The Culmination of Russian Radicalism in the 19th Century
Thursday, 11. October 2007, 21:23:41
Thom Miller
Examine the role of the intelligentsia in the development of Russia's radical movement in the later half of the 19th Century. Identify the main ideological currents. How did Lenin synthesize Western Marxism with Russian Radicalism?
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The Russian intelligentsia played a fair part in the beginning, middle, and end of the radical movement in Russia. The term ‘intelligentsia’ defines a sort of social class that would later be called non-existent by the Soviet Government from which it contributed greatly. Teachers, artists, lawyers, and intellectuals that were engaged in mental, not physical labour were all considered to be members of this small, quasi-elite, social class within Russian society. This movement known as Russian radicalism was born out of the turmoil and enormity between the higher and lower parts of the Russian sosloviia , and the way these thinkers interpreted it. Of course, we cannot exclude outside factors that contributed to the emergence of this way of thinking, such as the competing ideologies that were a major contributing factor in the development, mainly found in the liberal ‘politisophical’-spectrum of Western Europe.
The work of the defined intelligentsia can be seen in one of Russia’s first real significant uprisings of the 19th century. The Decembrist revolt in the winter of 1825 was the result of Tzar Aleksandar I’s death and who would succeed him as the autocratic leader of Russia. Several underground secret societies, originally created by some idealistic and impressed Officers who served during the Napoleonic Wars on the Western front, and brought back strange, liberalistic ideas to their native feudalistic idea-killing homeland. One such group called the Northern Society, scrambled at the news of Nicholas I’s ascension to the throne, and found a sympathetic audience within parts of the army to refuse allegiance to the new Tzar. The revolt was quickly driven into the ground by Nicholas, executing 5 major leaders of the rebellion, and exiling several others to Siberia.
The monumental failure of the Decembrist movement was due almost solely to the fact that there was absolutely no base for the movement to build upon in the first place. There was no notion of radical change to excite within the people at this point. The Decembrists are seen as the first jump-off point of Russian revolutionary activity to be seen. Their movement, and failure, put the idea of change into the minds of everyday individuals, and the remaining intelligentsia from that time era would push new ideas through the mediums of poetry and writing. However, the Tzar quite soon after the Decembrist trial implemented a series of measures to ensure that Russia would remain unchanged by similar attempts to shake the foundations of its autocracy. Nicholas would create the Corps of Gendarmes, a sort of extension of the secret police force whose sole purpose was to root out the political dissidents from Russia. They would be given even more power with the new Criminal Code of 1845, which essentially made it illegal to seek reform within the ancient regime, or to even ponder the idea out loud. This made it very difficult for the intelligentsia to operate with even the smallest amount of freedom, and caused many to immigrate into liberal Europe, or continue trying to fool the censors and getting themselves shipped to Siberia. In the years before, a man named Mikhail Bakunin left Russia ultimately ending up in Paris, and began to speak out against the Russian oppression of Poland. The new Criminal Code had its cold reaches even outside the Empire. He was ordered home and refused, deported from France, and after several years of evading the authorities, he was captured in Dresden for his role in the Czech rebellion of 1848, and shipped back to Petersburg. He spent 8 years in prison there before being sent to Siberia for hard labour. While in prison the hard-headed ethics of the intelligentsia movement shone through in Bakunin’s requested confession to Tzar Nicholas, where he refused to ‘name names’ in an ironic reminder of American McCarthyism. The Tzar noted after reading Bakunin’s confession, "He is a good lad, full of spirit, but he is a dangerous man and we must never cease watching him." He deemed Bakunin a dangerous man because of his revolutionary ideals, and saw him as a danger to autocratic rule rather than to actual society. This is important to recognize because with this in mind we can identify the moral direction of autocratic thought, and the main ideological currents of this time period can be analyzed against the Tzarist thinking. Bakunin himself is considered the father of Anarchism, and he collaborated with the infamous father of Communism Karl Marx, who himself would unwittingly play an important role in Russian history at a later time. They established contacts in Paris in 1844, and in 1868 Bakunin joined the First Internationale – which he was later expelled from due to a disagreement between two factions within the union. One rallied around Marx, pushed for the Internationale’s involvement in parliamentary elections, while the other rallied around Bakunin opposed such a pacifist undermining of true revolutionary thinking. This conflict resulted in Marx’s camp booting out the ‘mutualist’ Bakunin faction.
In the years of 1869 and 1870 Bakunin would join forces with Russian revolutionary Sergei Nechaev, an adamant Nihilist. Nihilists were notorious for what Bakunin called ‘Jesuit-like’ tactics of pursuing a revolution justified by any means . Any means usually meant acts of terrorism and assassinations of Officials, and the ultimate goal of assassinating the Tzar himself. Nihilism would foster the creation of many radical Russian groups, one such company called Land and Liberty which would later join forces with some other radical factions to create the Social Revolutionaries that would play a role in the 1917 Russian Revolution. The ideas of the SRs differed – not greatly – but substantially from that of the Bolshevik Party in that it was not Marxist in its nature. The Social Revolutionaries saw the most important class of the revolution as being the peasantry, rather than the Bolshevik/Menshevik notion that the classical-Marxist industrial proletariat’s concerns were to be placed on the front-burner. These groups reconciled their disagreements and integrated to bring about the new government of Russia in 1917.
Looking backwards for a moment, one pre-collectivized SR group known as the People’s Will to a great extent contributed to the horrors of the Imperial police state by their public terrorist activities against the ancient regime in the late 1870s. In 1878 in a counter-revolutionary measure, the Tzar empowered the Corps of Gendarmes that had been formed 30 years prior, and allowed them almost absolute rule over political dissent. They became the judge, jury and executioner of political cases, and emulated the terror of the French Revolution by condemning suspects on mere suspicion of acting against the autocracy. This would later be adopted by the Soviet regime when power is seized in 1917, to no surprise of Bakunin or the Social Revolutionaries of the late 1800s. Anarchism and Nihilism were very cautious of Marx’s socialism, seeing it as replacing the old ruling class with a newer ruling class.
This apprehension turned to reality when the Bolsheviks seized power in the culmination of Russian radicalism that was the 1917 Revolution. One of the leaders of this revolution was Lenin, who was responsible for the synthesis of Western Industrial-focused Marxism into the reality of Russia that was a vast peasantry, with very little industrial prominence. He attempted to reconcile these two classes and their relative importance, but stuck chiefly with the classic-Marxist approach that was geared primarily towards the industrial wage-earning class economics. This would result in some harsh times for the Russian economy, and a decrease in the overall quality of life for the Russian population. Feeling the weight of this recession, Lenin introduced his New Economic Policy in 1921 which allowed concessions to be made for the agrarian majority of Russia in terms of their grain production and allowed them the right to sell surplus produce privately. This put reliance on small family farms, a practice more akin to that of the SR policy of land-socialization opposed to that of the Marxist land-nationalization. While financial institutions and large industrial industry were still state-controlled, agriculture – Russia’s main sustaining way of life – was now somewhat in the hands of the people. These new policies however were intended to be temporary in the eyes of the Soviet government. The NEP opened up the agricultural sector to a low-level form of capitalism, which was met with resentment from Marxist-Communist hardliners within the party, but at the same time complemented the ideals of the rooted Russian anarchist-communist position of individual liberty within the social fabric of communal society.
Lenin did a great deal to create a merger of Industrial Marxism with the more traditional aspects of Russian radical anarchism and its peasantry. It was a new idealism that had been infused with political and philosophical thought in true Russian style: a failed coup in December of 1825, exile to Siberia and the west during the late 1860s, only to be piggy-backed into the Russian Empire through Finland by the Germans at the turn of the century. A hodgepodge of ideas and examples took hold of the Russian political culture, some home-grown while others were of foreign origin. In any case, Russia was unique in its capacity to facilitate all the radicalism, reformism, and terrorism that occurred during the entire 19th and early 20th centuries on its soil. The intelligentsia never ceased to exist during the whole period, and it was not simply the ‘shit of the nation’ as Lenin so eloquently put it. They were the bread and butter of the nation; they built Russia from the blood, sweat and tears of… those they sympathized with… and did an invaluable service to the revolutions that took place within the Empires of Tzarist and Soviet Russia.
Bibliography and works used:
BOOKS
-Dziewanowski, M.K., Russia in the Twentieth Century, 2003, Prentice Hall Publishing
-Gonzalez, Mike, A Rebel’s Guide to: MARX, 2006, Bookmarks Publications
-Birchall, Ian, A Rebel’s Guide to: LENIN, 2005, Bookmarks Publications
-Marx, Karl/Engels, Friedrich, The Communist Manifesto (ENG), 2004, Penguin Books
MAGAZINES
-NEW SOCIALIST, Summer 2007, Issue 61
WEB SOURCES
-WIKIPEDIA: Search MIKHAIL BAKUNIN, DECEMBRIST REVOLT, ANARCHISM, RUSSIAN HISTORY
-INTELLIGENTSIA INFORMATION: http://www.uoregon.edu/~kimball/ntg.htm
Examine the role of the intelligentsia in the development of Russia's radical movement in the later half of the 19th Century. Identify the main ideological currents. How did Lenin synthesize Western Marxism with Russian Radicalism?
-------------
The Russian intelligentsia played a fair part in the beginning, middle, and end of the radical movement in Russia. The term ‘intelligentsia’ defines a sort of social class that would later be called non-existent by the Soviet Government from which it contributed greatly. Teachers, artists, lawyers, and intellectuals that were engaged in mental, not physical labour were all considered to be members of this small, quasi-elite, social class within Russian society. This movement known as Russian radicalism was born out of the turmoil and enormity between the higher and lower parts of the Russian sosloviia , and the way these thinkers interpreted it. Of course, we cannot exclude outside factors that contributed to the emergence of this way of thinking, such as the competing ideologies that were a major contributing factor in the development, mainly found in the liberal ‘politisophical’-spectrum of Western Europe.
The work of the defined intelligentsia can be seen in one of Russia’s first real significant uprisings of the 19th century. The Decembrist revolt in the winter of 1825 was the result of Tzar Aleksandar I’s death and who would succeed him as the autocratic leader of Russia. Several underground secret societies, originally created by some idealistic and impressed Officers who served during the Napoleonic Wars on the Western front, and brought back strange, liberalistic ideas to their native feudalistic idea-killing homeland. One such group called the Northern Society, scrambled at the news of Nicholas I’s ascension to the throne, and found a sympathetic audience within parts of the army to refuse allegiance to the new Tzar. The revolt was quickly driven into the ground by Nicholas, executing 5 major leaders of the rebellion, and exiling several others to Siberia.
The monumental failure of the Decembrist movement was due almost solely to the fact that there was absolutely no base for the movement to build upon in the first place. There was no notion of radical change to excite within the people at this point. The Decembrists are seen as the first jump-off point of Russian revolutionary activity to be seen. Their movement, and failure, put the idea of change into the minds of everyday individuals, and the remaining intelligentsia from that time era would push new ideas through the mediums of poetry and writing. However, the Tzar quite soon after the Decembrist trial implemented a series of measures to ensure that Russia would remain unchanged by similar attempts to shake the foundations of its autocracy. Nicholas would create the Corps of Gendarmes, a sort of extension of the secret police force whose sole purpose was to root out the political dissidents from Russia. They would be given even more power with the new Criminal Code of 1845, which essentially made it illegal to seek reform within the ancient regime, or to even ponder the idea out loud. This made it very difficult for the intelligentsia to operate with even the smallest amount of freedom, and caused many to immigrate into liberal Europe, or continue trying to fool the censors and getting themselves shipped to Siberia. In the years before, a man named Mikhail Bakunin left Russia ultimately ending up in Paris, and began to speak out against the Russian oppression of Poland. The new Criminal Code had its cold reaches even outside the Empire. He was ordered home and refused, deported from France, and after several years of evading the authorities, he was captured in Dresden for his role in the Czech rebellion of 1848, and shipped back to Petersburg. He spent 8 years in prison there before being sent to Siberia for hard labour. While in prison the hard-headed ethics of the intelligentsia movement shone through in Bakunin’s requested confession to Tzar Nicholas, where he refused to ‘name names’ in an ironic reminder of American McCarthyism. The Tzar noted after reading Bakunin’s confession, "He is a good lad, full of spirit, but he is a dangerous man and we must never cease watching him." He deemed Bakunin a dangerous man because of his revolutionary ideals, and saw him as a danger to autocratic rule rather than to actual society. This is important to recognize because with this in mind we can identify the moral direction of autocratic thought, and the main ideological currents of this time period can be analyzed against the Tzarist thinking. Bakunin himself is considered the father of Anarchism, and he collaborated with the infamous father of Communism Karl Marx, who himself would unwittingly play an important role in Russian history at a later time. They established contacts in Paris in 1844, and in 1868 Bakunin joined the First Internationale – which he was later expelled from due to a disagreement between two factions within the union. One rallied around Marx, pushed for the Internationale’s involvement in parliamentary elections, while the other rallied around Bakunin opposed such a pacifist undermining of true revolutionary thinking. This conflict resulted in Marx’s camp booting out the ‘mutualist’ Bakunin faction.
In the years of 1869 and 1870 Bakunin would join forces with Russian revolutionary Sergei Nechaev, an adamant Nihilist. Nihilists were notorious for what Bakunin called ‘Jesuit-like’ tactics of pursuing a revolution justified by any means . Any means usually meant acts of terrorism and assassinations of Officials, and the ultimate goal of assassinating the Tzar himself. Nihilism would foster the creation of many radical Russian groups, one such company called Land and Liberty which would later join forces with some other radical factions to create the Social Revolutionaries that would play a role in the 1917 Russian Revolution. The ideas of the SRs differed – not greatly – but substantially from that of the Bolshevik Party in that it was not Marxist in its nature. The Social Revolutionaries saw the most important class of the revolution as being the peasantry, rather than the Bolshevik/Menshevik notion that the classical-Marxist industrial proletariat’s concerns were to be placed on the front-burner. These groups reconciled their disagreements and integrated to bring about the new government of Russia in 1917.
Looking backwards for a moment, one pre-collectivized SR group known as the People’s Will to a great extent contributed to the horrors of the Imperial police state by their public terrorist activities against the ancient regime in the late 1870s. In 1878 in a counter-revolutionary measure, the Tzar empowered the Corps of Gendarmes that had been formed 30 years prior, and allowed them almost absolute rule over political dissent. They became the judge, jury and executioner of political cases, and emulated the terror of the French Revolution by condemning suspects on mere suspicion of acting against the autocracy. This would later be adopted by the Soviet regime when power is seized in 1917, to no surprise of Bakunin or the Social Revolutionaries of the late 1800s. Anarchism and Nihilism were very cautious of Marx’s socialism, seeing it as replacing the old ruling class with a newer ruling class.
This apprehension turned to reality when the Bolsheviks seized power in the culmination of Russian radicalism that was the 1917 Revolution. One of the leaders of this revolution was Lenin, who was responsible for the synthesis of Western Industrial-focused Marxism into the reality of Russia that was a vast peasantry, with very little industrial prominence. He attempted to reconcile these two classes and their relative importance, but stuck chiefly with the classic-Marxist approach that was geared primarily towards the industrial wage-earning class economics. This would result in some harsh times for the Russian economy, and a decrease in the overall quality of life for the Russian population. Feeling the weight of this recession, Lenin introduced his New Economic Policy in 1921 which allowed concessions to be made for the agrarian majority of Russia in terms of their grain production and allowed them the right to sell surplus produce privately. This put reliance on small family farms, a practice more akin to that of the SR policy of land-socialization opposed to that of the Marxist land-nationalization. While financial institutions and large industrial industry were still state-controlled, agriculture – Russia’s main sustaining way of life – was now somewhat in the hands of the people. These new policies however were intended to be temporary in the eyes of the Soviet government. The NEP opened up the agricultural sector to a low-level form of capitalism, which was met with resentment from Marxist-Communist hardliners within the party, but at the same time complemented the ideals of the rooted Russian anarchist-communist position of individual liberty within the social fabric of communal society.
Lenin did a great deal to create a merger of Industrial Marxism with the more traditional aspects of Russian radical anarchism and its peasantry. It was a new idealism that had been infused with political and philosophical thought in true Russian style: a failed coup in December of 1825, exile to Siberia and the west during the late 1860s, only to be piggy-backed into the Russian Empire through Finland by the Germans at the turn of the century. A hodgepodge of ideas and examples took hold of the Russian political culture, some home-grown while others were of foreign origin. In any case, Russia was unique in its capacity to facilitate all the radicalism, reformism, and terrorism that occurred during the entire 19th and early 20th centuries on its soil. The intelligentsia never ceased to exist during the whole period, and it was not simply the ‘shit of the nation’ as Lenin so eloquently put it. They were the bread and butter of the nation; they built Russia from the blood, sweat and tears of… those they sympathized with… and did an invaluable service to the revolutions that took place within the Empires of Tzarist and Soviet Russia.
Bibliography and works used:
BOOKS
-Dziewanowski, M.K., Russia in the Twentieth Century, 2003, Prentice Hall Publishing
-Gonzalez, Mike, A Rebel’s Guide to: MARX, 2006, Bookmarks Publications
-Birchall, Ian, A Rebel’s Guide to: LENIN, 2005, Bookmarks Publications
-Marx, Karl/Engels, Friedrich, The Communist Manifesto (ENG), 2004, Penguin Books
MAGAZINES
-NEW SOCIALIST, Summer 2007, Issue 61
WEB SOURCES
-WIKIPEDIA: Search MIKHAIL BAKUNIN, DECEMBRIST REVOLT, ANARCHISM, RUSSIAN HISTORY
-INTELLIGENTSIA INFORMATION: http://www.uoregon.edu/~kimball/ntg.htm
