University Press.
Broadly speaking, socialism is the ideology of collective ownership of the means of production and the joint distribution of goods. There were two principal currents in Russian socialism. One held that the peasants, who comprised more than 80 percent of the population, would be the driving force in the creation of the new society; and the other assigned that role to the industrial proletariat. The first current was initially advocated by Alexander Herzen (1812-1870), who had been a supporter of the Decembrists and left Russia for the West in 1847 to escape persecution. The failure of the Revolutions of 1848, which he attributed to the conservatism and attachment to private property of most Europeans, disappointed him deeply. He concluded that the chances for socialism were much better in his native country because the peasant commune had accustomed the Russian people to communal life and egalitarianism. The Russian peasant, Herzen contended, “has no morality save that which flows instinctively, naturally, from his communism.” These ideas came to be known as narodnichestvo, which literally means “populism” but is perhaps better translated as “Russian socialism.” Taken up by such thinkers and activists as Mikhail A. Bakunin (a radical anarchist), Nikolai K. Mikhailovsky, and Nikolai G. Chernyshevsky, the populists gained a substantial following among the intelligentsia by the 1860s and 1870s. Although all populists agreed that Russia could by-pass capitalism in its evolution toward socialism, there was considerable disagreement over the means to achieve the final goal. Toward the end of his life, Herzen believed that socialism could be attained by peaceful means. Peter I. Lavrov was another strong advocate of peaceful methods; from the 1860s until his death in 1900 he argued that it was the obligation of intellectuals to educate the people politically and thus prepare them to undertake their own liberation. Chernyshevsky, on the other hand, did not believe that force could be avoided.
The failed attempt by the populist DmitryV. Karakozov to assassinate Alexander II in 1866 and the ensuring repression prompted many revolutionary intellectuals to opt for peaceful tactics. Early in the 1870s, idealistic young narodniki launched the Go to the People movement; hundreds of them moved to the countryside and lived with the peasants in order to teach them to read and write as well as the rudiments of modern technology. But the ultimate goal of the populists was to prepare the masses for the revolution. Many peasants were baffled by the visitors and feared they were trying to lead them astray. Some peasants even turned them in to the police, who in the mid- 1870s arrested many of the populists, bringing the well-intentioned project to a close. But the ideas of the populists remained alive and were incorporated by the largest socialist movement in Russia, the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs), founded in 1902. The SRs advocated the transfer of all land to peasant communes or local associations, which in turn would assign it on an egalitarian basis to all who wished to earn their living by farming. Industry
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
1413
would be similarly socialized. Although the Socialist Revolutionaries insisted that the final goal, socialism, must be achieved by means of persuasion, they tolerated the “Combat Organization,” an independent organ of the party that carried out dozens of political assassinations. Political terror, many believed, was necessary to bring about the dismantling of the autocratic regime.
In the meantime, in the late 1870s, a small group of intellectuals led by Georgy V. Plekhanov founded a Marxist movement in the name of the industrial working class, and this represented the second major current in Russian socialism. The Marxists contended that Russia’s development would be similar to trends in Central and Western Europe. The country would be industrialized, and would undergo a bourgeois revolution during which the autocratic system would be replaced by a constitutional order dominated by a middle class committed to capitalism. Eventually, when industrialization had reached maturity and the proletariat had become a powerful force, it would stage a second, socialist revolution. In 1898, the Russian Marxists founded the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, which five years later split into two factions.
The split occurred over the seemingly minor question of how to define a party member, but it soon turned out that the differences between the Bolsheviks (majoritarians) led by Vladimir I. Lenin and the Mensheviks (minoritarians) led by Yuli O. Martov and Paul B. Axelrod touched on fundamental issues. Lenin, in keeping with views he had expressed in 1902 in What Is to Be Done?, favored a highly centralized, elitist, hierarchically organized political party, whereas the Mensheviks stressed the necessity and desirability of broad working-class participation in the movement’s affairs and in the coming revolutionary events. In short order, it also became evident that while both factions subscribed to a revolutionary course, the Mensheviks tended to adopt more moderate tactics than did the Bolsheviks.
On November 7, 1917, after the country had endured three years of war that caused untold devastation and loss of life and eight months of revolutionary turbulence, the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government, which consisted of moderates committed to democracy and had been formed when the tsarist regime collapsed earlier that year, in March. Then, on November 8, one day after the Bolsheviks had formed a new government,
1414
Lenin sought to placate the peasants, still the vast majority of the population, by adopting the SR land program. He ordered the abrogation of the property rights of the nobility and placed land in the rural regions at the disposal of land committees and district soviets of peasants’ deputies for distribution to the peasants. But the Bolsheviks also remained faithful to their own program by introducing workers’ control in industry and in commercial and agricultural enterprises, abolishing distinctions and special privileges based on class, eliminating titles in the army, and outlawing inequality in wages. Lenin was convinced that the economically more advanced countries of Europe with large proletarian populations would soon follow Russia’s example in adopting socialism.
When this did not happen, his successor, Josef V. Stalin, in 1924 formulated the doctrine of “socialism in one country,” according to which Russia was strong enough economically to reach the final goal of socialism by itself. Four years later, the Soviet government launched a second revolution by forcing the peasants into collectives and speeding up the process of industrialization. Much more so than ever before, the major economic decisions were now made by officials in Moscow. Then, in 1936, Stalin formally declared that the goal of socialism had in fact been attained. This claim was disputed by Leon D. Trotsky, the man he had defeated in the struggle over the leadership of the country after Lenin’s death in 1924. Trotsky maintained that socialism could triumph only on a worldwide basis. Stalinist socialism remained the regnant ideology of the country until 1991, although many Stalinist methods of rule were gradually abandoned following Stalin’s death in 1953. See also: BOLSHEVIKS; HERZEN, ALEXANDER IVANOVICH; LENIN, VLADIMIR ILLICH; MARXISM; MENSHEVIKS; POPULISM; SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC WORKERS PARTY; SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY; SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES; STALIN, JOSEPH VISSARIONOVICH; TROTSKY, LEON DAVIDOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baron, Samuel H. (1963). Plekhanov: The Father of Russian Marxism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Haimson, Leopold H. (1955). The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lampert, Evgenii. (1965). Sons against Fathers: Studies in Russian Radicalism and Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Malia, Martin. (1961). Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812-1855. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Venturi, Franco. (1960). Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Walicki, Andrzej. (1995). Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Woehrlin, William F. (1971). Chernishevskii: The Man and the Journalist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wolfe, Bertram D. (1948). Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical Study. New York: Dial Press.
ABRAHAM ASCHER
The question of whether socialism could be built in the USSR provoked a great ideological and political debate
