leadership and increasingly despotic methods of rule. Although the Bolsheviks repudiated his efforts to secure a role for the socialist opposition, Martov supported the new regime in its struggle against counterrevolution and foreign intervention. Regardless of this, by 1920 the Menshevik party in Russia had been destroyed, and most of its leaders and activists were in prison or exile. In this year Martov finally left Russia and settled in Berlin. There he founded and edited the Sotsialistichesky vestnik (Socialist Courier), a widely influential social democratic newspaper committed to mobilizing international radical opinion against the Bolshevik dictatorship and halting the spread of Comintern influence among democratic left-wing movements. Martov died on April 4, 1923. As his biographer has written, Martov’s honesty, strong sense of principle, and deeply humane nature precluded his success as a revolutionary politician, but in opposition and exile he brilliantly personified social democracy’s moral conscience (Getzler, 1994). See also: BOLSHEVISM; LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH; MENSHE-VIKS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Getzler, Israel. (1994). “Iulii Martov, the Leader Who Lost His Party in 1917.” Slavonic and East European Review 72:424-439. Getzler, Israel. (1967). Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Karl Marx was born in Trier in Prussia in 1818, and he died in London in 1883. The general approach embodied in Marx’s theoretical writings and his analysis of capitalism may be termed historical materialism, or the materialist interpretation of history. Indeed, that approach may well be considered the cornerstone of Marxism. Marx argued that the superstructure of society was conditioned decisively by the productive base of society, so that the superstructure must always be understood in relation to the base. The base consists of the mode of production, in which forces of production (land, raw materials, capital, and labor) are combined, and in which relations among people arise, determined by their relationship to the means of production. As Marx said in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859, “The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life process in general.” Marx considered the superstructure to include the family, the culture, the state, philosophy, and religion.
In Marx’s view, all the elements of the superstructure served the interests of the dominant class in a society. He saw the class division in any society beyond a primitive level of development as reMASLENITSA flecting the distinction between those who owned and controlled the means of production, on the one hand, and those who lacked a share of ownership and therefore were compelled to labor in the process of production, on the other hand. That fundamental division had been reproduced in various forms in the stages of European history, from ancient slaveholding society through feudalism to capitalism. In capitalist society (which was the main subject of Marx’s writings) the crucial axis of social conflict was between the capitalist class, or bourgeoisie, and the industrial working class, or proletariat. Marx attempted to demonstrate that the antagonism between those classes would continue to intensify, until the workers’ revolution would destroy capitalism and usher in communism.
The dialectical mode of interpretation found a new application in Marx’s analysis of the development of the capitalist economy. Marx claimed to have detected three “laws of capitalist development”: the constant accumulation of capital, the increasing concentration of capital, and the increasing misery of the proletariat. Those laws spelled the progressive polarization of society between an expanding number of impoverished and exploited workers and a decreasing number of wealthy capitalists. As the system became more technologically advanced and productive, the mass of the people in the system would become more destitute and more desperate. The common experience of exploitation would forge powerful solidarity within the ranks of the proletariat, who at the height of the final crisis of capitalism would rise in revolution and expropriate the property of the capitalist class.
Marx wrote far more about capitalism than about the society that would follow the proletarian revolution. He made it clear, however, that he expected the revolution of the working class to socialize the means of production and create a dictatorship of the proletariat. That dictatorship would be the workers’ state, but its existence would be temporary, as society moved from the first, transitional phase of communism to the higher phase, in which the full potential of communism would be realized, so that class differences would have disappeared, the state would have died off, and each person would contribute to society according to personal ability and receive material benefits according to need.
Before the end of the nineteenth century Marx’s theory and his revolutionary vision had been embraced by the leaders of socialist parties in a number of European countries. The spread of Marxism’s influence was soon followed by schisms in international socialism, however. By the end of World War I, a fundamental split had taken place between Lenin’s version of Marxism in the Soviet Union (which after Lenin’s death became known as Marxism- Leninism) and the democratically oriented socialism of major Western socialist parties, which stemmed from the revisionism of Eduard Bernstein. The legacy of that division was a rivalry between socialist and communist parties, which was to hamper the left-wing forces in continental European countries for several decades. Ironically, though Marx’s theory suggested that proletarian revolutions would triumph in the most economically advanced capitalist nations, during the twentieth century successful revolutions under the banner of Marxism and in the name of the proletariat were carried off only in countries with mainly agrarian economies, in which industrialization was in its early stages and the working class was relatively small. See also: COMMUNISM; DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM; DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT; SOCIALISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Avineri, Shlomo. (1971). Karl Marx: Social and Political Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Evans, Alfred B., Jr. (1993). Soviet Marxism-Leninism: The Decline of an Ideology. Westport, CT: Praeger. Kolakowski, Leszek. (1978). Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth, and Dissolution. 3 vols. Oxford, UK: Clarendon. Leonhard, Wolfgang. (1974). Three Faces of Marxism: The Political Concepts of Soviet Ideology, Maoism, and Humanist Marxism, tr. Ewald Osers. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Derived from the word maslo, or “butter/oil,” Maslenitsa was a pagan mythological being personifying death, gloom, and winter as well as a week-long festival that divided winter and spring seasons. The pagan festival was synchronized with Lent and is equivalent to the western European Shrovetide and carnival. Maslenitsa survived
among all Eastern Slavs, particularly Russians, who began celebrating it on a Sunday a week prior to Lent, the final day when meat was permitted in the diet according to Church practices. After the last meat meal, for the remainder of the week people consumed milk products and fish, but most commonly butter-covered bliny, or pancakes. The festival ended on the following Sunday, the day before Lent, and is known as the day of dispatching Maslenitsa or Proshcheny Voskresenie (“Forgiveness Sunday”), as people who had wronged others (alive or deceased) begged for absolution. This day was rounded off with the ritual destruction and burial of Maslenitsa, commonly represented in the form of a female effigy made of straw and dressed in woman’s garb, in a bonfire, drowning in a river, or tearing apart. A wooden wheel, symbolizing the sun-disk, was also often burned alongside the effigy, leading to the idea that this festival was celebrated in connection with the spring equinox (usually on March 22) in pre-Christian times.
The annihilation of Maslenitsa symbolized the passing of the winter, spring renewal, and preparation for the new agrarian cycle as well as human and animal procreation. Family-marriage relations were tested among newlywed couples, who were publicly discussed, required to openly show affection, and put through trials testing their love and fidelity. Eligible singles who failed to wed the previous year were publicly ridiculed and punished. Virility of humans, plants, and animals were conjured up by performing magical rites, fist-fighting, dancing, loud singing, and sled-riding contests downhill or on troikas. The continued celebration of this pagan festival cloaked in a Christian holiday into modern times among the Eastern Slavs is a good example of dual faith (dvoyeverie) or syncretism. See also: FOLKLORE; RUSSIANS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ivantis, Linda J. (1989). Russian Folk Belief. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
