Marxism in Russia

Abstract

The use of the term “Marxism” to denote a certain doctrine gives rise to complicated problems. For example, if “Marxism” is used in its widest and most political sense as it is by the leaders of the Soviet Union then everything that has happened in the Soviet Union since 1917 could be brought under the heading of “Marxism in Russia,” and a paper on this subject would amount to a history of Soviet power much more than to the history of certain ideas. The much more modest aim of this paper is to look at the views of Marx and Engels in their relation to Russia, both in the way in which, in the formative years of the Russian revolutionary movement, Marx and Engels understood this movement and in the way in which the Russian revolutionaries, when they first became acquainted with the ideas of Marx and Engels, were influenced by them and attempted to interpret them in relation to their own situation. This is not to say that all discussion of the writings of Marx and Engels that has taken place in Russia since those early years is irrelevant to the question of Marxism in Russia. However, one cannot escape the fact that after 1903, for example, after the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks as the two factions of the party were to become known, interpretations of what Marx and Engels were supposed to have said or written became an integral part of the political struggle and therefore belong much more to the history of that political struggle than they do to intellectual history. Or to take some other examples of a rather more extreme kind. Stalin’s propagandists in the ’thirties were able to find, or claim to find, justification in the writings of Marx for the view that the idea of a Leader, a supreme Leader such as Stalin became, was an integral part of the doctrine of Marxism. They were also able to show that the repressive policy of Stalin, which resulted in the doing to death of many millions of innocent people, was somehow or other justified by doctrines which were supposed to derive from Marx. All this is very interesting for those who study the nature of totalitarian rule. It has nothing whatever to do with the intellectual history of a doctrine.