about a revolution, chose to refer to Herzen and Chernyshevskii without explicitly mentioning their names, and on the whole talked in the ‘language of Aesop’. This is why, at first glance, this letter appears equivocal. Nevertheless, anyone who is familiar with the contents of Mikhailovskii’s article and the previous development of Marx’s thought can easily understand what Marx is trying to say.
In the first half of the letter, Marx comments on Mikhailovskii’s critique of the footnote in the first German edition of Capital in which Marx ridiculed Herzen, and points out that Mikhailovskii is utterly mistaken, since ‘in no case can it serve as a key’ to Marx’s views on the efforts of the Russians to find for their country a path of development different from that of Western Europe. Marx then reminds Mikhailovskii that he calls Chernyshevskii a ‘great Russian scholar and critic’ in the postscript to the second edition of Capital, which Mikhailovskii had a chance to read; thus Mikhailovskii, argues Marx, ‘might just as validly have inferred’ that Marx shared Chernyshevskii’s Populist views as to conclude that Marx rejected them. Reserved and brief as these statements are, Marx’s reference to the second German edition – the one in which, as we have noted earlier, he deleted his words of contempt for Herzen that were present in the first edition, and included words of praise for Chernyshevskii – without doubt reveals his sympathetic attitude toward the Russian Populists. Marx goes on to say that he ‘studied the Russian language, and, over a number of years, followed official and other publications that dealt with this question’, and reached this conclusion: ‘If Russia continues along the road which it has followed since 1861, it will forego the finest opportunity that history has ever placed before a nation, and will undergo all the fateful misfortune of capitalist development. ‘54 This is the story told in ‘the language of Aesop’. From 1861 Russia started to follow the path of capitalist development; should it continue to follow the same path, the peasant commune would be destroyed and with it the possibility of proceeding directly towards socialism based on the rural community. Therefore, dear people of Russia, Marx pleads, don’t dare to ‘forego the finest opportunity that history has ever placed before a nation’, the opportunity that is too precious to be wasted. Throughout the period of the Russo-Turkish War, Marx kept looking forward to a Russian revolution which, he expected, would come on the heels of Russia’s defeat in the war, and after the failure of his expectations he felt as if the revolution had just slipped through the people’s fingers. This is exactly why he felt compelled here to remind the Russian people that they should not leave things as they were and thus lose for good the great chance of regeneration. This amounts to an appeal to the Russians to start a revolution right away.
In the second half of his letter, Marx quotes from the French edition of Capital, explains that the chapter on primitive accumulation only traces the path followed in Western Europe, and thus clarifies for the first time what really was his motivation when he revised this chapter in 1875. Marx further maintains that if this historical sketch were to be applied to Russia, the following two points must be made:
(1) If Russia attempts to become a capitalist nation, like the nations of Western Europe … it will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of its peasants into proletarians, and afterwards, (2) once it has crossed the threshold of the capitalist system, it will have to submit to the implacable laws of such a system, like the other Western nations.
It may be possible for us to interpret the second point above as suggesting that if Russia does not cross the threshold of the capitalist system, it need not submit to the implacable laws of capitalism. If our interpretation is correct, then the second point above is not much different from Mikhailovskii’s 1872 interpretation of the preface to Capital.55 On closer reading of Capital, however, Mikhailovskii later began to wonder if he was actually doing justice to Marx’s theory. Marx takes advantage of this wavering in Mikhailovskii’s interpretation and accuses him of twisting his own theory. ‘For him’, asserts Marx, ‘it is absolutely necessary to change my sketch of the origin of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophical theory of a Universal Progress, fatally imposed on all peoples, regardless of the historical circumstances in which they find themselves, ending finally in that economic system, which assures both the greatest amount of productive power of social labour and the fullest development of man.’ Marx says that ‘this is to do me both too much honour and too much discredit.’ However, the reproach which Marx aims at Mikhailovskii is evidently wide of the mark and irrelevant, for Mikhailovskii’s interpretation cannot be regarded as totally mistaken. It is rather Marx himself who underwent a significant change after he wrote the first German edition of Capital.
Before concluding the letter, Marx emphasized that ‘events which were strikingly analogous, but which took place in different historical environments, led to entirely dissimilar results.’ When Marx made this remark, he had clearly in his mind the opportunity open to the Russian village community in the prevailing historical conditions, in particular the existence of the advanced West and the crisis of capitalism there.
This letter which contains Marx’s second conclusion on the Russian question was not to be sent. Engels later reasoned that Marx chose not to send it because he was ‘afraid that his name would be enough of a threat to the continued existence of the journal’ which was going to print the letter. The true reason, I suppose, was rather that Marx, after reading his letter again, saw something wrong with his critique of Mikhailovskii.
IV
The Russian victory in the war with Turkey, after all, reinforced the power of tsarism inside Russia. In a country whose modern history was literally a series of defeats in wars that resulted either in drastic internal changes or in revolutions, this was the only war that ended in victory. And this very fact seems to have been one of the important factors that precipitated the contest between tsarism and revolutionary Populism. But let us for the time being go back to the days when the result of the struggle between tsarism and Populism was still unknown.
Even before the end of the war, the revolutionary Populists were markedly stepping up their efforts. In February 1879 when Engels heard the news of the assassination of Governor Kropotkin of Kharkov, he found a positive meaning in the incident, stating that political assassination was the only means of self-defence available to the Russian intellectuals, and that the movement was ‘just about to explode’.56 His expectations of a Russian revolution were thus brought to life again. They were further enhanced when the Executive Committee of People’s Will came into being in the summer of the same year and began its activities. Engels wrote in his New Year’s letter to Wilhelm Liebknecht dated 10 January 1880: ‘I offer you and all of you my congratulations on the New Year and on the Russian Revolution which is most likely to take place during it.’57
In contrast, Marx in this period did not put into words any expectations of this sort; but it seems safe to say that he was in the same state of mind as Engels. When, for instance, Leo Hartman visited London in February 1880 as a representative of People’s Will, Marx received him very warmly, showed hearty affection for him, and offered to help him as much as possible.58
In the months of May to July, Hartman wrote to N. Morozov saying that Marx was reading the ‘Programme’ which Morozov sent him, that he was critical toward the Black Repartition group (Chernyi Peredel) led by Plekhanov and supported the programme of the ‘Russian Terrorists’, and also that Marx, in spite of his sympathy toward the terrorists, was unwilling to write for their publications as he found their programme something other than that of socialists.59 We cannot, however, hastily conclude from these observations of Hartman that such was indeed the attitude which Marx finally adopted towards the People’s Will.
Five months later, in November of the same year, Marx received a message from the ‘Executive Committee of the Russian Social Revolutionary Party’ as well as the programme which People’s Will prepared for its working-class party members.60 That Marx read the programme of the worker-members of People’s Will very carefully, underlining it here and there, is an
