First I must report that Mr. P. Tkachov was strictly speaking not 
a Bakuninist, i.e. an anarchist, but made himself out to be a 
“Blanquist”. The error was an understandable one, since the said 
gentleman, in accordance with the Russian refugee custom of the 
time, expressed his solidarity with all Russian émigrés against the 
West, and indeed defended Bakunin and comrades against my 
attacks” in his pamphlet‘ as if they had been directed at himself.**! 

The views on the Russian communistic peasant commune which 
he championed vis-a-vis myself were essentially those of Herzen. 
This Pan-Slavist literary man, who was puffed up into a 
revolutionary, had discovered from Haxthausen’s Studien tiber 
Rufland that the serfs on his estates know of no private property, 
but redistribute the fields and meadows amongst themselves 
from time to time. As a literary man, he did not need to learn 
what soon after became common knowledge, that the common 
ownership of land is a form of ownership which was, in fact, 
common to all peoples at a certain stage of development. It 
prevailed among the Germans, Celts, Indians—in short, all the 
Indo-European peoples in primeval times; it still exists in India, 
was only recently suppressed by force in Ireland and Scotland, 

and, though it is dying out, still occurs here and there in Germany 
today. But as a Pan-Slavist who was at most a socialist in his 
rhetoric, he found in this a fresh pretext to depict his “holy” 
Russia and its mission to rejuvenate and regenerate the rotten and 
decrepit West—if necessary by force of arms—in an even more 
brilliant light in contrast to the same indolent West. What the 
worn-out French and English are unable to achieve for all their 
pains, the Russians have at home, ready-made. 

“Maintaining the peasant commune and establishing the freedom of the 
individual, extending the self-management of the village to the towns and the 
entire state while preserving national unity—this sums up the entire question of 
the future of Russia, i.e. the question of the same social antinomy whose solution 
occupies and moves the minds of the West” (Herzen, Letters to Linton).39? 

So there may be a political question for Russia; but the “social 
question” is already solved as far as Russia is concerned. 

Herzen’s successor Tkachov made it just as easy for himself as 
his master. Although he could no longer maintain in 1875 that the 
“social question” in Russia had already been solved, according to 
him the Russian peasants—as born communists—are infinitely 
closer to socialism than the poor, god-forsaken West European 
proletarians, and are infinitely better off into the bargain. When, 
on the strength of a hundred-year-old revolutionary tradition, 
French republicans consider their people to be the chosen people 
from a political point of view, many Russian socialists of the day 
declared that Russia was socially the chosen nation; the rebirth of 
the old economic world would, they thought, spring not from the 
struggles of the West European proletariat but from the innermost 
interior of the Russian peasant. My attack was directed at this 
childish view. 

But now the Russian commune had also found respect and 
recognition among people of infinitely greater stature than the 
Herzens and Tkachovs. They included Nikolai Chernyshevsky, 
that great thinker to whom Russia owes such a boundless debt and 
whose slow murder through years of exile among Siberian Yakuts 
will remain an eternal disgrace on the memory of Alexander II the 
“Liberator”. 

Owing to the Russian intellectual embargo Chernyshevsky never 
knew the works of Marx, and when Capital appeared he had long 
been captive in Sredne-Vilyuisk among the Yakuts. His entire 
intellectual development had to take place within the surrounding 
medium created by this intellectual embargo. What Russian 
censorship would not let in scarcely existed for Russia, if at all. If 
there are sporadic weaknesses, sporadic instances of a limited 

outlook, then one can only feel admiration that there are not more 
of them. 

Chernyshevsky, too, sees in the Russian peasant commune a 
means of progressing from the existing form of society to a new 
stage of development, higher than both the Russian commune on 
the one hand, and West European capitalist society with its class 
antagonisms on the other. And he sees a mark of superiority in 
the fact that Russia possesses this means, whereas the West does 
not. 

“The introduction of a better order of things is greatly hindered in Western 
Europe by the boundless extension of the rights of the individual ... it is not easy to 
renounce even a negligible portion of what one is used to enjoying, and in the 
West the individual is used to unlimited private rights. The usefulness and 
necessity of mutual concessions can be learned only by bitter experience and 
prolonged thought. In the West, a better system of economic relations is bound up 
with sacrifices, and that is why it is difficult to establish. It runs counter to the 
habits of the English and French peasants.” But “what seems a utopia in one 
country exists as a fact in another ... habits which the Englishman and the 
Frenchman find immensely difficult to introduce into their national life exist in fact 
in the national life of the Russians.... The order of things for which the West is 
now striving by such a difficult and long road still exists in our country in the 
mighty national customs of our village life.... We see what deplorable consequences 
resulted in the West from the loss of communal land tenure and how difficult it is 
to give back to the Western peoples what they have lost. The example of the West 
must not be lost on us” (Chernyshevsky, Works, Geneva edition, Vol. V, pp. 16-19, 
quoted by Plekhanov, ‘“‘Na8i raznoglasija”,? Geneva, 1885, [16-17])3% 

And of the Ural Cossacks, who still retained communal tilling of 
the soil and subsequent distribution of the produce among 
individual families, he says: 

“If the people of the Urals live under their present system to see machines 
introduced into corn-growing, they will be very glad of having retained a system 
which allows the use of machines that require big-scale farming embracing 
hundreds of dessiatines” (ibid., p. 131). 

It should not be forgotten, however, that the people of the 
Urals with their communal tilling—saved from extinction by 
military considerations (we also have barrack-room communism) — 
stand alone in Russia, more or less like the farmstead communities 
on the Mosel back home with their periodic redistributions. And if 
they adhere to their present system until they are ready for the 
introduction of machinery, it will not be they who profit from it, 
but the Russian military exchequer whose slaves they are. 

At any rate, it was a fact: at the same time as capitalist society 
was disintegrating and threatening to founder on the necessary 

contradictions of its own development, half of the entire cultivated 
land in Russia was still the common property of the peasant 
communes. Now, if in the West the resolution of the contradic- 
tions by a reorganisation of society is conditional on the conversion 
of all the means of production, hence of the land too, into the 
common property of society, how does the already, or rather still, 
existing common property in Russia relate to this common 
property in the West, which still has to be created? Can it not 
serve as a point of departure for a national campaign which, 
skipping the entire capitalist period, will convert Russian peasant 
communism straight into modern socialist common ownership of 
the means of production by enriching it with all the technical 
achievements of the capitalist era? Or, to use the words with which 
Marx sums up the views of Chernyshevsky in a letter to be quoted 
below: “Should Russia first destroy the rural commune, as 
demanded by the liberals, in order to go over to the capitalist 
system, or can it on the contrary acquire all the fruits of this 
system, without suffering its torments, by developing its own 
historical conditions?” * 

The very way in which the question is posed indicates the 
direction in which the answer should be sought. The Russian 
commune has existed for hundreds of years without ever 
providing the impetus for the development of a higher form of 
common ownership out of itself; no more so than in the case of 
the German Mark system, the Celtic clans, the Indian and other 
communes with primitive, communistic institutions. In the course 
of time, under the influence of commodity production surround- 
ing them, or arising in their own midst and gradually pervading 
them, and of the exchange between individual families and 
individual persons, they all lost more and more of their 
communistic character and dissolved into communities of mutually 
independent landowners. So if the question of whether the 
Russian commune will enjoy a different and better fate may be 
raised at all, then this is not through any fault of its own, but 
solely due to the fact that it has survived in a European country in 
a relatively vigorous form into an age when not only commodity 
production as such, but even its highest and ultimate form, 
capitalist production, has come into conflict in Western Europe 
with the productive forces it has created itself; when it is proving 
incapable of continuing to direct these forces; and when it is 

foundering on these innate contradictions and the class conflicts 
that go along with them. It is quite evident from this alone that 
the initiative for any possible transformation of the Russian 
commune along these lines cannot come from the commune itself, 
but only from the industrial proletarians of the West. The victory 
of the West European proletariat over the bourgeoisie, and, linked 
to this, the replacement of capitalist production by socially 
managed production—that is the necessary precondition for 
raising the Russian commune to the same level. 

The fact is: at no time or place has the agrarian communism 
that arose out of gentile society developed anything of its own 
accord but its own disintegration. As early as 1861 the Russian 
peasant commune itself was a relatively weakened form of this 
communism; the common tilling of the land which survived in 
some parts of India and in the South Slav household community 
(zadruga), the probable mother of the Russian commune, had been 
forced to give way to cultivation by individual families; common 
ownership only continued to manifest itself in the redistribution of 
land which took place at greatly varying intervals according to the 
different localities. This redistribution needs only to lapse or be 
abolished by decree, and the village of allotment peasants is a fait 
accompli. 

But the mere fact that alongside the Russian peasant commune 
capitalist production in Western Europe is simultaneously ap- 
proaching the point where it breaks down and where it points 
itself to a new form of production in which the means of 
production are employed in a planned manner as social proper- 
ty—this mere fact cannot endow the Russian commune with the 
power to develop this new form of society out of itself. How could 
it appropriate the colossal productive forces of capitalist society as 
social property and a social tool even before capitalist society itself 
has accomplished this revolution; how could the Russian commune 
show the world how to run large-scale industry for the common 
benefit, when it has already forgotten how to till its land for the 
common benefit? 

Certainly, there are enough people in Russia who are quite 
familiar with Western capitalist society with all its irreconcilable 
antagonisms and conflicts and are also clear about the way out of 
this apparent dead-end. But firstly, the few thousand people who 
realise this do not live in the commune, and the fifty million or so 
in Great Russia who still live with common ownership of the land 
have not the faintest idea of all this. They are at least as alien and 
unsympathetic to these few thousand as the English proletarians 

from 1800 to 1840 with regard to the plans which Robert Owen 
devised for their salvation. And, of the workmen whom Owen 
employed in his factory in New Lanark, the majority likewise 
consisted of people who had been raised on the institutions and 
customs of a decaying communistic gentile society, the Celtic- 
Scottish clan; but nowhere does he so much as hint that they 
showed a greater appreciation of his ideas. And secondly, it is an 
historical impossibility that a lower stage of economic development 
should solve the enigmas and conflicts which did not arise, and 
could not arise, until a far higher stage. All forms of gentile 
community which arose before commodity production and indi- 
vidual exchange have one thing in common with the future 
socialist society: that certain things, means of production, are 
subject to the common ownership and the common use of certain 
groups. This one shared feature does not, however, enable the 
lower form of society to engender out of itself the future socialist 
society, this final and most intrinsic product of capitalism. Any 
given economic formation has its own problems to solve, problems 
arising out of itself; to seek to solve those of another, utterly alien 
formation would be absolutely absurd. And this applies to the 
Russian commune no less than to the South Slav zddruga, the 
Indian gentile economy or any other savage or barbaric form of 
society characterised by the common ownership of the means of 
production. 

On the other hand, it is not only possible but certain that after 
the victory of the proletariat and the transfer of the means of 
production into common ownership among the West European 
peoples, the countries which have only just succumbed to capitalist 
production and have salvaged gentile institutions, or remnants 
thereof, have in these remnants of common ownership and in the 
corresponding popular customs a powerful means of appreciably 
shortening the process of development into a socialist society and 
of sparing themselves most of the suffering and struggles through 
which we in Western Europe must work our way. But the example 
and the active assistance of the hitherto capitalist West is an 
indispensable condition for this. Only when the capitalist economy 
has been relegated to the history books in its homeland and in the 
countries where it flourished, only when the backward countries 
see from this example “how it’s done”, how the productive forces 
of modern industry are placed in the service of all as social 
property—only then can they tackle this shortened process of 
development. But then success will be assured. And this is true of 
-all countries in the pre-capitalist stage, not only Russia. It will be 

easiest—comparatively speaking—in Russia, however, because 
there a section of the indigenous population has already assimi- 
lated the intellectual results of capitalist development, thereby 
making it possible in revolutionary times to accomplish the social 
transformation more or less simultaneously with the West. 

This was stated by Marx and me as long ago as January 21, 
1882 in the preface to Plekhanov’s Russian translation of the 
Communist Manifesto. The passage reads: 

‘Alongside a rapidly developing capitalist swindle and bourgeois 
landed property which is only just in the process of formation, in 
Russia we find the greater part of the land in the common 
ownership of the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian 
commune, this form of the original common ownership of land 
which is actually already in a state of severe disintegration, make 
the direct transition into a higher communist form of landed 
property—or must it first undergo the same process of dissolution 
that characterises the historical development of the West? The 
only possible answer to this question today is as follows: when the 
Russian revolution gives the signal for a workers’ revolution in the 
West, so that each complements the other, then Russian landed 
property might become the starting point for a communist 
development.” ** 

It should not be forgotten, however, that the considerable 
disintegration of Russian common property mentioned above has 
since advanced significantly. The defeats of the Crimean War*” 
had exposed Russia’s need for rapid industrial development. 
Above all railways were needed, and these are not possible on a 
broad footing without large-scale domestic industry. The precondi- 
tion for this was the so-called emancipation of the serfs; it marked 
the beginning of the capitalist era in Russia; but hence also the era 
of the rapid destruction of the common ownership of land. The 
redemption payments imposed on the peasants, together with 
increased taxes and the simultaneous reduction and deterioration 
of the land allotted to them, inevitably forced them into the hands 
of usurers, chiefly members of the peasant commune who had 
grown rich. The railways opened up for hitherto remote areas a 
market for their grain, but they also brought the cheap products 
of large-scale industry to them, thereby killing off the cottage 
industry of the peasants, who had previously manufactured similar 
goods partly for their own use and partly for sale. The traditional 
conditions of employment were thrown into confusion; there 
followed the breakdown which everywhere accompanies the 
transition from a subsistence economy to a money economy; 

within the commune large differences in wealth appeared between 
the members—debt turned the poorer into the slaves of the rich. 
In short, the same process that had caused the Athenian gens to 
break down in the period before Solon, with the advent of the 
money economy,* now began to break down the Russian 
commune. Solon was able to liberate the slaves of debt, it is true, 
by means of a revolutionary intervention in the then still fairly 
recent law of private property by simply annulling the debts. But 
he could not revitalise the old Athenian gens, any more than any 
power in the world will be able to restore the Russian commune 
once its breakdown has reached a certain point. And to cap it all 
the Russian Government has forbidden redistribution of land 
among the members of the commune more frequently than every 
twelve years, so that the peasant should grow increasingly 
unaccustomed to it and start to think of himself as the private 
owner of his share. 

This was the tenor of Marx’s comments in a letter to Russia 
which he wrote back in 1877.” A certain Mr. Zhukovsky, the same 
man who as head cashier of the State Bank now lends his 
signature to Russian credit notes, had written something about 
Marx in the European Herald (Vestnik Yevropy), to which another 
writer had replied in the National Records (Otechestvenniye Zapis- 
ki).°°° In order to correct this article Marx wrote a letter to the 
editor of the Records, which, after copies of the French original 
had long been circulating in Russia, appeared in Russian 
translation in the Herald of the People’s Will (Vestnik Narodnoi Volt) 
in 1886 in Geneva and later in Russia itself.**’ Like everything that 
emanated from Marx, this letter attracted a good deal of attention 
and varying interpretations in Russian circles, and I therefore 
present its gist here. 

First, Marx repudiates the view attributed to him in the Records 
that he shared the opinion of the Russian liberals, according to 
which nothing was more urgent for Russia than to destroy the 
communal property of the peasants and plunge headlong into 
capitalism. His short note on Herzén in the appendix to the first 
edition of Capital proves nothing. This note reads: “If the 

* Cf. Engels, Der Ursprung der Familie etc., 5th edition, Stuttgart, 1892, 
pp. 109-113.2 

influence of capitalist production, which is undermining the 
human race ... continues to develop on the continent of Europe as 
hitherto, hand in hand with competition in the size of national 
soldiery, national debts, taxes, elegant means of warfare, etc., the 
rejuvenation of Europe by the knout and the obligatory infusion 
of Kalmuck blood so earnestly prophesied by the half-Russian and 
whole-Muscovite Herzen (this literary man did not, incidentally, 
make his discoveries in the field of “Russian communism’’ in 
Russia but in the work of the Prussian privy councillor Haxt- 
hausen) might eventually become inevitable” (Capital, I, first 
edition, p. 763).2 Marx then continues”: This passage “can under 
no circumstances provide the key to my opinion of the efforts” 
(the following is quoted in Russian in the original) “‘of Russian 
men to find a course of development for their native country 
which differs from that which Western Europe has followed and is 
still following’, etc.—In the Afterword to the second German 
edition of Capital, I speak of a ‘great Russian scholar and critic’” 
(Chernyshevsky) “with the high esteem which he deserves.° In his 
noteworthy articles the latter dealt with the question whether 
Russia should start, as its liberal economists demand, by destroying 
the rural commune in order to go over to a capitalist system, or 
whether, on the contrary, it can acquire all the fruits of this 
system, without suffering its torments, by developing its own 
historical conditions. He comes out in favour of the second 
solution. 

“Be that as it may, as I do not like to leave anything to 
‘guesswork’, I will speak straight out. In order to be able to assess 
Russia’s economic development from the position of an expert, I 
learned Russian and then spent several long years studying official 
publications and others with a bearing on this subject. I have 
arrived at this result: if Russia continues along the path it has followed 
since 1861, it will miss the finest chance that history has ever offered a 
nation, only to undergo all the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist system“” 

Marx goes on to clear up a number of other misunderstandings 
on the part of his critic; the only passage relating to the matter in 
question reads: 

“Now, in what way was my critic able to apply this historical 
sketch to Russia?” (The account of primitive accumulation in 
Capital.) “Only this: if Russia is tending to become a capitalist 
nation, on the model of the countries of Western Europe,—and in 
recent years it has gone to great pains to move in _ this 
direction—it will not succeed without having first transformed a 
large proportion of its peasants into proletarians; and after that, 
once it has been placed in the bosom of the capitalist system, it will 
be subjected to its pitiless laws, like other profane peoples. That is 
all.” 

Thus wrote Marx in 1877. At that time there were two 
governments in Russia: the Tsar’s and that of the secret executive 
committee (ispolnitel’nyj komitet*) of the terrorist conspirators.*” 
The power of this secret second government grew daily. The fall 
of tsardom seemed imminent; a revolution in Russia was bound to 
deprive the entire forces of European reaction of its mainstay, its 
great reserve army, and thus give the political movement of the 
West a mighty new impulse and, what is more, infinitely more 
favourable conditions in which to operate. No wonder that Marx 
advises the Russians to be in less of a hurry to make the leap into 
capitalism. 

The Russian revolution did not come. Tsardom got the better of 
terrorism, which even managed to drive all the propertied, 
“law-abiding” classes back into its arms for the time being. And in 
the seventeen years which have elapsed since that letter was 
written both capitalism and the dissolution of the peasant 
commune have made tremendous headway in Russia. So how do 
matters stand today, in 1894? 

When the old tsarist despotism continued unchanged after the 
defeats of the Crimean War and the suicide of Tsar Nicholas, only 
one road was open: the swiftest transition possible to capitalist 
industry. The army had been destroyed by the gigantic dimensions