and thereby destroyed – if they, the “doers” (deyateli), as they boastfully call themselves, would at last accomplish a deed that provided proof that they really possess an organisation and that they occupy themselves 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! Make no sound! And the whole rigmarole of far-flung conspiracies serves only as a cloak behind which nothing more is concealed than revolutionary do-nothingness vis-à-vis the governments and ambitious clique intrigues inside the revolutionary party.

And it is precisely the fact that in the “Plot against the International” we ruthlessly exposed this whole swindle that so enrages these gentlemen. That was “tactless”. By exposing Mr. Bakunin, we sought “to besmirch one of the greatest and most self-sacrificing representatives of the revolutionary epoch in which we live”, and that with “filth”. The filth that came to light on that occasion was, down to the last ounce, Mr. Bakunin’s own manufacture, and by no means his worst. The publication in question depicted him far too cleanly. We merely quoted § 18 of the “Revolutionary Catechism”, the paragraph which prescribes how to behave towards the Russian aristocracy and bourgeoisie, how “to get hold of their dirty secrets and thereby make them our slaves, so that their riches, etc., become an inexhaustible treasure and a precious support in all manner of undertakings”. We have not yet related how this paragraph has been translated into practice. About that, however, there is a long and broad story to tell, which will indeed be told in due time.

Thus it turns out that all the reproaches which Mr. Tkachev has made to me, with that virtuous air of injured innocence that so well becomes all Bakuninists, are all based on assertions which he not only knew to be false, but which he had himself invented, trumped up, and lied through his teeth. With this we take leave of the personal part of his “Open Letter”.

V

Social Conditions in Russia

Preliminary remarks to the pamphlet “Social Conditions in Russia” Afterword (1894) [to “Social Conditions in Russia”] [“Der Volksstaat” No. 43 of 16 April 1875]

Coming to the point, Mr. Tkachev informs the German workers that, with regard to Russia, I possess not even “scanty knowledge”, but rather nothing at all beyond “ignorance”, and therefore feels himself impelled to explain to them the true state of affairs and especially the reasons why a social revolution can be accomplished in Russia right now with playful ease, far more easily than in Western Europe.

“We have no urban proletariat, that is certainly true; but then neither do we have a bourgeoisie ... our workers will have to fight only the political power – the power of capital is still in embryo among us. And you, my dear sir, will surely know that the struggle with the former is far easier than with the latter.”

The upheaval aspired to by modern socialism is, to put it briefly, the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie and the reorganisation of society through the destruction of all class distinctions. This requires not only a proletariat that carries through this upheaval, but also a bourgeoisie in whose hands the social productive forces have developed to such a degree that they permit the final destruction of class distinctions. Among savages and semi-savages, there are also frequently no class distinctions, and every people has passed through such a condition. It cannot occur to us to restore that condition, if for no other reason than that, out of it, with the development of the social productive forces, class distinctions necessarily arise. Only at a certain, and for our present historical conditions even very high, level of development of the social productive forces does it become possible to raise production to such a pitch that the abolition of class distinctions is a real advance, that it can be lasting, without bringing on a standstill or even a regression in the social mode of production. But the productive forces have reached this level of development only in the hands of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, therefore, is in this respect just as much a necessary precondition of the socialist revolution as the proletariat itself. Consequently, a man who can say that this revolution is easier to carry out in a country because, while it has no proletariat, it also has no bourgeoisie, proves thereby only that he has yet to learn the ABC of socialism.

The Russian workers – and these workers are, as Mr. Tkachev himself says, “agricultural labourers, and as such not proletarians but proprietors” – thus have it easier, because they do not have to struggle with the power of capital, but “only with the political power”, with the Russian state. And this state

“appears as a power only at a distance ... It has no roots in the economic life of the people; it does not embody in itself the interests of any estate whatever ... With you the state is no apparent power. It stands 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, so to speak, suspended in mid-air, a state which has nothing in common with the existing social order, which has its root in the past, not in the present.”

Let us not waste time on the confused notion that economic interests require the state, which they themselves create, in order to obtain a body, or on the audacious assertion that the Russian social form (to which, after all, the communal property of the peasants also belongs) owes its existence to the state, or on the contradiction that this selfsame state “has nothing in common” with the existing social order, which is supposed to be its very own creature. Let us rather examine at once this “state suspended in mid-air”, which does not even represent the interests of a single estate.

In European Russia, the peasants possess 105 million desyatinas, the nobles (as I call the large landowners for brevity) 100 million desyatinas of land, of which roughly half falls to 15,000 nobles, who thus possess, on average, 3,300 desyatinas each. The peasant land is therefore only a trifle larger than the land of the nobles. The nobles, as one can see, have not the slightest interest in the existence of the Russian state, which protects them in the possession of half the land. Furthermore. The peasants pay from their half annually 195 million rubles in land tax, the nobles – 13 million! The estates of the nobles are on average twice as fertile as those of the peasants, because during the settlement for the redemption of the corvées, the state not only took away from the peasants and awarded to the nobility most of the land, but also the best land; and what is more, the peasants had to pay the nobility 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 mass of them – have, through the redemption, been placed in a most wretched, completely untenable position. Not only were they robbed of the largest and best part of their land, so that in all the fertile regions of the empire the peasant land – for Russian agricultural conditions – is far too small for them to live from it. Not only was an exorbitant price charged them for it, which the state advanced and which they now have to pay interest on to the state and gradually amortise. Not only has almost the whole burden of the land tax been shifted on to them, while the nobility gets off almost scot-free – so that the land tax alone devours the whole ground-rent value of the peasant land and more, and all further payments the peasant has to make, and of which we shall speak directly, are direct deductions from that part of his income which represents wages. No, that is not all. To the land tax, to the interest and amortisation instalments on the state advance, there are added the provincial and district taxes since the newly introduced local administration. The most essential result 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 expenditure on to the provinces and districts, which thereupon imposed new taxes; and in Russia it is the rule that the higher estates are almost tax-free and the peasant pays almost everything.

A situation like that is as if made for the usurer, and given the Russians’ almost unparalleled talent for trade on the lower level, for exploiting favourable business situations and for the inseparable swindling that goes with it – Peter I already said that one Russian can deal with three Jews –, the usurer never fails to appear. When the time approaches when the taxes fall due, the usurer, the kulak – often a rich peasant of the same commune – arrives and offers his ready money. The peasant absolutely must have the money and must accept the usurer’s conditions without murmuring. This only lands him still deeper in the squeeze; he needs more and more cash. At harvest time comes the corn dealer; the need for money forces the peasant to sell off some of the corn that he and his family need to live on. The corn dealer spreads false rumours that depress prices, pays a low price, and even then often partly in all sorts of highly priced goods; for the truck system, too, is highly developed in Russia. Russia’s great corn export, as can be seen, rests quite directly on the hunger of the peasant population. – Another form of peasant exploitation is this: a speculator leases crown land from the government for a term of years, works it himself so long as it yields good returns without manure; then he divides it into plots and sublets the exhausted land at a high rent to neighbouring peasants who cannot make ends meet with their own share of land. Just as we had the English truck system above, so here we have exactly the Irish middlemen |middlemen (large tenants who sublet in small plots)|. In short, there is no country where, for all the primeval wildness of bourgeois society, capitalist parasitism is so developed, so covers and enmeshes the whole country, the whole mass of the people with its nets, as precisely in Russia. And all these peasant-suckers should have no interest in the existence of the Russian state, whose laws and courts protect their neat and profitable practices?

The big bourgeoisie of Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, which has developed at an incredibly rapid pace in the last ten years, especially through the railways, and merrily “joined in the crash” during the recent swindling years; the exporters of corn, hemp, flax and tallow, whose whole business is built on the misery of the peasants; the whole of Russian large-scale industry, which exists only by the protective tariff granted to it by the state – all these important and rapidly growing elements of the population should have no interest in the existence of the Russian state? To say nothing of the countless army of officials that overruns Russia, steals it empty and here forms a veritable estate. And when Herr Tkachov assures us that the Russian state “has no root in the economic life of the people, it does not embody within itself the interests of any estate”, that it “hangs in the air”, it seems to us that it is not the Russian state that hangs in the air, but rather Herr Tkachov.

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

That the situation of the Russian peasants has become intolerable, and in the long run untenable, since emancipation from serfdom, and that for this reason alone a revolution is brewing in Russia, is clear. The only question is: what can, what will be the result of this revolution? Herr Tkachov says it will be a social one. That is a pure tautology. Every real revolution is a social one, since it brings a new class to power and permits it to reshape society in its own image. But he means to say that it will be a socialist revolution, that 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 as well as 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 ownership of land.

The artel, which Herr Tkachov mentions only in passing, but which we take up here because it has played a mysterious role for certain Russians since Herzen’s time, the artel is a form of association widespread in Russia, the simplest form of free co-operation, such as occurs in hunting among hunting peoples. Word and thing are not of Slavic, but of Tatar origin. Both are found among Kirghiz, Yakuts, etc., on the one hand, and among Lapps, Samoyeds and other Finnish peoples on the other. (4) Hence the artel originally develops in Russia in the north and east, in contact with Finns and Tatars, not in the south-west. The harsh climate makes various kinds of industrial activity necessary, the lack of urban development and of capital then being 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, originally rests on ties of blood relationship, like the *Gewere* among the ancient Germans, the blood-feud, etc. – Incidentally, in Russia the word artel is used for every kind, not only of common activity, but also of common institution. The stock exchange, too, is an artel. {9} – In the workers’ artels an elder (*starosta*, eldest) is always elected, who attends to the functions of treasurer, bookkeeper, etc., and where necessary manager, and receives a special salary. Such artels exist:

1. for temporary enterprises, after the completion of which they dissolve;

2. for persons engaged in one and the same trade, e.g., porters, etc.;

3. for proper industrial, continuous enterprises.

They are established by a contract signed by all the members. If these members cannot scrape together the necessary capital, which very frequently happens, e.g., in cheese-making and fisheries (for nets, boats, etc.), the artel falls prey to the usurer, who advances the missing sum at high interest and from then on pockets the greater part of the proceeds of labour. Still more hideously exploited, however, are those artels that hire themselves out as a whole to an employer as wage-labour personnel. They manage their industrial activity themselves and thereby save the capitalist the cost of supervision. The latter rents huts to the members for dwellings and advances them provisions, whereupon the most hideous truck system develops again. Thus it is with the woodcutters and tar-burners in the Archangel Governorate, in many trades in Siberia, etc. (cf. Flerovsky, *Polozhenie rabochego klassa v Rossii*. The Condition of the Working Class in Russia, Petersburg 1869). Here, then, the artel serves to make it essentially easier for the capitalist to exploit wage-labourers. On the other hand, there are also artels that themselves employ wage-labourers who are not members of the association.

We see, the artel is a co-operative society that has arisen in a primitive, natural way and is therefore still very undeveloped, and as such by no means exclusively Russian or even Slavic. Such societies are formed everywhere where the need for them exists. Thus in Switzerland in dairying, in England among fishermen, where they are even of very varied kinds. The Silesian navvies (Germans, not Poles) who built so many German railways in the forties were organised in full artels. The predominance of this form in Russia certainly proves the existence of a strong drive to associate among the Russian people, but it is still far from proving that this people is capable of jumping straight from the artel into the socialist order of society with the help of that drive. For this it is needful above all that the artel itself become capable of development, cast off its primitive form, in which, as we have seen, it serves capital rather than the workers, and raise itself at least to the standpoint of the West European co-operative societies. But if we may believe Herr Tkachov for once (which, after all that has gone before, is, it is true, more than rash), this is by no means the case. On the contrary, he assures us, with a pride highly characteristic of his standpoint:

“As for the co-operative and credit associations artificially transplanted into Russia lately on the German (!) pattern, they have been received by the majority of our workers with complete indifference and have made 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). Up to now, the artel is not only incapable of this, but even necessarily succumbs to large-scale industry if it does not develop further.

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

The communal property of the Russian peasants was discovered around the year 1845 by the Prussian government councillor Haxthausen and trumpeted to the world as something quite miraculous, although Haxthausen could still have found plenty of survivals of it in his Westphalian homeland and, as a government official, was even obliged to know them exactly. It was from Haxthausen that Herzen, himself a Russian landowner, first learned that his peasants owned the land in common, and he seized the opportunity to present the Russian peasants as the true bearers of socialism, as born communists, in contrast to the workers of the ageing, rotten European West, who would have to toil and moil to acquire socialism artificially. From Herzen this knowledge passed to Bakunin and from Bakunin to Herr Tkachov. Let us hear the latter:

“Our people … in their vast majority … are imbued with the principles of communal property; they are, if one may so express it, instinctively, traditionally communist. The idea of collective ownership has become so deeply intertwined with the whole world outlook” (we shall see in a moment how far the world of the Russian peasant extends) “of the Russian people that now, when the government is beginning to grasp that this idea is incompatible with the principles of a ‘well-ordered’ society, and in the name of these principles wants to impress the idea of individual property on the consciousness and life of the people, it can achieve this only with the aid of bayonets and the knout. From this it is evident that our people, despite its ignorance, stands much closer to socialism than the peoples of Western Europe, even though these are more educated.”

In reality, communal property in land is an institution which we find at a low stage of development among all Indo-European peoples from India to Ireland, and even among the Malays developing under Indian influence, for example in Java. As late as 1608, the legally existing communal property {10} in the land in the newly conquered North of Ireland 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} has persisted down to the present day. In Germany it was universal; the common lands still occurring here and there are a survival of it, and distinct traces, in particular in the mountains, of temporary partitions of the common land, etc., are also often to be found. The more precise evidence and details concerning old German communal property may be consulted in the various writings 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 persisted to this day, thereby proving in the first place that rural production and the corresponding rural social conditions are still at a very undeveloped stage here, as is indeed the case. The Russian peasant lives and weaves only within his commune; the whole of the rest of the world exists for him only insofar 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 to the peasant the assembly of the commune members. If, therefore, 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 indeed creates identical, but the very opposite of common, interests throughout the country, is the natural foundation for Oriental despotism; and from India to Russia this form of society, wherever it predominated, has always produced it, has always found its complement in it. Not only the Russian state in general, but even its specific form, tsarist despotism, far from hanging in mid-air, is the 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 there as well, without the Russian government needing to intervene with “bayonets and knout”. And this all the more so because in Russia the common land is not cultivated jointly by the peasants 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 heads of families, and each cultivates his share for himself. Hence a very great diversity of wealth among the commune members is possible, and indeed it actually exists. Almost everywhere there are among them some rich peasants – here and there millionaires – who act as usurers and suck the mass of the peasants dry. Nobody knows this better than Herr Tkatschow. While he palms off on the German workers the notion that the Russian peasants, these instinctive, traditional communists, can have the “idea of collective property” driven out of them only with knout and bayonet, he tells us in his Russian brochure, p. 15:

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

These are the same sort of bloodsuckers we have depicted more closely above. The heaviest blow dealt to communal property was again the abolition of labour-services. The noble was assigned the largest and best part of the land; for the peasants barely enough, often not enough, to live on was left. At the same time the forests were adjudged to the nobles; the fuel, raw material and timber the peasant had formerly been allowed to fetch there freely he now has to buy. Thus the peasant now has nothing more than his house and the bare land, without the means to cultivate it, and on average not enough land to sustain 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 support themselves as wandering labourers, and leave their land at home. (5)

One sees that communal property in Russia has long since passed its prime and is apparently heading for dissolution. Nevertheless, the possibility undeniably exists of transforming this form of society into a higher one, if it is maintained long enough until the circumstances are ripe for this, and if it shows itself capable of development in such a way that the peasants no longer cultivate the land separately, but jointly (6) ; of transforming it into this higher form without the Russian peasants having to pass through the intermediate stage of bourgeois parcel property. This can happen, however, only if before the complete collapse of communal property a proletarian revolution is victoriously carried out in Western Europe, providing the Russian peasant with the preconditions for such a transformation, especially the material ones he requires just to carry through the necessarily connected upheaval in his whole agricultural system. It is therefore pure swindle when Herr Tkatschow says that the Russian peasants, although “proprietors”, stand “closer to socialism” than the propertyless workers of Western Europe. Quite the contrary. If anything can still save Russian communal property and give it the chance to transform itself into a new, genuinely viable form, it is a proletarian revolution in Western Europe.

Just as lightly as with the economic revolution does Herr Tkatschow deal with the political one. The Russian people, he relates, “protest incessantly” against slavery, now in the form of “religious sects … refusal of taxes … robber bands” (the German workers may congratulate themselves that, according to this, Schinderhannes is the father of German Social Democracy) “… acts of arson … insurrections … and therefore one can call the Russian people an instinctive revolutionary”. And thus Tkatschow is convinced that “it is only necessary to awaken simultaneously in several localities the accumulated feeling of bitterness and discontent that … always seethes in the breast of our people”. Then “the union of the revolutionary forces will come about all by itself, and the struggle … must turn out favourably for the cause of the people. Practical necessity, the instinct of self-preservation” will then quite of their own accord bring about “a firm and indestructible alliance among the protesting communes”.

It is quite impossible to imagine a revolution in a lighter and pleasanter way. You strike out simultaneously at three, four places, and the “instinctive revolutionary”, “practical necessity”, the “instinct of self-preservation” do everything else “all by themselves”. Why, given such child’s play ease, the revolution has not long since been made, the people liberated and Russia transformed into the socialist model country, is simply beyond all comprehension.

In fact the situation is quite different. The Russian people, this instinctive revolutionary, has admittedly 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 its head and claimed the throne. The last great peasant uprising under Catherine II was made possible only because Yemelyan Pugachev passed himself off as her husband Peter III, who had not been murdered by his wife, but merely dethroned and imprisoned, and had now escaped. The tsar, on the contrary, is the Russian peasant’s earthly god: Bog vysok, Car daljok – God is high and the tsar is far away – is his cry of distress. There is no doubt that the mass of the peasant population has been placed, especially since the abolition of labour-services, in a situation that more and more forces it to struggle also against the government and the tsar; but Herr Tkatschow may try to palm off the fairy tale of the “instinctive revolutionary” somewhere else.

And further, even if the mass of the Russian peasants were ever so instinctive-revolutionary, even if we were to imagine that one could make revolutions to order, just as one makes a piece of printed calico or a tea-kettle – even then I ask: is a person over twelve years of age permitted to imagine the course of a revolution in such an outrageously childish way as is done here? And now one also reflects 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 the blow was struck simultaneously in several places. There too people counted on practical necessity, the instinct of self-preservation, bringing about of its own accord a firm and indestructible alliance among the protesting communes. And what happened? Each commune, each town, defended only itself; mutual support was out of the question, and with only 3,000 men Pavía overthrew one town after another in 14 days and put an end to all the anarchic glory (see my “The Bakuninists at Work”, where this is described in detail).

There is no doubt, Russia stands on the eve of a revolution. The finances are disrupted to the utmost. The screw of taxation is no longer effective, the interest on old state debts is paid with new loans, and each new loan encounters greater difficulties; for money can only be obtained now under the pretext of railway construction! The administration has from time immemorial been thoroughly corrupt; the officials living more from theft, bribery and extortion than from their salary. The whole of agricultural production – by far the most essential for Russia – has been completely thrown into disorder by the abolition of serfdom in 1861; the large estates without sufficient labour-power, the peasants without sufficient land, crushed by taxes, sucked dry by usurers; agricultural production declining from year to year. The whole held together externally and with difficulty by an Oriental despotism, of whose arbitrariness we in the West can form no conception whatsoever; a despotism which 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 bourgeoisie of the capital, but which has also, under its present bearer, lost confidence in itself, which today makes concessions to liberalism only to take them back in fright tomorrow, and thereby itself loses more and more all credit. At the same time, among the more enlightened sections of the nation concentrated in the capital, a growing realisation that this situation is untenable, that an upheaval is impending, and the illusion that this upheaval can be guided into a quiet constitutional channel. Here all the conditions of a revolution are combined, a revolution which, initiated by the upper classes of the capital, perhaps even by the government itself, must be carried further by the peasants and rapidly driven beyond the first constitutional phase; a revolution which, for the whole of Europe, will be of the highest importance for this very reason, that it will at one blow annihilate the last, hitherto intact reserve of the whole European reaction. This revolution is surely approaching. Only two events could postpone it: a successful war against Turkey or Austria, for which money and secure alliances are necessary, or else – a premature attempt at insurrection which 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 September 1870).

2 What’s the betting that Herr Tkachov will say that by the above anecdote I committed a betrayal of the proletariat by making the tailors as such appear “in a ridiculous light”.

3 An exception occurred only in Poland, where the government wanted to ruin the nobility hostile to it, but to win over the peasants.

4 On the artel, compare among others: “Sbornik materialov ob Arteljach v Rossiji” (Collection of Materials on the Artels in Russia), St. Petersburg 1873, Part 1.

5 On the situation of the peasants, compare, among others, the official report of the government commission on rural production (1873), furthermore Skaldin, “W Zacholusti i w Stolice” (In the Most Remote Provincial Corner and in the Capital), Petersburg 1870; the latter work by a liberal conservative.

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