The Russian Revolution

4

The Intelligentsia

Nothing presents less of an obstacle than the perfecting of the imaginary.

—Hippolyte Taine

Whether the conflicts and resentments that exist in every society are peacefully resolved or explode in revolution is largely determined by two factors: the existence of democratic institutions able to redress grievances through legislation and the ability of intellectuals to fan the flames of social discontent for the purpose of gaining power. For it is intellectuals who transmute specific, and therefore remediable, grievances into a wholesale rejection of the status quo. Rebellions happen; revolutions are made:

Initially, a rebellion is without thought: it is visceral, immediate. A revolution implies a doctrine, a project, a program.… A revolution under one aspect or another has intellectual lines of force which rebellions lack. Moreover, a revolution seeks to institutionalize itself.… That which characterizes the transformation of a rebellion into a revolution is the effort to initiate a new organization (in the absence of society!) and this … implies the existence … of “managers” of the revolution.¹

In the words of Joseph Schumpeter, social discontent is not enough to produce a revolution:

Neither the opportunity to attack nor real or fancied grievances are in themselves sufficient to produce, however strongly they may favor, the emergence of active hostility against a social order. For such an atmosphere to develop it is necessary that there be groups to whose interest it is to work up and organize resentment, to nurse it, to voice it and to lead it.²

These groups, these “managers,” are the intelligentsia, who may be defined as intellectuals craving for political power.

Nothing in early-twentieth-century Russia inexorably pushed the country toward revolution, except the presence of an unusually large and fanatical body of professional revolutionaries. It is they who with their well-organized agitational campaigns in 1917 transformed a local fire, the mutiny of Petrograd’s military garrison, into a nationwide conflagration. A class in permanent opposition, hostile to all reforms and compromises, convinced that for anything to change everything had to change, it was the catalytic agent that precipitated the Russian Revolution.

For an intelligentsia to emerge two conditions are required:

1. An ideology based on the conviction that man is not a unique creature endowed with an immortal soul, but a material compound shaped entirely by his environment: from which premise it follows that by reordering man’s social, economic, and political environment in accord with “rational” precepts, it is possible to turn out a new race of perfectly rational human beings. This belief elevates intellectuals, as bearers of rationality, to the status of social engineers and justifies their ambition to displace the ruling elite.

2. Opportunities for intellectuals to gain social and occupational status to advance their group interests—that is, the dissolution of estates and castes and the emergence of free professions which make them independent of the Establishment: law, journalism, secular institutions of higher learning, an industrial economy in need of experts, an educated reading public. These opportunities, accompanied by freedom of speech and of association, make it possible for intellectuals to secure a hold on public opinion.

The word “intelligentsia” entered the English vocabulary in the 1920s from the Russian. The Russians, in turn, adopted it from France and Germany, where “intelligence” and “Intelligenz” had gained currency in the 1830s and 1840s to designate educated and “progressive” citizens.* It soon went out of fashion in the West, but in Russia it acquired great popularity in the second half of the nineteenth century to describe not so much the educated elite as those who spoke and acted on behalf of the country’s silent majority—a counterpart of the patrimonial establishment (bureaucracy, police, the military, the gentry, and the clergy). In a country in which “society” was given no political outlets, the emergence of such a group was inevitable. The term was never precisely defined, and pre-revolutionary literature is filled with disputes over what it meant and to whom it applied. Although in fact most of those regarded as intelligenty had a superior education, education in itself was not a criterion: thus, a businessman or a bureaucrat with a university degree did not qualify as a member of the intelligentsia, the former because he worked for his own profit, the latter because he worked for the profit of the Tsar. Only those qualified who committed themselves to the public good, even if they were semi-literate workers or peasants. In practice, this meant men of letters—journalists, academics, writers—and professional revolutionaries. To belong, one also had to subscribe to certain philosophical assumptions about man and society derived from the doctrines of materialism, utilitarianism, and positivism. The popularity of the word derived from the fact that it made it possible to distinguish social “activists” from passive “intellectuals.” However, we shall use the two terms interchangeably since in Western languages the distinction has not been established.

As a self-appointed spokesman for all those not members of the establishment—that is, more than nine-tenths of the population—the Russian intelligentsia saw itself and was seen by its rivals as the principal threat to the status quo. The battle lines in the last decades of Imperial Russia were drawn between official Russia and the intelligentsia, and it was eminently clear that the victory of the latter would result in the destruction of the former. The conflict grew so bitter that anyone advocating conciliation and compromise was liable to find himself caught in a deadly cross fire. While the establishment counted mainly on its repressive apparatus to keep the intelligentsia at bay, the latter used, as a lever, popular discontent, which it aggravated with all the means at its disposal, mostly by persistent discrediting of tsarism and its supporters.

Although circumstances caused the intelligentsia to be especially important in Russia, it was, of course, not unique to that country. Tönnies, in his seminal distinction between “communities” and “societies,” allowed that in addition to communities linked by territorial proximity and ties of blood there existed “communities of mind” whose bond was ideas.³ Pareto identified a “non-governing elite” which closely resembles the Russian intelligentsia.⁴ Because these groups are international, it is necessary at this point to engage in a digression from Russian history: neither the emergence of the Russian intelligentsia nor the impact of the Russian Revolution on the rest of the world can be properly appreciated without an understanding of the intellectual underpinnings of modern radicalism.

Intellectuals first appeared in Europe as a distinct group in the sixteenth century in connection with the emergence of secular society and the concurrent advances of science. They were lay thinkers, often men of independent means, who approached the traditional questions of philosophy outside the framework of theology and the clerical establishment, which had previously enjoyed a monopoly on such speculation. Montaigne was a classic representative of the type which at the beginning of the seventeenth century came to be referred to as “intellectualist.” He reflected on life and human nature without giving any thought to the possibility that either could be changed. To humanists like him, man and the world in which he lived were givens. The task of philosophy was to help man acquire wisdom by coming to terms with that changeless reality. The supreme wisdom was to be true to one’s nature and so restrain one’s desires as to gain immunity to adversity, especially the inevitable prospect of death: in the words of Seneca, “to have the weaknesses of a man and the serenity of a god” (“habere imbecillitatem hominis, securitatem dei”). The task of philosophy, as stated in the title of the book by the sixth-century writer Boethius, was “consolation.” In its more extreme forms, such as Chinese Taoism, philosophy counseled complete inactivity: “Do nothing and everything will be done.” Until the seventeenth century, the immutability of man’s “being” was an unquestioned postulate of all philosophic thought, both in the West and in the East. It was considered a mark of folly to believe otherwise.

It was in the early seventeenth century that a contrary trend emerged in European thought. Its stimulus came from the dramatic findings of astronomy and the other sciences. The discovery that it was possible to uncover nature’s secrets, and to use this knowledge to harness nature in the service of man, inevitably affected the way man came to view himself. The Copernican revolution displaced him and his world from the center of the universe. In one respect, this was a blow to man’s self-esteem; in another, it greatly enhanced it. By laying bare the laws governing the motions of celestial bodies, science elevated man to the status of a creature capable of penetrating the deepest mysteries of nature: the very same scientific knowledge which toppled him from the center of the universe gave him the power to become nature’s master. Francis Bacon was the earliest intellectual to grasp these implications of the scientific method and to treat knowledge—knowledge acquired through scientific observation and induction—as a means not only of gaining an understanding of the world but also of acting upon it. In his Novum Organum he asserted that the principles of physical science were applicable to human affairs. By establishing the methods through which true knowledge was acquired—that is, by rejecting classical and scholastic models in favor of the empirical and inductive methodology employed in the natural sciences—Bacon believed himself to be laying the foundations of man’s mastery over both nature and himself: he is said to have “epitomize[d] the boundless ambition to dominate and to exploit the material resources of nature placed by God at the disposal of man.”⁵ That he was aware of the implications of the theory he advanced is indicated by the subtitle of his treatise on scientific methodology: De Regno Hominis (Of Man’s Dominion).

Although scientific methodology progressively came to dominate Western thought, it took some time for man to view himself as an object of scientific inquiry. Seventeenth-century thought continued to adhere to the view inherited from antiquity and the Middle Ages, that man was composed of two discrete parts, body (soma) and soul (psyche), the one material and perishable, the other metaphysical and immortal and hence beyond the reach of empirical investigation. This conception, expressed by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo to explain his equanimity in the face of impending death, entered the mainstream of Western thought through the writings of St. Augustine. Related was a theory of knowledge based on the concept of “innate ideas,” that is, ideas believed to have been implanted in the soul at birth, including the notions of God, good and evil, the sense of time and space, and the principles of logic. The theory of innate ideas dominated European thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.⁶ The political implications of this theory were distinctly conservative: the immutability of human nature posited the immutability of man’s behavior and the permanence of his political and social institutions.

Bacon already had expressed doubts about innate ideas, since they did not fit his empirical methodology, and hinted that knowledge derived from the senses. But the principal assault on the theory of innate ideas was undertaken by John Locke in 1690 in his Essay on Human Understanding. Locke dismissed the whole concept and argued that all ideas without exception derived from sensory experience. The human mind was like a “dark room” into which the sensations of sight, smell, touch, and hearing threw the only shafts of light. By reflecting on these sensations, the mind formed ideas. According to Locke, thinking was an entirely involuntary process: man could no more reject or change the ideas which the senses generated in his mind than a mirror can “refuse, alter, or obliterate the images or ideas which objects set before it do therein produce.” The denial of free will, which followed from Locke’s theory of cognition, was to be a major factor in its popularity, since it is only by eliminating free will that man could be made the subject of scientific inquiry.

For several decades after its appearance, the influence of Locke’s Essay was confined to academic circles. It was the French philosophe Claude Helvétius who, in his anonymously published De l’Esprit (1758), first drew political consequences from Locke’s theory of knowledge, with results that have never been adequately recognized.

It is known that Helvétius studied intensely the philosophical writings of Locke and was deeply affected by them.⁷ He accepted as proven Locke’s contention that all ideas were the product of sensations and all knowledge the result of man’s ability, through reflection on sensory data, to grasp the differences and similarities that are the basis of thought. He denied as categorically as did Locke man’s ability to direct thinking or the actions resulting from it: for Helvétius, his biographer says, “a philosophical treatise on liberty [was] a treatise on effects without a cause.”⁸ Moral notions derived exclusively from man’s experience with the sensations of pain and pleasure. People thus were neither “good” nor “bad”: they merely acted, involuntarily and mechanically, in their self-interest, which dictated the avoidance of pain and the enhancement of pleasure.

Up to this point Helvétius said nothing that had not been said previously by Locke and his French followers. But then he made a startling leap from philosophy into politics. From the premise that all knowledge and all values were by-products of sensory experience he drew the inference that by controlling the data that the senses fed to the mind—that is, by appropriately shaping man’s environment—it was possible to determine what he thought and how he behaved. Since, according to Locke, the formulation of ideas was wholly involuntary and entirely shaped by physical sensations, it followed that if man were subjected to impressions that made for virtue, he could be made virtuous through no act of his own will.⁹

This idea provides the key to the creation of perfectly virtuous human beings—required are only appropriate external influences. Helvétius called the process of molding men “education,” by which he meant much more than formal schooling. When he wrote “l’éducation peut tout”—“education can do anything”—he meant by education everything that surrounds man and affects his thinking, everything which furnishes his mind with sensations and generates ideas. First and foremost, it meant legislation: “It is … only by good laws that we can form virtuous men.”¹⁰ From which it followed that morality and legislation were “one and the same science.”¹¹ In the concluding chapter of L’Esprit, Helvétius spoke of the desirability of reforming society through legislation for the purpose of making men “virtuous.”*

This is one of the most revolutionary ideas in the history of political thought: by extrapolation from an esoteric theory of knowledge, a new political theory is born with the most momentous practical implications. Its central thesis holds that the task of politics is to make man “virtuous,” and that the means to that end is the manipulation of man’s social and political environment, to be accomplished mainly by means of legislation, that is, by the state. Helvétius elevates the legislator to the status of the supreme moralist. He must have been aware of the implications of his theory for he spoke of the “art of forming man” as intimately connected with the “form of government.” Man no longer is God’s creation: he is his own product. Society, too, is a “product” rather than a given or “datum.”¹² Good government not only ensures “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” (a formula which Helvétius seems to have devised), but it literally refashions man. The logic of Helvétius’s ideas inexorably leads to the conclusion that in the course of learning about human nature man “acquires an unlimited power of transforming and reshaping man.”¹³ This unprecedented proposition constitutes the premise of both liberal and radical ideologies of modern times. It provides the theoretical justification for using politics to create a “new order.”

Such ideas, whether in their pure or diluted version, hold an irresistible attraction for intellectuals. If, indeed, human existence in all its manifestations obeys mechanical laws that reason can lay bare and direct into desirable channels, then it follows that intellectuals, as the custodians of rational knowledge, are man’s natural leaders. Progress consists of either the instantaneous or the gradual subordination of life to “reason,” or, as it used to be said in Russia, the replacement of “spontaneity” by “consciousness.” “Spontaneous” existence, as shaped by millennia of experience and embodied in tradition, custom, and historic institutions, is, in this conception, “irrational.”

A life ruled by “reason” is a life ruled by intellectuals: it is not surprising, therefore, that intellectuals want to change the world in accord with the requirements of “rationality.”* A market economy, with its wasteful competition and swings between overproduction and shortages, is not “rational” and hence it does not find favor with intellectuals. They prefer socialism, which is another word for the rationalization of economic activity. Democracy is, of course, mandatory, but preferably interpreted to mean the “rational” rather than the actual will of the people: Rousseau’s “general will” instead of the will made manifest through elections or referenda.

The theories of Locke and Helvétius permit intellectuals to claim status as mankind’s “educators” in the broadest sense of that word. They are the repository of reason, which they believe to be always superior to experience. While mankind gropes in darkness, they, the “illuminati,” know the path to virtue and, through virtue, to happiness. This whole conception puts intellectuals at odds with the rest of humanity. Ordinary people, in pursuit of their livelihood, acquire specific knowledge relevant to their particular occupation under the specific conditions in which they have to practice it. Their intelligence (reasoning) expresses itself in the ability to cope with such problems as they happen personally to confront: in the words of William James, in attaining “some particular conclusion or … gratifying] some special curiosity … which it is the reasoner’s temporary interest to attain.” The farmer understands the climatic and other requirements for his crops: knowledge that may be of little use in another place and useless in another occupation. The real estate agent knows the value of properties in his area. The politician has a sense of the aspirations and worries of his constituents. Societies function thanks to the immense variety of the concrete kinds of knowledge accumulated from experience by the individuals and groups that constitute them.

Intellectuals and intellectuals alone claim to know things “in general.” By creating “sciences” of human affairs—economic science, political science, sociology—they establish principles said to be validated by the very “nature” of things. This claim entitles them to demand that existing practices be abandoned and existing institutions destroyed. It was the genius of Burke to grasp the premises and consequences of this kind of thinking, as expressed in the slogans and actions of the French Revolution, and to insist, in response to this experience, that where human affairs are concerned, things never exist in “general” but only in particular (“Nothing is good, but in proportion, and with Reference”¹⁴), and abstract thinking is the worst possible guide to conduct.

Helvétius’s theory can be applied in two ways. One may interpret it to mean that the change in man’s social and political environment ought to be accomplished peacefully and gradually, through the reform of institutions and enlightenment. One can also conclude from it that this end is best attained by a violent destruction of the existing order.

Which approach—the evolutionary or revolutionary—prevails seems to be in large measure determined by a country’s political system and the opportunities it provides for intellectuals to participate in public life.

In societies which make it possible through democratic institutions and freedom of speech to influence policy, intellectuals are likely to follow the more moderate alternative. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and the United States, intellectuals were deeply involved in political life. The men who shaped the American republic and those who led Victorian England along the path of reform were men of affairs with deep intellectual interests: of some of them it would be difficult to say whether they were philosophers engaged in statesmanship or statesmen whose true vocation was philosophy. Even the pragmatists among them kept their minds open to the ideas of the age. This interplay of ideas and politics lent political life in Anglo-Saxon countries their well-known spirit of compromise. Here the intellectuals had no need to withdraw and form an isolated caste. They acted on public opinion, which, through democratic institutions, sooner or later affected legislation.

In England and, through England, in the United States, the ideas of Helvétius gained popularity mainly from the writings of Jeremy Bentham and the utilitarians. It was to Helvétius that Bentham owed the ideas that morality and legislation were “one and the same science,” that man could attain virtue only through “good laws,” and that, consequently, legislation had a “pedagogic” function.¹⁵ On these foundations, Bentham constructed his theory of philosophical radicalism, which greatly affected the movement for parliamentary reform and liberal economics. The preoccupation of modern Anglo-Saxon countries with legislation as a device for human betterment is directly traceable to Bentham and, through him, to Helvétius. In the speculations of Bentham and the English liberals, there was no place for violence: the transformation of man and society was to be accomplished entirely by laws and enlightenment. But even under this reform-minded theory lay the tacit premise that man could and ought to be remade. This premise links liberalism and radicalism and helps explain why, for all their rejection of the violent methods employed by revolutionaries, when forced to choose between them and their conservative opponents, liberals can be counted on to throw their lot in with the revolutionaries. For what separates liberals from the extreme left is disagreement over the means employed, whereas they differ from the right in the fundamental perception of what man is and what society ought to be.

In countries which excluded intellectuals from participation in public life—of which old regime France and Russia were prime examples—intellectuals were prone to form castes committed to extreme ideologies. The fact was noted by Tocqueville:

In England, writers on the theory of government and those who actually governed cooperated with each other, the former setting forth their theories, the latter amending or circumscribing these in the light of practical experience. In France, however, precept and practice were kept quite distinct and remained in the hands of two quite distinct groups. One of these carried on the actual administration while the other set forth the abstract principles on which good government should, they said, be based; one took the routine measures appropriate to the needs of the moment, the other propounded general laws without a thought for their practical application; one group shaped the course of public affairs, the other that of public opinion. Thus, alongside the traditional and confused, not to say chaotic, social system of the day there was gradually built up in man’s minds an imaginary ideal society in which all was simple, uniform, coherent, equitable, and rational in the full sense of the term.¹⁶

It is always dangerous to seek in historical analogies explanations for historical events: the model of the French Revolution employed by Russian radicals brought no end of grief to them and many others. However, in at least one respect the example of eighteenth-century France is applicable to twentieth-century Russia—namely, in the realm of ideas, which are less affected by concrete historic circumstances than are political and social conditions. The intellectual atmosphere of late Imperial Russia closely resembled that of ancien regime France on the eve of the Revolution, and the circles of philosophes anticipated those of the Russian intelligentsia. The analogy emphasizes to what extent intellectual trends can be self-generated: it reinforces the impression that the behavior of the Russian intelligentsia was influenced less by Russian reality than by preconceived ideas.

A brilliant if little-known French historian, Augustin Cochin, first showed the peculiarly destructive intellectual atmosphere that had prevailed in France in the decades immediately preceding the Revolution. He began his inquiries with a study of Jacobinism.* Seeking its antecedents, he was led to the social and cultural circles formed in France in the 1760s and 1770s to promote “advanced” ideas. These circles, which he called sociétés de pensée, were made up of literary associations, Masonic lodges, academies, as well as various “patriotic” and cultural clubs. According to Cochin, the sociétés de pensée insinuated themselves into a society in which the traditional estates were in the process of disintegration. To join them required severing connections with one’s social group and dissolving one’s class (estate) identity in a community bound exclusively by a commitment to common ideas. Jacobinism was a natural product of this phenomenon: in France, unlike England, the movement for change emanated not from parliamentary institutions but from literary and philosophical clubs.

These circles, in which the historian of Russia recognizes many of the features of the Russian intelligentsia of a century later, had as their main mission the forging of a consensus: they achieved cohesion not through shared interests but through shared ideas, ruthlessly imposed on their members and accompanied by vicious attacks on all who thought differently:

Prior to the bloody terror of ’93, there existed, between 1765 and 1780, a dry terror in the republic of letters, of which the Encyclopedia was the Committee of Public Safety and d’Alembert was Robespierre. It mowed down reputations as the other did heads: its guillotine was defamation …¹⁷

For intellectuals of this kind, the criterion of truth was not life: they created their own reality, or rather, sur-reality, subject to verification only with reference to opinions of which they approved. Contradictory evidence was ignored: anyone inclined to heed such evidence was ruthlessly cast out.

This kind of thinking led to a progressive estrangement from life. Cochin’s description of the atmosphere in the French sociétés de pensée of the late eighteenth century perfectly fits that prevailing in intelligentsia circles in Russia a century later:

Whereas in the real world the arbiter of all thought is proof and its issue is the effect, in this world the arbiter is the opinion of others, and the aim their approbation.… All thought, all intellectual effort here exists only by way of concurrence. It is opinion that makes for existence. That is real which others see, that true which they say, that good of which they approve. Thus the natural order is reversed: opinion here is the cause, and not, as in real life, the effect. Appearance takes the place of being, speaking, doing.… And the goal … of that passive work is destruction. It consists, in sum, of eliminating, of reducing. Thought which submits to this initially loses the concern for the real, and then, little by little, the sense of the real. And it is precisely to this deprivation that it owes its freedom. It does not gain in freedom, orderliness, clarity except to the extent that it sheds its real content, its hold on that which exists.¹⁸

It is only with the help of this insight that we can understand the seeming paradoxes in the mentality of the genus intelligentsia, and especially its more extreme species, the Russian intelligentsia. Theories and programs, on which Russian intellectuals spent their waking hours, were indeed evaluated in relation not to life but to other theories and programs: the criterion of their validity was consistency and conformity. Live reality was treated as a perversion or caricature of “genuine” reality, believed to lurk invisible behind appearances and waiting to be set free by the Revolution. This attitude would enable the intelligentsia to accept as true propositions at total variance with demonstrable fact as well as common sense—for example, that the living standards of European workers in the nineteenth century were steadily declining, that the Russian peasant in 1900 was on the verge of starvation, that it was legitimate, in the name of democracy, to disperse in January 1918 the democratically elected Constituent Assembly, or that, more generally, freedom meant bowing to necessity. To understand the behavior of the intelligentsia it is imperative to keep in mind at all times its deliberate detachment from reality: for while the revolutionaries can be ruthlessly pragmatic in exploiting, for tactical purposes, the people’s grievances, their notion of what the people desire is the product of sheer abstraction. Not surprisingly, when they come to power, revolutionary intellectuals immediately seize control of the means of information and institute a tight censorship: for it is only by suppressing free speech that they can impose their “sur-reality” on ordinary people bogged down in the quagmire of facts.*

The habit calls for the creation of a special language by means of which initiates of the movement can communicate with one another and, when in power, impose their fantasy on the population at large. This language, with its own vocabulary, phraseology, and even syntax, which reached its apogee in the stultified jargon of the Stalinist era, “describes not reality but an ideal conception of it.” It is severely ritualized and surrounded by lexical taboos.¹⁹ Long before 1917, Russian revolutionary polemics were carried out in this medium.

Nowhere is this penchant for creating one’s own reality more apparent—and pernicious—than in the intelligentsia’s conception of the “people.” Radicals insist on speaking for and on acting on behalf of the “people” (sometimes described as “the popular masses”) against the allegedly self-seeking elite in control of the state and the nation’s wealth. In their view, the establishment of a just and free society requires the destruction of the status quo. But contact with the people of flesh and blood quickly reveals that few if any of them want their familiar world to be destroyed: what they desire is satisfaction of specific grievances—that is, partial reform, with everything else remaining in place. It has been observed that spontaneous rebellions are conservative rather than revolutionary, in that those involved usually clamor for the restitution of rights of which they feel they have been unjustly deprived: they look backward.²⁰ In order to promote its ideal of comprehensive change, the intelligentsia must, therefore, create an abstraction called “the people” to whom it can attribute its own wishes. According to Cochin, the essence of Jacobinism lay not in terror but in the striving of the intellectual elite to establish dictatorial power over the people in the name of the people. The justification for such procedure was found in Rousseau’s concept of “general will,” which defined the will of the people as what enlightened “opinion” declared it to be:

For the doctrinaires of the [French revolutionary] regime, the philosophes and politicians, from Rousseau and Mably to Brissot and Robespierre, the true people is an ideal being. The general will, the will of the citizenry, transcends the actual will, such as it is, of the greatest number, as in Christian life grace dominates and transcends nature. Rousseau has said it: the general will is not the will of numbers and it has reason against it; the liberty of the citizen is not the independence of the individual, and suppresses it. In 1789, the true people did not exist except potentially, in the consciousness or imagination of “free people,” of “patriots,” as they used to be called … that is to say, a small number of initiates, recruited in their youth, trained without respite, shaped all their lives in societies of philosophes … in the discipline of liberty.²¹

It is only by reducing people of flesh and blood to a mere idea that one can ignore the will of the majority in the name of democracy and institute a dictatorship in the name of freedom.

This whole ideology and the behavior to which it gave rise—a mélange of ideas formulated by Helvétius and Rousseau—was historically new, the creation of the French Revolution. It legitimized the most savage social experiments. Although for personal reasons Robespierre despised Helvétius (he believed him to have persecuted his idol, Rousseau), his entire thinking was deeply influenced by him. For Robespierre, the mission of politics was the “reign of virtue.” Society was divided into “good” and “bad” citizens, from which premise he concluded that “all those who do not think as we do must be eliminated from the city.”²²

Tocqueville was perplexed by this whole phenomenon when late in life he turned his attention to the history of the French Revolution. A year before his death, he confided to a friend:

There is something special about the sickness of the French Revolution which I sense without being able to describe it or analyze its causes. It is a virus of a new and unfamiliar kind. The world has known violent revolution: but the boundless, violent, radical, perplexed, bold, almost insane but still strong and successful personality of these revolutionaries appears to me to have no parallel in the great social upheavals of the past. From whence comes this new race? Who created it? Who made it so successful? Who kept it alive? Because we still have the same men confronting us, although the circumstances differ, and they have left progeny in the whole civilized world. My spirit flags from the effort to gain a clear picture of this object and to find the means of describing it fairly. Independently of everything that is comprehensible in the French Revolution, in its spirit and in its deeds, there is something that remains inexplicable. I sense where the unknown is to be found but no matter how hard I try, I cannot lift the veil that conceals it. I feel it through a strange body which prevents me from really touching or seeing it.²³

Had he lived into the twentieth century, Toqueville might have found it easier to identify the “virus,” because its peculiar blend of ideas and group interests has become commonplace since his day.

Intellectuals can acquire influence only in an egalitarian and open society, in which estate barriers have broken down and politics are shaped by opinion. In such a society they assume the role of opinion-makers, to which end they employ the printed word and other media as well as educational institutions. Although the intelligentsia likes to see itself as selflessly dedicated to the public good, and hence a moral force rather than a social group, the fact of its members sharing common values and goals inevitably means that they also share common interests—interests which may well clash with their professed ideals. The intelligentsia has difficulty admitting this. Its profound aversion for sociological self-analysis—in such contrast to its penchant for analyzing all other social groups and classes, especially its main obstacle to power, the “bourgeoisie”—has resulted in a striking paucity of works on the subject. The sparse literature on the intelligentsia as a social and historic phenomenon is entirely disproportionate to that group’s importance.²⁴

Although they can flourish only in societies free of estate privileges, with egalitarian citizenship, such as have arisen in the West in modern times, such societies place intellectuals in an ambivalent position. While they enjoy immense influence on public opinion, they constitute socially a marginal element, since they control neither wealth nor political power. A good part of them make up an intellectual proletariat which barely manages to eke out a living: even the more fortunate representatives of this group are economically and politically insignificant, often forced to serve as paid spokesmen of the nation’s elite. This is a painful position to be in, especially for those who regard themselves as far more deserving of the prerogatives of power than those who actually wield it by virtue of accident of birth or economic exploitation.

Capitalism benefits the intelligentsia by increasing the demand for its services and giving its members opportunity to practice the profession of opinion-molding:

The cheaper book, the cheap newspaper or pamphlet, together with the widening of the public that was in part their product but partly an independent phenomenon due to the access of wealth and weight which came to the industrial bourgeoisie and to the incident increase in the political importance of an anonymous public opinion—all these boons, as well as increasing freedom from restraint, are by-products of the capitalist engine.²⁵

“Every society of the past,” writes Raymond Aron,

has had its scribes … its artists or men of letters … and its experts.… None of these three species belongs strictly to our modern civilisation, but the latter has nonetheless its own special characteristics which affect the numbers and status of the intellectuals. The distribution of manpower among the different professions alters with the progress of economic development: the percentage of manpower employed in industry grows, the proportion employed in agriculture decreases, while the size of the so-called tertiary sector, which includes a multitude of professions of varying degrees of prestige—from the quill-driver in his office to the research worker in his laboratory—is enormously inflated. Modern industrial societies comprise a greater number of non-manual workers, absolutely and relatively, than any society of the past.… The three categories of non-manual workers—scribes, experts, and men of letters—develop simultaneously, if not at the same rate. Bureaucracies offer outlets to scribes with inferior qualifications; the management of labor and the organization of industry require more and more specialized experts; schools, universities, and various mediums of entertainment or communication employ men of letters, artists, or mere technicians of speech and writing, hacks and popularizers.… Though its significance is not always fully recognized, the growth in the number of jobs remains a crucial fact …²⁶

By filling the ranks of the “tertiary sector” of the modern economy, intellectuals turn into a social group with its own interests, the most important of which calls for the increase in the number and prestige of white-collar jobs—an objective best promoted by centralization and bureaucratization. Their interests further require untrammeled freedom of speech, and intellectuals, even while helping put in power regimes which suppress liberties, have always and everywhere opposed restraints on free expression: they often are the first victims of their own triumphs.

Paradoxically, therefore, capitalism and democracy, while enhancing the role of intellectuals, also increase their discontent. Their status in a capitalist society is far beneath that of politicians and businessmen, whom they scorn as amateurs in the art of social management. They envy their wealth, authority, and prestige. In some respects it was easier for intellectuals to accommodate to pre-modern society, in which status was fixed by tradition and law, than to the fluctuating world of capitalism and democracy, in which they feel humiliated by lack of money and status: Ludwig von Mises thought that intellectuals gravitate to anti-capitalist philosophies “in order to render inaudible the inner voice that tells them that their failure is entirely their own fault.”²⁷

As previously pointed out, intellectuals can avoid these humiliations and rise to the top only under one condition: if society becomes “rationalized”—that is, intellectualized—and “reason” replaces the free play of economic and political forces. This means socialism. The main enemy of the socialists, in their peaceful (“Utopian”) as well as violent (revolutionary) guise, has always been “spontaneity,” by which is meant laissez-faire in its economic as well as political manifestations. The call for the abolition of private property in the means of production on behalf of “society,” common to all socialist programs, makes it theoretically possible to rationalize the production of goods and to equalize their distribution. It also happens to place those who claim to know what is “rational”—intellectuals—in a commanding position. As in the case of other class movements, interest and ideology coincide: just as the bourgeoisie’s demands for the abolition of restraints on manufacture and trade in the name of public welfare served its own interests, so the radical intellectuals’ call for the nationalization of manufacture and trade, advanced for the sake of the masses, happens to work to its own advantage.

The anarchist leader, and Marx’s contemporary, Michael Bakunin, was the first to note this coincidence and insist that behind the intellectuals’ yearning for socialism lay ordinary class interests. He opposed Marx’s vision of the socialist state on the grounds that it would result in Communist domination of the masses:

According to Mr. Marx, the people should not only not abolish [the state], but, on the contrary, fortify and strengthen it, and in this form turn it over to the full disposal of their benefactors, guardians, and teachers, the chiefs of the Communist Party—in other words, to Mr. Marx and his friends, who will then proceed to liberate [them] in their own fashion. They will concentrate the reins of government in a strong hand, because the ignorant people are in need of strong guardianship. They will create a central state bank, which will concentrate in its hands all commercial-industrial, agricultural, and even scientific production. They will divide the mass of the people into two armies, the industrial and the agricultural, under the direct command of state engineers, who will form the new privileged political-scientific class.²⁸

Another anarchist, the Pole Jan Machajski, depicted socialism as an ideology formulated in the interest of the intelligentsia, “an emergent privileged class,” whose capital consisted of higher education. In a socialist state they would achieve dominance by replacing the old class of capitalists as administrators and experts. “Scientific socialism” promises the “slaves of bourgeois society happiness after they are dead: it guarantees the socialist paradise to their descendants.”*

This was not a message likely to appeal to intellectuals. And so it was no accident that Marx defeated Bakunin and had him expelled from the First International, and that in the modern world anarchism is but a faint shadow of socialism. Historical experience indicates that any movement that questions the ideology and interests of intellectuals dooms itself to defeat, and that any intellectual who challenges his class condemns himself to obscurity.

Socialism is commonly thought of as a theory which aims at a fairer distribution of wealth for the ultimate purpose of creating a free and just society. Indisputably this is the stated program of socialists. But behind this program lurks an even more ambitious goal, which is creating a new type of human being. The underlying premise is the idea of Helvétius that by establishing an environment which makes social behavior a natural instinct, socialism will enable man to realize his potential to the fullest. This, in turn, will make it possible, ultimately, to dispense with the state and the compulsion which is said to be its principal attribute. All socialist doctrines, from the most moderate to the most extreme, assume that human beings are infinitely malleable because their personality is the product of the economic environment: a change in that environment must, therefore, alter them as well as their behavior.

Marx pursued philosophical studies mainly in his youth. When, as a twenty-six-year-old émigré in Paris, he immersed himself in philosophy, he at once grasped the political implications of the ideas of Helvétius and his French contemporaries. In The Holy Family (1844–45), the book which marked his and Engels’s break with idealistic radicalism, he took his philosophical and psychological premises directly from Locke and Helvétius: “The whole development of man …,” he wrote, “depends on education and environment.”

If man draws all his knowledge, sensations, etc., from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, the empirical world must be arranged so that in it man experiences and gets used to what is really human.… If man is shaped by his surroundings, his surroundings must be made human.²⁹

This, the locus classicus of Marxist philosophy, justifies a total change in the way society is organized—that is, revolution. According to this way of thinking, which indeed inexorably flows from the philosophical premises formulated by Locke and Helvétius, man and society do not come into existence by a natural process but are “made.” This “radical behaviorism,” as it has been called, inspired Marx in 1845 to coin what is probably his most celebrated aphorism: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.”³⁰ Of course, the moment a thinker begins to conceive his mission to be not “only” observing the world and adapting to it, but changing it, he ceases to be a philosopher and turns into a politician with his own political agenda and interests.

Now, the world can conceivably be “changed” gradually, by means of education and legislation. And such a gradual change is, indeed, what all intellectuals would advocate if their exclusive concern were with improving the human condition, since evolution allows for trial and error, the only proven road to progress. But many of those who want to change the world regard human discontent as something not to be remedied but exploited. Exploitation of resentment, not its satisfaction, has been at the center of socialist politics since the 1840s: it is what distinguished the self-styled “scientific” socialists from their “Utopian” forerunners. This attitude has led to the emergence of what Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu called in 1902, in a remarkably prescient book, the “politics of hatred.” Socialism, he noted, elevates “hatred to the heights of principle,” sharing with its mortal enemies, nationalism and anti-Semitism, the need “chirurgically” to isolate and destroy the alleged enemy.³¹ Committed radicals fear reform because it deprives them of leverage and establishes the ruling elite more solidly in power: they prefer the most savage repression. The slogan of Russian revolutionaries—“chem khuzhe, tern luchshe” (“the worse, the better”)—spelled out this kind of thinking.

There are, of course, many varieties of socialists, from the most democratic and humane to the most despotic and cruel, but they differ over means, not ends. In tracing the attitude of Russian and foreign socialists toward the brutal experiments of the Bolsheviks, we will have occasion to see their inconsistencies: revulsion at Bolshevik atrocities combined with admiration for their undeviating commitment to the common cause and support for them whenever they were threatened. As we will show, the Bolsheviks could neither have seized power nor have kept it were it not for the support, active and passive, given them by the democratic, nonviolent socialists.

We have it on the authority of Leon Trotsky that the architects of the October 1917 coup d’état looked far beyond correcting the inequities of capitalism. Describing the future in the early 1920s, he predicted:

Communist life will not be formed blindly, like coral reefs, but it will be built consciously, it will be tested by thought, it will be directed and corrected. Having ceased to be spontaneous, life will cease to be stagnant.

Having dismissed all of human history until October 1917 as an era of “stagnancy,” Trotsky proceeded to depict the human being whom the new regime would create:

Man will, at last, begin to harmonize himself in earnest.… He will want to master first the semi-conscious and then also the unconscious processes of his own organism: breathing, the circulation of blood, digestion, reproduction, and, within the necessary limits, will subordinate them to the control of reason and will. Even purely physiological life will become collectively experimental. The human species, the sluggish Homo sapiens, will once again enter the state of radical reconstruction and will become in its own hands the object of the most complex methods of artificial selection and psychophysical training.… Man will make it his goal to master his own emotions, to elevate his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent … to create a higher sociobiological type, a superman, if you will.… Man will become incomparably stronger, wiser, subtler. His body will become more harmonious, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more melodious. The forms of life will acquire a dynamic theatricality. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, Goethe, Marx. And beyond this ridge, other peaks will emerge.³²

These reflections, not of an adolescent daydreamer but of the organizer of Bolshevik victories in October 1917 and in the Civil War, provide an insight into the psyche of those who made the greatest revolution of modern times. They and those who emulated them aimed at nothing less than reenacting the Sixth Day of Creation and perfecting its flawed product: man was to remake himself “with his own hands.” We can now understand what Nicholas Chernyshevskii, a prominent Russian radical of the 1860s and a major influence on Lenin, had in mind when he defined his “anthropomorphic principle” to mean “Homo homini deus” (“Man is god to man”).

The Russian intelligentsia made its appearance in the 1860s in connection with the Great Reforms of Alexander II. After its humiliating defeat in the Crimean War, the tsarist government decided it had to activate Russian society and involve it more in public life. But society proved difficult to stir: “The country, patiently trained to inertia, lost all power of initiative and when … informed that it was expected to act for itself, to settle its own local affairs, scarcely knew how to respond to the invitation, having lost the habit of action, lost interest in public life, especially in the provinces.”³³ This inertia gave Russian intellectuals the opportunity to step forward as spokesmen for society, which in any event had no opportunities to express itself through elections.

Several policies which the government initiated at this time created favorable conditions for the growth of the intelligentsia. Censorship was eased. During the preceding reign of Nicholas I, it had attained a level of mindless severity which made it increasingly difficult to communicate by means of the printed word. Under the new reign, preliminary censorship was abolished and the rules governing publication sufficiently relaxed to permit the spread of the most radical ideas by means of a coded (“Aesopian”) language. The periodical press became the principal vehicle through which opinion-makers in Moscow and St. Petersburg influenced thinking in the provinces. The Russian press in the second half of the nineteenth century had surprising latitude to criticize the authorities: by 1900, most dailies and monthlies upheld oppositional views.

In 1863, universities received autonomy, which made their faculties self-governing. Admission to the institutions of higher learning was opened to commoners, who under Nicholas I had been virtually excluded. They quickly turned into centers of political ferment. A high proportion of the Russian intelligentsia became radicalized during their student years.

The introduction in 1864–1870 of organs of self-government—the zemstva and Municipal Councils—offered intellectuals opportunities for professional public employment. Together with rural schoolteachers, agronomists, physicians, statisticians, and other experts hired by the zemstva, known collectively as the “Third Element,” they formed an active body with a radical, if nonrevolutionary, bent which gave the tsarist bureaucracy cause for much anxiety.³⁴ Professional revolutionaries scorned this kind of work on the grounds that it helped to solidify the existing regime. The elected zemstvo deputies, on the other hand, held liberal or liberal-conservative views.

Lastly, the growth of the Russian economy created a demand for professional specialists of all sorts: lawyers, engineers, scientists, managers. Independent of the government, these experts formed professional associations or “unions” (soiuzy), which were in varying degrees permeated with an anti-autocratic, pro-Western spirit. As we have seen, in 1900–5 these associations played a major role in unleashing revolutionary unrest.

Thus, between 1860 and 1900, one precondition for the emergence of an intelligentsia was met: opportunities emerged for economic independence from the government along with the instruments for the spread of unconventional ideas. Under these favorable conditions, an ideology binding the intelligentsia into a cohesive group was not slow to emerge.

The Russian intelligentsia was prone to the wildest excesses of thought, to bickering and theoretical hair-splitting, but these quarrels should not obscure the fact that its members held a body of philosophical ideas in common. These ideas were in no wise original: in nearly all cases they were adopted from the Enlightenment and brought up to date in the light of modern science. From the eighteenth-century French materialists and their nineteenth-century German followers, Russian intellectuals adopted the “monistic” conception of man as a creature made up exclusively of material substances in which there was no room for a “soul.” Ideas which failed to meet materialist criteria, beginning with God, were treated as figments of the imagination. Applying the utilitarian principle, the usual corollary of materialism, they rejected customs and institutions that did not satisfy the criterion of bringing the “greatest happiness to the greatest number.” The early exponents of this ideology in Russia were called “nihilists,” a term often misunderstood to mean that they believed in nothing; in fact, they had very strong beliefs but held nothing sacred and insisted on the universal validity of materialism and utilitarianism.

Positivism, the doctrine of August Comte, influenced Russian intellectuals in two ways. As a methodology for the study of human society (for which Comte coined the word “sociology”), it reinforced materialism and utilitarianism in that it taught that human behavior follows laws, which, if studied scientifically, make it fully predictable. Mankind can be scientifically managed with the help of the science of society, or sociology, which is to society what physics is to inert matter and energy and biology to living organisms. This proposition gained the status of an axiom in Russian intelligentsia circles from the 1860s onward. Positivism also exerted a more short-lived influence with its theory of progress as the advance of enlightenment, revealed in the gradual displacement of “theological” and “metaphysical” modes of thought by the scientific or “positivistic” one.

Materialism, utilitarianism, and positivism became the ideology of the Russian intelligentsia and the test which determined qualifications for membership. No one who believed in God and the immortality of the soul, no matter how otherwise “enlightened” and “progressive,” could lay claim to being an intelligent. Nor was there place in the intelligentsia for those who allowed accident a role in human affairs or believed either in the immutability of “human nature” or in transcendental moral values. Russian intellectual history is replete with examples of intelligenty who, having developed doubts about one or more aspects of this ideology, suffered expulsion from its ranks. The “dry terror” which Cochin found in pre-revolutionary France was much in evidence in pre-revolutionary Russia: here, too, defamation of deviants and outsiders served to preserve group cohesion. Inasmuch as the survival of the intelligentsia depended on its members adhering to an ideological consensus, the consensus was ruthlessly enforced. This made the intelligentsia incapable of adjusting to changing reality, causing Peter Struve to describe it as “perhaps the most conservative breed of human beings in the world.”³⁵

The intelligentsia had tenuous relations with the creators of Russian culture—the novelists, poets, and artists. The latter intensely disliked attempts of political activists to impose restraints on their work. These restraints were much more onerous in their way than the government’s official censorship: for while the government exercised negative censorship, forbidding certain themes, the intelligentsia practiced it in a positive form by demanding that art and literature serve the cause of social progress, as they defined it. Relations between the two groups worsened further in the 1890s when Russia came under the influence of Modernist art and literature with their commitment to “art for art’s sake.” The control that radical intellectuals sought to exercise over culture, to have it serve utilitarian rather than aesthetic goals, had little effect on genuine talent: no Russian writer or artist of distinction submitted to this kind of tyranny. Its main effect was to cut off the intelligentsia from the most vital sources of contemporary culture. Once in a while the simmering conflict became explicit, as when Chekhov confessed to a friend in what for him was an unusual outburst of anger:

I do not believe in our intelligentsia—hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated, lazy. I do not believe in it even when it suffers and complains, because its oppressors come from its own inner depths.*

Dissent in Russia first became open and endemic at the universities. Although the 1863 statutes gave them considerable autonomy, its main beneficiaries were the faculty: the students continued to be treated as minors, subject to strict discipline. They chafed under it and from time to time gave vent to their frustration by staging protests. The pretexts were often minor and usually not political. Under a more tolerant regime they would have been allowed to dissipate. But the Russian authorities knew only one way of dealing with “insubordination” and that was by repression. Students guilty of nothing worse than rowdyism or breaches of regulations were arrested and expelled, sometimes permanently. Such severity radicalized student bodies and helped transform institutions of higher learning into centers of opposition.

In the latter part of the 1860s, students formed circles to discuss public questions and their role in society. These circles initially showed no political, let alone revolutionary, inclinations. Influenced by French positivism, they identified progress with science and enlightenment, and saw their mission as spreading the gospels of materialism and utilitarianism. At this time, thousands of Russian youths who had neither interest in nor talent for science enrolled at the scientific faculties in the belief that by peering into microscopes or dissecting frogs they were advancing the cause of human happiness.

This naïve scientism soon ran its course: it was only the first of the enthusiasms a French visitor found characteristic of Russian intellectuals, who were quickly captivated by new ideas and just as quickly grew bored with them.³⁶ The fresh ideas that penetrated the universities in the early 1870s already had activist and, in the Russian context of the time, revolutionary implications. The emancipation of the serfs, the centerpiece of the Great Reforms, had transformed twenty million Russians from chattel into subjects. This gave the students a mission: to carry the message of positivism and materialism to the rural masses. In the spring of 1874, hundreds of students left the lecture rooms and dispersed in the countryside. The majority were “propagandists,” followers of Peter Lavrov, who took it upon themselves to enlighten the peasants about the injustices of the regime, in the expectation that this knowledge would stir them into action. The smaller body of “agitators,” followers of Bakunin, believed the peasants were instinctive rebels and would turn to violence once they were told they had large company. For the major part, the young “socialists-revolutionaries” who participated in this first “going to the people” crusade were still committed to the idea of change through enlightenment. But the persecution to which the authorities, frightened of peasant unrest, subjected them turned many into full-time revolutionaries. By 1877, when the second “going to the people” movement took place, Russia had several hundred experienced radical activists. Supporting them were thousands of sympathizers at the universities and in society at large.

Face-to-face contact with the “people” proved to be a bewildering experience for the radical youths. The muzhik turned out to be a very different creature from the one they had imagined: a “noble savage” steeped in communal life, an egalitarian, and a born anarchist who required only encouragement to rise against the Tsar, landlords, and capitalists. The following excerpt from the recollections of a “propagandist” of the 1870s reflects this bewilderment. A peasant is speaking:

As far as land goes, we’ve got little. No place to put a chicken. But the Tsar will give. Absolutely. There is nothing doing without land. Who will pay taxes? How fill the treasury? And without the treasury, how can one rule? We will get the land! Ab-so-lute-ly! You will see.

The author noted with dismay the effects of radical propaganda on the peasants:

How curiously our speeches, our concepts were interpreted by the peasant mind!… their conclusions and comparisons utterly astonished me. “We have it better under the Tsar.” Something struck me in the head, as if a nail had been driven into it.… There, I said, are the fruits of propaganda! We do not destroy illusions but reinforce them. We reinforce the old faith of the people in the Tsar.³⁷

The disillusionment with the people pushed the most determined radicals to terrorism. While many of the disappointed Socialists-Revolutionaries abandoned the movement and a handful adopted the doctrines of German Social-Democracy, a dedicated minority decided to carry on by different means. In the fall of 1879 this minority formed a secret organization called the People’s Will (Narodnaia Volia). The mission of its thirty full-time members, banded in an Executive Committee, was to fight the tsarist regime by means of systematic terror: on its founding, it passed a “sentence” of death on Alexander II. It was the first political terrorist organization in history and the model for all subsequent organizations of this kind in Russia and elsewhere. Resort to terror was an admission of isolation: as one of the leaders of the People’s Will would later concede, terror

requires neither the support nor the sympathy of the country. It is enough to have one’s convictions, to feel one’s despair, to be determined to perish. The less a country wants revolution, the more naturally will they turn to terror who want, no matter what, to remain revolutionaries, to cling to their cult of revolutionary destruction.³⁸

The stated mission of the People’s Will was to assassinate government officials, for the twin goal of demoralizing the government and breaking down the awe in which the masses held the Tsar. In the words of the Executive Committee:

Terrorist activity … has as its objective undermining the fascination with the government’s might, providing an uninterrupted demonstration of the possibility of struggling against the government, in this manner lifting the revolutionary spirit of the people and its faith in the success of the cause, and, finally, organizing the forces capable of combat.³⁹

The ultimate political goal of the People’s Will was the convocation of a National Assembly through which the nation would express its wishes. The People’s Will was a highly centralized organization, the decisions of the Executive Committee being binding on all followers, known as “vassals.” Members were expected to dedicate themselves totally to the revolutionary cause, and if called upon, to sacrifice to it their properties and even their lives.

The emergence of the People’s Will marked a watershed in the history of the Russian Revolution. For one, it established violence as a legitimate instrument of politics: enlightenment and persuasion were rejected as futile and even counterproductive. But even more important was the arrogation by the revolutionary intelligentsia of the right to decide what was good for the people: the name People’s Will was a deceptive misnomer, since the “people” not only did not authorize an organization of thirty intellectuals to act on their behalf but had made it unmistakably clear that they would have no truck with anti-tsarist ideology. When the terrorists defined as one of their tasks “lifting the revolutionary spirit of the people,” they were well aware that the real people, those tilling the fields and working in the factories, had no revolutionary spirit to lift. This attitude had decisive implications for the future. Henceforth all Russian revolutionaries, whether favoring terrorism or opposed to it, whether belonging to the Socialist-Revolutionary or the Social-Democratic Party, assumed the authority to speak in the name of the “people”—an abstraction without equivalent in the real world.

The terrorist campaign launched by the People’s Will against a government entirely unprepared for it—the Third Department, in charge of state security, had about as many personnel as the Executive Committee—succeeded in its immediate objective: on March 1, 1881, Alexander II fell victim to a terrorist bomb. The political benefits of this outrage were nil. The public reacted with horror and the radical cause lost a great deal of popular support. The government responded with a variety of repressive measures and counterintelligence operations which made it increasingly difficult for the revolutionaries to function. And the “people” did not stir, unshaken in the belief that the land which they desired would be given them by the next Tsar.

There followed a decade of revolutionary quiescence. Russians who wanted to work for the common good now adopted the doctrine of “small deeds”—that is, pragmatic, unspectacular activities to raise the cultural and material level of the population through the zemstva and private philanthropic organizations.

Radicalism began to stir again in the early 1890s in connection with the spurt of Russian industrialization and a severe famine. The Socialists-Revolutionaries of the 1870s had believed that Russia would follow a path of economic development different from the Western because she had neither the domestic nor the foreign markets that capitalism required. The Russian peasantry, being poor and heavily dependent on income from cottage industries (estimated at one-third of the peasant total income), would be ruined by competition from the mechanized factories and lose that little purchasing power it still possessed. As for foreign markets, these had been preempted by the advanced countries of the West.* Russia had to combine communal agriculture with rural (cottage) industry. From these premises Socialist-Revolutionary theoreticians developed a “separate path” doctrine according to which Russia would proceed directly from “feudalism” to “socialism,” without passing through a capitalist phase.

This thesis was advanced with the help of arguments drawn from the writings of Marx and Engels. Marx and Engels initially disowned such an interpretation of their doctrine, but they eventually changed their minds, conceding that there might be more than one model of economic development. In 1877, in an exchange with a Russian, Marx rejected the notion that every country had to repeat the economic experience of Western Europe. Should Russia enter the path of capitalist development, he wrote, then, indeed, nothing could save her from its “iron laws,” but this did not mean that Russia could not avoid this path and the misfortunes it brought.⁴⁰ A few years later Marx stated that the “historical inevitability” of capitalism was confined to Western Europe, and that because Russia had managed to preserve the peasant commune into the era of capitalism, the commune could well become the “fulcrum of Russia’s social rejuvenation.”* Marx and Engels admired the terrorists of the People’s Will, and, as an exception to their general theory, Engels allowed that in Russia a revolution could be made by a “handful of people.”⁴¹

Thus, before a formal “Marxist” or Social-Democratic movement had emerged in Russia, the theories of its founders were interpreted, with their sanction, when applied to an autocratic regime in an agrarian country, to mean a revolution brought about, not by the inevitable social consequences of matured capitalism, but by terror and coup d’état.

A few Russians, led by George Plekhanov, dissented from this version of Marxism. They broke with the People’s Will, moved to Switzerland, and there immersed themselves in German Social-Democratic literature. From it they concluded that Russia had no alternative but to go through full-blown capitalism. They rejected terrorism and a coup d’état on the grounds that even in the unlikely event that such violence succeeded in bringing down the tsarist regime, the outcome would be not socialism, for which backward Russia lacked both the economic and cultural preconditions, but a “revived tsarism on a Communist base.”

From the premises adopted by the Russian Social-Democrats there followed certain political consequences. Capitalist development meant the rise of a bourgeoisie committed, from economic self-interest, to liberalization. It further meant the growth of the industrial “proletariat,” which would be driven by its deteriorating economic situation to socialism, furnishing the socialist movement with revolutionary cadres. The fact that Russian capitalism developed in a country with a pre-capitalist political system, however, called for a particular revolutionary strategy. Socialism could not flourish in a country held in the iron grip of a police-bureaucratic regime: it required freedom of speech to propagate its ideas and freedom of association to organize its followers. In other words, unlike the German Social-Democrats, who, since 1890, were able to function in the open and run in national elections, Russian Social-Democrats confronted the prior task of overthrowing autocracy.

19. L. Martov (on the left) and T. Dan, two leading Mensheviks.

The theory of a two-stage revolution, as formulated by Plekhanov’s associate, Paul Akselrod, provided for the “proletariat” (read: socialist intellectuals) collaborating with the bourgeoisie for the common objective of bringing to Russia “bourgeois democracy.” As soon as that objective had been attained, the socialists would rally the working class for the second, socialist phase of the revolution. From the point of view of this strategy, everything that promoted in Russia the growth of capitalism and the interests of the bourgeoisie was—up to a point—progressive and favorable to the cause of socialism.

The decade of the 1890s witnessed intense debates between the two radical camps about the economic and, implicitly, the political future of Russia. One group, which in 1902 would form the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (SRs for short), adhered to the traditions of “separate path” and “direct” struggle—that is, terrorism.* Their Social-Democratic rivals believed in the inevitability of capitalism and the political liberalization of Russia. The two groups had many strategic and tactical disagreements, which we will describe below, but they shared an equal commitment to revolution. In the early 1900s, each had several thousand adherents, virtually all intellectuals, most of them university students and dropouts, a minority of whom formed a cadre of professional revolutionaries: persons whose sole occupation in life was promoting revolution. They diligently studied social and economic conditions favoring or hindering their objective, and engaged in continuous polemics from their foreign residences and even from prison and exile. The description of the professional revolutionary by the French political writer Jacques Ellul well fits the Russian representative of the genre. According to him, people of this type

spend their life on study, on formulating the theory of revolution, and, accidentally, on agitation. They live off the revolution—intellectually, but also materially … Marx was a typical example of such professional revolutionaries, perfect idlers, veritable rentiers of the revolution. They spend most of their lives in libraries and clubs. They do not directly prepare the revolution. They analyze the disintegration of society, they classify the conditions favorable to it. But when the revolution breaks out, then their preparation enables them to play a decisive role in it: they turn into its managers, organizers. They are not men who cause trouble, but men of order: once the disturbance is over, they reorganize the structures, they are intellectually prepared for this, and, above all, their names are known to the public as specialists in revolution. They thus naturally come to power.*

Russia’s political parties began to take shape at the turn of the century.

The Socialist-Revolutionary Party, formed in 1902, was, in word and deed, the most radical, with a penchant for anarchism and syndicalism and an abiding commitment to terrorism.⁴² The Social-Democrats founded their party at a clandestine congress in Minsk in 1898. The police, however, got wind. of the meeting and arrested the participants. The Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Rossiiskaia Sotsial-Demokraticheskaia Rabochaia Partiia, or RSDRP) came into existence five years later at its Second Congress, held in Belgium and England.

The liberals formed their own Constitutional-Democratic Party (also known as the Party of National Freedom) in October 1905.

All these parties were led by intelligenty, and although the socialists referred to the liberals as “bourgeois” and the Bolsheviks labeled their socialist opponents “petty bourgeois,” there was no discernible difference in the social background of the leaders of the three principal opposition parties. They competed for much the same constituency, and even though the liberals wanted to avoid the revolution which the socialists promoted, in their strategy and tactics they were not averse to employing revolutionary methods and benefiting from terrorism.

Russian liberalism was dominated by intellectuals with a pronounced left-wing orientation: its complexion was radical-liberal. The Constitutional-Democrats, or Kadets as they were popularly known, espoused the traditional liberal values: democratic franchise, parliamentary rule, liberty and equality of all citizens, respect for law. But operating in a country in which the overwhelming majority of the population had little understanding of these imported ideas and the socialists were busy inciting revolution, they felt it necessary to adopt a more radical stance.

The Socialist-Revolutionary Party was the elder of the two leading socialist parties, since it could trace its origins to the People’s Will. Its platform had three main planks: anti-capitalism, terrorism, and socialization of land. Following the Socialists-Revolutionaries of the 1870s and 1880s, the SRs espoused the theory of “separate path.” They could not entirely ignore the spectacular growth in Russia after 1890 of capitalism in its industrial and financial forms, but they argued that this was an artificial and transient phenomenon, that by its very success undermined itself, laying waste the rural economy, its principal market. They allowed the “bourgeoisie” some role in the revolutionary process; on the whole, however, they considered it loyal to the autocracy. Russia would be liberated by armed action of the masses in the cities and villages.

Since they did not believe that the Russian bourgeoisie would lead or even join in the political struggle, the task devolved on the intelligentsia. This mission it could fulfill best by acts of political terrorism which had the same objective as that formulated by the People’s Will—that is, undermining the prestige of the government in the eyes of the population and encouraging it to rebellion. Terror occupied the central plank in the SR program. To the SRs it was not only a political tactic but a spiritual act, a quasi-religious ritual, in which the terrorist took life but paid for it with his own. SR literature contains curiously barbaric paeans to the “holy cause,” the “creative ecstasy,” and the “highest peak of human spirit,” which found expression, it was said, in the spilling of blood.⁴³ Terrorist operations were directed by the conspiratorial SR Combat Organization (Boevaia Organizatsiia), which “sentenced” government officials to “execution.” But local SR cells and individual members also engaged in assassinations on their own initiative. The first act of political terror directed by the SRs was the murder in 1902 of the Minister of the Interior, D. S. Sipiagin. Subsequently, until crushed in 1908–9, the SR Combat Organization perpetrated hundreds of political murders.

Its daring terrorist undertakings, which often ended with the death of the terrorist, won the SRs much admiration in oppositional circles, including those formally opposed to terrorism. The Social-Democrats, who rejected this tactic, suffered serious defections to their rivals, reputed to be “real” revolutionaries.⁴⁴

The social program of the SRs centered on the “socialization” of land, which called for the abolition of private property in land and the transfer of its management to local organs of self-government: these were to ensure that any citizen able and willing to cultivate the land received an adequate allotment. The SRs adopted the peasant slogan of “Black Repartition”—that is, the expropriation and distribution to the communes of all privately held land. This program, which reflected the desires of the rural population of Orthodox Russia, gained the SRs the support of nearly the entire peasantry. The much more modest demands on behalf of the peasants in the SD program, and the general contempt in which the SDs held the muzhik kept that party from gaining any following in the countryside.

Although their main base of support lay in the village, the SRs did not ignore industrial workers: in their program, they described the proletariat as an essential element in the revolution and allowed for a transitional period of “proletarian revolutionary dictatorship.”⁴⁵ Unlike the SDs, the SRs did not treat the peasants and industrial workers as distinct and hostile classes. Their theoreticians, of whom Victor Chernov was the most prominent, defined classes not by the relationship to the means of production but by the source of income. By this standard, societies had only two classes: the exploited or “toilers” and the exploiters—those who earned their livelihood and those who lived off the labor of others. In the latter category they placed landlords, capitalists, officials, and clergy; in the former, peasants, workers, and themselves, the intelligentsia. A self-employed peasant was to them a “toiler” and a natural ally of the industrial worker. They were vague, however, on what to do about industrial enterprises in a post-revolutionary society and had difficulty attracting workers.

The SR Party, extremist as it was, had a still more extreme wing known as Maximalists. This minority wanted to supplement political terror with “economic terror,” by which they meant assassinations of landlords and factory owners. In practice, their strategy reduced itself to indiscriminate bombings, as illustrated by the attack on Prime Minister Stolypin’s villa in 1911 in which dozens of bystanders lost their lives. To finance their operations, the Maximalists carried out bank holdups, euphemistically called “expropriations,” which brought them hundreds of thousands of rubles. (In these operations, as we shall see, they sometimes collaborated with the Bolsheviks.) The movement had a maniacal quality, as is evident from the ideas of the Maximalist I. Pavlov. In a pamphlet published legally in Moscow in 1907, The Purification of Mankind (Ochistka chelovechestva), Pavlov argued that “exploiters” were not only a social class but a “degenerate race,” which inherited and developed beyond anything known in the animal world the vilest characteristics of the gorilla and the orangutan. Since they bequeathed these vicious traits to their own offspring, all representatives of that “race,” including women and children, had to be exterminated.⁴⁶ The SR Party formally disowned the Maximalists and the Union of Socialists-Revolutionaries Maximalists, formed in October 1906, but in practice it managed to accommodate itself to their outrages.

The SRs were loosely organized in good measure because the police, for whom prevention of terrorist acts had the highest priority, kept on infiltrating and decimating SR ranks. (According to G. A. Gershuni, the founder of the SR terrorist apparatus, for the denunciation of a member of the SR Combat Organization, the Okhrana paid a reward of 1,000 rubles, for an SR intellectual, 100, and for an SR worker, 25, but for a Social-Democrat, at most 3.⁴⁷) The party’s cells were filled with students: in Moscow they were said to constitute at least 75 percent of SR activists.⁴⁸ In the countryside, the most loyal supporters of the SRs were schoolteachers. Propaganda and agitation among the peasantry, consisting mainly of a scattering of pamphlets and leaflets, seems to have had little direct success in stimulating anti-governmental disorders, since at least until 1905 the peasants remained loyal to the notion that the land they craved would be provided by the Tsar.

We shall deal with the Social-Democratic Party at length elsewhere. Here it will be sufficient to point out certain features of that party that were to have political consequences in the early years of the century. Unlike the SRs, who divided society into “exploiters” and “exploited,” the SDs defined classes in relation to the means of production, and regarded the industrial working class (“proletariat”) as the only truly revolutionary class. The peasants, with the possible exception of those without access to communal land, they considered “petty bourgeois” and, as such, reactionary. On the other hand, to the SDs the “bourgeoisie” was a temporary ally in the common struggle against the autocracy, and capitalism was both inevitable and progressive. The SDs disparaged terror on the grounds that it diverted attention from the main immediate task of the socialists, that of organizing workers, although they benefited considerably from it.

The social background of the leaders as well as the rank and file of the two socialist parties showed no significant differences.⁴⁹ Their leadership was drawn from the gentry and the middle class—that is, from the same social milieu as that of the liberal party. The SRs had in their top ranks a surprising number of sons of millionaires, among them V. M. Zenzinov, Abraham Gots, and I. I. Fundaminskii.⁵⁰ For all their dedication to the peasantry, the SRs admitted no peasants into their directing organs, and the SDs, the self-proclaimed party of the working class, allowed very few manual workers into their top ranks.⁵¹ In times of unrest (1905–6 and 1917), both parties relied heavily on rural immigrants to the cities, uprooted peasants who had acquired only the most superficial qualities of city dwellers. Psychologically and economically insecure, some of these peasants flocked to the socialists, while others joined the “Black Hundred” gangs that terrorized students and Jews. According to the Social-Democrat P. P. Maslov:

Essentially the activity of local SR groups differed little from that of the SDs. The organizations of both parties usually consisted of small groups of intelligenty, formed into committees, who had little connection with the masses and viewed them mainly as material for political agitation.⁵²

Russian liberals belonged only partly to the ranks of the intelligentsia. They did not share the basic philosophical premise of the radicals—that is, the belief in the perfectibility of man and society. Their stated objectives were not different from those of Western liberals. In their strategy and tactics, however, the Russian liberals drew very close to the radicals: as Paul Miliukov, their leader, liked to boast, their political program “was the most leftist of all those advanced by analogous groups in Western Europe.”⁵³ Ivan Petrunkevich, another leading Kadet, thought that Russian “liberals, radicals, and revolutionaries” were distinguished not by political objectives but by temperament.⁵⁴

This left-wing tendency was dictated by two considerations. The liberals, appealing to the mass electorate, had to compete with radical parties, which also stood to the left of their Western European counterparts, making the most extreme and Utopian promises to the electorate. It was a challenge they had to meet. To steal the thunder from the socialists, the liberals adopted a radical social program, which included a demand for the expropriation of large landed estates (with compensation at “fair” rather than market prices), as well as Church and state properties, for distribution to the peasants.* Their platform also called for a comprehensive program of social welfare. They would turn a deaf ear to counsels of moderation, afraid of “compromising” themselves in the eyes of the masses and losing out to the socialists.

Even more compelling were tactical reasons. To wrest from the autocracy first a constitution and a legislative parliament and then parliamentary democracy, the liberals required leverage. This they found in the threat of revolution. In 1905–7 and then again in 1915–17, they urged the monarchy to make political concessions to them as a way of avoiding a much worse fate. The party maintained discreet silence in regard to SR terror, which its liberal principles should have caused it to condemn outright.

The political practice of the Kadets thus displayed a troublesome ambivalence—dread of revolution and exploitation of the revolution—and proved a gross miscalculation: playing with the revolutionary threat contributed not a little to promoting the very thing the liberals most wished to avoid. But this they would realize only after the event, when it was too late.

Although more moderate than the socialists, the liberals gave the Imperial regime greater trouble, because they had in their ranks socially prominent individuals who could engage in politics under the disguise of legitimate professional activity. Socialist students were fair game for the police. But who would dare to lay hands on a Prince Shakhovskoi or a Prince Dolgorukov, even as they were busy organizing a subversive liberal party? And how could one interfere with gatherings of physicians or jurists, although it was common knowledge that the participants discussed forbidden subjects? This difference in social status explains why the directing organizations of the liberals could function inside Russia, virtually free of police interference, while the SRs and SDs had to operate from abroad. It also explains why in both 1905 and 1917 the liberals were the first on the scene and in charge, weeks before their socialist rivals made an appearance.

The Russian liberal movement had two main bases of support: the zemstva, and the intelligentsia.

The zemstva were elected on a franchise that ensured solid representation of the landed gentry, then considered by the monarchy to be a staunch supporter. They functioned on the district and provincial level, but the government did not allow them to form a national organization, fearing that it would arrogate to itself quasi-parliamentary functions. The elected deputies tended to be either liberal-constitutionalists or Slavophile conservatives, both hostile to the autocracy and bureaucratic rule, but opposed to revolution. The salaried personnel hired by the zemstva (agronomists, physicians, teachers, etc.), known as the Third Element, was more radical but also non-revolutionary.

Properly treated, the zemstva might have helped stabilize the monarchy. But for the conservatives in the bureaucracy, and especially those in the Ministry of the Interior, the zemtsy were an intolerable irritant: busybodies who meddled in affairs that were none of their business and hindered the efficient administration of the provinces. Under their influence, Alexander III in 1890 restricted the authority of the zemstva, giving the governors wide latitude to interfere with their personnel and activities.

Harassed by the authorities, zemstvo leaders in the 1890s held informal national consultations, often disguised as professional and scientific meetings. In 1899, they went further, organizing in Moscow a discussion group called Beseda (Symposium). Its membership was sufficiently prominent socially and professionally for the police to look at its meetings through their fingers: these took place in the Moscow mansion of Princes Peter and Paul Dolgorukov.⁵⁵

In June 1900, the government once again restricted the competence of the zemstva, this time in the realm of taxation. It further ordered the dismissal of zemstvo deputies who were especially active in promoting constitutional causes. In response, Symposium, which until then had confined its deliberations to zemstvo affairs, turned attention to political questions. To many zemtsy, the government’s persecution raised the fundamental question whether it made sense to pursue “constructive,” apolitical work under a regime dominated by bureaucracy and police bent on stifling every manifestation of public initiative. These doubts were heightened by the publication in 1901 in Germany of a confidential memorandum by Witte which urged the total abolition of zemstva as institutions incompatible with autocracy.

The ranks of zemstvo constitutionalists were augmented in 1901 by a small but influential group of intellectuals, defectors from Social-Democracy who had found intolerable its partisanship and dogmatism. The most prominent among them was Peter Struve, the author of the founding manifesto of the Social-Democratic Party and one of its outstanding theoreticians. Struve and his friends proposed to forge a national front, encompassing parties and groupings from the extreme left to the moderate right, under the slogan “Down with the Autocracy.” Struve emigrated to Germany and with money provided by zemstvo friends founded there in 1902 the journal Osvobozhdenie (Liberation). The periodical carried information not permitted in censored publications, including secret government documents supplied by sympathizers within the bureaucracy. Issues smuggled into Russia helped forge a community of “Liberationists” (Osvobozhdentsy) from which, in time, would emerge the Constitutional-Democratic Party. In January 1904, its supporters founded in St. Petersburg the Union of Liberation (Soiuz Osvobozhdeniia) to promote constitutionalism and civil rights. Its branches in many towns attracted moderate elements as well as socialists, especially Socialists-Revolutionaries. (The Social-Democrats, insisting on their “hegemony” in the struggle against the regime, refused to collaborate.) These circles, operating semi-legally, did much to stimulate discontent with existing conditions.⁵⁶

The rank and file of the liberal movement was highly diversified. The Constitutional-Democratic Party, which in 1906 had 100,000 members—several times the combined membership of the socialist parties—rested on a broader social base than its rivals on the left, attracting many artisans, junior officials, salesmen, and tradesmen. The liberal intelligentsia consisted mainly of professionals, such as professors, lawyers, physicians, and editors, rather than the students who filled socialist ranks.⁵⁷

At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were in Russia thousands of men and women committed to fundamental change. A good part of them were “professional revolutionaries,” a novel breed who dedicated their lives to plotting political violence. They and their supporters might quarrel among themselves about strategy and tactics—whether to engage in terror, whether to “socialize” or “nationalize” the land, whether to treat the peasant as an ally or as an enemy of the worker. But they were at one on the central issue: that there was to be no accommodation, no compromise with the existing social, economic and political regime, that it had to be destroyed, root and branch, not only in Russia but throughout the world. So strong was the influence of these extremists that even Russia’s liberals came under their spell. Clearly, the limited political concessions spelled out in the October Manifesto satisfied none of them.

The existence of such an intelligentsia created, in and of itself, a high risk of permanent revolution. For just as lawyers make for litigation and bureaucrats for paperwork, so revolutionaries make for revolution. In each case, a profession emerges with an interest in promoting situations that demand its particular expertise. The fact that the intelligentsia rejected any accommodation with official Russia, that it exacerbated discontent and opposed reform, made it unlikely that Russia’s problems could be peacefully resolved.

*The history of this term in Western Europe and Russia is recounted by Otto Wilhelm Müller in Intelligencija: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte eines politischen Schlagwortes (Frankfurt, 1971). According to the author (p. 98n.), the word “intelligent” was applied in France to experts as early as the fifteenth century.

*The notion that the task of politics is to inculcate virtue and that virtue is attained by laws and education is as old as political theory, since it goes back to Plato. But the innovation of Helvétius is that to him politics, by creating a propitious environment, not only enables man to act virtuously but compels him to do so by remaking his personality.

*Francis G. Wilson has noted that even in early modern times, before the influence of science had made itself fully felt, intellectuals favored centralized authority and a powerful state: American Political Science Review, XLVIII, No. 2 (1954), 325, 335–38.

*Cochin fell in battle in 1916. His principal works are La Crise de l’Histoire Révolutionnaire (Paris, 1909) and the posthumously published Les Sociétés de pensée et la Démocratie (Paris, 1921). His ideas are summarized in François Furet’s Penser la Révolution Française (Paris, 1983).

*Eric Hoffer sees in imperviousness to reality an essential feature of all fanaticism: “the effectiveness of a doctrine should not be judged by its profundity, sublimity or the validity of the truths it embodies, but by how thoroughly it insulates the individual from his self and the world as it is” (The True Believer, New York, 1951, 79).

*A. Volskii (Machajski), Umstvennyi rabochii (New York-Baltimore, 1968), 328. (Originally published in 1904–5.) In the preface (p. 14), Albert Parry notes that this work aroused the “fierce opposition” of virtually all revolutionary intellectuals of the time: “They at once mobilized the entire corps of their theoretical publicists, orators, and agitators. The whole propaganda apparatus of the Socialist movement, be it Bolshevik, Menshevik, or Socialist-Revolutionary, went into action against this new common enemy. The virulence of their attack was unprecedented.” Machajski’s writings have been placed on the Soviet Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

*Letter to Aleksei Suvorin, in Anton Chekhov, Pis’ma, V (Moscow, 1915), 352. Bernard De Voto in The Literary Fallacy (Boston, 1944) voices similar complaints about American writers of the interwar period, which indicates to what extent the problem that afflicted Imperial Russia had become international.

*This theory has recently received fresh support from a German scholar who argues that because of the poverty of her rural population, pre-revolutionary Russia lacked the conditions for the development of a market-based industrial economy: Jürgen Nötzold, Wirtschaftspolitische Alternativen der Entwicklung Russlands in der Ära Witte und Stolypin (Berlin, 1966), 193, 204.

*K. Marks, F. Engels’ i revoliutsionnaia Rossiia (Moscow, 1967), 443–44. According to N. Valentinov, The Early Years of Lenin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1969), 183, this letter was kept secret for many years, presumably because it ran contrary to the views of the Russian Social-Democratic establishment.

*In English, the adherents of this group are usually called either Social-Revolutionaries or Socialist-Revolutionaries. Both renditions are inaccurate. They called themselves Sotsialisty-Revoliutsionery—that is, Socialists-Revolutionaries.

*Jacques Ellul, Autopsie de la Révolution (Paris, 1969), 69. Ellul concedes that Lenin represented a new type of revolutionary activist.

*Ingeborg Fleischhauer (Cahiers du Monde Russe et Soviétique, XX, No. 2, 1979, 173–201) draws attention to the close similarities between the agrarian programs of the Kadets and the German Social-Democrats.