The 1882 Russian Edition

The first Russian edition of the Manifesto of the
Communist Party, translated by Bakunin [A], was published early in the ’sixties by the printing office of the Kolokol [reference to the Free Russian Printing House]. Then the West could see in it (the
Russian edition of the Manifesto) only a literary curiosity. Such a view
would be impossible today.

What a limited field the proletarian movement occupied at that time
(December 1847) is most clearly shown by the last section: the position
of the Communists in relation to the various opposition parties in various
countries. Precisely Russia and the United States are missing here. It
was the time when Russia constituted the last great reserve of all European
reaction, when the United States absorbed the surplus proletarian forces
of Europe through immigration. Both countries provided Europe with raw
materials and were at the same time markets for the sale of its industrial
products. Both were, therefore, in one way of another, pillars of the
existing European system.

How very different today. Precisely European immigration fitted North
American for a gigantic agricultural production, whose competition is shaking
the very foundations of European landed property — large and small. At
the same time, it enabled the United States to exploit its tremendous industrial
resources with an energy and on a scale that must shortly break the industrial
monopoly of Western Europe, and especially of England, existing up to now.
Both circumstances react in a revolutionary manner upon America itself.
Step by step, the small and middle land ownership of the farmers, the basis
of the whole political constitution, is succumbing to the competition of
giant farms; at the same time, a mass industrial proletariat and a fabulous
concentration of capital funds are developing for the first time in the
industrial regions.

And now Russia! During the Revolution of 1848-9, not only the European
princes, but the European bourgeois as well, found their only salvation
from the proletariat just beginning to awaken in Russian intervention.
The Tsar was proclaimed the chief of European reaction. Today, he is a
prisoner of war of the revolution in Gatchina [B], and Russia forms the vanguard
of revolutionary action in Europe.

The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the
inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia
we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and
bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land
owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina,
though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of
land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or,
on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution
such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?

The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian
Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West,
so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership
of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.

Karl Marx & Frederick Engels

January 21, 1882, London