Nihilists, Narodniks, and the Importance of Pisarev

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Nihilists, Narodniks, and the Importance of Pisarev

Post by blindpig » Thu Nov 30, 2017 6:58 pm

This is an abridged repost:

Nihilists, Narodniks, and the Importance of Pisarev
.

Part 1 of 2

The "nihilists" began as the open embrace of an insult or a malicious parody of themselves. Stop for a minute and think about it. "Nihilists" - people who believe in nothing... How is that possible?

To understand the "joke", you have to understand the context. The Russian autocracy should have died with the other remnants of the absolute monarchies of Europe, but it didn't. The democratic ideals of the European revolutions met with complete rejection and ever increasing repression in the most backward of European empires. But, while Russia was certainly the most backward of European states, the implications of that backwardness were uneven. In the cities, the same ferment, the same ideas, the same demands, and the same democratic yearnings as in the rest of Europe, increasingly utopian and "socialistic" in their expression, began to crest. In Russia, however, the wave broke on the rocks of an intransigent autocracy unwilling to entertain "reforms", and on a state apparatus, modern and feudal, increasingly efficient in its suppression of any challenge. More, the countryside was dominated by 50 million "serfs", a form of rural slavery whose continued existence negated even the possibility of all other advances (and, in this way alone, was not unlike slavery in the U.S.).

The story of the rise and fall of Russian liberalism from the great outcry at the time of the Decembrists, to its utter defeat and humiliation by the 1850s, is a historian's project. Only the side effects matter to us. The ascent with absurdly overblown claims, of the Russian liberals, was matched only by their utter collapse, at the first "whiff of grapeshot", and by their subsequent wholesale abandonment of all that they had previously held true, now traded in for mysticism, nationalism and every other manner of slavish abandonment of previously held "principles". The Russian liberals strode boldly off of the historical stage for nearly a century... and, perhaps, even to today.

On reflection, one of the most prominent outlets for this roller-coaster ride was in the realm of literature. Russia was one country in which, for a time, politics was literally a “morality play”. Literature briefly became the quintessential expression of popular unrest.

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Why literature? The revolutionary democrat and literary critic, Vissarion Belinsky, wrote that the only sphere where “true freedom” existed during the rule of Nicholas I was in the realm of literature. Perhaps the cause was greater than that, but the result was indisputable. In the most backward of European countries, the most advanced of literary cultures, uniquely concentrated in time and space, was born: Alexander Pushkin, Lev Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Nekrasov, and two dozen others, all within the first rank of human treasures and all, initially at least, focused on the misery of “the people” and the travesties of the social institutions which prolonged their misery. Alongside this literature itself, a literature about literature, also emerged, in dozens of journals of literary criticism which wandered, predictably, into social criticism, even as they lectured the rising writers on their obligation to humanity. The people, are “always ready to forgive a writer for a bad book, but never for a pernicious one”, wrote Belinsky to Gogol, when the latter produced a volume that failed to “awaken in the people a sense of their human dignity, trampled down in the mud and the filth for so many centuries.”

In 1845, one year after leaving the Army, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote his novel Poor Folk to the acclaim and approval of Nekrasov, Belinsky, and many others. By 1848, Dostoyevsky was part of the liberal literary group, the Petrashevsky Circle. In April of 1849, he was arrested along with others of that group and he was sentenced to death in November. After a “mock execution” (see http://populistindependent.org/phpbb/vi ... a&start=15 ), his sentence was commuted to four years of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp, followed by 5 years of service as a private in a Siberian Regiment. The shock to the spirit of the young liberal could not have been greater: “In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall...We were packed like herrings in a barrel...There was no room to turn around. From dusk to dawn it was impossible not to behave like pigs...Fleas, lice, and black beetles by the bushel.”

The result was as the Tsar’s police had intended. Entering prison as a “radical” liberal, Dostoyevsky returned to St. Petersburg in 1859, reborn into the Eastern Orthodox faith and a dedicated spiritualist and ardent foe of radicalism and socialism. The remainder of his ascendant career would focus on themes of redemption and “awakening”, but in so alienated a form as to rip him out of his own historical setting and allow him to make a quantum leap of over a century to become the “father” of that most angst-ridden and isolating of 20th century “schools”, existentialism.


Like dominos, they fell one by one. In 1842, Nikolai Gogol had published Dead Souls to the astonished gasps of the literary intelligentsia. The epic poem was considered the greatest satirical work of its age and, through it, Gogol became the young Homer. In 1849, came the second part of Gogol’s trilogy, patterned on The Divine Comedy, and entitled Purgatory. The young Homer had, in seven short years, transformed himself into the mystical promoter of uninspired religious platitudes, presented in support of the church, the autocracy, serfdom… in a phrase, in defense of all that he had so thoroughly savaged shortly before.

By way of “Pan-Slavism”, patriotism, mysticism, anti-Westernism, religiosity, conspiracy-theory, conservatism, and personal pre-occupation, the greatest generation of Russian writers deserted the field of battle. They were, of course, archetypical of Russian liberals as a whole, the main body of whom were neither as talented nor as noble as the wielders of the pen. Liberalism had had its say and receiving a stern “no” in reply from the patriarch, that was all there was to it. Something had to give and it was Russian liberalism that “gave”.

And there things would have remained if the very greatness of Russian literature had not pulled up alongside itself a superstructure of equivalent stature. Two distinct generations of writers about writers now rose to the task. The older generation of these, the émigré socialist and literary critic, Alexander Herzen, the radical poet and literary critic, Nikolai Nekrasov, the revolutionary democrat and literary critic, Victor Belinsky, and several others took up the mission. Where once they had heaped the most honeyed praise on the Russian giants, now they criticized the delinquent social artists, alternately lampooning, cajoling, lecturing, and finally, replacing, the sword that had been sheathed. One aspect of that transformation was the return of the debate which had taken place in the clouds, back to earth, to become interwoven with actual Russian conditions. Herzen’s journal, The Bell, now simply turned to social commentary. Built around the drumbeat demand for “Freedom for the Serfs”, it became the most widely read magazine in all of Russia. Even the tsar was rumored to read it, often responding with titanic rages.

Yet, even these voices had to look over their shoulders. In the next generation of young intellectuals, a distinct hardening had occurred. The time had passed for talk of appeals, reforms and dependency on the more “humane” characteristics of this or that Tsar or police commissioner. Leading the way was the journal, Sovremennik ("Contemporary") and it’s editor-in-chief, Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Sovremennik’s literary focus increasingly was for the censors alone. Instead, direct social criticism, a form of what would later be called, “muck-raking”, was interspersed with commentary on materialist philosophy, science, economics, and the revolutionary politics of Western Europe. Nikolai Dobrolyubov was an early writer for the journal, while the immensely talented principle of another journal, Russkoye Slovo, Dimitri Pisarev, walked in virtual lock-step with the more senior Chernyshevsky. Commenting on the relationship, the radical democrat Shelgunov wrote that Pisarev “went hand in hand with Chernyshevsky on political and economic questions”.

The audience for the new journals was also “new”. In the youthful intelligentsia of Russia, the young materialists found a willing public, infinitely disgusted with the cowardice, bankruptcy and mystical idealism of the Russian liberals. Even after the radical journals had been officially banned and their editors arrested, they were devoured eagerly by hard young “negativists” reading torn pages by candlelight.

In 1862, the great Russian novelist, Ivan Turgenev, wrote Fathers and Sons, the epic work that from then on would be associated with a society that feared its own children. The novel was a work of intense ambiguity, coming just one year after the anti-climatic and largely meaningless abolition of serfdom by decree . The unintended hero, Yevgeny Bazarov, was a lampoon: intelligent, coldly skeptical, scientific, and revolutionary, he was also amoral, and shockingly unsentimental. He was immediately adopted as a “model” by students and young intellectuals, who now proudly began to call themselves “nihilists”.

The same year that Fathers and Sons was published, Chernyshevsky was arrested. From within the thick walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress, Chernyshevsky would complete his turn from literary criticism to literature itself. In 678 days of solitary confinement, he penned What is to be Done, perhaps simultaneously the most poorly written, and the most important political novel ever produced. Acknowledging his lack of writing talent, Chernyshevsky nevertheless claimed in his prologue that it was “not less important” than the works of the previous literary giants. That turned out to be a vast understatement. With his hero, Rakhemtov, Chernyshevsky responded to Turgenev and expressed not an ounce of the ambiguity that had characterized Bazarov. Writing much later, the literary critic, Jen Marder, would say, “This book has the general appearance of a novel but is really more a handbook of radicalism. The tenuous plot serves primarily to link one monologue of conversation on a point of radical policy with the next. The "revolutionary youth" of the time used What is to be Done as a guide to behavior and ideology for the next twenty years. Rakhemtov, the hero of the novel, became the prototype of hard-headed materialism and pragmatism, of total dissatisfaction with the government, and of the self-sacrificing nobility of spirit that was the ideal of many of the radical intelligentsia.”

The real influence of the novel was felt for more than a century. An entire generation of Russian revolutionaries were moved by the work, not least of whom was V.I. Lenin himself, who wrote his own, What is to be Done” in 1901, in open acknowledgement of Chernyshevsky. In a letter to A. N. Potresov dated January 26, 1899, from exile in Siberia, Lenin conceded to Chernyshevsky, the “heritage” of the Russian revolutionary movement.

In vain did the literary giants counterattack. “They believe in NOTHING!”, shouted Tolstoy in one of his most backward moments, before penning his own What is to be Done about “moral responsibility”. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground was written as a direct polemic against Chernyshevsky, as was, in part, his tract against “nihilist extremism” and Nechayev, The Possessed.

It was all too late, as it turned out, for such gestures. The history of Russian literary opposition to oppression was already coming to a close. In it’s place, an actual opposition was forming.

The extended quotations by Alan Woods which follow are from a so-so chapter in a book that is even less than that. Woods has entirely too many modern fish to fry, though that criticism is probably fair for any chronicler of the Russian Revolution. The book, however, has two great advantages which recommend it here: It is full of stories and anecdotes which are often missing from other, drier, presentations, and it is reprinted, in its entirety, on the web.

http://www.marxist.com/bolshevism/part1-1.html
Quote Originally Posted by Woods
The phenomenon of the Russian Narodniks (“populists”, men of the people) was a consequence of the extreme belatedness of Russian capitalism. The decay of feudal society proceeded faster than the formation of the bourgeoisie. Under these conditions, sections of the intelligentsia, especially the youth, broke away from the nobility, bureaucracy and clergy and began to look for a way out of the social impasse. However, when they looked around for a point of support within society, they could not be attracted by the crude, backward and underdeveloped bourgeoisie, whilst the proletariat was still in its infancy, unorganized, politically untutored and small in numbers, particularly in comparison with the many millions of peasants who made up the dumb, oppressed and crushed majority of Russian society.

It was therefore understandable that the revolutionary intelligentsia should look to the “people” in the person of the peasantry as the main potential revolutionary force within society. This movement had its roots in the great turning-point in Russian history in 1861. The emancipation of the serfs that took place in that year was by no means, as has been frequently suggested, the result of the enlightened benevolence of Alexander II. It flowed from the fear of a social explosion after Russia’s humiliating defeat in the disastrous Crimean War of 1853-56, which, like the later war with Japan, served to cruelly expose the tsarist regime. Not for the first, nor the last time, military defeat revealed the bankruptcy of the autocracy, providing a powerful impetus to social change. But the Edict of Emancipation solved none of the problems and, indeed, made the lot of the mass of the peasants considerably worse. The landlords naturally made off with the best plots of land, leaving the most barren areas to the peasants. Strategic points such as water and mills were usually in the hands of the landlords who forced the peasants to pay for access. Worse still, the “free” peasants were legally tied to the village commune or mir which had collective responsibility for collecting taxes. No peasant could leave the mir without permission. Freedom of movement was hampered by the system of internal passports. The village commune, in effect, was transformed into “the lowest rung of the local police system”.

To make matters worse, the reform allowed the landlords to cut off and appropriate one-fifth (in some cases, two-fifths) of the lands formerly cultivated by the peasants. They invariably chose the best and most profitable parts —woods, meadows, watering places, grazing grounds, mills, etc.—which gave them a stranglehold over the “emancipated” peasant. Year after year, a greater number of peasant families sunk hopelessly into debt and impoverishment as a result of this swindle.

The emancipation of the serfs was an attempt to carry through reform from the top to prevent revolution from below. Like all important reforms, it was a by-product of revolution. The Russian countryside had been shaken by peasant uprisings. In the last decade of the reign of Nicholas I, there were 400 peasant disturbances and an equal number in the following six years (1855-60). In a space of 20 years, 1835-54, 230 landowners and bailiffs had been killed, and a further 53 in the three years before 1861. The announcement of the emancipation was met by a further wave of disorders and uprisings, brutally suppressed. The hopes placed by an entire generation of progressive thinkers on the ideas of reform were cruelly betrayed by the results of the emancipation, which turned out to be a gigantic fraud. The peasants, who believed that the land was rightfully theirs, were cheated in all directions. They had to accept only those allotments laid down by the law (by agreement with the landlord) and had to pay a redemption fee over a period of 49 years at 6 per cent interest. As a result, the landlords retained approximately 71,500,000 desyatins of land, and the peasants, representing the overwhelming majority of society, only 33,700,000 desyatins.

In the years after 1861, the peasantry, hemmed in by repressive legislation on “poverty lots” and impoverished by the weight of debt, staged a series of desperate local uprisings. But the peasantry, throughout history, has always been incapable of playing an independent role in society. Capable of great revolutionary courage and sacrifice, its efforts to shake off the rule of the oppressor have only succeeded where leadership of the revolutionary movement has been taken up by a stronger, more homogeneous and conscious class based in the towns. In the absence of this factor, the peasant “jacqueries”, from the middle ages onwards, have inevitably suffered the cruelest defeats. The result of the scattered nature of the peasantry, its lack of social cohesion and lack of class consciousness.

In Russia, where capitalist forms of production were still at the embryonic phase, no such revolutionary class existed in the towns. Yet a class, or more accurately caste, of largely impoverished students and intellectuals, the raznochintsy (those without rank) or “intellectual proletariat” proved exceptionally sensitive to the subterranean mood of discontent which lay deep within the recesses of Russian life. Years later, the terrorist Myshkin declared at his trial that “the movement of the intelligentsia was not artificially created, but was the echo of popular unrest.” As always, the ability of the intelligentsia to play an independent social role was no greater than that of the peasantry. Nevertheless it can act as quite an accurate barometer of the moods and tensions developing within society.

In 1861, the very year of the Emancipation, the great Russian democratic writer Alexander Herzen wrote from exile in London in the pages of his journal Kolokol (The Bell) urging the youth of Russia to go “to the people!” The arrest of prominent publicists like Chernyshevsky (whose writings were influenced by Marx and who had a big impact on Lenin and his generation) and Dimitri Pisarev, demonstrated the impossibility of peaceful liberal reform. By the end of the decade of the 1860s, the basis of a mass revolutionary movement of populist youth had been laid.

The appalling conditions of the masses in post-reform Russia moved the best sections of the intelligentsia to anger and indignation. The arrest of the most radical of the democratic wing, Pisarev and Chernyshevsky, only served to deepen the alienation of the intellectuals and push them further to the left. While the older generation of liberals accommodated themselves to the reaction, a new breed of young radicals was emerging in the universities, immortalized in the figure of Bazarov in Turgenyev’s novel Fathers and Sons. The hallmark of this new generation was impatience with the fumbling of the liberals, whom they treated with contempt. They believed fervently in the ideas of a complete revolutionary overturn and a radical reconstruction of society from top to bottom.

Within 12 months of the Emancipation, the “reforming tsar” had moved towards reaction. There was a clamp-down on intellectuals. The universities were placed under the oppressive vigilance of the reactionary Minister of Education, Count Dimitri Tolstoy, who imposed an educational system designed to crush independent spirits and stifle imagination and creativity. The schools were forced to teach 47 hours of Latin a week and 36 hours of Greek, with a heavy emphasis on grammar. Natural science and history were excluded from the curriculum as potentially subversive subjects—and the system of policing the mind was rigidly enforced under the baleful eye of the school inspector. The heady days of “reform” gave way to the bleak years of police surveillance and grey conformity. The move to reaction was intensified after the unsuccessful Polish uprising of 1863. The revolution was drowned in blood. Thousands of Poles were killed in battle; hundreds were hanged in the repression that followed. The brutal Count Muravyov personally hanged 128 Poles and transported 9,423 men and women. The total exiled to Russia was twice that number. Peter Kropotkin, the future anarchist theoretician, witnessed the sufferings of the Polish exiles in Siberia where he was stationed as a young captain of the Imperial Guard: “I saw some of [them] on the Lena, standing half naked in a shanty, around an immense cauldron filled with salt-brine, and mixing the thick, boiling brine with long shovels, in an infernal temperature, while the gate of the shanty was wide open to make a strong current of glacial air. After two years of such work, these martyrs were sure to die from consumption.”

But, beneath the permafrost of reaction, the seeds of a new revolutionary revival were swiftly germinating. The case of Prince Kropotkin is a striking example of how the wind blows the tops of the trees first. Born into an aristocratic family, this one-time member of the Imperial Corps of Pages was, like many of his contemporaries, affected by the terrible suffering of the masses and driven to draw revolutionary conclusions. A keen scientist, Kropotkin, vividly describes in his memoirs the political evolution of an entire generation: “But what right had I to these higher joys,” he asked himself, “when all around was nothing but misery and the struggle for a moldy bit of bread; when whatever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotion must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not bread enough for their children?”

The cold cruelty towards the Poles showed the other face of the “reforming tsar”, a man who, in Kropotkin words, “merrily signed the most reactionary decrees and then afterwards became despondent about them”. The corrupt and degenerate system of autocratic rule, the dead hand of bureaucracy, the all-pervasive whiff of religious mysticism and obscurantism roused all the living forces of society to revolt. “It is bitter,” wrote the poet Nekrasov, “the bread that has been made by slaves.” The revolt against slavery spurred the revolutionary student youth to search for a way out. Echoing Herzen, their watchword became: “V Narod!” (To the people!). To these courageous and dedicated youth, the words uttered by Herzen made an indelible impression: “Go to the people… That is our place… Demonstrate… that from among you will emerge not new bureaucrats, but soldiers of the Russian people.”

‘Going to the People’

This movement of mainly upper-class youth was naive and confused, but also courageous and utterly selfless, and left behind a priceless heritage for the future. While criticizing the utopian character of their program, Lenin always paid warm tribute to the revolutionary valor of the early Narodniks. He understood that the Marxist movement in Russia was raised on the bones of these martyrs, who cheerfully gave up wealth and worldly comforts to face death, prison and exile for the sake of the fight for a better world. Theoretical confusion was only to be expected in a movement as yet in its infancy. The absence of a strong working class, the lack of any clear traditions or model from the past to light their path, the dark night of censorship which prevented them from having access to most of the writings of Marx, all this deprived the young Russian revolutionaries of the chance to understand the real nature of the processes at work in society.

To most of the youth, Marx was seen as “just an economist”, whereas Bakunin’s doctrine of “implacable destruction”, and his calls for direct action, seemed to be more in tune with the spirit of a generation tired of words and impatient for results. Pavel Axelrod, in his memoirs, recalls how the theories of Bakunin gripped the minds of the radicalized youth with its striking simplicity. The “people”, according to Bakunin, were revolutionary and socialist by instinct—going right back to the Middle Ages—as shown by peasant revolts, the Pugachov uprising, and even brigands, who were held up as a good example to follow! All that was required to ignite a universal revolt, he maintained, was for the students to go to the villages and raise the standard of revolution. Local uprisings would soon provoke a general conflagration, bringing the whole existing order crashing down.

In a striking passage, Trotsky graphically recaptures the spirit of these youthful pioneers: “Young men and women, most of them former students numbering about a thousand in all, carried socialist propaganda to all corners of the country, especially to the lower reaches of the Volga, where they sought the legacy of Pugachov and Razin. This movement, remarkable in its scope and youthful idealism, the true cradle of the Russian revolution, was distinguished—as is proper to a cradle—by extreme naiveté. The propagandists had neither a guiding organization nor a clear program; they had no conspiratorial experience. And why should they have? These young people, having broken with their families and schools, without profession, personal ties, or obligations, and without fear either of earthly or heavenly powers, seemed to themselves the living crystallization of a popular uprising. A constitution? Parliamentarianism? Political liberty? No, they would not be swerved from the path by these western decoys. What they wanted was a complete revolution, without abridgement or intermediate stages.”

In the summer of 1874, hundreds of young people from upper or middle class backgrounds went out to the villages, burning with the idea of rousing the peasantry to revolution. Pavel Axelrod, one of the future founders of Russian Marxism, recalls the radical break which these young revolutionaries had made with their class: “Whoever wished to work for the people had to give up university, renounce his privileged condition and his family, turn his back even upon science and art. They had to cut all the bonds which linked them to the highest social classes, burn their bridges behind them. In one word, they had to voluntarily forget about any possible road of retreat. The propagandist, so to speak, had to effect a complete transformation of his inner essence, so that he would feel at one with the lower strata of the people, not only ideologically, but also in his habitual everyday behavior.”

These courageous young men and women had no definite program, other than to find a road to “the people”. Dressed in old working clothes bought from second-hand stalls in markets, clutching false passports, they traveled to the villages hoping to learn a trade which would enable them to live and work undetected. The wearing of peasants’ clothes was not the theatrical gesture it might appear at first sight. Kropotkin points out that: “The gap between the peasant and the educated people is great in Russia, and contact between them is so rare that not only does the appearance in a village of a man who wears the town dress awaken general attention, but even in town, if one whose talk and dress reveals that he is not a worker is seen to go about with workers, the suspicion of the police is aroused at once.”

Unfortunately, this admirable revolutionary spirit was founded upon theories which were fundamentally unsound. The mystical idea of a “special Russian road to socialism” which could somehow leap from feudal barbarism to a classless society, skipping the phase of capitalism, was the source of an endless series of errors and tragedies. A false theory inevitably leads to a disaster in practice. The Narodniks were motivated by revolutionary voluntarism—the idea that the success of the revolution can be guaranteed by the iron will and determination of a small group of dedicated men and women. The subjective factor, of course, is decisive in human history. Karl Marx explained that men and women make their own history, but added that they do not make it outside of the context of social and economic relationships established independently of their will.

The attempts of the Narodnik theoreticians to establish a “special historical path” for Russia, differently from that of Western Europe inevitably led them down the road of philosophical idealism and a mystical view of the peasantry. The theoretical confusion of Bakunin—a reflection of the very underdeveloped and inchoate class relations in Russia—found a ready audience among the Narodniks, seeking an ideological justification for their vague revolutionary aspirations.

Standing reality on its head, Bakunin portrayed the mir—the basic unit of the tsarist regime in the village—as the enemy of the state. All that was necessary was for the revolutionaries to go to the village and rouse the “instinctively revolutionary” Russian peasants against the state and the problem would be solved, without recourse to “politics” or any particular form of party organization. The task was not to fight for democratic demands (since democracy also represented a form of state and therefore another expression of tyranny) but to overthrow the state “in general” and replace it with a voluntary federation of local communities, based on the mir, purged of its reactionary features.

The contradictory elements of this theory rapidly became evident when the Narodnik youth attempted to put it into practice. The revolutionary exhortations of the students were met with sullen suspicion or outright hostility by the peasants, who frequently handed over the newcomers to the authorities.

Zhelyabov, one of the future leaders of the Narodnaya Volya party (People’s Will), graphically described the Narodnik youth’s desperate efforts to win over the peasants “like fish beating their heads against the ice”. Despite the terrible conditions of oppression and exploitation, the Russian peasant, who believed that “the body belongs to the tsar, the soul to God and the back to the squire”, proved impervious to the revolutionary ideas of the Narodniks. The shock and disappointment of the intelligentsia is echoed in the words of a participant:

“We ourselves were too blindly assured of the imminence of the revolution to notice that the peasants had not nearly as much of the revolutionary spirit as we wanted them to have. But we did notice that they all wanted the land to be divided up among them. They expected the Emperor would give an order and the land would be divided up … most of them imagined he would have had it carried through long ago if he had not been prevented by the big landowners and the officials—the two arch-enemies of both the Emperor and the peasants.”

The naive attempt to pass for peasants frequently had its tragi-comical side, as one of the participants, Debogori-Mokrievich, recalls: “The peasants did not want to let us stay the night in their cottages: quite obviously they did not like the look of our dirty, ragged clothing. This was the last thing we expected when we first dressed up as workmen.”

Sleeping out in the open, hungry, cold and tired, their feet bleeding from long marches in cheap boots, the spirits of the Narodniks were dashed against the solid wall of peasant indifference. Gradually, inexorably, those who had not been arrested drifted back, disillusioned and exhausted, to the towns. The movement of “going to the people” was swiftly broken by a wave of arrests—more than 700 in 1874 alone. It was an expensive defeat. But the heroic and spirited speeches of defiance hurled from the dock by the arrested revolutionists served to kindle a new movement which began almost immediately.

The Narodniks swore by “the people” in every other sentence. Yet they remained completely isolated from the peasant masses they idolized. In reality, the entire movement was concentrated into the hands of the intelligentsia: “The Populists’ worship of the peasant and his commune was but the mirror image,” wrote Trotsky, “of the grandiose pretensions of the ‘intellectual proletariat’ to the role of chief, if not indeed sole, instrument of progress. The whole history of the Russian intelligentsia develops between these two poles of pride and self-abnegation—which are the short and long shadows of its social weakness.”

But this social weakness of the intelligentsia merely reflected the underdeveloped state of class relations in Russian society. The rapid development of industry and the creation of a powerful urban working class which was to be brought about by a massive influx of foreign capital in the 1890s was still the music of an apparently remote future. Thrust back upon their own resources, the revolutionary intelligentsia sought salvation in the theory of a “special Russian road to socialism”, based upon the element of common ownership which existed in the mir.

The theories of guerrillaism and individual terrorism which have become fashionable among certain circles in recent times repeat in caricatured form the antiquated ideas of the Russian Narodniks and terrorists. Like the latter, they try to find a base in the peasantry of the Third World, in the lumpenproletariat, in fact, any class except the proletariat. Yet such ideas have nothing in common with Marxism. Marx and Engels explained that the only class capable of carrying through the socialist revolution and establishing a healthy workers’ state leading to a classless society was the working class. And this is no accident. Only the working class, by virtue of its role in society and in production, especially large scale industrial production, possesses an instinctive socialist class consciousness. Not accidentally, the classical methods of struggle of the proletariat are based upon collective mass action: strikes, demonstrations, picket lines, the general strike.

By contrast, the first principle of every other social class is the individualism of the property owner and exploiter of labor, both big and small. Leaving aside the bourgeoisie, whose hostility to socialism is the first condition of its existence, we have the middle class, including the peasantry. The latter is the social class least able to acquire a socialist consciousness. In its upper reaches, the wealthy peasant, lawyer, doctor, parliamentarian, stand close to the bourgeoisie. However, even the poor landless peasant in Russia, although formally a rural proletarian, had a consciousness very far removed from his brothers in the cities. The one desire of the landless peasant was to possess land, i.e. to become transformed into a small proprietor. Individual terrorism and “guerrillaism” in all its multiplicity of forms, are the methods of the petty bourgeoisie, particularly the peasantry, but also the students, intellectuals and lumpenproletariat. It is true that under certain conditions—particularly in the present epoch—the mass of the poor peasants can be won over to the idea of collective ownership, as we saw in Spain in 1936. But the prior condition for such a development is the revolutionary movement of the working class in the towns. In Russia, the working class came to power by mobilizing the poor peasants, not on the basis of socialist slogans, but on the basis of “land to the tillers!” This fact, in itself, shows how far the mass of Russian peasants stood from a socialist consciousness even in 1917.

To the Narodniks, lacking in a sound theoretical basis, and setting out with a confused and amorphous concept of class relations (“the people”), the Marxist argument of the leading role of the proletariat sounded like so much hair-splitting. What did the working class have to do with it? Clearly Marx and Engels had not understood the special situation in Russia! The Narodniks, in as much as they considered the role of the workers in the towns, regarded them as an aberration—as “peasants in factories”, capable of playing only the role of auxiliaries to the peasantry in the revolution—precisely the opposite to the real relationship of revolutionary class forces, as subsequent events demonstrated.

As a crowning paradox, despite all the prejudice of the Narodnik theoreticians, almost the only area where the revolutionary appeals got an echo was among the despised “town peasants” as they called the factory workers. Like the modern guerrillas, the supporters of Zemlya i Volya (Land and Freedom) adopted the policy of taking revolutionary workers out of the factories and sending them to the countryside. Plekhanov, before he became a Marxist, participated in this kind of activity and was able to see the consequences: “The factory worker who has worked in the city for several years,” he wrote, “feels ill at ease in the country and goes back to it reluctantly… Rural customs and institutions become unendurable for a person whose personality has begun evolving a little…

“These were experienced people, sincerely devoted to and profoundly imbued with Populist views. But their attempts to set themselves up in the countryside led to nothing. After roving about the villages with the intention of looking for a suitable place to settle down (at which some of them were taken to be foreigners), they shrugged their shoulders at the whole business and finished by returning to Saratov where they established contacts among the local workers. No matter how astounded we were by this alienation from the ‘people’ of its urban children, the fact was evident, and we had to abandon the idea of involving workers in a purely peasant business.”

According to the Narodnik theory, the town worker was further away from socialism than the peasant. Thus, a Narodnik organizer in charge of work amongst the workers of Odessa complained that “the men in the workshops, spoilt by urban life and unable to recognize their links with the peasants, were less open to socialist propaganda”.

Nevertheless, the Narodniks did conduct work amongst the workers and obtained important results. The initiator of this pioneer work was Nikolai Vasilevich Chaikovsky. His group established propaganda circles in the workers’ districts of Petersburg, where Kropotkin was one of his propagandists. Reality forced sections of the Narodniks to come face to face for the first time with the “worker question” which, expelled by Bakuninist theories by the front door, persistently flew back through the window. Even at this very early period, the Russian working class, despite the extreme smallness of its numbers, was beginning to set its stamp upon the revolutionary movement.

The attitude of the workers to the “young gentlemen” was instructive. The Petersburg worker I.A. Bachkin recommended to his fellow workers: “You must take the books from the students, but when they begin to teach you nonsense, you must knock them down.” It was possibly Bachkin of whom Plekhanov was thinking when he passed the remark about the unwillingness of the workers to go to the villages to work. Bachkin was arrested in September 1874 and, upon his release in 1876, he told Plekhanov that he was “ready, as before, to work for revolutionary propaganda, but only among the workers… ‘I don’t want to go into the country on any account’ he argued. ‘The peasants are sheep, they will never understand revolution’.”

While the Narodnik intelligentsia wrestled with the theoretical problems of the future revolution, the first stirrings of class consciousness were emerging in the urban centers. The emancipation of the serfs represented a collective act of violence against the peasantry in the interests of the development of capitalism in agriculture. The landlords were, in effect, “clearing the estates” for capitalism, as Lenin explained, accelerating the process of inner differentiation of the peasantry through the crystallization of a class of rich peasants (kulaks) at the top and a mass of impoverished peasants at the bottom. In order to escape the grinding poverty of village life, the poor peasants migrated in massive numbers to the towns, in search of jobs. In the period 1865-90, the number of factory workers increased by 65 per cent, with those employed in mining increasing by 106 per cent. A.G. Rashin gives the figures of the number of workers in European Russia (in 1,000s) as follows:

Year Factories and workshops Mining Total
1865 509 165 674
1890 840 340 1,180

The development of industry experienced a particularly powerful impetus during the 1870s. The population of St Petersburg grew from 668,000 in 1869 to 928,000 in 1881. Torn from their peasant backgrounds and hurled into the seething cauldron of factory life, the workers’ consciousness underwent a rapid transformation. Police reports chartered the growing discontent and audacity of the workforce: “The crude, vulgar methods employed by factory employers are becoming intolerable to the workers,” complains one such report. “They have obviously realized that a factory is not conceivable without their labor.” Tsar Alexander read the reports and penciled in the margin: “Very bad.”

The growth of this labor unrest permitted the establishment of the first organized workers’ groups. The Southern Workers’ Union was set up by E. Zaslavsky (1844-78 ). Son of a noble but impecunious family, he went “to the people” in 1872-73, became convinced of the uselessness of this tactic and began propaganda work amongst the workers of Odessa. Out of these worker-circles, with weekly meetings and a small subscription, the Union was born. Its program started from the premise that “the workers can get their rights recognized only by means of a violent revolution capable of destroying all privileges and inequality by making work the foundation of private and public welfare”. The Union’s influence grew rapidly until it was smashed by arrests in December 1875. The leaders were sentenced to hard labor. Zaslavsky himself got ten years. His health undermined by the harsh conditions of imprisonment, he became deranged and died of tuberculosis in prison.

A more substantial development was the Northern Union of Russian Workers, set up illegally in the autumn of 1877 under the leadership of Khalturin and Obnorsky. Victor Obnorsky, son of a retired NCO, was a blacksmith, then a mechanic. While working at different factories in St Petersburg, he became involved in workers’ study circles, and had to flee to avoid arrest to Odessa, where he came into contact with Zaslavsky’s Union. He traveled abroad as a sailor, where he was influenced by the ideas of the German Social Democracy. Returning to St Petersburg, he met P.L. Lavrov and P. Axelrod, the leading lights in the Narodnik movement. Stepan Khalturin was an important figure in the revolutionary movement of the late seventies. Like Obnorsky, a blacksmith and a mechanic by trade, he began his activity in the Chaikovsky group, where he worked as a propagandist. In his series of pen portraits of Russian worker militants, Plekhanov has left an enduring picture of this working-class revolutionary:

“When his [Khalturin’s] activities were still on the right side of the law, he willingly met students and tried to make their acquaintance, getting every kind of information from them and borrowing books. He often stayed with them until midnight, but he very rarely gave his own opinions. His host would grow excited, delighted at the chance to enlighten an ignorant workman, and would speak at great length, theorizing in the most ‘popular’ way possible. Stepan would gaze carefully, looking up at the speaker. Every now and then his intelligent eyes would reflect an amiable irony. There was always an element of irony in his relations with the students… with the workers, he behaved in a very different way… he looked upon them as more solid and, so to speak, more natural revolutionaries and he looked after them like a loving nurse. He taught them, he sought books and work for them, he made peace with them when they quarreled and he scolded the guilty. His comrades loved him dearly: he knew this, and in return gave them even greater love. But I do not believe that even in his relations with them, Khalturin ever gave up his customary restraint… In the groups he spoke only rarely and unwillingly. Among the workers of Petersburg, there were people just as educated and competent as he was: there were men who had seen another world, who had lived abroad. The secret of the enormous influence of what can be called Stepan’s dictatorship lay in the tireless attention which he devoted to every single thing. Even before the meeting began, he spoke with everyone to find out the general state of mind, he considered all sides of a question, and so naturally he was the most prepared of all. He expressed the general state of mind.” Khalturin was an outstanding representative of a type: the worker-propagandist active in the circles in the first period of the Russian labor movement. Yet even he was drawn into terrorist activities in the subsequent period, organizing a spectacular attempt on the tsar’s life.

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Re: Nihilists, Narodniks, and the Importance of Pisarev

Post by blindpig » Thu Nov 30, 2017 7:06 pm

Nihilists, Narodniks, and the Importance of Pisarev Part 2
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Part 2 of 2


Quote Originally Posted by Woods
‘Land and Freedom’

In the meantime, the remnants of the Narodnik movement were attempting to regroup their forces in the towns under a new banner. In 1876, Zemlya i Volya was set up by the Natansons, Alexander Mikhailov and George Plekhanov. The new underground organization was headed by a General Council with a smaller elected Executive Committee (or Administrative Centre). Subordinate to these bodies were a Peasants’ Section, a Workers’ Section, a Youth (Students’) Section and, a new development, a “Disorganization Section”, an armed wing for “protection against the arbitrary conduct of officials”. The program of Zemlya i Volya was based on a confused idea of “peasant socialism”—all land was to be transferred to the peasants and self-determination was to be granted to all parts of the Russian empire. Russia was to be run on the basis of self-governing peasant communes. However, all this was subordinate to the central objective of the revolutionary overthrow of the autocracy, which was to be carried out “as speedily as possible”—the extreme haste being due to the idea of preventing the undermining of the peasant commune (the Mir) by capitalist development! Thus, the real originators of “socialism in one country” were the Narodniks, who sought to deliver society from the horrors of capitalism by espousing the idea of a “special path of historical development” for Russia, based on the supposed uniqueness of the Russian peasantry and its social institutions.

On 6 December 1876, an illegal demonstration of anything up to 500— mainly students—assembled on the steps of Kazan Cathedral, with cries of “land and freedom” and “long live the socialist revolution!” The demonstration was addressed by a 21-year old student called George Plekhanov, whose revolutionary appeal led to the beginning of years of exile and underground life. Born in 1855, the son of an aristocratic family from Tambov, Plekhanov, like many of his generation, cut his teeth on the writings of the great school of Russian democratic authors—Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, and, above all, Chernyshevsky. While still an adolescent, he joined the Narodnik movement, participating in dangerous missions, including the release of arrested comrades and even the liquidation of an agent provocateur. Arrested several times, he always succeeded in escaping from his tsarist captors.

Following his daring speech, Plekhanov was forced to flee abroad, but his prestige was such that he was elected, in his absence, as a member of the “basic circle” of Zemlya i Volya. Returning to Russia in 1877, the future founder of Russian Marxism led a precarious underground existence. Armed with a knuckleduster and a pistol which he kept under his pillow at night, he went first to Saratov, on the lower Volga, where he was subsequently put in charge of the “worker section” of Zemlya i Volya. The young man’s first-hand experience of work with factory workers had a profound effect on his thinking, which undoubtedly helped him to break with Narodnik prejudices and find a road to Marxism.

In December 1877, an explosion in the gunpowder store at an arms factory on Vasilevsky Island killed six workers and injured many more. The workers’ funeral turned into a demonstration. Plekhanov wrote a manifesto which ended with the words: “Workers! Now is the time to understand reason. You must not expect help from anyone. And do not expect it from the gentry! The peasants have long been expecting help from the gentry, and all they have got is worse land and heavier taxes, even greater than before… Will you too, the workers in towns, put up with this for ever?”

The author got his reply far sooner than he, or anyone else, expected. The economic boom which arose from the Russo-Turkish War (1877-78 ) created the conditions for an unprecedented explosion of strikes, spearheaded by the most downtrodden and exploited section of the class, the textile workers. Not for the last time, the more oppressed and volatile textile workers moved into action far more quickly than the big battalions in the metal industries. The workers went to ask for help from “the students”, through the agency of a number of individual worker-revolutionaries.

Plekhanov, as head of the worker section of Zemlya i Volya, found himself virtually in control of the movement. Unfortunately, the Narodniks had no idea what to do with a workers’ movement which did not really enter into their scheme of the universe. In the space of two years, St Petersburg saw 26 strikes. Not until the massive strike wave of the 1890s was this to be equaled. The members of the Northern Union played a prominent part in these strikes, and, by the first months of 1879, it reached its high-water mark, with 200 organized workers and another 200 in reserve, carefully distributed in different factories. They were all linked to a central body. The workers’ circles even had a library, also carefully split up between different underground groups and widely used even by workers outside the Union. The resourceful Khalturin set up an underground print-shop. Obnorsky entered into agreements with a workers’ group in Warsaw, “the first example of friendly relations between Russian and Polish workers”, as Plekhanov observed with satisfaction.

But within months of the appearance of the first issue of its illegal journal, Rabochaya Zarya (Workers’ Dawn), the police smashed the Union’s print-shop and the bulk of its membership was swept away by a wave of arrests into hard labor, imprisonment and exile. The result of the break up of this first solid organization of the working class was catastrophic. Khalturin and others drew pessimistic conclusions and went over to terrorism. It took ten years and countless unnecessary sacrifices for the movement to get the terrorist bug out of its system.

From its very outset, the revolutionary movement in Russia was divided by the polemics between “educators” and “insurrectionists”, the two lines being broadly identified with the respective positions of Lavrov and Bakunin. The failure of the movement “to the people” brought this disagreement to the point of an open split. In the period 1874-75, there were thousands of political prisoners in Russia, youngsters who had paid the price of their defiance with the loss of their freedom. Some were later released on bail and kept under surveillance. Others were exiled to Siberia by administrative order. The rest merely rotted in gaol awaiting trial. Of those who remained active and at liberty, some decided to return to the villages, but this time as school teachers or doctors, devoting their time and energies to humble educational work and waiting for better days. But for others, the realization that Bakunin’s theory of an “instinctively revolutionary peasantry” was false meant that an entirely different road had to be found.

Zemlya i Volya was never a mass organization. A few dozen, mainly students and intellectuals in their 20s and 30s, made up its active membership. But the seeds of dissolution were present from the outset. Lavrov’s supporters looked to “open the people’s eyes” by peaceful propaganda. “We must not arouse emotion in the people, but self-awareness,” he argued. The frustrated attempts to provoke a mass movement of the peasantry by means of propaganda gave rise to a new theory whereby Bakuninism was stood upon its head. From “denying politics” and especially political organization, a section of the Narodniks effected a 180 degree turn and set up a secret, highly centralized terrorist organization—the Narodnaya Volya—designed to provoke a revolutionary movement of the masses by means of the “propaganda of the deed”.

The latest military humiliation of tsarist Russia in the Russo-Turkish War revealed anew the bankruptcy of the regime and gave fresh heart to the opposition. The leaders of Narodnaya Volya were determined to wage a war against the autocracy in a kind of terrorist single combat which would encourage “from above” the flame of revolt. A section of the youth was now burning with impatience. The words of Zhelyabov, future leader of Narodnaya Volya, sum the whole thing up: “History,” said Zhelyabov, “moves too slowly. It needs a push. Otherwise the whole nation will be rotten and gone to seed before the liberals get anything done.”

“‘What about a constitution?’

“‘All to the good’.

“‘Well, what do you want—to work for a constitution or give history a push?’

“‘I’m not joking, just now we want to give history a push’.”

These four lines show up starkly the relation between terrorism and liberalism. The terrorists had no independent program of their own. They borrowed their ideas from the liberals, who leaned upon them to give emphasis to their demands.

In the autumn of 1877, nearly 200 young men and women were brought to trial for the crime of “going to the people”. They had already spent three years in gaol without trial and there were numerous cases of ill-treatment meted out to the prisoners by brutal warders and officials. For the revolutionaries the systematic ill-treatment, torture and humiliation suffered by the prisoners was the last straw. One particularly atrocious case caused widespread indignation in July 1877. When General Trepov, the notorious Petersburg police chief, had visited the Preliminary Detention Centre, a young “political” called Bogolyubov refused to stand up. He was sentenced to 100 lashes on Trepov’s orders. A decisive turning point was passed in January 1878 when a young girl by the name of Vera Zasulich fired a shot at Trepov. This action, which Zasulich had planned and executed all on her own, was intended as a reprisal for the ill-treatment of political prisoners. After the Zasulich affair, the swing towards the “propaganda of the deed” became irresistible, particularly since, against all expectations, the jury had found her not guilty.

Initially, the use of terror was conceived as a limited tactic for freeing imprisoned comrades, eliminating police spies, and for self-defense against the repressive actions of the authorities. But terrorism has a logic of its own. In a short space of time, the terrorist mania took possession of the organization. From the outset, there were doubts about the “new tactics”. In the pages of the official party journal critical voices were raised: “We must remember,” says one article, “that the liberation of the laboring masses will not be achieved by this (terrorist) path. Terrorism has nothing in common with the struggle against the foundations of the social order. Only a class can resist against a class. Therefore, the main bulk of our forces must work among the people.”

The adoption of the new tactics caused an open split in the movement, between the terrorists and the followers of Lavrov who argued in favor of a prolonged period of preparation and propaganda among the masses. In practice, the latter trend was moving away from revolutionism, advocating the politics of “small deeds” and a “little by little” gradualist approach. The right wing of Narodnism was becoming indistinguishable from liberalism, while its more radical section prepared to stake everything on the force of the bullet and the “revolutionary chemistry” of nitro-glycerin.

In the recent period, attempts have been made by the modern terrorists to distinguish themselves from their Russian forebears. The Narodnik terrorists, it is asserted, believed in individual terrorism, substituting themselves for the movement of the masses, whereas modern proponents of “armed struggle” or “urban guerrillaism” see themselves only as an armed wing of the mass struggle, whose purpose is to detonate the masses into action. Yet the supporters of Narodnaya Volya never claimed to be acting as a self-sufficient movement. Their stated objective was to initiate a mass movement, based on the peasantry, which would overthrow the state and institute socialism. Their aim was also supposed to be the “detonation” of the mass movement by giving a courageous example.

However politics has a logic of its own. All the appeals of the Narodnaya Volya in the name of the masses, merely served as a smoke-screen to reveal a deep-seated distrust in the revolutionary capacity of those same masses. The arguments advanced more than a century ago in Russia to justify terrorism have a strikingly similar ring to the arguments of “urban guerrilla” groups in more recent times: “We are in favor of the mass movement, but the state is too strong,” and so on and so forth. Thus, the terrorist Morozov affirmed:

“Observing contemporary social life in Russia the conclusion is reached that, because of the arbitrary conduct and violence of the government, no activity at all is possible on behalf of the people. Neither freedom of expression, nor freedom of the press exists to work by means of persuasion. In consequence, for every vanguard activist it is necessary, first and foremost, to put an end to the present system of government, and to struggle against it there is no other means than to do it with arms in hand. As a consequence, we will fight against it in the style of William Tell, until we reach the moment when we win free institutions under which it will be possible for us to discuss without obstacles in the press and in public meetings all the political and social questions, and decide upon them by means of the free representation of the people.”

The Narodniks were courageous, but misguided, idealists who confined their targets to notorious torturers, police-chiefs guilty of repressive acts and the like. More often than not, they subsequently gave themselves up to the police in order to use their trials as a platform for the indictment of existing society. They did not plant bombs to slaughter women and children, or even to murder ordinary soldiers. On the rare occasions that they killed individual policemen, it was to get hold of weapons. Yet, despite this, their methods were completely incorrect and counterproductive, and were roundly condemned by the Marxists.

The allegedly “modern” theories of urban guerrillaism only repeat in caricature form the old pre-Marxist ideas of the Russian terrorists. It is quite ironic that these people, who frequently lay claim to be “Marxist-Leninists”, have not the vaguest idea that Russian Marxism was born out of an implacable struggle against individual terrorism. The Russian Marxists scornfully described the terrorist as “a liberal with a bomb”. The liberal fathers spoke in the name of “the People”, but considered the latter too ignorant to be trusted with the responsible work of reforming society. Their role was to be reduced to passively casting a vote every few years and looking on while the liberals in Parliament got on with their business. The sons and daughters of the liberals had nothing but contempt for Parliament. They stood for the revolution, and, of course, “the People”. Except that the latter, in their ignorance, were unable to understand them. Therefore, they would resort to the “revolutionary chemistry” of the bomb and the revolver. But, just as before, the role of the masses was reduced to that of passive spectators. Marxism sees the revolutionary transformation of society as a conscious act carried out by the working class. That which is progressive is that which serves to raise the consciousness of the workers of their own strength. That which is reactionary is that which tends to lower the workers’ own opinion of their role. From this point of view, the role of individual terrorism is a wholly reactionary one. Thus, the policy of individual terrorism is most harmful to the cause of the masses precisely when it succeeds. The attempt to find short-cuts in politics frequently leads to disaster. What conclusions are the workers supposed to draw from a spectacularly successful act of individual terrorism? Only this: that it is possible to attain their ends without any necessity for the long and arduous preparatory work of organizing trade unions, participating in strikes and other mass actions, agitation, propaganda and education. All that would be seen as an unnecessary diversion, when all that is needed is to get hold of a bomb and a gun, and the problem is solved...

A section of the old Zemlya i Volya movement attempted to resist the trend towards terrorism, but was swept aside. An attempt to reach a compromise at the Voronezh Congress of June 1879 failed to stop the split which finally took place in October of that year with a formal agreement of both sides to dissolve the organization. The funds were divided and both sides agreed not to use the old name. The terrorist faction adopted the name of Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will), while the remnants of the old school “village” Narodniks took the name of the Cherny Peredel (Black Redistribution), echoing the old Narodnik idea of an agrarian revolution. It was from the latter organization, led by Plekhanov, that the first forces of Russian Marxism were to emerge.
Epilogue

Woods sees entirely too much of the targets of his own polemics in Narodnaya Volya. That short-lived organization contributed at least two elements to the future of all Russian Revolutionary movements. First, Narodnaya Volya. established the methods for surviving within the Autocracy’s police state. The survivability of a dedicated group of “professional revolutionaries”, trained in covert methods, and focused on a single task was amply demonstrated in the war that the People’s Will waged with the police. That Narodnaya Volya was isolated and later destroyed was due more to its program and tactics, and to its increasing isolation, than to its methodology. This dispute would reappear, later on, in the great schism of Russian Marxism between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Though it would be expressed in Marxist terminology (“vanguard of the proletariat”, and so on), the split was very much based on the same issues of organization and survival.

The second legacy of Narodnaya Volya was in the formal articulation of “direct” revolutionary action, which in this case meant a final abandonment of the Russian liberals who were declared to be too weak, too cowardly, too corrupt, and too bought into the autocracy to ever lead a democratic revolution. This idea, too, would reappear in the schism of Russian Marxism between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, once again expressed in Marxist terminology (“dictatorship of the proletariat”, and so on). In fact, it was as much an outgrowth of the very real but sorry history of Russia in which the children were sent off to class war while the liberals cringed.

The final verdict on Narodnaya Volya was delivered by history. After the organization was crushed, the executions ended and the prisoners slowly filtered out of jail or exile, a new political party was the beneficiary. A series of groups, merging into the Socialist-Revolutionary Party in 1902, maintained the Narodnik “principles” of agrarian reform, and land redistribution. Oddly, the SRs maintained a “Combat Organization” (SR-CO, i.e. terrorist branch – responsible for political assassinations) until 1908 when the head of the SR-CO, Yevno Azef, was revealed to be a secret police spy. That aspect of the party’s “work” had become irrelevant in any case. By WWI, the party was the largest underground party in Russia but so quickly had the revolution moved leftward that it was, by then, the right-wing of the Russian revolutionary movement. It fell out of that movement altogether when the Socialist-Revolutionary, Alexander Kerensky, became the head of government, after the revolution of February, 1917. It was this government, by then a stand-in for the failed Russian liberals of bygone days, which the Bolsheviks overthrew in October, 1917.


But, what of “Black Redistribution”? If the People’s Will had set out to revamp the tactics of the populist children’s crusade, Black Redistribution set out to rethink the thinking. In contrast to the action program of the Narodniks, Plekhanov above all others, returned to the materialist critics – Chernyshevsky and Pisarev – who had set the wheels in motion even if their ideas had little to do with the Narodnik program as it evolved. To these, were now added the ideas of Marx. In 1883 Plekhanov formed the "Emancipation of Labor" group with Vera Zasulich and Lev Deutsch. Later, they were joined by Pavel Axelrod. The objectives of the group were to develop an understanding of Marxism appropriate to Russian conditions, to connect that thinking to the previous history and experience of the Russian revolutionary movement and to reopen the “theoretical debate” that had long since lapsed.

It was not just a very modest but also a very odd group for undertaking that task:

Image
Georgi Plekhanov

-- Plekhanov, the 21 year old strike leader and jail-escape artist with a revolver under his pillow who was known for “participating in dangerous missions, including the release of arrested comrades and even the liquidation of an agent provocateur.”

Image
Vera Zasulich

-- Zasulich who had gone to see General Trepov, now appointed Governor of St. Petersburg, only to pull out a gun and shoot him in the chest; who then calmly dropped the gun to the floor and awaited arrest; who was so moving and articulate at her trial that she was acquitted, despite her open admission of guilt, and who then fled Russia in an epic escape, with the secret police on her tail under the Tsar’s order for re-arrest, despite her acquittal.

Image
Lev Deutsch

-- Deutsch who only a year after the founding of the Emancipation of Labor group, was arrested again for “terrorist offences”, sentenced to 13 years of prison but escaped once again in seven.

Image
Pavel Axelrod

-- Axelrod, the former Bakuninist, the romanticizer of “brigands”, and the author of the personal code that demanded the “burning of all bridges”.

Why review these biographies? The answer is merely to give contrast. The Emancipation of Labor group returned essentially to where Chernyshevsky had left off, now with a Marxist elaboration on the dry materialist tracts that had begun the entire process. The idea of the recently “bookish” Plekhanov, focused exclusively on “theoretical” pursuits and writing about philosophy and economics must have initially delighted the secret police.

But the police would have been wrong. The entire spectrum of Russian revolutionaries were, by now, of a type that ate ground glass for breakfast and mashed carburetors for lunch. Almost none had escaped prison or worse and each biography included a litany of personal tragedy. These were not abstract philosophical discussions, nor silly debates about “direct democracy” that were at issue, any more than Chernyshevsky or Pisarev really wrote about literature. This was, once again, “philosophy with a purpose”.

The direct result of the “return to theory” of the Emancipation of the Labor group was the formation of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1898. With this, the old Narodnik revolutionaries, armed with new theoretical weapons, handed over the reins to an even newer generation of even harder young men and women. Two of the leading lights of the new party were V.I. Ulyanov, whose brother Alexander had been a member of Narodnaya Volya, executed for an attempt on the life of Alexander III, and Y. O. Zederbaum. Ulyanov, eventually to lead the Bolsheviks, would adopt the nom du guerre, Lenin, in the style of the old Narodnaya Volya, just as Zederbaum, his closet friend, would become Martov and one day head the Mensheviks.

To this new group, Plekhanov and his companions played the role of teachers and mentors, much as Belinsky and Herzen had played their roles for a previous generation. They taught, not only theory but the skills of survival which had been so dearly bought. Yet, they themselves were not immune. The leftward drift of the revolutionary movement also opened up new fissures, much like those which they had opened up with their Narodnik past. By the time of the Russian revolution, all of those above had also drifted to the right of the Menshevik stage, and eventually fell off of it completely.

But, that is yet another story, best saved for a different day…

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Re: Nihilists, Narodniks, and the Importance of Pisarev

Post by blindpig » Thu Nov 30, 2017 7:22 pm

Nekrasov and Muraviev, The Hangman
http://www.emich.edu/public/history/moss/

Chapter 15: NEKRASOV AND MURAVIEV THE HANGMAN

On a Saturday less than two weeks after the attempted assassination, the stoop-shouldered, goateed Nicholas Nekrasov approached the fat, bull-dog faced Count Michael Muraviev and asked if he could read him a poem. The scene was the exclusive English Club along the Neva, not far from the Winter Palace.

The previous five years had been difficult ones for Nekrasov. Due to differing ideologies and Nekrasov's contradictory personality, he had lost a number of old friends including Turgenev. Herzen was not the only one who came to think of him a hypocrite and swindler. How could he be a radical and sympathizer with the poor and at the same time ride in his carriage to the English Club and eat gourmet meals and gamble with the ministers and advisers of the Tsar? The fact that he was usually successful at cards and relieved such individuals as Alexander Abaza, a future Minister of Finance, of enormous sums of money did not seem to mitigate his guilt in the eyes of his critics.

Avdotya Panaeva was also no longer in his life. Perhaps she had hoped that after her husband's death in 1862, Nekrasov would marry her. Perhaps she grew tired of his sexual encounters with other women and his gambling. At any rate, she had moved out of the apartment they shared on the Liteiny Prospect. And two years after the death of her husband, she married someone else.

Then there were the losses by death and imprisonment. First was the death in 1861 of the young Dobrolyubov, of whom Nekrasov was very fond. For about a month in their apartment Nekrasov and Avdotya had watched this twenty-five-year-old slowly die from consumption. (See this link for a photo of the room in Nekrasov's apartment, where he often met with Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov.) Then there were the arrests of several of the contributors to The Contemporary, most importantly that of Chernyshevsky in 1862. When he was sentenced to Siberia for life, even the moderate Professor Soloviev was incensed at the injustice of the sentence. How could the government allow him to preach his views for a decade and then suddenly send him to Siberia even though he had apparently committed no crime?

Although Nekrasov's journal was shut down shortly before Chernyshevsky's arrest, when it appeared again the following year it was clear that Nekrasov's radical sympathies were still intact. In the March, April, and May issues he printed a novel which Chernyshevsky had written while in the Peter and Paul Fortress and which, incredibly enough, government censors permitted.

The novel was What Is to Be Done? It was not great literature, but it summarized Chernyshevsky's views, at least to the extent he could state them and still hope to get them through the censor. In it he portrayed characters he thought more appealing than the "sons" of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. The novel preached enlightened, rational self-interest and radical views on love and marriage, and it hinted at the desirability of a socialist order by having its heroine establish dressmaking co-operatives. It also introduced Rakhmetov, an almost superhuman figure, a completely rational ascetic who trained himself by such feats as sleeping on a bed of nails. Chernyshevsky was confident his readers would realize that Rakhmetov was preparing himself for revolutionary activity. What Is to Be Done? soon helped to inspire a whole generation of radicals.

Nekrasov also continued writing his poetry, some of which appeared in The Contemporary and in new editions of his poems which appeared in the early sixties. At times he wrote satirical poems, critical of government policies and the behavior of society's elite, or poems expressing his own inadequacies, such as his "Knight for an Hour." But increasingly he wrote of the peasants and other poor suffering people such as Volga boat haulers and children in factories. (See this link for Repin's famous picture of.the early 1870s, the Volga Boatmen.) In 1864 his journal earned an official warning for printing his poem "The Railroad," which deplored the oppression and suffering inflicted upon the railway workers who had built the St. Petersburg-Moscow line. (See this link for an 1874 portrait of railway workers.) At times he even wrote for the literate poor. And some of his poems or parts of them became popular folk songs. Like many intellectuals, he became increasingly interested in peasant folklore and tales. Although tending to idealize the poor, he also strove to picture them as they really were: often victims, but also at times victimizers; usually suffering, but also at times light and happy.

Less than a year after the emancipation of the serfs, Nekrasov bought a fourteen-hundred-acre estate, Karabikha, near the city of Yaroslavl, and not far from where he had spent most of his boyhood years. It became his summer retreat. His brother ran the estate for him, and it contained all the natural loveliness of a typical large estate: woods, ponds, parks, a wild-orange grove, and greenhouses. A large central house with a belvedere atop and two wings, all of two stories, looked down on the lower park and woods and beyond them on the little Kotorosl River, which emptied into the great Volga. At Karabikha Nekrasov loved to hunt and swim, as well as write.

Both at Karabikha and at his apartment on the Liteiny Prospect he spent time with his new mistress, Celine Lefresne, a French actress from a St. Petersburg acting company. While not a great beauty, she was attractive, dressed well, and possessed a lively disposition. Nekrasov loved to hear the French songs she would sing to him as she accompanied herself on the piano.

The man approached by Nekrasov at the English Club on that April day in 1866 was not only one of the "hanging Muravievs," he was "the hangman." He had earned this sobriquet by hanging Poles during the Polish rebellion. Although as a youth he had belonged to one of the secret societies which helped to produce the Decembrists, he soon got over such liberal inclinations. In the early years of Alexander's reign he acted as the Minister of State Properties and was one of the chief opponents of the proposed emancipation settlement. As the Polish revolt spread to the province of Lithuania, where Polish landowners predominated, Muraviev was appointed governor-general there. He soon unleashed a reign of terror on rebellious and suspected nobles and Catholic priests, restricted the use of Polish language and culture, and readjusted the land settlements between landowners and peasants in favor of the Lithuanian peasants. In addition to hanging a few hundred Poles, he also sent many thousands more into Siberian exile. Furthermore, Muraviev's methods were soon applied in Warsaw and other parts of Poland outside of his jurisdiction and gained in 1815 as a result of the war against Napoleon. (See this link for a photo of "the Gate of Execution" of the Citadel, a major Russian fortress in northern Warsaw where Polish rebels were imprisoned and sometimes executed.)

Angered by British and French popular and diplomatic support for the rebellious Poles and seeing the rebellion as part of a centuries old conflict between Catholic Poland and Orthodox Russia, the Russian public, led by the journalist Katkov, cheered Muraviev on. They sent him letters, dispatches, deputations, flowers, icons, and flags. He was met at trains by cheering crowds. Bells were rung in his honor. The Moscow publicist Michael Pogodin wrote: "Muraviev is a good man! He's hanging and shooting [the suspected rebels]. May God give him health!"1

Once the rebellion was firmly crushed and Muraviev's new policies enacted, the Tsar replaced him and he went into retirement. Alexander and his good friends and advisers in the capital did not care for Muraviev, even though the Tsar thought that under the circumstances Muraviev's extreme tactics were unfortunately necessary. Muraviev reciprocated the dislike of many of the Tsar's advisers. He believed they were too cosmopolitan, too influenced by European ideas.

In the relationship between Muraviev and Alexander one again sees that the Tsar was less a Russian nationalist than some of his subjects. In an age in which Bismarck in Germany and the Meiji leaders in Japan were skillfully orchestrating nationalist aspirations in order to better unite and modernize their nations, Alexander seemed little inclined to do likewise, for such a purpose. Perhaps he realized that as the ruler of a multinational empire, he could not rely on nationalism as a unifying force to the extent the rulers of more homogeneous populations could. He also distrusted any nationalist agitators, such as the editor Katkov, who might try to influence his thinking.

During the early stages of the Polish revolt, as Katkov and others beat the drums of Russian nationalism, even moderates such as Nikitenko criticized Alexander's government for being too pusillanimous and conciliatory towards the Polish rebels. Muraviev's bloodier tactics were more to the liking of an aroused Russian public.

Immediately following the attempted assassination of Alexander II, Russians once again reacted with a display of feverish emotion, only this time out of gratitude that their Tsar had not been harmed. Despite dissatisfactions over conditions and government policies in Russia, many had still refused to place major blame on the Tsar. A British memorandum of the previous year had noted that "there is, perhaps, no country where the Sovereign is held by his people less responsible for the acts of his Ministers."2 In St. Petersburg crowds rushed along the streets yelling "hurrah" and headed for Palace Square, where they waited for the Tsar to appear on a Winter Palace balcony overlooking the square. In the days which followed cities, ethnic groups, professional and workers' organizations, students, and even prisoners, poured forth telegrams and prayers of thanksgiving. Crowds on the streets and at concerts sang "God Save the Tsar." The man who supposedly had saved the Tsar's life became an instant hero. The Tsar made this capmaker, Komissarov, a noble; and his picture, along with that of the Tsar, appeared on the streets.

Accompanying the outpouring of thanksgiving was another feeling, not nearly as intense, but yet present and disturbing. Who was this Karakozov who tried to kill the Tsar? Was he a Pole? A nihilist? Part of a larger conspiracy, possibly aided by revolutionaries abroad? An investigation was obviously needed and a tough investigator to head it. The Tsar called Michael Muraviev, now nearly seventy, out of retirement.

Many conservatives, such as Muraviev and Katkov, thought that the Tsar had listened too much to some of his more liberal St. Petersburg advisers and that their liberal policies and permissiveness were partly responsible for such acts as Karakozov's. By mid April, Alexander had replaced a number of these "liberals" with more conservative-minded men. Thus, Alexander appointed a new Minister of Education, Count Dmitry Tolstoy, a new Director of the Third Division (security police), Count Peter Shuvalov, and a new St. Petersburg police chief, General Fedor Trepov. Alexander's behavior indicated, neither for the first nor the last time, that events and public opinion could strongly affect his policies and appointments.

The news of the new appointments helped to create a climate of fear among liberals and radicals in the capital. What would the "Hangman" do? Or the new police chief, Trepov, who had previously dealt severely with the Poles while holding a similar position in Warsaw? People became suspect if they seemed to lack enthusiasm when hurrahs were shouted for the Tsar or failed to remove their hats when passing a picture of Komissarov. Also suspect were women who wore no crinolines, but cut their hair short and wore dark glasses--later that year one governor ordered that such women were to be taken to police stations and given the choice of putting on crinolines or leaving his province. Those with scores to settle revenged themselves by denouncing their enemies. Arrests multiplied. So did rumors. One of the contributors to Nekrasov's journal later recalled that "all of these rumors, the constantly growing apprehension and the sleepless nights had so enervated me and brought me so near the point of complete prostration that I considered going and asking them to lock me up in the fortress."3

Amidst this reaction and fear, Nekrasov and his journal seemed destined to suffer. Despite his friendship and support for the likes of Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, despite his own subversive poetry, he had up to now somehow avoided arrest. Meanwhile The Contemporary, according to conservatives, had continued to spew forth its poison. But then there was that other side of Nekrasov: he was a member of the English Club, where he ate, drank, and gambled with Tsarist ministers. He also was conniving and had displayed an ability to do whatever was necessary to keep his journal running. Perhaps he could once again avoid the seemingly inevitable.

When the governor of the English Club asked him to prepare a poem for Komissarov at a banquet in the capemaker's honor, Nekrasov agreed. On Saturday, April 9th, a week before he approached Muraviev with a poem, he stood up and recited his verse in his whispering, but husky voice. It was not his finest effort. He repeated a number of trite phrases that had already been attached to Komissarov's name in the press. Nekrasov called him "Son of the folk" and "the instrument of God."4

During the week that followed, Nekrasov heard that his poem had made a good impression on some high officials, but that his journal was nevertheless due to be shut down. He also was approached again by the governor of the English Club, who suggested he write another poem to be read at another dinner in honor of still another hero, Muraviev. Nekrasov now faced a terrible dilemma. If he said no, it would look like a protest against Muraviev and support for the would-be assassin, Karakozov. The Contemporary would then without doubt be terminated. But how could he who had exhorted the youth to "Go into the flames," "Go and perish," who had told them "You shall not die in vain: the cause is sure with your blood flowing under it,"5 how could he, this same poet, now write a poem in honor of "the Hangman"?

The dinner for Muraviev was held the following Saturday. One can imagine the members and guests consuming in hearty Russian style the usual large quantities of food and drink that were served at such clubs. After dinner, coffee was served in the gallery near the entrance to the dining room. Muraviev sat in an armchair, the center of a small group. While he had the face of a bulldog, his bloated face and body also called to mind a hippopotamus. After another versifier had approached and read Muraviev a poem in his honor, Nekrasov walked up and asked permission to recite one. Muraviev continued smoking his pipe and contemptuously indicated his approval. The short poem was a shameless glorification of "the Hangman," who was now investigating the attempted assassination. It apparently concluded with the line "spare not the guilty ones."6 Nekrasov had decided to degrade himself. His action and the reaction to it would scar him for the rest of his life.
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Re: Nihilists, Narodniks, and the Importance of Pisarev

Post by blindpig » Thu Nov 30, 2017 7:31 pm

Quote Originally Posted by meganmonkey
Thanks, anax.

Much to think about here, some of which has been touched on by others on this thread already.

Reading through this history has certainly clarified some things for me - not only about Russia's history but about Marxist theory itself and how it compares/contrasts with other schools of thought - this is all very good and I much appreciate it.

I have a couple thoughts/questions based on the following excerpts.

From Part I:
.

...The theories of guerrillaism and individual terrorism which have become fashionable among certain circles in recent times repeat in caricatured form the antiquated ideas of the Russian Narodniks and terrorists. Like the latter, they try to find a base in the peasantry of the Third World, in the lumpenproletariat, in fact, any class except the proletariat. Yet such ideas have nothing in common with Marxism. Marx and Engels explained that the only class capable of carrying through the socialist revolution and establishing a healthy workers’ state leading to a classless society was the working class. And this is no accident. Only the working class, by virtue of its role in society and in production, especially large scale industrial production, possesses an instinctive socialist class consciousness. Not accidentally, the classical methods of struggle of the proletariat are based upon collective mass action: strikes, demonstrations, picket lines, the general strike. ....
From Part II:
[quote:28oax8lx]

...Marxism sees the revolutionary transformation of society as a conscious act carried out by the working class. That which is progressive is that which serves to raise the consciousness of the workers of their own strength. That which is reactionary is that which tends to lower the workers’ own opinion of their role....
.
I guess the first question is whether or not this is a fair representation of the history and of Marxism - I've erroneously made that assumption once before about something posted here, LOL, so I ask this as a bit of a disclaimer before I go asking dumb questions..

Okay, assuming it is fair/accurate - I understand what I have read here about the peasants in Russia not being able to sort of substitute for the working class in a revolutionary socialist movement - you can't skip out on the capitalism phase and go straight to socialism for reasons that seem to make sense both in theory and in the context of this history.

The above excerpts point toward the importance specifically of large-scale manufacturing/production type of work under a capitalist system, to create the conditions that can lead to a working-class socialist movement/revolution.

Now as I apply it to the present, I feel like the cube rats need a little thought.

In the Rust Belt and the rest of the US (and I am speaking specifically about the US not because we are special but because this is where I live and work and talk to people) we have a little manufacturing left and a fair amount of manual labor, but we have this huge, weird semi-professional class of people - paper pushers, number crunchers, administrative assistants,data entry, 'support', etc, doing abstract work that certainly doesn't qualify as large-scale industrial production, yet based on low wages and thier relationship to the ruling class seem to me to be part of the working class. So, given the statement I bolded in the first excerpt above, where do these people fit?

I ask this because I see what Mike has been posting about the people he talks to in his area, in his field (or should I say 'orchard') and how they are reacting politically/socially, how he sees this consciousness developing and that what needs work is forging relationships between this part of the working class and the intellectuals (minus the liberal/establishment crap addiction). And while I agree with what he says and I get much-needed hope from what he says, I see something very different in the people around me (not the bourgie ann arbor liberals who are *thrilled* that a second Whole Foods store is being built here, btw, but the actual low-income normal working people of Ann Arbor and it's working-class sister-city, Ypsilanti).

Up north with the farms and the orchards, on farms all around and in factories where real things are made, or at least assembled, the idea that this consciousness can develop and that workers can become aware of their own strength, their power and ability to affect serious change, that all makes sense to me. Those workers know what their role is in a functioning society or community - it is a vital, fundamental role providing an essential part of life. Although many are doing their work for the benefit of the capitalist class, it is the type of work that will occur under any system.

But the cube rats? There is no strength in what they do. Fluorescent lights and repetitive tasks and bad pay and bad benefits and monotony and at the end of the day they can't even tell you what they accomplished because it is intangible. I can see power in the factory, power in the land, but not in the cube farm (my apologies to Billy Bragg).

Just some thoughts. I know on a global scale of a socialist/worker's revolution this category of workers may not be that substantial, but in my little realm they are significant.[/quote:28oax8lx]

Well MM, I'm not crazy about Woods. I was sort of ambivalent about him in the piece, as I said, and just upthread, I wrote this:

"Consider Woods... he throws in everything but the kitchen sink ("guerillaism", "degenerate workers state... blah, blah, blah", "Terrorists are just liberals with a bomb",....). He should know better because otherwise he writes a fine history. It gets much worse than that. People claim to see "democracy and authoritarianism", "anarchism and socialism"... all kinds of shit. In truth, the real world offers an infinite diversity which diverges 180 degrees from this sort of modern fiction. That is exactly why the history matters and why it won't help you at all if you know what it says before you read word one. "

Some of that criticism is apparent in the quotes you chose... which is too bad because the history tells itself. Having said that though, the points you've chosen to emphasize are pretty accurate. It's my own personal experience as well. I have never been as comfortable in my politics as when I have waded into the sea of "industrial labor"... it's what's made every factory job I have ever held tolerable and it beats "leftists" hands down.

Which brings us to your 64 thousand dollar question: what about cube rats? I don't have a definite answer. Lot's of people have thought about it and worked on it. There is no debate that almost the entirety of the segment are workers and in many cases they are subject to lower pay, lesser security, and the pettiest of industrial dictatorships. Still, that little bit of air conditioning seems to make a difference.

The issue is certainly two edged. Consider the union movement. In the 1960s and 70s, some of the most militant expressions of trade unionism came from the non-industrial parts of American labor. District 1199 (known universally as the "Noyces Union" - i.e. healthcare workers) comes to mind as do various public employee, teachers, and retail units. One of the wildest bargaining units I ever worked with was a group of town librarians, every one of whom was a born "red". In some cases, organizing such trades into industrial unions rather than as independent trades, helped a lot. It brought an immediate change of "perspective" as well as a rising militancy on both sides of the cubicle wall. But, I've seen it go the other way as well. The Teamsters tried endlessly to organize employers like J.C.Penny (the pioneers of the WalMart "strategy") and found that even if they approached them by trades, even the trades which were our natural audience, such as warehousemen, were heavily influenced by calling people "associates" and promoting the worst rats to the positions of unpaid auxiliary foremen. European experience with all this is also mixed, although they have gotten much further than we have.

If I were to guess, I would guess that part of the problem has been the changing nature of this kind of labor, with the "steno pools" of the 1950s as much more obviously "industrial" than the regional sales offices of today (although, it is anything but clear where all this will end up). Part of the problem has been a certain amount of social mobility at the other end of the cubicular ghetto (much of this may have ended). Part of the problem has been the huge regional migration of such jobs from North to South, alongside industrial labor. Part of it has been in the decline of the industrial unions just as service and office unions were getting going. Part of the problem is the lack of working class organizations and even "institutions" which would support such development of newer and isolated spheres of work. Part of the issue is in labor legislation, which in this segment is downright strategic (and may be the most important of legislative programs, totally ignored by even "left" political parties). Finally, part of the problem is in the politics of the United States and its lack of working class perspectives, such perspectives being amplified in this labor segment perhaps more than in any other. In this last regard, it's worth closing the circle with 1199. More than anything else, that union was a direct product of 1960's militancy and the Civil Rights Movement.

Put up a thread and let's talk about it. Even the bare statistics of the "cube rats" are enlightening...

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Re: Nihilists, Narodniks, and the Importance of Pisarev

Post by blindpig » Thu Nov 30, 2017 7:46 pm

Tolstoy's journey from Count to liberal to Slavophile mystic

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Russian Peasants:
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It's hard to read Tolstoy and not conclude that he was a huge talent and that he loved the Russian people. In the end , as great as he was, he could not rise above the accident of his birth. It must have felt like his head was caught in a vice. I don't think he was a fraud at all... but I do think that the ones who "Burned all bridges" (and they were more than a few), were greater still.
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Re: Nihilists, Narodniks, and the Importance of Pisarev

Post by blindpig » Thu Nov 30, 2017 7:49 pm

Quote Originally Posted by PPLE
On the other hand, opportunists and revisionists of every shade avoided discussion of principles and counterposed superficial and misleading episodic appraisals of events to the revolutionary class analysis of the scientific socialists. Trotsky cited examples from the history of the German social-democracy and from the disputes of the Russian Marxists with the “Economists”, the Social Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks. The Narodnik terrorists, bomb in hand, used to argue: “Iskra [Lenin’s paper] wants to found a school of dialectic materialism while we want to overthrow tsarist autocracy — It is historical experience”, Trotsky observed with characteristic irony, “that the greatest revolution in all history was not led by the party which started out with bombs but by the party which started out with dialectic materialism.”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/novack/ ... y/ch14.htm

I'll tell ya, in light of shit like this http://www.progressiveindependent.com/d ... g_id=73045

combined with the still-to-be-explored air-conditioning effect on the working class, I have a harder and harder time seeing what was wrong with the Narodniks' desire to bomb a few deserving motherfuckers.

I see "Comrade Lenin stands, as it were, on the borderland between the old generation of Narodnik [Populist] revolutionists and the new school of Marxist revolutionists. Comrade Lenin himself took part in the student Narodnik circle, but already, even at that time, he stood with one foot in the camp of the Marxists."
http://marx.org/archive/zinoviev/works/ ... n/ch01.htm

which may finally give me some incentive to get him on my reading list. For now, a little listening:
http://www.radio-rouge.org/Users/resist ... irchal.mp3

Nothing wrong with the "Narodniks' desire"... it was the actual doin' that was the problem. There is a certain conflation in what you quoted (between the "original" Narodniks and the later Peoples Will) and I have no idea what Trotsky is talking about. The key ironies in the above are not in this or that "mistake" but in the whole movement taken as a simple evolution. Read Plekhanov (and to a lesser extent, the others like Zasulich) on why they transformed themselves. The biggest criticism is that the actual physical struggle became, not a "People's War" but a spectacle to which the people were invited as spectators. Yet, some of that was unavoidable.

People's Will probably was the highest possible expression of the "secret society", but it also targeted individuals for attacks in the same way that the old Liberals had targeted them in order to influence them. The contest was uneven as well as "wrong". The destruction of the "People's Will" was only a matter of time. When it was "reborn", it was equally inevitable that it would eventually be infiltrated to the point of becoming an organ of the secret police. The romantic and nostalgic aspects of it all are also on display (not unlike the history of the IRA). Retrospectively, it is easy to argue that this idea was PB and the other proletarian but the actual distinction of these was anything but clear.

Consider "Comrade Lenin" in all this... The current story on him is that he was the "authoritarian", yadda yadda... but at the time you have him being attacked for being an anarco-adventurist who refuses to disassociate himself from the "heritage" of the "terrorists", and yet is also absolutely dedicated to writing in his newpaper and founding "a school of dialectic materialism", rather than engaging in any such "contests" himself. The Zinoviev story you produce is very typical (and forgotten). On the other hand, the generic criticism that all the Marxists wanted to do was write academic tracts also turned out to be true among a section of the Mensheviks.

What we really have here are ideas changing as circumstances change... At first, everybody (among the radicals) is in on it and later distinct class partisanship emerges. At first the revolutionary ideas (materialism first among them) matter, then they are swept up by "action", and then they return to centrality. At first the men and women of the revolution turn to "combat" merely to survive in their isolation. With the spread of revolutionary ideas among the people, the continuation of any such "combat" becomes counter-productive as well as futile. The answer to, "Waddya think?" is "When?"

As far as reading Lenin, he's a blast - he's everybody all rolled up into one... Amazing guy.

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Re: Nihilists, Narodniks, and the Importance of Pisarev

Post by blindpig » Thu Nov 30, 2017 8:12 pm

While on the topic of 'dead Russians' I'll throw in excerpts from ' The Story of Zoya and Shura by L. Kosmodemyanskaya' http://www.thebellforum.net/Bell2/www.t ... ml?t=53358

The Story of Zoya and Shura
L. Kosmodemyanskaya

Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow, 1953
http://www.greeklish.org/features/zoya/ ... /index.htm



Chapter 39 - A High Standard

"Is your daughter a college student?" asked the librarian who used to give me the books on Zoya's list.

The lists were always long and varied. What did Zoya not read for her paper on the Paris Commune! There were historical works and translations from the French worker poets—Pottier and Clement. She read even more books about the Patriotic War of 1812. Her imagination was fired by Kutuzov and Bagration and the battles they fought, and she would rapturously repeat whole passages from Tolstoy's War and Peace by heart. Preparing for her report on Ilya Muromets, the folklore hero, she made up a long list of rare books, which I sought out with difficulty in various libraries.

It was no news to me that Zoya could work seriously, go straight to the very deepest source, to the very heart of the matter, that she could bury herself in her subject. But before Chernyshevsky she had never given herself up to any pursuit so completely and unreservedly. The day she became acquainted with Chernyshevsky was one of the most important in Zoya's life.

When she came home from the lesson at which Vera Sergeyevna had told the children about Chernyshevsky's life, Zoya said, "I want to know everything about him, Mummy! And at school we've only got What Is To Be Done? Please find out what they have in your library. I should like to have a big lull biography, and the correspondence and memoirs of his contemporaries. I want to be able to picture to myself what he was like in life."

A reticent girl, Zoya suddenly became talkative Apparently she needed to share every thought, ever discovery, every new spark ignited by the things she had read.

She would show me an old biography of Chernyshevsky, and say, "Here it says that in his first years as a student he took no interest in anything except study. But take a look at the Latin poetry he gave his cousin ft translate: 'May justice triumph or the world perish!' Or this: 'May falsehood vanish or the heavens fall!' Could that just be by chance…? And here, from a letter to the literary critic A. N. Pypin: 'To work not for transient glory but for the eternal glory of your Fatherland and for the good of mankind—what can be higher and more desirable than this?' Mama, I won't bother you any more but just listen to this. It's a note in his diary: 'I shall gladly give up my life for the triumph of my convictions! For the triumph of freedom, equality, brotherhood and prosperity, for the destruction of poverty and sin! If 1 am convinced that my convictions are just, and that they will triumph, I will not even regret not seeing the day when they shall triumph and rule, and death itself will be sweet, not bitter, be I only convinced of this'…To think of anyone saying after that that he was only interested in study!"

Once she began to read What Is To Be Done? Zoya could not tear herself away from the book. She was so absorbed in it that for the first time in her life, I think, she forgot to warm up the dinner at the usual hour. She hardly noticed me come in. For a second she gazed at me with faraway, unseeing eyes, and again bent over the book. Without disturbing her I lighted the kerosene stove, put on the soup, and took the bucket to pour water into the wash basin. It was only then that Zoya stirred, jumped up and grasped the bucket from me with the words, "I'll do it myself!"

That night, after supper was over, Shura and I went to bed. When I awoke late at night, Zoya was still reading. I got up, took the book from her in silence and placed it on the shelf. Zoya looked at me guiltily and imploringly.

"It's difficult for me to sleep with the light, and I must be up early tomorrow," I said, knowing that only this would persuade her.

In the morning Shura could not resist teasing his sister. "You know, Mummy, Zoya dived into that book as soon as she came back from school yesterday. And I saw she was lost to the world. I expect she'll soon begin sleeping on nails like Rakhmetov."

Zoya said nothing, but in the evening she came home from school with a book quoting Georgi Dimitrov's words about Rakhmetov—how the Russian writer's hero had become a model for the young Bulgarian worker taking his first steps in the revolutionary movement. Dimitrov wrote how in his youth he had striven to become just as firm, strong-willed and seasoned as Rakhmetov, how he had striven to subjugate his own personal life to the great cause—the struggle for the liberation of the toilers.

"The Life of Chernyshevsky"—was the theme of Zoya's next essay. She read and searched tirelessly for more and more material, and frequently unearthed facts of winch I had no knowledge.

Zoya described the civil (i.e., mock) execution of Chernyshevsky with laconic eloquence. The dull wet morning, the scaffold with the black post and chains, and the black board with the white letters "State Criminal," which they hung on Chernyshevsky's neck.

Then, the three months of hard exhausting travel, hundreds and thousands of long endless versts. And at last Kadaya—the remote Siberian convict settlement where the tsarist government tried to extinguish "the bright torch of banished science."

In one of her books Zoya found an ink drawing or rather a sketch, done by one of the political exiles, of the hut where Chernyshevsky lived. Shura, stirred by Zoya's enthusiasm, copied this sketch into her notebook, and succeeded in conveying the main thing: the despair gripping the cold deserted region. The hard line of the horizon, the marsh, the sandy wastes, a thin dwarfish forest, the crosses on the graves—all this seemed crushed by the low sullen skies; and crushed also by a terrible weight was the little hut itself, behind the walls of which one could expect neither warmth, nor comfort, nor joy.

The years dragged on in loneliness…A cheerless dreary life. And the more incredible seemed the letters which Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky wrote to his wife and children, letters full of warmth, light, tenderness and love, which took months to arrive through the night and snow.

Thus passed seven long years. What a remarkable letter Chernyshevsky writes on the eve of his release to his wile Olga Sokratovna!

"My dear friend, my joy, my only love and thought. I write to you on the anniversary of our wedding. My dear joy, I thank you for bringing light to my life… On the 10th of August I shall cease to be idle and useless to you and the children. By the autumn I think I shall find a place in Irkutsk, or near Irkutsk, and shall be able to work as before… Soon everything will begin to go right…From this autumn…

Every word breathes the confidence and hope that they will meet soon. But instead—exile to Vilyuisk, and another thirteen long years of loneliness! The cold severe winter lasting half a year, and all round—marshland and tundra. These are the hardest years of imprisonment, not even lightened by the hope of release. There is nothing ahead. Only loneliness, and the night and snow…

And then there comes to Chernyshevsky a Colonel Vinnikov who hands him the government's proposal that he should send in a petition for pardon. Release and return to his native land is the promised reward.

"For what should I ask pardon?" replies Chernyshevsky. "That is the question…It seems to me that I have been exiled merely because my head and the head of the chief of the gendarmerie Shuvalov vary in structure, and can one ask pardon for that? Thank you for your pains… I absolutely refuse to ask for pardon…

And once again time dragged on. Day after day, year after year life ebbed away.

His is an active, mighty mind which so longs to work and create, which can see so far into the future! It is his hand that wrote those wrathful and impassioned proclamaitions to the Russian peasants. It was his voice that urged Hertzen not to call to prayer in his Kololeol but to call on Russia to take up the axe. All his life he devoted to one thing, strove always towards one goal—that the oppressed should obtain freedom. Even to his bride he said once: "I do not belong to myself, I have chosen another path which threatens me with prison and exile." And this man was condemned to what was for him the most terrible torture—inactivity. He was not even allowed to shake the hand of his dying friend and bid him a word of farewell.

Nekrasov was dying—the news was a cruel blow to Chernyshevsky. "If Nekrasov still breathes when you receive my letter," he wrote to Pypin, "fell him that I love him dearly as a human being, that I thank him for his kind disposition towards me, that I kiss him, that I am convinced his fame will be immortal, that Russia's love for him, the most noble, the most brilliant of all Russian poets, is eternal. I sob for him…

This letter took three months to arrive—and reached Nekrasov when he was still alive. "Tell Nikolai Gavrilovich," the dying man said, "that I am very grateful to him. Now I am comforted: his words are dearer to me than those of anyone else…

After twenty years of hard labour and exile Chernyshevsky at last returns to his native parts. He is full of impatience and impetuosity. He rushes on, without stopping anywhere, without giving himself an hour's rest through the whole of his long difficult journey. At last he reaches Astrakhan. And here again comes a cruel blow: Chernyshevsky is deprived of the opportunity to work. Who, what magazine will publish the articles of a "state criminal"? And again inactivity, again silence and emptiness all round.

Not long before Chernyshevsky's death he was visited by the writer Korolenko. Nikolai Gavrilovich refused to be pitied, recalls Korolenko. "He always had complete control of himself, and if he suffered—and could he help suffering cruelly!—he always suffered proudly, by himself, not sharing his bitter grief with anyone."

Zoya read us her essay aloud. Both Shura and I said what we thought, "Very good!" "One day," said Shura, pacing about the room, "I mean to paint a big picture. It will be called 'The Civil Execution of Chernyshevsky.'"

"That's what Hertzen wrote," Zoya quickly put in. "He wrote: 'Will not someone paint a picture—Chernyshevsky in the pillory?' He said that such a picture would expose—how did he put it?—would expose the obtuse scoundrels who pilloried human thought."

"I can see it all," went on Shura, hardly letting her finish. "Both the girl who threw flowers to him, and the officer who shouted 'Farewell!' And I can see Chernyshevsky himself at that moment, you know, when the executioner broke the sword above his head…They have forced Chernyshevsky to his knees but all the same, you can see at once from his face that he is not conquered and never will be conquered!"

The next day I had scarcely appeared at the door when Shura shouted, "Mama, Vera Sergeyevna called out Zoya! And, just think, she asked about the life and work of Chernyshevsky!"

"Well?"

"'Excellent'! 'Excellent'! The whole class listened open-mouthed. Me too, although I knew it so well already! And Vera Sergeyevna was very pleased!"

Zoya received an "excellent" for her essay too.

"She deserved it," I said.

"Not half!" exclaimed Shura.

One might have thought that the "excellent" would mark the completion of Zoya's work. But it was not so. Her acquaintance with Chernyshevsky, his life and his books, meant very much to Zoya. Chernyshevsky became for her a high standard of thought and deed. That was the real sum total of Zoya's work on her essay.
There is a round site in the park not far from Pokrovskiye Gates with the monument to 19-th century writer and thinker Nikolai Chernyshevsky. The author of the monument is Juriy Neroda.

The bronze statue is installed on a low granite slab. There is a granite wall with iron rings behind the statue and low parapets on the sides. There are four 19-th century street lamps in the place where paths meet the site. The monument was unveiled in 1988.

For his beliefs Nikolai Chernyshevsky was condemned by the tsarist regime to seven years of penal servitude and lifelong exile to Siberia. He wrote his famous novel "What Is to Be Done?" in the Petropavlovskaya Fortress, in the dreadful Alexeyevskiy Ravelin.
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Re: Nihilists, Narodniks, and the Importance of Pisarev

Post by blindpig » Thu Nov 30, 2017 8:25 pm

Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov


Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov


THE MOURNER

As to war's terrors and alarms I list,
When some new victim hath his life-blood shed,
'Tis not his wife I pity, nor his friend,
Nor grieve I for the hero who is dead.

The wife in time will cease to mourn her loss,
The best of friends and comrades will forget;
But there is one who will remember him
Even unto her grave, with eyes still wet.

Amid our trivial, hypocritic lives,
The only tears all holy and sincere
That I have seen, are those by mothers shed,
Who sorrow for their children, ever dear.

Their children on the bloody field who fell
They ne'er forget, but mourn them all their days.
Like are they to the weeping willow tree,
That never can its drooping branches raise.

**************************************************

Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky

What Is To Be Done
by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, 1863


"About 2:30 a.m., on a dark, cloudy night, there was a sudden flash of light and the sound of a shot from the middle of the Liteiny Bridge. The night watchmen ran toward the noise and a few passers-by gathered around. But no one was there and there was nothing left on the spot from which the sound had come. It appeared that someone had shot himself, rather than shot at someone else. A few men volunteered to dive; after a while some boathooks were produced and then even a fisherman's net. They dived, searched, fished around, caught some fifty large spars, but failed to retrieve even one body. How could they? It was so dark! During those two intervening hours the body must have been washed out to sea. Go and search along the shore. There emerged, as a result, a group of "progressives" who rejected the previous proposition: "Perhaps there never was a body. Maybe it was some drunk or mischiefmaker fooling around - someone who fired a shot and then ran off. Or else, I wonder, could he be standing here right now among this bustling crowd, chuckling about the fuss he's caused."

But the majority, as always when they are behaving sensibly, turned out to be "conservative" and defended their position: "What nonsense! Fooling around! No, someone put a bullet through his head and that's all there is to it!" The progressives were defeated. But, as usual, the victorious party split immediately after its victory. All right. So he blew his brains out. But why did he do it? Some of the conservatives were of the opinion that he was "dead drunk"; others argued that perhaps he had "gone broke". Someone else observed that he was simply a fool. On this view, "simply a fool", everyone was in agreement, even those who denied that he had shot himself. Indeed, whether it was someone drunk or broke who had shot himself, or some mischiefmaker who hadn't shot himself but was only playing a trick, it was still a stupid, foolish thing to do.

Thus the affair on the bridge that night came to an end. The next morning in the hotel at the Moscow Railway Station it was discovered that the fool had not been fooling around at all, but really had shot himself. But in the resolution of this affair there remained one element with which even the defeated party could agree: namely, that even if someone had not been making mischief but really had shot himself, he was still a fool. This result, satisfactory for all concerned, was particularly sound precisely because of the triumph it afforded the conservatives. Indeed, if someone had merely played a prank with that shot on the bridge, then, in fact, it would still be open to question whether the person was a fool or merely a mischiefmaker. But someone who shot himself on the bridge! Who would shoot himself on a bridge? How could it happen? For what purpose? How stupid to do it on a bridge! Therefore, this someone was undoubtedly a fool.

Once again doubts began to occur: someone had shot himself on a bridge. But people don't shoot themselves on bridges; therefore, he didn't shoot himself. But toward evening the staff of the hotel was summoned to the police station to identify a peaked cap that had a bullet hole in it and had been fished out of the water. Everyone confirmed that the cap was the very one the guest had been wearing. Thus he had undoubtedly shot himself; the spirit of protest and progress was decisively defeated.

Everyone was in agreement that he was a "fool". But suddenly they all declared: "How shrewd to do it on a bridge! If his aim is poor, it would obviously end his suffering at once. Good thinking! If he had been wounded, he would have fallen into the water and drowned before he could regain consciousness. Yes indeed, on a bridge...very clever!"

One couldn't make any sense whatever of this whole affair: he was both a fool and very clever."
I am currently re-reading 'What Is To Be Done', it is easier this time.
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Re: Nihilists, Narodniks, and the Importance of Pisarev

Post by blindpig » Thu Nov 30, 2017 8:39 pm

Peter and Paul Fortress
Quote Originally Posted by
In Russian and French Prisons
, Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin]
The fortress covers more than 300 acres with its six bastions and six courtines, two ravelins, and the wide red-brick cronwerk erected by Nicholas I. on the north. It has, within its enclosure, plenty of all kinds of accommodation for all kinds of prisoners. Nobody, except the commander of the place, knows all of them.

There is a lofty three-storied building, which once obtained the nickname of “St. Petersburg Imperial University,” because hundreds of students were marched there, between two files of bayonets, after the disorders at the University in 1861. Scores of young men were kept there for months before they were transported to “more or less remote provinces of the Empire,” and saw their scientific career destroyed for ever by this “measure of the Emperor’s clemency.”

There is again the Courtine of Catherine which faces the Neva, under whose wide embrasures graceful flowering bushes grow at the foot of the granite walls, between two bastions. It is there that Tchernyshevsky wrote in 1864 his remarkable novel “What is to be done?” which is just now stirring the hearts of the Socialist youth of American, and in Russia made a revolution in the relations of the students and the women who were striving for their right to knowledge. From the depth of a casemate in the Courtine, Tchernyshevsky taught the young men to see in woman a comrade and a friend – not a domestic slave – and his lesson has borne its fruits.

It was there again that, a few years later, Dimitri Pissareff was imprisoned for having taken up the same noble work. Compelled to abandon it in the fortress, he did not lie idle: he wrote his remarkable analysis of the “Origin of the Species,” one of the most popular, and surely the most attractive ever penned. Two great talents were thus destroyed precisely as they were reaching their full growth. Tchernyshevsky was sent to Siberia, where he was kept for twenty years, in the mines first, and then, for thirteen years, in Viluisk, a hamlet of a few houses situated on the confines of the Arctic region. A petition for release, signed by an International Literary Congress, produced no effect. The Autocrat was so much afraid of the influence Tchernyshevsky might enjoy in Russia, that he permitted him to return from Siberia and to be settled at Astrakhan, only when he had no more to fear from his noble pen: when the writer was a ruin after a twenty years’ life of privation and sufferings among semi-savages. There was a simulacrum of judgment passed upon Tchernyshevsky; his writings, all of which had passed through the hands of the Censorship, his novel written in the fortress, were brought forward as so many proofs of guilt before the Senate. Pissareff was not even brought before a court: he was merely kept in the fortress until reported harmless…He was drowned a few months after his release.

***************************************

- "'Mock' Executions"


In the 19th Century, a unique Tsarist institution called "Civic Executions" was put into effect. All of the steps leading to a real execution were undertaken, but it was not clear whether the act was to be consummated or not. The most famous victim of such a "punishment" was Dostoevskii, but the torture was common
These people and this case--the Petrashevtsy, as a group or for that matter as individuals--were creatures of the Russian state. And like sinners in the hand of an angry God, Dostoevskii and several of the "most guilty" among them were subjected to a sadistic mock execution by firing squad, halted by preordained and wholly arbitrary plan just before triggers were pulled. The state then marched them off to Siberia, some, like Petrashevskii, never to return.

The Petrashevtsy, under judicial threat of extinction, had not for their own part so much called for the "destruction" of "the existing order" as they had felt in their bones that the existing order was collapsing around them, and they perceived active ways to ride out the winds of change, perhaps to emerge victorious, transformed from petty hirelings in a ponderous and unjust bureaucratic tyranny into participants in, perhaps leaders of, a brighter and better life for their whole nation, possibly the whole world. The solutions of their problems sometimes appeared to be solutions of all mankind's problems. Fourier contributed to these moments of giddy vision. Tsar Nicholas and his commission countered with sobering reminders of cold reality.
Berlioz was fortunate to have made his visit in 1847. After the upheavals of 1848, the final years of the Emperor’s rule were darkened still further by the spectre of revolution and conspiracy. Censorship became more prohibitive, the agents of the Third Department – the secret police – stepped up their surveillance of dissidents; private letters were routinely opened; societies were infiltrated. Among those arrested for conspiracy in 1849 was the twenty-eight year-old Dostoevskii. Along with twenty others, he was subjected to a terrifying mock execution in Semenovskii Square in the centre of St Petersburg, before being sent to Siberia. He was not allowed back to Russia until four years after Nicholas’s death.
There is significant testimony that this institution has been resurrected in Iraq, today, and that it has, once again, become routine...
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Re: Nihilists, Narodniks, and the Importance of Pisarev

Post by blindpig » Sun Jul 15, 2018 10:11 pm

bout time this was bumped
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