London, 23 April 1885 

Dear Citizen, 

I still owe you an answer to your letter of 14 February. Below you 
will find the reasons for my tardiness, which can certainly not be at- 
tributed to idleness on my part. 

You ask me to give you my opinion of Plekhanov’s book Hawu pas- 
noeaacia.* To do this I should have to have read it. I find little diffi- 
culty in reading Russian when I have spent a week devoting myself to 
it, but six months or more may go by without my having any oppor- 
tunity to do so; then, having lost the habit of it, I am compelled to 
learn the language all over again, as it were. And that is what has 
happened with the Pasnoeaacia. Marx’s manuscripts, which I dictate 
to a secretary, ° take up the whole of my day; in the evening people 
come to call who cannot, after all, simply be shown the door. Also 
there are proofs to be read, a great deal of correspondence and, fi- 
nally, translations (into the Italian, Danish, etc.) of my Origin etc.,‘ 
which I am asked to look over and whose revision sometimes turns 
out to be neither easy nor superfluous. Well, all these interruptions 
have prevented my progressing further than page 60 of the Pasnoeaa- 
cia. If only I could have three days to myself, the job would be done 
and, what is more, I should have brushed up my Russian. 

However, the little I have read is, I think, enough to put me more 
or less au fait with the dispute“ in question. 

To begin with, let me repeat how proud I am to know that there 
exists among the younger generation in Russia a party which frankly 
and unreservedly accepts the great economic and historical theories 
evolved by Marx, and which has broken for good with all the anar- 
chic and to some extent Slavophil traditions of its predecessors. °° 
And Marx himself, had he lived a little longer, would have been no 
less proud than I. It marks a step forward which will be of the utmost 

4 See this volume, p. 264. - > Oskar Eisengarten - © The Origin of the Family, Private 
Property and the State; see also this volume, pp. 264 and 272. - ¢ Crossed out in the 
draft: ‘between your group and the Narodnaya Volya members?. 

importance to the revolutionary development of Russia. In my eyes, 
Marx’s historical theory is fundamentally essential to revolutionary 
tactics, if these are to be consistent and logical; to discover what those 
tactics ought to be, all one has to do is to apply the theory to eco- 
nomic and political conditions in the country concerned. 

But to do so demands familiarity with those conditions, and I, for 
my part, am too ignorant of the present situation in Russia to suppose 
myself competent to assess in detail the tactics that might be required 
at any given moment. Again, the internal and intimate history of the 
Russian revolutionary party, in particular that of the last few years, is 
to me a closed book. My friends among the Narodnaya Volya mem- 
bers have never discussed it with me. Yet this is an element which, if 
one is to form an opinion, cannot be ignored. 

What I know, or believe I know, of the situation in Russia leads me 
to think that that country is nearing its 1789. Revolution is bound to 
break out some time or other; it may break out any day. In conditions 
such as these the country is like a charged mine, all that is needed is to 
apply the match. Especially after what happened on 13 March. It 
is one of those special cases where it is possible for a handful of men to 
effect a revolution, that is, to bring about at one stroke the collapse of 
an entire system whose equilibrium is more than labile (to use Ple- 
khanov’s metaphor *),°** and to release, by a single and intrinsically 
insignificant act, explosive forces which later become uncontrollable. 
Well, if ever Blanquism, the fantasy of subverting the whole of a so- 
ciety through action by a small group of conspirators, had any ra- 
tional foundation, it would assuredly be in St Petersburg.” Once the 
match has been applied to the powder, once the forces have been un- 
leashed and the national energy has been converted from potential to 
kinetic (another of Plekhanov’s favourite and, indeed, excellent met- 
aphors) —the men who have sprung the mine will be swept off 
their feet by an explosion a thousand times more powerful than they 
themselves, one which will seek whatever outlet it may find in accor- 
dance with the prevailing economic forces and resistances. 

Suppose that these men imagine they will be able to seize power, 
what of it? Providing they make the hole which causes the dam to col- 
lapse, the resulting torrent of water will soon put paid to their illusions. 
But what if those illusions succeeded in endowing them with an ex- 

* The draft had ‘pet metaphor’. -” Crossed out in the draft: ‘I do not say “in Russia” 
because in the provinces, far from the administrative centre, it [such action] is not 
necessary.” 

a 

ceptional strength of will? Would that be any cause for complaint? 
Men who have boasted of having effected a revolution have always 
found on the morrow that they didn’t know what they were doing; 
that once effected, the revolution has borne no resemblance at all to 
what they had intended. That is what Hegel calls the irony of histo- 
ry, ? an irony which few historical apateau* can escape.” You have 
only to look at Bismarck, a revolutionary in spite of himself, and 
Gladstone, who ended up by falling out with his beloved Tsar. ° 

What, in my view, is important in Russia is that the impulse should 
be given, that revolution should break out. Whether it is this or that 
group that gives the signal, whether it be under this flag or that, is of 
little concern to me. Even if it were* a palace plot, its instigators 
would be swept away on the morrow. In a place where the situation is 
so tense, where revolutionary elements have accumulated to such 
a degree, where the economic situation of the vast mass of the people 
becomes daily more impossible, where every degree of social develop- 
ment is represented, from the primitive commune to modern big 
industry and high finance, and where all these contradictions are forci- 
bly pent up by an unheard-of despotism — a despotism increasingly 
unacceptable to a younger generation in which are combined the na- 
tion’s intelligence and dignity — in such a place 1789, once launched, 
will before long be followed by 1793. 

I say ‘good-bye’, dear Citizen. It is half past two in the morning. 
Tomorrow before the departure of the courier I will hardly have time’ 
to add anything. If you prefer, do write to me in Russian, but please 
bear in mind that Russian handwriting is something I do not read 
every day. 

Your devoted 

F. Engels