tempt for anarchism, which was at best a 'bourgeois sport' and at worst an invitation to irrationalism of all kinds:
In the name of revolution anarchists serve the cause of reaction; in the name of morality they encourage the most immoral actions; in the name of individual freedom they trample underfoot the rights of their neighbors.43
Marxism provides the theoretical basis for the revolutionary movement in Russia as elsewhere by providing an objective science of society and history. In contrast to the dualism of the populists, which was unable to 'build a bridge across this seemingly bottomless abyss'44 between noble ideals and harsh realities, Plekhanov's philosophy is totally monistic. The material world alone is real, he proclaims repeatedly in a series of studies on materialism that was climaxed by his most influential book (and the only one published in Russia prior to the revolution), On the Question of the Development of the Monistic View of History: In Defence of Materialism. Absolute objectivity is possible, because 'the criterion of truth lies not in me, but in the relations which exist outside of me.'43
Plekhanov thus offered to a new generation of radical thinkers a monistic, objective philosophy that would liberate them from schism and subjectivity. As distinct from classical materialism of France in the eighteenth century (and Russia in the 1860's), Plekhanov's materialism contained a built-in guarantee of revolutionary change, for it is 'historical' or 'dialectic' materialism. Following Marx, it contends that the material world is in a state of motion and conflict and that the liberation of all humanity will inevitably come out of the clash of opposing forces in the material world. The driving forces in human society are social classes; and the social class to whom the future ultimately belongs is the proletariat.
As early as his 1884 pamphlet, 'Our Differences,' Plekhanov bluntly insisted that Russia was already in a capitalist stage of development. It was irrelevant to him whether private or state capitalism was controlling the economy; the practical result was that a new urban proletariat was coming into being. This class-rather than the demagogic and self-important intelligentsia or the confused and primitive peasantry-was the true bearer of progress in Russia. The proletariat had a practical familiarity with the tools of material progress and would not be so easily misled by demagogic talk of a 'people's will.' The growth of a proletariat was historically inevitable, and the old communal forms of organization no longer had any realistic potential for serving as socialist alternatives to the pattern of economic development which Marx had outlined in Capital. In his consistent attempt to 'appeal to reason, not feelings,' Plekhanov insisted that the
Russian revolutionary movement must effect an 'unconditional break with its present theories' by accepting 'a revolutionary theory' rather than 'theories of revolutionaries.'48 The program of the Liberation of Labor group urges not the dissolution of other radical groups but rather that the revolutionary struggle be fortified by a group recognizing the importance of 'organizing a Russian workers' socialist party' and acknowledging the 'international character of the present-day working-class movement.'47
Plekhanov brought into the light of day many of the inconsistencies and presumptions of populist thought: the romantic attachment to the idea of a special path for Russia, the exaggerated belief in the ability of individuals to change the course of history, and the palpably unscientific theories of history and 'formulas of progress' advanced by populist writers. The rational cosmopolitanism of Plekhanov's Marxism had a particular appeal to leaders of some of the minority cultures within the Russian empire, whose peoples were subjected to new indignities by the Russification campaigns of the late imperial period. Even before the first Marxist circle was formed inside Russia proper in 1885, a Marxist circle and journal had appeared in Russian-occupied Latvia; and the rapidly growing Social Democratic movement of the nineties had particular strength among the more advanced and Westernized peoples of the Russian empire: Poles, Finns, and Georgians. Plekhanov's chief lieutenant, Paul Axelrod, was a Jew, and the Jewish Bund was one of the most important catalysts in bringing together the Social Democrats of the Russian Empire for their first national congress in 1898.
Plekhanov's Marxism also.had a more general appeal for the increasing number of thinking Russians who were becoming preoccupied with problems of material growth and economic analysis. Economic analysis became in the last two decades of the century a major subject of intellectual interest in Russia. There were sophisticated populist economists like Nicholas Dan-ielson (Marx's most regular Russian correspondent), liberal economists like Alexander Chuprov (a lecturer on political economy at the University of Moscow and a regular economic analyst for the daily newspaper Russkie Vedomosti-Russian Reports), and an increasing number of professional economists in the service of the central government and local zemstvos. The predominant influence on Witte and most government economists was Friedrich List's national system urging protective tariffs and state investment in order to develop a balanced and self-sufficient national economy.48 Also influenced by List was the great chemist Dmitry Mendeleev, who devoted much of his energy to devising the regional and industrial patterns and the necessary tariff structure for the development of a Russian national economy. He visited and admired America, but not the 'politic-mongering'
(politikanstvo) of democratic politicians. As early as 1882 he advocated separating the ministry of industry from that of finance in order to stimulate economic growth; and he was active in the agitation that led to the founding in 1903 at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute of the first separate faculty of economics in a Russian institution of higher learning.49
Amidst all this interest in economic problems, Marxism with its unique and unequivocal insistence on the primacy of the economic factor to all of life and history was bound to have a strong intellectual appeal. So great was the infatuation with Marxist ideas in Russian intellectual circles of the nineties that Marxism rapidly became caught up in the factional debates that were simultaneously raging in the liberal camp. Some Russian Marxists, the so- called economists, accepted a Marxist analysis of economic development but wished to concentrate on improving the economic lot of the workers rather than working for a political revolution. Somewhat more radical were the 'legal' Marxists, who built on Marxist economic analysis and accepted the need for a political struggle against autocracy but favored a merging of the socialist and liberal causes in a common struggle for the democratic liberties that were prerequisite for social democracy.50
The leading spokesman for the 'legal' or 'revisionist' Marxists was Peter Struve, one of the most ranging minds of the late imperial period, who also participated in the new currents of liberalism and idealism. Grandson of the Danish-German first director of the Pulkovo Observatory, Struve spent much of his early life in Stuttgart, and brought to the study of Russian reality a deep grounding in the philosophical and economic thinking of the German universities and the German Social Democratic movement. His Critical Comments on the Economic Development of Russia, written in 1894 at the age of twenty-four, was the first full-length original Marxist work to be published in Russia, and it provided the guidelines for the general assault of economists in the late nineties on the populist contention that the capitalist phase of development might be avoided or bypassed in Russia. He also wrote a seminal philosophic critique of the shallow pro-gressivist ideology of Mikhailovsky and other populists in his long introduction, in 1901, to Nicholas Berdiaev's first book, Subjectivism and Individualism in Social Philosophy. This work also reflected his critical attitude toward rigid philosophical orthodoxy and revolutionary 'Jacobinism' within Russian Marxism. His Marxist Theory of Social Evolution of 1899 had denied that there was a fundamental, dialectical opposition between capitalism and socialism, and foresaw a natural, continuing progression toward socialism along lines proclaimed in Eduard Bernstein's famous work of the same year, Evolutionary Socialism.51
All three of the new perspectives of the late imperial period came to
play a role in Struve's protean intellectual development. Although retaining an essentially Marxist approach to social and economic analysis, Struve became an active leader in the movement for constitutional liberalism,
