Esther Kingston-Mann
University of Massachusetts

Review of International Political Economy 10:1 February 2003: 93-117

Review of International Political Economy
ISSN 0969-2290 print/ISSN 1466-4526 online© 2003
Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/0969229032000048871

ABSTRACT
In the 1990s, Russian reformers vainly sought to discover a bourgeoisie committed to democracy, productive economic behaviour, and an ever more elusive ‘civil society’. Their quest constituted the latest chapter in a centuries-long struggle that began with the challenge posed by economists like N. F. Daniel’son (Marx’s foremost disciple) to ‘Orthodox’ Marxists and to state capitalists of the tsarist regime. The latter two groups agreed to discount Daniel’son’s data on the state-dependent, risk-averse and politically undemocratic behaviour of Russia’s bourgeoisie, as well as the statistical and economic evidence that had led Marx to reconsider his skepticism about the role of peasantries in the development process. In the past and in the present, even-handed and unsentimental comparative research on the bourgeoisie as well as other, less privileged economic actors in the development scenario remains – regrettably – quite rare.

KEYWORDS
Bourgeoisie, development, Marx/Marxism, Daniel’son, Lenin, peasants, shock therapy, agency, property rights, privatization.

“I am by no means an admirer of the bourgeoisie; its crudeness, its prosaic vulgarity offend me as much as anyone else; but for me it is facts that count . . . my sympathy is undoubtedly on the side of the workers as the downtrodden class. And yet I cannot help adding – God grant us such a bourgeoisie!”
(V. I. Botkin, a Russian ‘Westernizer’, 1839)

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the means of production.” (Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 1848)

“If you guarantee to a man the rights of property in the desert, he will turn it into a smiling garden, but if you lease the garden to the same man for nine years, he will turn it into a howling desert.” (Tsarist Finance Minister Witte, citing John Stuart Mill, citing Arthur Young (1902))

In the post-Soviet era, the former Communists who emerged as millionaire/billionaire proponents of capitalism (as well as many less venal Russians in search of a Western alternative to the Soviet era’s constraints and deficiencies) have sought in vain for a bourgeoisie committed to democracy, productive economic behaviour, and an ever more elusive ‘civil society’. Their quest has its roots in an earlier era in Russian history, when tsarist government reformers and their leading Marxist critics – equally dazzled by the mystique and productive powers of the capitalist entrepreneur – came to share a faith in the bourgeoisie’s ever-dynamic, ever-progressive and revolutionary role in the modern world. Inspired by this faith, they set themselves to discover a bourgeoisie eager to introduce the rule of law, habits of tolerance and compromise, and a propensity for risk-taking and innovation to a backward peasant society¹. (Kingston- Mann, 1999: 1-22)

This optimistic mindset was distinctly at odds with the judgements of leading Russian economists, statisticians and radical activists of the day, who were: 1) less enthusiastic about the bourgeoisie; and 2) less pessimistic about the repartitional land communes to which the peasant majority of the population belonged. In general, those who challenged the Marxist/state capitalist consensus of the early l900s were dismissed as ‘populists’ (narodniki²).

Today, as socialists the world over contemplate Russia’s increasingly deadly embrace of capitalism and the abandonment of 70 years of flawed but real guarantees of economic security, it is particularly useful to explore an earlier ‘romance of the bourgeoisie’ that united Russian progressives of the Left and the Right during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At that time, state capitalists within and outside the tsarist regime happily welcomed the ‘spirit of enterprise’ in all of its urban and rural manifestations. But Marxists were confronted by a far more difficult task. For even as they denounced the bourgeoisie as rapacious colonizers and compradors in the non-Western world, they were ideologically constrained to rely upon Russia’s bourgeoisie to engineer a successful transition from backwardness to modernity.

The emergence of Marxian socialists as cheerleaders for the bourgeoisie – and as more or less reluctant gravediggers for the peasantry – did not take place without a struggle. It was only after a prolonged and acrimonious ideological battle that the victors were able to create a Marxist ‘Orthodoxy’ that excluded: 1) Marx’s own caveats about the bourgeoisie as a key player in every conceivable development scenario; 2) considerable evidence that Russia’s bourgeoisie was risk-averse, state-dependent, and undemocratic in behaviour and outlook; and 3) an emerging body of statistical data documenting unexpected survival, flexibility and innovation within Russia’s ubiquitous peasant commune (Kingston-Mann, 1991³). The discussion that follows is intended to cast some light upon this late nineteenth-century conflict over ideology, data and power, and to explore the implications for contemporary and later students of development of an anti-bourgeois Marxist path not taken.

1. MARX: UNIVERSALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Until the 1870s, Marx was as confident as John Stuart Mill or August Comte that the bourgeoisie constituted the principal agent of humanity’s advance from medievalism to the modern age. As human history unfolded – so the story went – backward and medieval peasant societies governed by priests and warriors everywhere gave way to a world dominated by an infinitely creative bourgeoisie. While Mill contended that ‘Whoever knows the political economy of England, or even of Yorkshire, knows that of all nations, actual or possible’ (Kingston-Mann, 1999: 132), and Marx maintained with equal confidence that ‘England shows to the less developed nations of the world the image of their future’, it is probably to August Comte – today the most neglected of the three – that we are particularly obliged for the notion that England’s ‘man of property’ embodied universal economic laws of history and development⁴. To all three thinkers, it seemed obvious that a revolutionary bourgeoisie was destined to eliminate peasants and their obsolete communities, even as it generated untold benefits for future generations.

In Marx’s classic writings, the bourgeoisie appeared as brutally creative agents of both a new form of exploitation and a distinctly higher level of civilization. In stark contrast, peasants were a social element with neither a past nor a future. Either as obsolete survivors of feudalism or as small producers engaged in a futile quest for bourgeois status, their future was equally bleak. According to Marx, ‘the idiocy of rural life’ rendered peasant communities reactionary and conservative in both the medieval and capitalist stages of their socioeconomic development. In the first volume of Capital, he argued that the low degree of division of labour within medieval villages reinforced an oppressive, backward and ‘Asiatic’ feudal order.

Later, in volume three, he argued that under capitalism, associations of petty bourgeois peasant producers fostered illusory hopes of prosperity and reinforced existing systems of bourgeois exploitation. According to Marx, strong peasant communities served either to anchor and fortify a feudal order, or to promote the short-sighted goals of petty capitalism. In either case, they were obstacles to progress (Kingston-Mann, 1983: 16-17).

Although Marx ridiculed the notion that liberal intellectuals could be unbiased in their understanding of the proletariat, his own middle-class culture and social background inclined him to share the standard liberal assessment of backward peasants and peasant institutions. In writing about the world beyond Western Europe, Marx’s hatred of colonial imperialism thus did not initially extend to include a critique of the forcible ‘civilizing’ measures taken by colonial authorities to combat ‘native ignorance and resistance to progress’.

Like the conservative scholar Sir Henry Maine⁵, Marx viewed the destruction of peasant communal institutions as both inevitable and – in the long run – beneficial. But unlike Maine, Marx was a revolutionary. Never wholly comfortable with either colonial or capitalist civilizing missions, he found it difficult to reconcile what he called:

“the natural repugnance as fellow creatures to the sufferings of Orientals while their society is being violently transformed, with the historical necessity of these transformations.”

Faced with such difficult choices, Marx opted to identify himself with liberalism’s ‘horror of the primitive.’ Contending that India could only become an economically productive and modern society through the revolutionary actions of the bourgeoisie, he cited the Indian panchayat and reminded his readers of its failings:

“we must not forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath the traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies.” (Marx, 1969: 494-9, Kingston-Mann, 1983: 16-17, Marx, l973: 306-7, 320)

Like many other nineteenth-century European intellectuals, Marx was endowed with a bundle of certainties – rooted in anecdote and culturebound assumptions rather than a systematic empirical investigation of any non-elite population – that included contemporary stereotypes about ‘Orientals’, ‘the idiocy of rural life’ and the despotism-loving inhabitants of village communities. Until the late l860s, he considered it obvious – almost axiomatic – that without the intervention of an English-style bourgeoisie, ‘Asiatic’ populations would remain trapped in conditions of feudal stagnation (Kingston-Mann, 1999: 118-19). From such a perspective, intellectuals who idealized outmoded social groups and institutions like the panchayat were reactionary as well as misguided.

However, during the last 15 years of his life, Marx’s rather narrowly Eurocentric perspectives began to widen. A key factor in his intellectual evolution was the historical research on property relations then being carried out by Russian scholars like M. M. Kovalevskii and K. D. Kavelin and by Germany’s Ludwig von Maurer. In response to their data, Marx set himself to investigate communal and private tenure more seriously both as historical and contemporary issues. As a consequence, in l873, he deleted from the second edition of Capital his earlier attacks on the ‘reactionary’ defenders of peasant communal systems, and turned his attention to the class interests that inspired the commune’s critics (Shanin, 1983: 15, 108-110 and White, 1987: 51-81).

Reversing his former judgements about the Indian panchayat, Marx now trained his polemical sights on:

“British officials in India, as well as critics like Sir Henry Maine who rely on them, [who]describe the dissolution of communal ownership of land in the Punjab as if it took place as the inevitable consequence of economic progress despite the affectionate attitude of the British towards this archaic form. The truth is rather that the British themselves are the principal offenders responsible for this dissolution – to their own danger.”

In North Africa, where Britain’s French counterparts rehearsed similar laments over the ‘tragic’ backwardness of indigenous peoples, Marx noted that colonial expressions of sympathy were invariably followed by the forcible destruction of communal property systems. Convinced that idealized notions of the civilizing impact of private property rights functioned as a disguise, or ‘cover’, for the colonial subjugation of the Algerian populace. Marx went on to denounce the ‘disgusting poetry of landownership (Grundeigenthumspoesie) that exceeded in its depersonalization of human relationships even the poetry of Capital (Kapitalpoesie)’ (Marx, 1977).

In his commentaries of the 1870s and 1880s, Marx challenged some of liberalism’s axiomatic certainties about the uniquely progressive historical role of the bourgeoisie, and the inherently retrograde character of indigenous communal institutions. As he now saw it, the bourgeoisie’s triumph over the panchayat was due not so much to bourgeois ability or acumen, but to the legal and economic privileges (and armed protection) granted them by British colonial administrators. Critical reassessments of this sort were a characteristic feature of Marx’s later thought. However, they exerted little influence over his most famous heirs and admirers. As we shall see, the pioneers of Russian Marxist ‘Orthodoxy’ were far more inclined to imitate Marx’s unwavering refusal to acknowledge in his own published writings that Marxists were either capable of making mistakes or – more importantly – could learn from them.

In the 1860s, Russian scholars and revolutionary activists were among Marx’s earliest devotees, and authored the first foreign translations of the Manifesto and Capital. For his part, Marx praised N. Bervi’s The Condition of the Russian Working Class (1869) as the best economic study to appear since Engels’ Conditions of the Working Class in England, and hoped that the terrorist Narodnaia Volia (the People’s Will) might spark a Russian revolution that could spread to Western Europe. However, in the 1860s, Marx still considered Russia a ‘prehistoric’ society whose peasant communes were ‘compatible with Russian barbarism, but not with bourgeois civilization’.

In a 1868 letter to Engels, Marx expressed delight that the development of capitalism in Russia would at last bring ‘all that trash’ to an end (Marx, 1961, 32: 358, Shanin, 1983: 3-39). Marx’s views shifted in earnest during the 1870s, when Russia’s professional statisticians and economists began to inundate him with Russian economic and statistical data⁶, and radicals queried him on the relevance of Capital to revolutionary activity in a still predominantly peasant society. Resisting the temptation to refer admirers to the appropriate pages of Capital or Critique of Political Economy for definitive answers, Marx instead called into question many of his own prior certainties about ‘Russian barbarism’, the idiocies of rural life and the revolutionary historical role of the bourgeoisie. Profoundly challenged by the complexities of the Russia case, Marx began teaching himself Russian – in the words of his wife – as if it were a matter of life or death’ (Rubel, l975: 252). Understanding Russia, and in particular the economics of the Russian countryside, became a central feature of Marx’s later writings and correspondence.

Marx’s leading Russian popularizer was N. F. Daniel’son, an economist who collaborated on the first Russian translation of Capital and supplied Marx with many of his more than 200 books on Russia. Encouraged by Daniel’son, Marx immersed himself in Russian literature, history and economics. Accumulating some 30,000 pages of notes on the Russian peasant question by the end of his life, Marx paid particular attention to an emerging body of statistical evidence indicating that the supposedly ‘prehistoric’ peasant commune was neither static, moribund nor lacking in flexibility. In 1872, Marx delighted Daniel’son by announcing that he planned to devote a whole section of the forthcoming volume three of Capital to the topic of Russian landed property. However, although Daniel’son repeatedly urged Marx to publish an authoritative study of Russia’s present and future economic prospects, Marx steadfastly refused (but encouraged Daniel’son to take on this task).

In 1877, Marx responded to a letter from the Russian radical N. K. Mikhailovskii by placing himself explicitly in opposition to Comte’s universalist notions of progress. Denying that his writings were ever intended to be a ‘historico-philosophical theory of the general path fatally imposed upon all peoples, whatever their historical circumstances’ (Marx, 1944: 354-5), he declared that ‘history offered Russia’ a chance to avoid the full-blown capitalist stage of economic development⁷. As Teodor Shanin long ago observed, the challenges from Russian radicals finally ‘allowed him [Marx] to break free of a social Darwinist model of teleological social evolution and to connect with the revolutionary traditions of the twentieth century and the Third World’ (Shanin, 1984: 255).

In 1881, when Vera Zasulich wrote to ask whether capitalism was ‘inevitable,’ Marx’s response to Zasulich was – in the words of Maximilien Rubel – ‘aussi peu “Marxiste” que possible’ [as ‘un-Marxist’ as possible]. With uncharacteristic humility, Marx confessed to Zasulich that his exclusive reliance on data taken from the history of Western Europe might well limit the applicability of his work. Repudiating Capital’s view of the triumphant English bourgeoisie as a predictor of worldwide economic development, he asserted in 1883 that ‘the English system is completely incapable of fulfilling the conditions on which the development of Russia’s agriculture depends’ (Kingston-Mann, 1999: 132).

It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of Marx’s reply to Zasulich. For the first time in his career, he had abandoned his earlier contention that questions of historical and cultural difference were primarily the concern of reactionaries intent on denying the realities of capitalism. Assuming a stance more open to non-Western perspectives, Marx advised his Russian admirers to carry out their own economic investigations of the Russian scene instead of relying on Capital, or on the lessons of England’s experience. Marx’s own investigations of the Russian data led him to question whether peasantries were inevitably doomed, or whether peasant and non-peasant societies might in fact coexist – like consecutive geological strata in the earth’s surface. Like many of Russia’s leading professional economists and statisticians, Marx had become an agnostic rather than a true believer in the unique historical mission of the bourgeoisie in the modern world.

2. N. F. DANIEL’SON: MARXISM ACCORDING TO MARX’S WRITINGS ON RUSSIA
(DANIEL’SON, 1893 AND 1895)
In 1880, N. F. Daniel’son published the first volume of his Essays on the Post-Reform Economy, a book he intended as a Russian version of Capital. Like Marx in his study of England, Daniel’son documented the process of primary accumulation and transition to commodity production in Russia after the peasant emancipation reforms of 1861. Noting that the challenges facing Russia differed from those which had beset England and other Western European nations at earlier periods in their history, Daniel’son contended that the specifics of Russia’s decidedly non-English historical trajectory were crucial to the formulation of any realistic development strategy. Unlike England, whose economic transformation occurred in the absence of capitalist rivals, nineteenth-century Russia faced an array of far more powerful Western capitalist states bent upon unlimited colonial expansion⁸. Russia’s capitalist options were therefore in Daniel’son’s view quite problematic. On the one hand, emulating England’s slow-paced, 300-year process of economic development might leave Russia vulnerable to colonial domination by one or another of the world’s great powers. On the other, a headlong, Darwinian introduction of ‘western-style’ free markets and privatization might produce a corrupt bourgeois elite and a destitute majority – without any increase in productivity rates. Convinced that Russia faced a cruel and repellent choice between possible colonization by Western empire-builders on the one hand and new forms of inequality and poverty on the other, Daniel’son appealed to socialists to reframe the contemporary debate on development. To begin this process, he called for a more even-handed approach to the bourgeoisie, one which considered not only the economic genius of this social class, but also paid careful attention to the role of government loans, subsidies and other economic and non-economic privileges in ensuring bourgeois success.

Daniel’son’s work provided evidence that Russian businessmen were quite averse to the risk-taking mentality that was supposed to be their hallmark. Eager for government assistance, they tended to use their profits to amass private fortunes or to satisfy the economic demands of the rich and the newly rich for luxury goods. On the other hand, Russia’s entrepreneurs were apparently reluctant to take on the far more important business of manufacturing the inexpensive clothing, tools or shelter required by ordinary citizens. For its part, the government tolerated (and profited from) corrupt business practices and the impoverishment of the populace, even as it carried out a Draconian policy of primary accumulation that deployed the army to collect escalating tax burdens on the peasantry.

According to Daniel’son, the ascendancy of corrupt and short-sighted ‘entrepreneurs’ was not a cause for rejoicing – it was, rather, a deplorable phenomenon that siphoned off much needed capital for non-productive purposes. As he saw it, bourgeois economic success rested not so much upon entrepreneurial skill as it did upon: 1) a talent for corrupt political accommodations with the autocracy; and 2) an all-too appealing set of Western-centred arguments for the bourgeoisie as the sole agents of human economic progress. In the Russia case, Daniel’son was able to discover little evidence that the profits accrued by Russia’s merchants and bankers had significantly strengthened Russia’s productive forces or inspired the bourgeoisie to emulate the historic revolutionary achievements of their French, English or US counterparts. In an 1880s scenario eerily relevant to the behaviour of ex-Communist billionaires over a century later, Daniel’son portrayed Russian industrialists as quite willing to rename themselves ‘capitalist entrepreneurs’ if that turned out to be the way to secure lucrative government contracts, loans and subsidies.

Although Daniel’son believed that the behaviour of Russia’s bourgeoisie was in general conservative, he feared that his fellow Marxists might be unwilling either to acknowledge this fact or to recognize its implications for the future. As intellectuals themselves, Russian Marxists functioned within a Western-dominated culture whose revolutionaries were generally in agreement on the bourgeoisie’s revolutionary role in backward peasant societies. In this context, Daniel’son suspected that Westernized Russian radicals might well turn out to be reluctant to challenge Western wisdom. Instead of carrying out careful and systematic research on the bourgeoisie and the peasantry, they might be content either to reify or to demonize the social groups that their European senior colleagues so confidently dismissed as backward and medieval.

Daniel’son’s deepest fear was that his contemporaries might come to accept an English-style solution that involved the wholesale elimination of commune peasants as a ‘tragic’ step forward in Russia’s evolution as a developing society.

According to Daniel’son, such a stance – while perfectly understandable for capitalists or for admirers of capitalism – was both unrealistic and unconscionable for socialists. As he saw it, it was not incumbent upon socialists to explain away capitalism’s brutal inequalities or to try to outdo Russia’s traditional or modern elites in denouncing the failings of exploited social groups like the peasantry. Instead, a truly radical Marxist strategy would in his view train its sights upon government policies that provided unfair advantages and abundant privileges to the bourgeoisie and blocked the progress of those who were less privileged. Daniel’son contended that socialists were obliged to devise strategies for development that positioned the majority of the population as contributors rather than obstacles to progress and development.

Although he was less optimistic about the constructive economic potential of the peasant commune than some of this contemporaries⁹, Daniel’son’s shared Marx’s view that Russia’s peasant communes were complex institutions that included varied forms of private and collective ownership, and some intriguing potentials for change. Although capitalism was obviously developing in the Russian countryside, Daniel’son noted as well that the supposedly moribund commune was not dying out – the ‘future’ was apparently not obliterating ‘the past’. Marx responded to Daniel’son’s book with praise for his ‘originality’, and encouraged Daniel’son to continue working along similar lines (Grin, 1978: 437).

It is worth noting that by the turn of the century, Daniel’son’s view was shared by many of Russia’s leading professional economists. Five out of seven professors of political economy and statistics at the University of St. Petersburg and four of Moscow University’s economists were convinced that the most recent statistical findings indicated that communes were not only surviving, but capable of performing at least as well as private agricultural producers (Grant, 1973: 334-6). As they saw it, peasants might be as capable of productive economic reactions to changing historical conditions as other social groups. Neither Daniel’son nor Moscow University’s A. I. Chuprov (the leading economist of his day) described themselves as advocates of a ‘separate path’ for Russia. They did not claim that Russia was somehow immune to the economic realities that faced other nations; they contended instead that England’s ‘man of property’ was not the only – and not necessarily the best model for any society whose history, geography, and demographics differed markedly from England’s.

The more radical of Russia’s social scientists would have agreed with Marx’s 1880s declaration:

“thanks to an extraordinary concatenation of circumstances, the peasant commune, still existing on a national scale, can gradually shake off its primitive qualities and develop directly as an element of collective production on a national scale. Precisely because it is a coeval of capitalist production, it is in a position to assimilate its positive achievements without going through all its horrors¹⁰.”

However, in general, leading economists like Chuprov and A. S. Posnikov remained uncertain that communes would continue to hold their own against entrepreneurs who were being so generously supported and subsidized by the Russian state. As they saw it, a more level playing field might open the possibility for economic outcomes that were less costly in human terms. But achieving the latter seemed to them clearly a political, rather than a purely economic question¹¹.

3. MARXISM ACCORDING TO CAPITAL
To members of Russia’s first revolutionary Marxist organization (the Emancipation of Labor group), Marx’s later writings and the work of Daniel’son were decidedly unwelcome. In the words of M. A. Silvin, it was an ‘evil day’ for Russian Marxism when Daniel’son’s book appeared.

Fearing Daniel’son’s influence as a personal acquaintance of Marx whose research deployed the analytical techniques set out in Capital, Silvin and other fledgling Marxists declared that Daniel’son’s work constituted a ‘disservice’ to the cause of socialism (Mitskevich, 1937: 128). Vera Zasulich and G. V. Plekhanov, who converted to Marxism after a decade of failed efforts to organize revolutionary activity among the peasantry, were particularly hostile to what they dismissed as ‘populist’ data on peasant communes. Finding absolution for their political failures in the pages of Capital, they adopted Marxism as a ‘science’ that mandated the destruction of peasants and peasant institutions by universal laws of historical development.

Convinced that Western Europe represented the image of Russia’s future, Plekhanov contended that however backward the peasantry, ‘capitalism goes on its way, dislodging the independent producers from their unstable conditions and creating an army of workers in Russia, by the same tried and true method’ set out in the pages of Capital’. Focusing on the similarities between England’s past and Russia’s future, Plekhanov ignored Marx’s comments on Russia. According to Plekhanov, peasants were ‘barbarian-tillers of the soil’ who were ‘Chinese’ in their failure to develop ‘solidarity, broad social interests, or ideas’ (Plekhanov, 1923: x, 129 and ii, 221-2 and 271).

In the decades to come, the Emancipation of Labor group devoted themselves to Russia’s tiny but dynamic class of urban proletarians (Kingston-Mann, 1999: 140-6). Ignoring Marx’s letters to Mikhailovskii¹², Plekhanov and Zasulich even went so far as to deny the existence of Marx’s letter to Zasulich. The latter was not discovered until well after the Bolshevik Revolution of l9l7, when the scholar B. I. Nikolaevskii found it in the papers of Aksel’rod, and published it for the first time in l924 (Riazanov, 1926: 309-10).

In the absence of Marx’s letters and the data contained in Daniel’son’s work a remarkably pro-capitalist tone flourished among Russia’s newly ‘Orthodox’ Marxists. Plekhanov and P. B. Struve, who authored the Russian Social Democratic Party’s first manifesto, argued that Russia’s immediate future depended upon the exploits of a revolutionary Russian bourgeoisie. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Plekhanov contended that Russia’s state-subsidized merchants and industrialists were ready to do battle – like their French counterparts in 1789 – for the ‘Rights of Man’.

In a rather peculiar argument for a Marxist advocate of class struggle, he went on to blame Russian workers for their ‘inappropriate’ hostility to the bourgeoisie. According to Plekhanov, the proletariat’s stubborn refusal to support Russian liberal and constitutional struggles was to blame for the bourgeoisie’s current reluctance to ‘speak with the authorities in language worthy of a citizen’ (Plekhanov, 1923: 187-9, 203, 344).

In the 1880s, P. B. Struve celebrated the long-overdue civilizing mission of the ‘man of property’ in the Russian countryside. Although Struve quickly abandoned Marxism for a long-term commitment to capitalism, as a Marxist he was a particularly tough-minded advocate for the bourgeoisie as agents of ‘iron’ laws of economic development. Dismissing peasant deaths in the famine of 1891 as a ‘regrettable episode’ on Russia’s road to economic progress (Pipes, 1976: 90-1), Struve denounced Daniel’son as an enemy of the West, prone to ‘exaggerated’ predictions about poverty under capitalism and stubbornly committed to denying the existence of capitalism in Russia. Although Struve’s accusations were unfounded – as we have seen, Daniel’son was neither anti-Western nor ignorant of Russia’s capitalist development – Struve’s judgement became the standard conventional wisdom for twentieth-century Marxists and was also taken up by Russian tsarist officials. Minister of Agriculture A.

S. Ermolov eagerly deployed Karl Kautsky’s ‘Orthodox’ Marxist arguments to buttress his attacks on Daniel’son and others as ‘enemies of economic science’. Just as Daniel’son had feared, there turned out to be many educated Russians ready to believe that economic progress and development required the shocks of famine, unemployment and a rural bourgeoisie that expelled the peasantry from the countryside. According to economist N. I. Ziber’s interpretation of Marx, Russia’s future required that peasants be ‘cooked up in the industrial boiler’ until they became proletarians (Mikhailovskii, 1903: 327-8; Kingston-Mann, 1981: 735-6). While the autocracy’s reformers hoped that capitalism would inspire a class of politically conservative rural entrepreneurs that supported any government that defended the rights of property¹³, ‘Orthodox’ Marxists maintained that Russia’s bourgeoisie were revolutionaries whose historical mission was to prepare the ground for a later socialist revolution. In a brilliant observation made long after l9l7, Struve contended that late nineteenth-century Russian Marxists were playing precisely the role assumed by liberals in earlier phases of Western European history.

According to Struve, Russia’s Marxists were more interested in denouncing the reactionary defenders of ‘medieval’ social groups and institutions than they were to expose the failings of the bourgeoisie (Pipes, 1970: 326 and Struve, 1921: 130-1).

Although the young Lenin was far less sanguine than Plekhanov and Struve about the heroic role of the bourgeoisie, he was emphatically on the side of Struve against Daniel’son. Lenin’s influential study The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) ignored most of the relevant statistical data as well as the conclusions contained in the economic works he cited, and arrived at the wildly mistaken conclusion that the Russian countryside was already capitalist¹⁴. According to Lenin’s scenario, the Russian countryside was already dominated by a rural bourgeoisie, with the peasantry portrayed as a remnant of Russia’s feudal past¹⁵. Russia was thus no ‘exception’ to the universal laws of economics and history that everywhere replaced feudalism with capitalism, a rural bourgeoisie and a rural proletariat.

In Lenin’s case, capitalism’s alleged triumph in Russia turned out to be quite short-lived. When a Russian revolution broke out in 1905 and new political opportunities beckoned, he unceremoniously abandoned his earlier arguments. Attempting nevertheless to remain ideologically consistent, he proceeded to reverse his previous interpretation of the economic data. Since ‘Orthodox’ Marxist analysis only permitted peasants to be revolutionaries in the course of a petty-bourgeois struggle against feudalism, Lenin’s had no choice but to view the Revolution of 1905 as a movement to foster capitalism in a predominantly feudal economy. In 1906, he accordingly declared the Russian countryside overwhelmingly pre-capitalist, and denounced as ‘reactionaries’ those who dissented from his new analysis. As I have suggested elsewhere, Lenin’s political understanding of the peasant question deepened in the years to come, but his economics – and in particular, his baseless contention that peasant communes had disappeared from the Russian countryside – continued to reflect the constraints of the Marxist ‘Orthodoxy’ that he helped to create (Kingston-Mann, 1983).

In contrast to Lenin, Daniel’son predicted that a wholesale privatization of the basic means of production would: 1) de-stabilize the Russian economy; 2) set the stage for a social revolution; and 3) produce only minimal productivity gains. Although ‘Orthodox’ Marxists and state capitalists of the tsarist regime denounced him as a reactionary who idealized the feudal past and denied the realities of the capitalist present, as the historian Richard Pipes long ago observed, Daniel’son’s predictions for the pre-1917 period turned out to be remarkably accurate.

“As a matter of historical record, Russia did not follow the capitalist path, it did not emulate Britain, but, short-circuiting capitalism, evolved a type of state socialism not unlike that envisioned by radical opponents of capitalism in the nineteenth century. Those who held this view turned out to have been much closer to the truth than the Social Democrats who abused them as ‘utopians’ and insisted that Russia had no choice but to emulate the West.” (Pipes, 1970: 39)

4. THE TRIUMPH OF ‘ORTHODOX’ MARXISM
During the final decade of his life, Marx did not publish a single article or book that reflected his new perspectives on Russia’s future development. Although his correspondence with Russian revolutionaries and scholars (and his voluminous notes) clearly indicate the direction of his thinking, the ‘Russia question’ had in important respects reduced him to silence.

Marx was apparently never able to devise a systematic conceptual response to Russia’s challenge to the universalist features of his analysis¹⁶. When he died in 1883, the task of pronouncing the last word on the ‘essence’ of Marxism was thus left to Friedrich Engels (Daniels, 1980: 314-16).

For his part, Daniel’son immediately sought to recreate with Engels the relationship he had earlier enjoyed with Marx. But Engels was unfamiliar with the research that Marx had so carefully studied, and turned out to be far more content than Marx with the universalism of Capital¹⁷. There was something rather poignant in Daniel’son’s fruitless efforts to find out from Engels whether any writings about Russia had survived in Marx’s papers.

‘As you know’, Daniel’son wrote to Engels, ‘he considered it an important question’ (Marx, 1951: 118). In letter after letter to Engels, Daniel’son cited Russian statistical data and quoted Marx’s writings on Russia, vainly attempting to convince Engels that Russia’s past and present did not fit the English model. Years later, when he had already translated volumes two and three of Capital into Russian, Daniel’son wrote to Engels to express regret that Marx had not carried out his earlier plan to make use of Russia as a case study: ‘Are there any notes left behind that would give an idea of what he had planned to do?’ (Marx, 1951: 118). Engels replied in the negative.

In the course of Daniel’son’s correspondence with Engels, it became evident that the latter had come to view Daniel’son as a ‘Revisionist’ whose scepticism about capitalism’s inevitable triumph was not only untrue, but profoundly dangerous to the cause of revolutionary Marxism in Germany and elsewhere¹⁸. Engels declined to openly criticize Struve’s celebrations of the bourgeoisie, and refrained as well from comment on either the refusal of the Emancipation of Labor Group to publish Marx’s letter to Zasulich or the conspiracy of silence that surrounded it. After ending his correspondence with Daniel’son, Engels wrote to Plekhanov:

“It is quite impossible to debate with that generation of Russians to which Daniel’son belongs, a generation which continues to believe in the elemental communistic mission allegedly distinguishing Russia, the real Holy Russia, from the other, infidel nations. . . . In any case, in a country like yours, in which industry is still linked to the commune and intellectual life is so isolated, it is no wonder that such monstrous ideas evolve. It is a stage the country must pass through. As cities expand, the isolation of talented minds will cease as you have the opportunity to communicate with one another.”(Marx, 1951: 340)

Daniel’son was thus relegated by Engels to the status of a backward thinker from a backward society whose work would – fortunately, from Engels’ point of view – be forgotten as Russia became more urban and civilized.

In important respects, Engels’ hopes would be realized. In the decades to come, Daniel’son’s ideas were indeed forgotten. A dichotomized, ‘either/or’ choice between the universal, forward march of the bourgeoisie and the ‘Asiatic’ backwardness of commune peasants came to enjoy far greater appeal among ‘Orthodox’ Marxists, tsarist government officials, and classical liberals than did the complexities of Daniel’son, the later views of Marx himself, or the massive body of statistical data then being published by Russia’s professional economists and statisticians.

5. BACK TO THE FUTURE
“The future oligarchs did what any red-blooded businessman would do.” (Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: Russia’s Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism, 2000)

“It’s a little like the Middle Ages. When the patient died they would say, ‘well, he stopped the bloodletting too soon, he still had a little blood in him’.” (Joseph Stiglitz, Former Chief Economist, World Bank 2001)

It has always been a comfort to believe that we possess universal, – preferably scientific – solutions to all human problems. In the aftermath of England’s Industrial Revolution, when the unrestricted freedom of owner-investors to trade, hire and fire without fear of government regulation (including the right to sell opium to China and to hire fouryear olds as chimney-sweepers) helped to create the most powerful and wealthy empire in the history of the world, the bourgeoisie attained near legendary status. No longer a social element whose achievements were decisively constrained or encouraged by the specifics of a particular historical context, the bourgeois entrepreneur was portrayed instead as the universal exemplar of rational and productive economic behaviour in every time and place.

Wherever members of this social class were free to deploy their magic, they were believed to transform backward and inefficient economic systems into productive ones. In stark contrast to the creativity and common sense of the bourgeoisie stood the tragically oppressed, ignorant, inefficient, and short-sighted lower classes. In keeping with this mindset, it seemed obvious that only self-deluded romantics, populists and reactionaries could believe that peasants or workers might understand any aspect of their economic or noneconomic lives – much less generate useful strategies for change. Agency, ideas and leadership remained the province of bourgeois and/or Marxist elites¹⁹.

During the 1990s, World Bank and IMF policies that privileged bourgeois investor/entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere have triggered accelerated rates of malnutrition and infant mortality, declines in productivity rates and in access to education, particularly for women (Gibbon et al., 1993). However, the romance of the bourgeoisie nevertheless persisted, with the American entrepreneur replacing England’s ‘man of property’ as standard-bearer for the world’s economic progress. In relation to Russia at least, there is a certain self-indulgent quality to such claims, and a substantial measure of tragedy and venality in their embrace by Russians, Estonians, Armenians and other reformers in the successor states of the Soviet Union²⁰.

In the early post-Soviet era, Yegor Gaidar and his supporters were prone to argue that the mentality of the Russian people – brainwashed and infantilized by decades of protection from exposure to the market – constituted one of the nation’s chief obstacles to progress²¹. Sharing with their predecessors of a century ago a disdain for the ‘backward’ masses, neoliberals of the post-Soviet era decried ‘peasant-like’ Russians, ever nostalgic for Stalin and the Gulag. When the public stubbornly persisted in fear and suspicion of the bourgeoisie, reformers rehearsed many of the same arguments deployed earlier against commune peasants. The appalling range of character defects typical of ordinary Russians – including deep-seated propensities for laziness, theft and violence – were routinely cited as obstacles to the emergence of a much-needed civil society²². Too entangled in the irrational constraints and expectations of state socialism to become model capitalists or model workers in a free market economy, Russians who did not swiftly become entrepreneurs were at best ‘raw material,’ capable of a progressive historical role only after they were purged of their traditional collectivist ways²³.

Contending that the Soviet system functioned to destroy all natural impulses toward productive economic behaviour, ‘shock therapists’ devised Draconian counter-measures to eliminate its vestiges. Ignoring the recent experience of the UK, where it had taken Margaret Thatcher a decade to privatize only 5 percent of the nation’s state-owned enterprises (Dobek, 1993: 4-5), the economists S. S. Shatalin and G. Yavlinskii (counseled by US economist Jeffrey Sachs) demanded implementation of a variety of rather hare-brained ‘500-day’ and ‘1000-day’ plans for full-scale privatization. Arguing that rejection of their proposals was tantamount to ignoring ‘the laws of economic and social development’ (Feige, 1993: 67), shock therapists demanded that Russians ‘grow up’ and get used to both the economic insecurities and the freedoms of the modern world.

Like the nineteenth-century economist N. I. Ziber who bloodthirstily imagined peasants ‘cooked up in the industrial boiler’, late twentieth century reformers contended that accelerating suicide, infant and adult mortality rates and deaths due to preventable diseases – together with the triumphant accumulation of wealth by powerful businessmen – represented a painful transition to adulthood for a tragically risk-averse Russian populace²⁴. Like the nineteenth-century’s Peter Struve, neoliberal reformers described economic polarization and declining access to education and health care as ‘regrettable episodes’ on the road to economic progress. According to one American commentator, a painful but productive process of growth and change had at last put an end to ‘a seventyfour-year experiment to defy the laws of capitalism and suppress the basic instincts of human nature’ (Hoffman, 2002). Less tough-minded American observers were more likely to attribute these phenomena to ‘the eternal darkness of the Russian soul’ (Specter, 1997).

In a nightmare parody of the American Dream, profit-seeking oligarchs and gangsters of the 1990s monopolized Russia’s wealth and media channels, and – like Daniel’son’s subsidy-seeking businessmen – they declared themselves entrepreneurs, individualists and defenders of civil liberty. Defending their interests by hiring private armies and intelligence gathering teams, they made car-bombings and contract murders into a familiar feature of the Russian urban landscape (Kotz, 2000a). Alongside a number of important and exceedingly well-publicized success stories, economic strategies whose ostensible purpose was to encourage aspiring Russian entrepreneurs to obliterate the economic inefficiency of the Soviet system have also produced:
1) new adventures in inefficiency and disinvestment;
2) a privileging of entrepreneurs at the expense of labour unions; 3) an extraordinary, US-style income gap between rich and poor; and 4) recommendations to president Vladimir Putin that he adopt Chile’s Augusto Pinochet as his role model.

As the world continues to await the appearance of Russia’s democratic, law-abiding and productive bourgeoisie, veteran US commentator Marshall Goldman has compared the scandal-ridden exploits of America’s Enron entrepreneurs with the entrepreneurs of Russia’s Gazprom, the world’s largest exporter of natural gas (headed for many years by former prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin). The latter firm created some 300 Enron-style subsidiaries that were directed by, among others, Chernomyrdin’s sons as well as the wives, children and mistresses of Gazprom’s senior associates. Gazprom apparently deployed a strategy of selling at low prices to subsidiaries, which the latter in turn then sold at high prices as a way to benefit those in control of their subsidiaries at the expense of those who invested in or expected to collect taxes from the parent company. As a consequence, Itera, Gazprom’s Florida offshoot, became in 2002 Russia’s second-largest producer and exporter of natural gas – ‘all’ – in Goldman’s words ‘with no visible sign of investment from either stockholders or lenders’. Auditors for both companies (Arthur Andersen for Enron and PricewaterhouseCoopers for Gazprom) generally tolerated the questionable practices of their clients. In an effort to diminish the likelihood of government oversight, Enron – like Gazprom – provided lavish support to their legislators (including, in Gazprom’s case, the Russian Communist Party) (Goldman, 2002).

Questions to consider

It has been persuasively argued in many venues that the opportunity to acquire great quantities of personal wealth explains the extraordinary 1990s feeding frenzy by Russia’s newly capitalist, former Communist Party officials. However, this analysis does not help us to understand either the hopes or the sense of disillusion experienced by less venal Russians who wanted to believe in some version of the American Dream, or the malaise that afflicted Marxists and socialists the world over in the wake of the Soviet Union’s break-up. As in the 1880s, many socialists and non-socialists came to believe the story that capitalists have always told about the characteristics that rendered them universally and eternally successful. In his later writings, Marx denounced such mythologizing as the ‘disgusting poetry of landownership (Grundeigenthumspoesie). In contrast to such ‘poetry’, Marx welcomed Daniel’son’s unsentimental history of a corrupt and short-sighted Russian bourgeoisie and called for further investigation of the massive body of statistical data that documented the complexity of economic decision-making by a non-elite, peasant population.

As I see it, socialist traditions have long been riven not only by a tension between critiques of capitalist exploitation and a sometimes uncritical admiration for bourgeois culture and economic skills, but also between a commitment to justice for workers and peasants and a rejection of the latter as a source of ideas, strategies and experiences for building a better economy and society²⁵. While Daniel’son viewed the bourgeoisie with scepticism and sought to discover whether non-elite social groups and institutions might become potentially productive contributors to modern economic life, most of his Russian Marxist critics did not. Lenin welcomed the masses as courageous fighters, followers and supporters in time of revolution, but he did not ever consider the possibility that there was anything constructive or creative to be learned from the social groups whose interests he claimed to serve. It is revealing that during the Revolution of 1905, Lenin even denied agency to the bourgeoisie, claiming that a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries could be even more effective in leading a bourgeois-democratic revolution (Kingston-Mann, l983: 79-86²⁶). From a historical standpoint, it is obvious that in a variety of contexts, bourgeois entrepreneurs have played a leading role in struggles that have produced substantial economic and non-economic benefits to other social groups as well. However, they are not the only group to have done so – they are simply the group whose exploits have been most widely documented, analysed, contemplated and publicized by historians, economists, and development specialists of the Right and the Left. In the case of Russia, the Marxist and post-Marxist willingness to grant a monopoly on productive economic behaviour to the bourgeoisie has deflected research and activism away from the possibility that majorities – peasants, factory workers, women as well as men – might be subjects as well as objects in a world ‘in transition’. By and large, neither leftists, liberals or neoliberals carried out evenhanded, comparative research investigations on the evidence of economic flexibility and capacity for innovation among elite and non-elite groups as imperfect agents of change in the modern world²⁷.

The preceding discussion has set out some of the historical obstacles to the exploration of strategies for change that positioned majorities as coparticipants rather than as ‘raw material’ or ‘resources’ for development. As we have seen, peasantophobic nineteenth-century Marxists joined with tsarist officials to discount evidence and arguments that challenged either the romance of the bourgeoisie or the ‘idiocy of rural life’. Attempting to erase for later generations even the knowledge that such data and analysis existed, ‘Orthodox’ Marxists and their capitalist adversaries worked to render invisible both the data and the arguments that might complicate stereotypical views of the bourgeoisie and of the peasantry. But the data and the arguments remain nevertheless. Although we cannot prejudge the outcome of a more inclusive and balanced understanding of the potential agents of political, social and economic transformation – either in the past or in the present – it seems high time to pay attention to these alternative perspectives and to the research agenda that they demand. If we deconstruct the romance of the bourgeoisie, it will become much easier to discover whether the privileges granted to entrepreneurs in the post- Soviet era: 1) function to promote constructive economic decision-making; and 2) either constrain or expand the options of other social groups in Russian society.

NOTES

• This essay is dedicated to the late Bo Gustaffson, professor of economic history at Uppsala University.

¹ In Russia, a ‘spirit of enterprise’ was in vogue as early as the eighteenthcentury among admirers of Adam Smith and the Physiocrats at the court of Catherine the Great. By the 1850s, some of Russia’s leading professional economists were such enthusiastic advocates of the English ‘man of property’ that the young radical Dmitri Pisarev described them as the ‘Moscow University Anglomaniacs’. In general, the work of Russia’s nineteenth-century professional economists has been neglected by Western scholars. See the preliminary discussion by Kingston-Mann, 1999: 92-99, the useful but tendentious Soviet accounts by Karataev (1956, 1957, 1958, and the less skewed Kosachevskaia, 1971 and Kitaev, 1972).

² Note on populism: In the discussion that follows, the reader will note that the term ‘populist’ [narodnik] rarely appears. This is a deliberate omission. It is too rarely recalled that ‘populism’ gained prominence as an epithet popularized above all by a faction within the Russian Marxist movement of the 1890s. Claiming to be ‘Orthodox’ interpreters of Marx’s teachings, Plekhanov, Lenin et al lumped their socialist adversaries together, linked the latter to the Slavophiles, and contrasted them to Westernizers and to the truths of their own Marxist analysis. However, in historical terms, the populist-Marxist conflict was primarily a dispute between two groups with differing conceptions of Marxism (Pipes, l970: 85-7 and l964: 141-158). In my own scholarly experience, the populist label tends to impede rather than foster understanding and useful analysis (Kingston-Mann, 1983, 1991, 1999, 2002). In a revealing, latter-day use of the term, President Putin’s economics minister discovered in April 2002 that Russian shock therapists of the l990s were also ‘populists.’ (However, for a perspective sympathetic to the view that populists were indeed anti-Western reactionaries, see Walicki, 1989: 2-3.)

³ These data were produced by statisticians hired by the elected zemstvo institutions created during the post-Emancipation era. Charged with the task of organizing the collection of statistics upon which fiscal and tax policies could be based, zemstvo statisticians interviewed 4.5 million peasant households. By the early 1900s, they compiled what was for the next half century the largest ever database on a peasant population (Johnson, 1982: 343-63; Kingston-Mann, 1991: 23-51, Darrow; 2000: 52-75; Svavitskii, l961; Svavitskaia and Svavitskii l926; Kaufman, l9l8: 520-531; Rusov, l9l3, and Harrison, 1977: 127-161).

⁴ In the mid-nineteenth century, August Comte was one of the leading social scientists of his day. Schools to propagate his ‘science of society’ flourished in Paris, London, and Berlin; Comtean ‘temples of Reason’ were erected in Rio de Janeiro, and Comtean ideas were cited as inspiration in China’s Taiping Rebellion. There is a vast literature dealing with his work. See, for example, Kolakowski (1968: 47-72) and Seligman (1969: 256-78).

⁵ Maine’s influential Ancient Law (1861) and Village Communities East and West (1871) examined communal institutions in a broad comparative perspective that included the Indian panchayat, the English commons and the Russian peasant commune (mir, or obshchina). Maine – together with German scholar Ludwig von Maurer – helped to focus nineteenth-century scholarly attention on the history of private tenure. In contrast to Maurer, Maine contended that peasant communes died out because they were obsolete in the modern world (Lippincott, 1938: 167-206).

⁶ Like the study of Russian economics, the history of the Russian social sciences has been a curiously neglected topic among Western scholars. Many of Russia’s leading economists and statisticians were students of German economists like Wilhelm Roscher and Gustav Schmoller. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Russians frequently comprised the largest delegation at international conferences for statisticians (Kingston-Mann, 1999: 62-77, 93-99, 112-131).

⁷ Almost a century later, Jean-Paul Sartre argued that this letter was proof that for Marx, ‘the history of the noncapitalist and pre-capitalist societies of the past is not over and done with’ (Sartre, 1975: 140 and 142).

⁸ It is useful to compare Daniel’son’s formulations with the recent work of Gilbert Rist, who writes: ‘Industrial society doesn’t show the rest of the world their economic future; industrial societies are a special case. Their existence altered the context in which all other countries would operate and made replication impossible because the circumstances which had facilitated the ascendance of the first case and bestowed upon it certain characteristics no longer existed once other players entered the field’ (Rist, 1997, 107, 74).

⁹ See for example, Vorontsov (1892).

¹⁰ It is worth noting that Marx worked very carefully on this formulation and prepared many drafts before arriving on the statement quoted here (Marx: 1944, 412, 420-1, Walicki, 1989: 179-194).

¹¹ Many of Russia’s leading economists and statisticians supported the founding of the Constitutional Democratic Party, and some joined the peasant-oriented Socialist Revolutionary Party that won a majority in the democratic elections to Russia’s Constituent Assembly in January, 1918. The rather dismal consequences of their political efforts are detailed in Kingston-Mann (1999: 184-85).

¹² Engels sent a copy to Zasulich in l884 (the year after Marx’s death). The letter finally appeared in 1886 in the radical journal Vestnik narodnoi voli, shortly after Engels sent a copy of it to Daniel’son (White, 1987: 75).

¹³ Among the government officials who believed that Russia’s salvation depended upon the emergence of a politically conservative rural bourgeoisie were Tsarist Finance Minister Witte, Minister of Agriculture A. S. Ermolov, leading policy advisers like C. A. Kofoed, A. A. Rittikh, A. V. Krivoshein, V. I. Gurko, and of course P. A. Stolypin, who became Premier in 1906 (Kingston-Mann, 1999: 147-80).

¹⁴ The book’s failings were noted by many leading economists and statisticians, and by radical peasant activists. According to the statistician K. R. Kachorovskii, Lenin’s book reflected only the ‘sketchiest’ knowledge of primary sources, with data arbitrarily selected in order to support a priori conclusions. Lenin’s study nevertheless became one of the most influential economic studies of the day. His extremely selective use of economic data is documented in Kingston-Mann, 1983: 48-54.

¹⁵ Like his progressive-minded liberal contemporaries, Lenin used ‘Asia’ and ‘Orientalism’ as codewords to describe every possible economic and noneconomic evil. While Plekhanov described the advocates of mixed economies like Daniel’son as ‘Easterners,’ Struve demanded that Russia exorcise the legacy of ‘Orientalism’ which was the nation’s curse (Pipes, 1970: 69, Lenin, 1958-65: 185-191, Plekhanov, 1923, 10: 128).

¹⁶ In this connection, it will be important to consider Anderson and Smith (2003).

¹⁷ In the mid-1880s, when he still entertained some hope of a peasant revolution in Russia, Engels reacted negatively to Plekhanov’s 1885 book Nashi raznoglasiia [Our Disagreements], curtly suggesting that Plekhanov would do better to engage in ‘serious research work’ instead of ‘polemical articles’ against the Populists (Marx, 1962: 320). However, in the years to come, the failure of terrorist assassinations to destabilize the Russian autocracy and the emergence of Revisionism would lead Engels to close ranks with the ‘Orthodox’ wing of Russian Marxism.

¹⁸ By the 1890s, Engels was deeply involved in the battle then being waged by August Bebel and Karl Kautsky to defeat Revisionist demands that Marxists devise a political strategy that appealed to peasants as well as urban proletarians. Daniel’son’s concern for peasant welfare seemed to Engels to be part and parcel of the Revisionism that produced Eduard Bernstein’s retreat from a proletarian-focused class struggle (Kingston-Mann, 1999: 144-6, 162-4, and Maehl, 1980: 143).

¹⁹ According to Guy Standing, the late twentieth-century role of Western economic advisers in Russia: were inspired by similar assumptions. In his words, ‘the advocacy of rapid privatization was flawed because the foreign economic advisers neglected the development of agency’ (Standing, 1997).

²⁰ Although Russia’s difficult plight has been widely discussed, it is worth noting that in Estonia, often featured as a post-Soviet success story, the preliminary results of the recent census revealed a population decline of over 200,000 since the 1989 census. Given existing economic inequalities and the rapid fraying of the social safety net, the UN Economic Commission for Europe predicts that if current trends persist, Estonia’s population will decrease by 34 percent during the next 50 years. (CDI 25 July 2000: 19 and RFE/RL Newsline 2000, 4: 88, pt. 2) In Armenia, the average annual income of the richest 20 percent of the Armenian population is now 32 times higher than that of the poorest 20 percent; it was 27 times higher in l997. The Armenian government has declared that Armenians are eating better than in l996, although not yet at the consumption levels of the late Soviet period (RFE/RL 2000, 4: 34, pt. 1.

²¹ In some cases, historians have projected this analysis backward into earlier periods of Russian history. According to one recent study, Russian peasants of the 1900s were equally ‘infantilized’ by government-sponsored reform initiatives that prevented peasants from simply ‘practicing capitalism on each other’ (Kotsonis, 1999: 124).

²² Among many such comments on the backwardness and irrationality of the Russian people, see, for example, Popov 1990: 27-28. A November 2001 presentation by Kingston-Mann at Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian Affairs evoked numerous comments from Russia scholars about the peculiarly
Russian propensity for dishonesty and corruption.

²³ I am deeply indebted to an anonymous RIPE reviewer for this formulation.

²⁴ Among the most striking of Russia’s ‘growing pains: ’ The Russian birthrate and life expectancy have plummeted. Between 1990 and 1995, the life expectancy of Russian males fell 6.3 years (from 66 to 60). In 1999, the population of the Russian Federation fell by 716,900, the largest population decline in Russian history since World War II. This has generally been attributed to worsening economic conditions, rising rates of alcoholism, and poor medical treatment. Between 1991 and 1998, Russia’s population fell from 148,300,000 to 146,300,000 (Field et al., in Kim et al., 2000: 155-73).

²⁵ In this connection, it is useful to consider the career of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, erstwhile president of Brazil, who declared his Marxism, while advocating leadership by private owner/investors and rejecting the working classes as economic or political actors. From Cardoso’s perspective, the lower classes are ‘sand in the machinery’ of society (Goertzel, 1999). I am grateful to Herman Schwartz of the University of Virginia for suggesting this comparison.

²⁶ While Lenin’s political understanding of the peasant question deepened, and eventually produced the NEP strategy of the early Soviet period, his economic assumptions continued to blind him to the ‘anomalous’ survival and growth of peasant communes during the course of the 1920s (Kingston-Mann, 1983: 108).

²⁷ In the post-Soviet era, some important avenues for future research might include the assessment of relevant economic and noneconomic data related to the following: 1) the 1980s Soviet contention that Russians were averse to competition not because they were lazy, but because competitive regimes were identified in the public mind with anarchy in production, unemployment, and the destruction of ‘surplus’ output in order to keep prices high (Moscow News, 22 March 1987; 2) the 1980s-early 1990s worker-driven factory decisions to increase output through less corrupt management, less favouritism, and a system of income distribution that included funds for kindergartens, preventive health centres, and housing construction (Izviestiia, 28 July 1985); 3) leading Soviet sociologist Tatiana Zaslavskaia’s argument that the assumptions of social scientists about the backward masses deflected scholarly attention away from a systematic investigation of what factory workers actually had to say about issues of economic incentive and wage differentials (Sovietskaia kultura, 23 January 1986, Pravda, 6 February 1987, New York Times, 28 August, 1987); and 4) the complexities of the positions taken by the supposedly ‘conservative’ Russian Parliament in opposition to the economic policies of Boris Yeltsin (Barnes, 2001: 39-61).

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