revolution were to become an actual issue in Europe – which in the aftermath of the defeat of the Paris Commune was as silent as the grave – it would do so only after Europe was shaken by a Russian revolution.
Engels insisted nevertheless that ‘if there was anything which can save the Russian system of communal property, and provide the conditions for it to be transformed into a really living form, it is the proletarian revolution in Western Europe.’ This, of course, was an exaggeration, in support of his point that ‘it is pure hot air’ for Tkachev to say that the Russian peasants, although ‘owners of property’ are ‘nearer to socialism than the propertyless workers of Western Europe’.48 It was a product of his experiences in the first International which led him to see Bakunin behind Tkachev and to stand out against Bakunin’s ‘Panslavism’, in defence of Western European hegemony in the international proletariat movement. I believe that on this point too there was virtually no difference between Marx and Engels. Russia had two alternative paths of development to choose from; it could either follow the path of capitalist development or the route that led directly from the village commune to socialism. Chernyshevskii was well aware that Russia had embarked upon the former path, yet considered it possible for Russia to reject this path and pursue the latter course, without mentioning this precondition. Tkachev also insisted that since capitalist development was already under way in Russia, a revolution must be started at the earliest possible opportunity so as to enable it to switch paths before it became too late. Marx and Engels, accepting Chernyshevskii’s assertion, came to think that it would be possible for Russia to start from its village commune and jump directly to socialism. But their treatment of Tkachev’s thesis was affected both by the memory of their own struggle with Bakunin and Nechaev and by the exaggerated way in which Tkachev expressed it. They therefore argued against Tkachev that a precondition for the success of the communal path would be a victorious proletarian revolution in Western Europe and the material aid this revolution would offer. It thus seemed also that, in reaching this conclusion, Marx and Engels did not see any difference between their positions.
III
In the period from 1875 to 1876, Marx made further progress in his Russian studies. He read Die Agrarverfassung Russlands [The Agrarian Constitution of Russia] by Haxthausen, Communal Ownership of Land in Russia by A.I. Koshelev, Appendix A of Statism and Anarchy by Bakunin, an article by A.N. Engel’gardt entitled ‘Various problems of Russian agriculture’, a voluminous Report of the Committee of Direct Tax, and other materials, and made careful notes of their contents. Of these, Marx was particularly impressed by the criticisms which Bakunin directed at the patriarchal aspect and the closed character of the village communes. After a brief interruption, in the spring of 1877 Marx proceeded to read such works as Outlines of the History of Village Communes in Russia and Other European Countries by A.I. Vasil’chakov and Outline of the History of Village Communes in Northern Russia by P.A. Sokolovskii.49
The year 1877 saw the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War. The desperate battles the Russian forces had to fight in its first phases led to the expectation of another Sevastopol and the hope that a revolution would follow soon after the Russian defeat. On 27 September of the same year, Marx wrote to F.A. Sorge:
This crisis is a new turning point for the history of Europe. Russia – I have studied the situation in this country on the basis of official and non-official original sources in the Russian language – has for a long period been on the brink of revolution. All the factors for this are already present. The brave Turks, by the hard blow they struck against not only the Russian army and Russian finance but also the dynasty in command of the army … have advanced the date of explosion by a number of years. The change will begin with a constitutional comedy, puis il y aura un beau tapage [then all hell will break loose]. If Mother Nature is not extraordinarily hard on us, we will perhaps be able to live long enough to see the delightful day of the ceremony. The revolution this time starts from the East, that same East which we have so far regarded as the invincible support and reserve of counter-revolution.50
We see how excited Marx was at the prospect of Russian defeat in the Turkish war, followed by a Russian revolution, and then a revolution in Europe. However, these expectations were miserably disappointed. Somehow or other, Russia managed to reduce the Fort of Plevna by the end of 1877, and drove Turkey to admit its defeat in March the following year. In the face of this turn of events, Marx had to admit that ‘things have turned out differently from our expectations.’51
According to widely accepted hypothesis, Marx is supposed to have written his so-called ‘Letter to the Editor of Otechestvennye Zapiski’ some time in November 1877. This view, however, is completely without foundation. It is much more likely that Marx wrote this letter at the end of 1878 after his hopes of an imminent Russian revolution had already been disappointed. My hypothesis is supported by Marx’s letter of 15 November 1878 to Danielson, which reads in part as follows:
As regards the polemics which B. Chicherin and several others are directing against me, I haven’t seen anything other than what you sent me in 1877 (… an article by N.I. Ziber written as a response to Yu. Zhukovskii and another article, I guess it was, by Mikhailov – both of which appeared in the Otechestvennye Zapiski). Professor M.M. Kovalevskii who is staying here has told me that a fairly animated debate is going on in connection with Capital.52
The ‘Letter to the Editor of Otechestvennye Zapiski’ was written as a refutation of an article entitled ‘Karl Marx before the Tribunal of Mr Zhukovskii’ which Mikhailovskii published in the tenth issue of the same journal in 1877 under the signature of ‘H.M.’. If Marx had actually finished writing his letter or if, after having started to write some part of it, he had chosen not to finish it and send it off, then it would have been nearly impossible for him to refer to this article inaccurately as an ‘article, I guess it was, by Mikhailov’. It would be far more logical for us to assume that he was tempted, partly perhaps stimulated by the conversations with Professor Kovalevskii, to read the article by Mikhailovskii and that only after reading the article did he feel that he should not keep silent.
Mikhailovskii in his article rejected Zhukovskii’s coarse and primitive understanding of Marx’s theory, while at the same time questioning the application of Marx’s theory to the Russian situation. Mikhailovskii first called into question the chapter on ‘The so-called primitive accumulation’ in Capital, and considered that there Marx was expounding a ‘historico-philosophical theory of Universal Progress’. In other words, Mikhailovskii took Marx to be asserting that every country must experience exactly the same process of expropriation of the peasant from the land as had been the case in England. Mikhailovskii then questioned Footnote 9 of the first German edition of Capital where Marx made a mockery of Herzen. Mikhailovskii criticized Marx as follows:
Even judging solely by its overall tone, it can easily be seen what attitude Marx would take towards the efforts of the Russians to find for their country a different path of development from that which Western Europe has followed and is still following – efforts for which there is no need whatsoever to become a Slavophile or to mystically believe in the specially high quality of the Russian nation’s spirit; all that is needed is to draw lessons from the history of Europe.53
Mikhailovskii pointed out that ‘the soul of a Russian disciple of Marx’ was torn apart and that ‘this collision between moral feeling and historical inevitabiity should be resolved, of course, in favour of the latter.’ ‘But the problem,’ Mikhailovskii concluded, ‘is that one should thoroughly assess whether the sort of historical process that Marx described is truly unavoidable or not.’
Clearly Mikhailovskii directed his criticism against exactly those points which Marx himself had already either corrected or entirely struck out.
After reading this article by Mikhailovskii, Marx started writing the letter as he felt he should not remain silent. Since the letter was to be published
