Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/124

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
98
THE SPIRIT OF RUSSIA

the monarch and against the working masses, and the same thing would happen in Russia. It was a matter of no importance whatever whether Alexander II or Alexander III did or did not serve out these "social cates" (the constitution); the bourgeoisie would eat them whilst the revolutionaries looked on. Doubtless the intelligentsia and also the folk desired political freedom; but for the mužik freedom was intimately connected with economic conditions, and it was to such conditions that the mužik must look in the first instance. The business of a genuinely practical revolutionary party in Russia was to awaken men intellectually and to prepare the means for the struggle. Such, at any rate, was the work of peaceful days; when the revolution came, the party would have to regulate the movement and to determine its trend. The special function of the intelligentsia was initiatory merely, the folk would do the rest for itself and would create its own leaders. But the function of the intelligentsia did not consist in the mere handing on of culture in accordance with legally authorised methods; an energetic revolutionary secret agitation must be promoted.

In 1881, the Černyi Pereděl was forced for a time to suspend its journalistic activities, but in 1883 the party was reorganised as the Group for the Liberation of Labour, and developed henceforward along Marxist lines, in continuous and close connection with the Marxist and socialist movements in other lands and above all in Germany. In 1883, and in fuller detail in 1884, Plehanov defined the attitude of his party towards other parties and trends, condemning from the Marxist outlook the socialism of Herzen and Černyševskii, the anarchism of Bakunin, and the Blanquism of Tkačev. We shall have more to say about this matter when we come to discuss the history of Marxism.

§ 112.

When we survey these programs which appeared during the space of two decades, we recognise that political radicalism has taken the form of socialism. All the programs preach socialism, those of earlier date chiefly in the French sense, whilst the later ones are formulated more along the lines of Marx and Lassalle. To speak of Russian socialists, the ideas of Pestel, Herzen, Bakunin, Černyševskii, and Lavrov, are prominent. The leader of the Marxists was Plehanov.