ENGELS TO NIKOLAI DANIELSON ¢#! 

London, 15 March 1892 

Dear Sir, 

I am almost ashamed to reply to your kind and interesting letters of 
the 12 and 21 November last. But I have been so overwhelmed with 
work, and I find that writing by gaslight is still so hurtful to my eyes 
(which otherwise keep quite serviceable) that this extra work and 
the shortness of daylight during our winter must be my excuse. 

You are passing indeed through a momentous period for your 
country, the full importance of which can hardly be overestimated. 
From your letters it seems to me that you look upon the present Hey- 
poxait not as an accident, but as the necessary result, as one of the 
unavoidable concomitants of the economic development entered 
upon by Russia since 1861.**? And that is my opinion too, as far as 
one can judge from a distance. With the year 1861 Russia entered 

* But we shall see! - ? crop failure (Russ.) 

upon the development, on a scale worthy of a great nation, of Mod- 
ern Industry. The conviction ripened that now-a-days no country 
can take a befitting rank among civilised nations without possessing 
steam-driven industrial machinery and providing, to a great extent at 
least, for its own wants of manufactured goods. And upon that con- 
viction Russia has acted, and acted with great energy. That she sur- 
rounded herself with a rampart of protective duties, was but too na- 
tural, English competition forced that policy upon almost every great 
country, even Germany, where une grande industrie had successfully de- 
veloped under almost absolute free trade, joined the chorus and turned 
protectionist, merely to accelerate the process of what Bismarck 
called die Züchtung von Milliondren.* And if Germany entered upon this 
course even without any necessity, who can blame Russia for doing 
what to her was a necessity, as soon as the new industrial course was 
once determined upon? 

To some extent your present situation appears to me to find a paral- 
lel in that of France under Louis XIV. There, too, manufactures 
were placed in a condition of vitality by Colbert’s protective system; 
and within 20 or 30 years, it was found out that a national manufac- 
turing industry, under the circumstances then existing, can be creat- 
ed only at the expense of the peasantry. The Naturalwirtschaft? of 
the peasants was broken up and supplanted by the Geldwirtschaft,° 
the home market was created and, at the same time, nearly destroyed 
again, at least for the time, by this process and the unprecedented 
violence with which economic necessity enforced itself, and by the in- 
creased taxation in money and in men, necessitated, then, by the in- 
troduction of standing armies by conscription, as it is now-a-days ne- 
cessitated by the introduction of the Prussian military system of uni- 
versal army service. And when at last a crop or two failed, then arose 
that universal state of discomfort all over the country which we find 
depicted in Boisguillebert and Marshal Vauban.* 

But there is one immense difference: The difference between old 
‘Manufaktur’ and modern ‘grande industrie’ which (in the action upon 
the peasant, the agricultural producer on a small scale and with his 
own means of production) is as the difference between the old 
smooth-bore flint-musket of 1680 and the modern repeating rifle, ca- 

b 

c 

* raising of millionaires -° subsistence economy -° money economy -¢ [P.] Boisguille- 
bert, Le détail de la France and S. Vauban, Projet d'une dime royale. In: Economistes fi- 
nanciers du XVIII-e siécle. 

libre 7.50 millimetres, of 1892. And moreover, whereas in 1680 agri- 
culture on a small scale was still the normal mode of production, and 
large estate-farming could only be a rising exception, but always an 
exception, large farming with machinery is now the rule and becomes 
more and more the only possible mode of agricultural production. So 
that the peasant today appears to be doomed. 

You remember what our author said in the letter on Joukow- 
sky*—that if the line entered upon in 1861 was persevered in, the 
peasants’ obs¢ina must go to ruin. That seems to me to be in course of 
fulfilment just now. The moment seems getting near, at least in some 
districts, where the whole of the old social institutions of Russian 
peasant life not only lose their value to the individual peasant but be- 
come a fetter, exactly as they have done in former times in Western 
Europe. I am afraid we shall have to treat the o6muua? as a dream of 
the past, and reckon, in future, with a capitalist Russia. No doubt 
a great chance is thus being lost, but against economic facts there is 
no help. The only curious thing is that the very men in Russia who 
never tire of defending the invaluable superiority of Russian primitive 
institutions as compared with those of the rotten Occident, are doing 
their very best to destroy those primitive institutions and to replace 
them by those of the rotten Occident! 

But if the Russian peasant is doomed to be transformed into a prole- 
tarian, industrial or agricultural, the nombuynxs* does appear to be 
doomed too. From what I gather, this class is even more in debt than 
the peasants, and has to sell out gradually. And between the two seem 
to step in a new class of landowners, village kyaaku or town- 
bourgeois — the fathers of, perhaps, a future Russian landed aristoc- 
racy?? 

The failure of last year’s crop has brought all this out into glaring 
daylight. And I am quite of your opinion that the causes are entirely 
social. As to deforestation, that is as essentially, as is the ruin of the 
peasants, a vital condition of bourgeois society. No European ‘civil- 
ised’ country but has felt it, and America,* and no doubt Russia, too, 
feels it at this moment. Thus deforestation, in my eyes, is essentially 

* In America I have seen it myself 4 years ago.**? There great efforts are made to 
counteract its effects and redress the mistake. 

* K. Marx, ‘Letter to Otechestuenniye Zapisk’.-” commune (Russ.) -° landowner (Russ.) 

a social factor as well as a social result. But it is also a very common 
pretext for interested parties, to devolve the blame for economic mis- 
haps upon a cause which apparently nobody can be made responsible 
for. 

The failure of the crop, in my opinion, has only made patent, what 
was there already datent. But it has terribly accelerated the velocity of 
the process going on. The peasant, at seed-time this spring, will be in- 
finitely weaker than he was at seed-time last autumn. And he will be 
called upon to recover strength under far more unfavourable circum- 
stances. A pauper, over head and ears in debt, no cattle, what can he 
do— even in the places where he has got through the winter without 
having to leave his land? It therefore seems to me that it will take 
years before this calamity is completely overcome, and that when 
that point is reached, Russia will be a very different country from 
what she was even on | January 1891. And we will have to console 
ourselves with the idea that all this in the end must serve the cause of 
human progress. 

I sent you last autumn a little book: Ursprung der Familie,* 4th edi- 
tion, it was registered and my address outside on the wrapper, as it 
did not come back I hope you have received it. 

I thank you very much for the many papers and reviews sent — the 
one of Mendelejeff's” was especially interesting. But I regret I cannot 
just now give to them all the attention they deserve, owing to hard 
work. How fast I was with extra work, you will conceive when J tell 
you that from New Year to now—- generally my quietest time —I 
have not been able to give one minute to 3rd volume.‘ 

Your congratulations were duly forwarded to Paris.*** 

With kind regards ever yours 

P. W. Rosher4 
No news from our mutual‘?