History of the Russian Revolution Vol 1 Part 1

The History of the Russian Revolution.

Leon Trotsky.

Volume One.

PREFACE.

During the .rst two months of 1917 Russia was still a Romanov monarchy. Eight months later the Bolsheviks stood at the helm. They were little know to anybody when the year began, and their leaders were still under indictment for state treason when they came to power. You will not .nd another such sharp turn in history especially if you remember that it involves a nation of 150 million people. It is clear that the events of 1917, whatever you think of them, deserve study.

The history of a revolution, like every other history, ought .rst of all to tell what hap-pened and how. That, however, is little enough. From the very telling it ought to become clear why it happened thus and not otherwise. Events can neither be regarded as a series of adventures, nor strung on the thread of a preconceived moral. They must obey their own laws. The discovery of these laws is the author's task.

The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the ma.s.ses in historical events. In ordinary times the state, be it monarchical or democratic, elevates itself above the nation, and history is made by specialists in that line of business -kings, ministers, bureaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists. But at those crucial moments when the old order becomes no longer endurable to the ma.s.ses, they break over the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside their traditional representatives, and create by their own interference the initial groundwork for a new rgime. Whether this is good or bad we leave to the judgement of moralists. We ourselves will take the facts as they are given by the objective course of development. The history of a revolution is for us .rst of all a history of the forcible entrance of the ma.s.ses into the realm of rulers.h.i.+p over their own destiny.

In a society that is seized by revolution cla.s.ses are in con.ict. It is perfectly clear, however, that the changes introduced between the beginning and the end of a revolution in the economic bases of the society and its social substratum of cla.s.ses, are not suf.cient to explain the course of the revolution itself, which can overthrow in a short interval age-old inst.i.tutions, create new ones, and again overthrow them. The dynamic of revolutionary events is directly determined by swift, intense and pa.s.sionate changes in the psychology of ii cla.s.ses which have already formed themselves before the revolution.

The point is that society does not change its inst.i.tutions as need arises, the way a me-chanic changes his instruments. On the contrary, society actually takes the inst.i.tutions which hang upon it as given once for all. For decades the oppositional criticism is nothing more than a safety valve for ma.s.s dissatisfaction, a condition of the stability of the social structure. Such in principle, for example, was the signi.cance acquired by the social-democratic criticism. Entirely exceptional conditions, independent of the will of persons and parties, are necessary in order to tear off from discontent the fetters of conservatism, and bring the ma.s.ses to insurrection.

The swift changes of ma.s.s views and moods in an epoch of revolution thus derive, not from the .exibility and mobility of man's mind, but just the opposite, from its deep conservatism. The chronic lag of ideas and relations behind new objective conditions, right up to the moment when the latter crash over people in the form of a catastrophe, is what creates in a period of revolution that leaping movement of ideas and pa.s.sions which seems to the police mind a mere result of the activities of "demagogues."

The ma.s.ses go into a revolution not with a prepared plan of social reconstruction, but with a sharp feeling that they cannot endure the old rgime. Only the guiding layers of a cla.s.s have a political program, and even this still requires the test of events, and the approval of the ma.s.ses. The fundamental political process of the revolution thus consists in the gradual comprehension by a cla.s.s of the problems arising from the social crisis the active orientation of the ma.s.ses by a method of successive approximations. The different stages of a revolutionary process, certi.ed by a change of parties in which the more extreme always supersedes the less, express the growing pressure to the left of the ma.s.ses so long as the swing of the movement does not run into objective obstacles. When it does, there begins a reaction: disappointments of the different layers of the revolutionary cla.s.s, growth of indifferentism, and therewith a strengthening of the position of the counter-revolutionary forces. Such, at least, is the general outline of the old revolutions.

Only on the basis of a study of political processes in the ma.s.ses themselves, can we understand the role of parties and leaders, whom we least of all are inclined to ignore. They const.i.tute not an independent, but nevertheless a very important, element in the process. Without a guiding organisation, the energy of the ma.s.ses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston-box. But nevertheless what moves things is not the piston or the box, but the steam.

The dif.culties which stand in the way of studying the changes of ma.s.s consciousness in a revolutionary epoch are quite obvious. The oppressed cla.s.ses make history in the factories, in the barracks, in the villages, on the streets of the cities. Moreover, they are least of all accustomed to write things down. Periods of high tension in social pa.s.sions leave little room for contemplation and re.ection. All the muses even the plebeian muse of journalism, in spite of her st.u.r.dy hips have hard sledding in times of revolution. Still the historian's situation is by no means hopeless. The records are incomplete, scattered, accidental. But in the light of the events themselves these fragments often permit a guess as to the direction and rhythm of the hidden process. For better or worse, a revolutionary party bases its tactics upon a calculation of the changes of ma.s.s consciousness. The historic course of Bolshevism demonstrates that such a calculation, at least in its rough features, can be made. If it can be made by a revolutionary leader in the whirlpool of the struggle, why not by the historian afterwards?

However, the processes taking place in the consciousness of the ma.s.ses are not unrelated and independent. No matter how the idealists and the eclectics rage, consciousness is nevertheless determined by conditions. In the historic conditions which formed Russia, her economy, her cla.s.ses, her State, in the action upon her of other states, we ought to be able to .nd the premises both of the February revolution and of the October revolution which replaced it. Since the greatest enigma is the fact that a backward country was the .rst to place the proletariat in power, it behoves us to seek the solution of that enigma in the peculiarities of that backward country that is, in its differences from other countries.

The historic peculiarities of Russia and their relative weight will be characterised by us in the early chapters of this book which give a short outline of the development of Russian society and its inner forces. We venture to hope that the inevitable schematism of these chapters will not repel the reader. In the further development of the book he will meet these same forces in living action.

This work will not rely in any degree upon personal recollections. The circ.u.mstance that the author was a partic.i.p.ant in the events does not free him from the obligation to base his exposition upon historically veri.ed doc.u.ments. The author speaks of himself, in so far as that is demanded by the course of events, in the third person. And that is not a mere literary form: the subjective tone, inevitable in autobiographies or memoirs, is not permissible in a work of history.

However, the fact that the author did partic.i.p.ate in the struggle naturally makes easier his understanding, not only of the psychology of the forces in action, both individual and collective, but also of the inner connection of events. This advantage will give positive results only if one condition is observed: that he does not rely upon the testimony of his own memory either in trivial details or in important matters, either in questions of fact or questions of motive and mood. The author believes that in so far as in him lies he has ful.lled this condition.

There remains the question of the political position of the author, who stands as a his-torian upon the same viewpoint upon which he stood as a partic.i.p.ant in the events. The reader, of course, is not obliged to share the political views of the author, which the latter on his side has no reason to conceal. But the reader does have the right to demand that a his-torical work should not be the defence of a political position, but an internally well-founded portrayal of the actual process of the revolution. A historical work only then completely ful.ls the mission when events unfold upon its pages in their full natural necessity.

For this, is it necessary to have the so-called historian's "impartiality"? n.o.body has yet clearly explained what this impartiality consists of. The often quoted words of Clmenceau that it is necessary to take a revolution "en bloc," as a whole are at the best a clever evasion. How can you take as a whole a thing whose essence consists in a split? Clmenceaus apho-rism was dictated partly by shame for his too resolute ancestors, partly by embarra.s.sment before their shades.

One of the reactionary and therefore fas.h.i.+onable historians in contemporary France, L. Madelin, slandering in his drawing-room fas.h.i.+on the great revolution that is, the birth of his own nation a.s.serts that "the historian ought to stand upon the wall of a threatened city, and behold at the same time the besiegers and the besieged": only in this way, it seems, can he achieve a "conciliatory justice." However, the words of Madelin himself testify that if he climbs out on the wall dividing the two camps, it is only in the character of a reconnoiterer for the reaction. It is well that he is concerned only with war camps of the past: in a time of revolution standing on the wall involves great danger. Moreover, in times of alarm the priests of "conciliatory justice" are usually found sitting on the inside of four walls waiting to see which side will win.

The serious and critical reader will not want a treacherous impartiality, which offers him a cup of conciliation with a well-settled poison of reactionary hate at the bottom, but a sci-enti.c conscientiousness, which for its sympathies and antipathies open and undisguised seeks support in an honest study of the facts, a determination of their real connections, an exposure of the causal laws of their movement. That is the only possible historic objec-tivism, and moreover it is amply suf.cient, for it is veri.ed and attested not by the good intentions of the historian, for which only he himself can vouch, but the natural laws re-vealed by him of the historic process itself.

The sources of this book are innumerable periodical publications, newspapers and jour-nals, memoirs, reports, and other material, partly in ma.n.u.script, but the greater part pub-lished by the Inst.i.tute of the History of the Revolution in Moscow and Leningrad. We have considered its super.uous to make reference in the text to particular publications, since that would only bother the reader. Among the books which have the character of collec-tive historical works we have particularly used the two-volume Essays on the History of the October Revolution (Moscow-Leningrad, 1927). Written by different authors, the var-ious parts of this book are unequal in value, but they contain at any rate abundant factual material.

The dates in our book are everywhere indicated according to the old style that is, they are 13 days behind the international and the present Soviet calendar. The author felt obliged to use the calendar which was in use at the time of the revolution. It would have been no labour of course to translate the dates into the new style. But this operation in removing one dif.culty would have created others more essential. The overthrow of the monarchy has gone into history as the February revolution; according to the Western calendar, how-ever, it occurred in March. The armed demonstration against the imperialist policy of the Provisional Government has gone into history under the name of the "April Days," whereas according to the Western calendar it happened in May. Not to mention other intervening events and dates, we remark only that the October revolution happened according to Euro-pean reckoning in November. The calendar itself, we see, is tinted by the events, and the historian cannot handle revolutionary chronology by mere arithmetic. The reader will be kind enough to remember that before overthrowing the Byzantine calendar, the revolution had to overthrow the inst.i.tutions that clung to it.

L. TROTSKY.

Prinkipo November 14, 1930.

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE FOR VOLUME.

ONE.

1774.

Pugatchev Rebellion of Cossacks and peasants.

1825.

Dekabrist (Decembrist) uprising against czarism led by liberal of.cers.

1848.

The Communist Manifesto published by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: The foun-dation of revolutionary socialism or communism 1861.

Peasant Reform; abolition of serfdom in Russia.

1864.

"The International" (.rst international organisation of socialist workers) established by Marx and others.

1871.

The Paris Commune.

1882.

Plekhanov publishes .rst pamphlet introducing Marxian socialism into Russia.

1905.

The Revolution of 1905 in Russia. First organisation of soviets by Russian workers.

(January 9) "b.l.o.o.d.y Sunday": workers led by Father Gapon and carrying a pet.i.tion to the czar [Nicholas II], are mowed down by the czar's troops.

vii 1914.

(August 1) World War begins. Germany declares war against Russia.

(November 4) Bolshevik deputies in the State Duma arrested and sent to Siberia 1915.

(April) Russian revolutionary internationalist paper, Nashe Slovo, appears in Paris with Trotsky on the editorial staff.

(September) International socialist congress in Zimmerwald, Switzerland.

1916.

(May) Second Congress of socialist internationalists at Kienthal.

1917.

(January 9)-Street meetings and a printers' strike celebrate the anniversary of "b.l.o.o.d.y Sunday" (February 14)-The last State Duma a.s.sembles. (February 23)-Celebration of International Woman's Day begins the revolution. (February 24)-Two hundred thousand workers on strike in Petrograd. (February 25)-General strike in Petrograd. Shootings and arrests of revolutionists. (February 26) Duma dissolved by the czar [Nicholas II]. The deputies disperse but decide not to leave town. Tens of thousands of workers in the streets. Mutiny of the Guard regiments. Formation of the Soviet of Workers' deputies. Formation of Provisional Committee of the Duma. (February 28)-Arrest of the czar's ministers. Capture of Schlusselberg Prison. First issue of Izvestia [Russian word for News or Information??]-"The News of the Soviet." (March 1)-"Order No. 1" [LINK] is issued to the soldiers. Formation of the soldiers' section of the Soviet. First session of the Moscow Soviet.

(March 2)-The czar abdicates in favour of the Grand Duke Mikhail.

The Provisional Government is formed by the Provisional Committee of the Duma, with the support of the Soviet and with Kerensky a Minister of Justice.

(March 3)-The Grand Duke Mikhail abdicates.

The Provisional Government announces the revolution to the world by radio.

(March 5)-the .rst issue of Pravda [Truth], central organ of the Bolshevik Party.

(March 6)-The Provisional Government declares amnesty for political prisoners.

(March 8)-The czar arrested at Moghilie.

(March 14)-Address of the Soviet "to the people of the whole world" declaring for peace without annexations or indemnities.

(March 23)-Funeral of the martyrs of the revolution.

(March 29)-All-Russian conference of the Soviets. [[[Note: soviets was not capital- ized, but I think an editorial error]]]

(April 3)-Lenin, Zinoviev and other Bolshevik arrive from Switzerland.

(April 4)-Lenin's "April Theses" outlining his policy of proletarian revolution.

(April 18)-Celebration of the international socialist holiday of May 1.

Foreign Minister Miliukov sends a note to the Allies promising war to victory on the old terms. (April 20)-Armed demonstrations of protest against the note of Miliukov the "April Days" (April 24)-Beginning of an All-Russian conference of the Bolshevik Party. (May 1)-The Petrograd Soviet votes for a coalition government. (May 2)-Miliukov resigns. (May 4)-Trotsky arrives from America, seconding the policies of Lenin. An All-Russian Congress of Peasants' Deputies opens in Petrograd. (May 5)-Coalition government is organised with Kerensky as Minister of War. (May 17)-The Kronstadt Soviet declares itself the sole governing power in Kronstadt. (May 25)-All-Russian Congress [[[Another miscapitalization]]] of the Social Revo-lutionary party.

(May 30)-First conference of factory and shop committees opens in Petrograd. (June 3)-First All-Russian [[[Another miscap]]] Congress of Soviets [[and two more]]. (June 16)-Kerensky orders Russian armies to take the offensive. (June 18)-A demonstration called by the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries turns out to be a Bolshevik demonstration. (June 19)-Patriotic demonstration on Nevsky Prospect, carrying portrait of Kerensky. (July 3-5)-"July Days"-semi-insurrection followed by attempted stamping out of Bolshevism in Petrograd. Note: Russian dates are given according to the Julian calendar. Add 13 days to .nd the date according to the calendar that is now internationally recognised.

CHAPTER 1.

PECULIARITIES OF RUSSIA'S.

DEVELOPMENT.

The fundamental and most stable feature of Russian history is the slow tempo of her devel-opment, with the economic backwardness, primitiveness of social forms and low level of culture resulting from it.

The population of this gigantic and austere plain, open to eastern winds and Asiatic migrations, was condemned by nature itself to a long backwardness. The struggle with nomads lasted almost up to the end of the seventeenth century; the struggle with winds, bringing winter cold and summer drought, continues still. Agriculture, the basis of the whole development, advanced by extensive methods. In the north they cut down and burned up the forests, in the south they ravished the virgin steppes. The conquest of nature went wide and not deep, While the western barbarians settled in the ruins of Roman culture, where many an old stone lay ready as building material, the Slavs in the East found no inheritance upon their desolate plain: their predecessors had been on even a lower level of culture than they. The western European peoples, soon .nding their natural boundaries, created those economic and cultural cl.u.s.ters, the commercial cities. The population of the eastern plain, at the .rst sign of crowding, would go deeper into the forest or spread out over the steppe. The more aggressive and enterprising elements of the peasantry in the west became burghers, craftsmen, merchants. The more active and bold in the east became, some of them, traders, but most of them Cossacks, frontiersmen, pioneers. The process of social differentiation, intensive in the west, was delayed in the east and diluted by the process of expansion. "The Tzar of Muscovia, although a Christian, rules a lazy-minded people," wrote Vico, a contemporary of Peter I. That "lazy" mind of the Muscovites was a re.ection of the slow tempo of economic development, the formlessness of cla.s.s relations, the meagerness of inner history.

The ancient civilisations of Egypt, India and China had a character self-suf.cient enough, and they had time enough at their disposal, to bring their social relations, in spite of low productive powers, almost to the same detailed completion to which their craftsmen brought the products of their craft. Russia stood not only geographically, but also socially and historically, between Europe and Asia. She was marked off from the European West, but also from the Asiatic East, approaching at different periods and in different features now one, now the other. The East gave her the Tartar yoke, which entered as an important element into the structure of the Russian state. The West was a still more threatening foe but at the same time a teacher. Russia was unable to settle in the forms of the East because she was continually having to adapt herself to military and economic pressure from the West. The existence of feudal relations in Russia, denied by former historians, may be con-sidered unconditionally established by later investigations. Furthermore, the fundamental elements of Russian feudalism were the same as in the West. But the mere fact that the existence of the feudal epoch had to be established by means of extended scienti.c argu-ments suf.ciently testi.es to the incompleteness of Russian feudalism, its formlessness, its poverty of cultural monuments.

A backward country a.s.similates the material and intellectual conquests of the advanced countries. But this does not mean that it follows them slavishly, reproduces all the stages of their past. The theory of the repet.i.tion of historic cycles Vico and his more recent followers rests upon an observation of the orbits of old pre-capitalist cultures, and in part upon the .rst experiments of capitalist development. A certain repet.i.tion of cultural stages in ever new settlements was in fact bound up with the provincial and episodic character of that whole process. Capitalism means, however, an overcoming of those conditions. It prepares and in a certain sense realises the universality and permanence of man's develop-ment. By this a repet.i.tion of the forms of development by different nations is ruled out. Although compelled to follow after the advanced countries, a backward country does not take things in the same order. The privilege of historic backwardness and such a privilege exists permits, or rather compels, the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of any speci.ed date, skipping a whole series of intermediate stages. Savages throw away their bows and arrows for ri.es all at once, without travelling the road which lay between those two weapons in the past. The European colonists in America did not begin history all over again from the beginning. The fact that Germany and the United States have now econom-ically outstripped England was made possible by the very backwardness of their capitalist development. On the other hand, the conservative anarchy in the British coal industry as also in the heads of MacDonald and his friends -is a paying-up for the past when England played too long the role of capitalist path.nder. The development of historically back-ward nations leads necessarily to a peculiar combination of different stages in the historic process. Their development as a whole acquires a planless, complex, combined character.

The possibility of skipping over intermediate steps is of course by no means absolute. Its degree is determined in the long run by the economic and cultural capacities of the coun-try. The backward nation, moreover, not infrequently debases the achievements borrowed from outside in the process of adapting them to its own more primitive culture. In this the very process of a.s.similation acquires a self-contradictory character. Thus the introduction of certain elements of Western technique and training, above all military and industrial, under Peter I, led to a strengthening of serfdom as the fundamental form of labour organ-isation. European armament and European loans both indubitable products of a higher culture -led to a strengthening of tzarism, which delayed in its turn the development of the country.

The laws of history have nothing in common with a pedantic schematism. Unevenness, the most general law of the historic process, reveals itself most sharply and complexly in the destiny of the backward countries. Under the whip of external necessity their backward culture is compelled to make leaps. From the universal law of unevenness thus derives another law which, for the lack of a better name, we may call the law of combined devel-opment by which we mean a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of the separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms. Without this law, to be taken of course, in its whole material content, it is impossible to understand the history of Russia, and indeed of any country of the second, third or tenth cultural cla.s.s.

Under pressure from richer Europe the Russian State swallowed up a far greater relative part of the people's wealth than in the West, and thereby not only condemned the people to a twofold poverty, but also weakened the foundations of the possessing cla.s.ses. Being at the same time in need of support from the latter, it forced and regimented their growth. As a result the bureaucratised privileged cla.s.ses never rose to their full height, and the Russian state thus still more approached an Asiatic despotism. The Byzantine autocratism, of.cially adopted by the Muscovite tzars at the beginning of the sixteenth century, subdued the feudal Boyars with the help of the n.o.bility, and then gained the subjection of the n.o.bility by making the peasantry their slaves, and upon this foundation created the St. Petersburg imperial absolutism. The backwardness of the whole process is suf.ciently indicated in the fact that serfdom, born at the end of the sixteenth century, took form in the seventeenth, .owered in the eighteenth, was juridically annulled only in 1861.

The clergy, following after the n.o.bility, played no small role in the formation of the tzarist autocracy, but nevertheless a servile role. The church never rose in Russia to that commanding height which it attained in the Catholic West; it was satis.ed with the role of spiritual servant of the autocracy, and counted this a recompense for its humility. The bishops and metropolitans enjoyed authority merely as deputies of the temporal power. The patriarchs were changed along with the tzars. In the Petersburg period the dependence of the church upon the state became still more servile. Two hundred thousand priests and monks were in all essentials a part of the bureaucracy, a sort of police of the gospel. In return for this the monopoly of the orthodox clergy in matters of faith, land and income was defended by a more regular kind of police.

Slavophilism, the messianism of backwardness, has based its philosophy upon the as-sumption that the Russian people and their church are democratic through and through, whereas of.cial Russia is a German bureaucracy imposed upon them by Peter the Great. Mark remarked upon this theme: "In the same way the Teutonic jacka.s.ses blamed the despotism of Frederick the Second upon the French, as though backward slaves were not always in need of civilised slaves to train them." This brief comment completely .nishes off not only the old philosophy of the Slavophiles, but also the latest revelations of the "Racists."

The meagerness not only of Russian feudalism, but of all the old Russian history, .nds its most depressing expression in the absence of real mediaeval cities as centres of com-merce and craft. Handicraft did not succeed in Russia in separating itself from agriculture, but preserved its character of home industry. The old Russian cities were commercial, administrative, military and manorial centres of consumption, consequently, not of pro-duction.. Even, Novgorod, similar to Hansa and not subdued by the Tartars, was only a commercial, and not an industrial city. True, the distribution of the peasant industries over various districts created a demand for trade mediation on a large scale. But nomad traders could not possibly occupy that place in social life which belonged in the West to the craft-guild and merchant-industrial petty and middle bourgeoisie, inseparably bound up with its peasant environment. The chief roads of Russian trade, moreover, led across the border, thus from time immemorial giving the leaders.h.i.+p to foreign commercial capital, and im-parting a semi-colonial character to the whole process, in which the Russian trader was a mediator between the Western cities and the Russian villages. This kind of economic relation developed further during the epoch of Russian capitalism and found its extreme expression in the imperialist war.

The insigni.cance of the Russian cities, which more than anything else promoted the development of an Asiatic state, also made impossible a Reformation that is, a replace-ment of the feudal-bureaucratic orthodoxy by some sort of modernised kind of Christianity adapted to the demands of a bourgeois society. The struggle against the state church did not go farther than the creation of peasant sects, the faction of the Old Believers being the most powerful among them.

Fifteen years before the great French revolution there developed in Russia a movement of the Cossacks, peasants and worker-serfs of the Urals, known as the Pugachev Rebellion. What was lacking to this menacing popular uprising in order to convert it into a revolution? A Third Estate. Without the industrial democracy of the cities a peasant war could not develop into a revolution, just as the peasant sects could not rise to the height of a Refor-mation. The result of the Pugachev Rebellion was just the opposite -a strengthening of bureaucratic absolutism as the guardian of the interests of the n.o.bility, a guardian which had again justi.ed itself in the hour of danger.

The Europeanization of the country, formally begun in the time of Peter, became during the following century more and more a demand of the ruling cla.s.s itself, the n.o.bility. In 1825 the aristocratic intelligentsia, generalising this demand politically, went to the point of a military conspiracy to limit the powers of the autocracy. Thus, under pressure from the European bourgeois development, the progressive n.o.bility attempted to take the place of the lacking Third Estate. But nevertheless they wished to combine their liberal rgime with the security of their own caste domination, and therefore feared most of all to arouse the peasantry. It s thus not surprising that the conspiracy remained a mere attempt on the part of a brilliant but isolated of.cer caste which gave up the sponge almost without a struggle. Such was the signi.cance of the Dekabrist uprising.

The landlords who owned factories were the .rst among their caste to favour replacing serfdom by wage labour. The growing export of Russian grain gave an impulse in the same direction. In 1861 the n.o.ble bureaucracy, relying upon the liberal landlords, carried out its peasant reform. The impotent bourgeois liberalism during this operation played the role of humble chorus. It is needless to remark that tzarism solved the fundamental problem of Russia, the agrarian problem, in a more n.i.g.g.ardly and thieving fas.h.i.+on than that in which the Prussian monarchy during the next decade was to solve the fundamental problem of Germany, its national consolidation. The solution of the problems of one cla.s.s by another is one of those combined methods natural to backward countries.

The law of combined development reveals itself most indubitably, however, in the his-tory and character of Russian industry. Arising late, Russian industry did not repeat the development of the advanced countries, but inserted itself into this development, adapting their latest achievements to its own backwardness. Just as the economic evolution of Rus-sia as a whole skipped over the epoch of craft-guilds and manufacture, so also the separate branches of industry made a series of special leaps over technical productive stages that had been measured in the West by decades. Thanks to this, Russian industry developed at cer-tain periods with extraordinary speed. Between the .rst revolution and the war, industrial production in Russia approximately doubled. this has seemed to certain Russian historians a suf.cient basis for concluding that "we must abandon the legend of backwardness and slow growth." In reality the possibility of this swift growth was determined by that very backwardness which, alas, continued not only up to the moment of liquidation of the old Russia, but as her legacy up to the present day.

The basic criterion of the economic level of a nation is the productivity of labour, which in its turn depends upon the relative weight of the industries in the general economy of the country. On the eve of the war, when tzarist Russia had attained the highest point of its prosperity, the national income per capita was 8 to 10 times less than in the United States a fact which is not surprising when you consider that 4/5 of the self-supporting population of Russia was occupied with agriculture, while in the United States, for every one engaged in agriculture, 2 were engaged in industry. We must add that for every one hundred square kilometres of land, Russia had, on the eve of the war, 0.4 kilometres of railroads, Germany 11.7, Austria-Hungary 7. Other comparative coef.cients are of the same type.

But it is just in the sphere of economy, as we have said, that the law of combined development most forcibly emerges. At the same time that peasant land-cultivation as a whole remained, right up to the revolution, at the level of the seventeenth century, Russian industry in its technique and capitalist structure stood at the level of the advanced countries, and in certain respects even outstripped them. Small enterprises, involving less than 100 workers, employed in the United States, in 1914, 35 per cent of the total of industrial workers, but in Russia 17.8 per cent. The two countries had an approximately identical relative quant.i.ty of enterprises involving 100 to 1000 workers. But the giant enterprises, above 1000 workers each, employed in the United States 17.8 per cent of the workers and in Russia 41.4 per cent! For the most important industrial districts the latter percentage is still higher: for the Petrograd district 44.4 per cent, for the Moscow district even 57.3 per cent. We get a like result if we compared Russian with British or German industry. This fact .rst established by the author in 1908 hardly accords with the ba.n.a.l idea of the economic backwardness of Russia. However, it does not disprove this backwardness, but dialectically completes it.

The con.uence of industrial with bank capital was also accomplished in Russia with a completeness you might not .nd in any other country. But the subjection of the industries to the banks meant, for the same reasons, their subjection to the western European money market. Heavy industry (metal, coal, oil) was almost wholly under the control of foreign .nance capital, which had created for itself an auxiliary and intermediate system of banks in Russia. Light industry was following the same road. Foreigners owned in general about 40 per cent of all the stock capital of Russia, but in the leading branches of industry that percentage was still higher. We can say without exaggeration that the controlling shares of stock in the Russian banks, plants and factories were to be found abroad, the amount held in England, France and Belgium being almost double that in Germany.

The social character of the Russian bourgeoisie and its political physiognomy were determined by the condition of origin and the structure of Russian industry. The extreme concentration of this industry alone meant that between the capitalist leaders and the pop-ular ma.s.ses there was no hierarchy of transitional layers. To this we must add that the proprietors of the princ.i.p.al industrial, banking, and transport enterprises were foreigners, who realised on their investment not only the pro.ts drawn from Russia, but only a political in.uence in foreign parliaments, and so not only did not forward the struggle for Russian parliamentarism, but often opposed it: it is suf.cient to recall the shameful role played by of.cial France. such are the elementary and irremovable causes of the political isolation and anti-popular character of the Russian bourgeoisie. Whereas in the dawn of its history it was too unripe to accomplish a Reformation; when the time came for leading a revolution it was overripe.

In correspondence with this general course of development of the country, the reservoir from which the Russian working cla.s.s formed itself was not the craft-guild, but agriculture, not the city, but the country. Moreover, in Russia the proletariat did not arise gradually through the ages, carrying with itself the burden of the past as in England, but in leaps involving sharp changes of environment, ties, relations, and a sharp break with the past. It is just this fact combined with the concentrated oppressions of tzarism that made the Russian workers hospitable to the boldest conclusions of revolutionary thought just as the backward industries were hospitable to the last word in capitalist organisation.