MIA > Archive > Radek > Paths of the Russian Rev.
Russian Marxism, which prepared the ground for the activity of the Russian working class by clearly setting forth the tendencies of Russia’s development at the end of the nineteenth century and by defining the role of the different social classes in the struggles to come, began by destroying the illusions of the petit-bourgeois Socialists about the driving forces and nature of the Russian Revolution. Already in his first works, Plekhanov showed that Russia also had to pass along the road of capitalism and that it was doing so. He destroyed the dreams of the possibility of leaping from the yoke of Tsarism into the rule of Socialism as a damaging illusion. The working class, he said, must put every effort into gaining democracy for Russia, and that only after having become informed, organised and enlightened, would it, within the framework of capitalism and democracy, be able to conclude successfully the struggle for Socialism. In his pamphlet Socialism and the Political Struggle which appeared in 1881, Plekhanov wrote:
‘To bind together in one two so fundamentally different matters as the overthrow of absolutism and the Socialist revolution, to wage revolutionary struggle in the belief that these elements of social development will coincide in the history of our country means to put off the advent of both.’ [2]
By thus establishing the bourgeois content of the coming Russian Revolution, he nonetheless at the same time explained that the revolution itself would in the first place be the work of the working class. ‘Political liberty will be conquered by the working class, or it will not be conquered at all’, Plekhanov explained in the Sozialdemokrat in 1888. The arguments of the pioneers of Russian Marxism on the Russian Revolution thus make evident the objective bourgeois limits of that revolution, but also ascribe to the proletariat the role of the leading agent, the executor of the revolution.
The years that preceded the start of the great revolutionary movements in Russia were full of struggles concerning the methods of work of the revolutionary Social Democratic Party, the tactics of the young working class party that was in the process of formation, and by the struggles of Iskra against the ‘Economists’ [3], which were only indirectly linked to the great historical questions. But the question of the social content of the Russian Revolution was to pose itself again to the party in the broadest manner when the birth of the petit-bourgeois peasant Socialism of the Socialist Revolutionaries [4] and the rise of the liberal movement required the taking up of clear positions. In the course of the year 1904-05 the Menshevik and Bolshevik tendencies crystallised within the Russian Social Democracy, arising precisely around these questions. What were the differences between the two tendencies in their analysis of the character of the Russian Revolution and of its motor forces? In Lenin’s pamphlet Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (Summer 1905) we read this:
‘Finally, we will note that the resolution, by making implementation of the minimum programme the provisional revolutionary government’s task, eliminates the absurd and semi-Anarchist ideas of giving immediate effect to the maximum programme, and the conquest of power for a Socialist revolution. The degree of Russia’s economic development (an objective condition), and the degree of class-consciousness and organisation of the broad masses of the proletariat (a subjective condition inseparably bound up with the objective condition) make the immediate and complete emancipation of the working class impossible. Only the most ignorant people can close their eyes to the bourgeois nature of the democratic revolution which is now taking place; only the most naive optimists can forget how little as yet the masses of the workers are informed about the aims of Socialism and the methods of achieving it. We are all convinced that the emancipation of the working classes must be won by the working classes themselves; a Socialist revolution is out of the question unless the masses become class-conscious and organised, trained, and educated in an open class struggle against the entire bourgeoisie. Replying to the Anarchists’ objections that we are putting off the Socialist revolution, we say: we are not putting it off, but are taking the first step towards it in the only possible way, along the only correct path, namely, the path of a democratic republic. Whoever wants to reach Socialism by any other path than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary both in the economic and the political sense. If any workers ask us at the appropriate moment why we should not go ahead and carry out our maximum programme we shall answer by pointing out how far from Socialism the masses of the democratically-minded people still are, how undeveloped class antagonisms still are, and how unorganised the proletarians still are. Organise hundreds of thousands of workers all over Russia; get the millions to sympathise with our programme! Try to do this without confining yourselves to high-sounding but hollow Anarchist phrases – and you will see at once that achievement of this organisation and the spread of this Socialist enlightenment depend on the fullest possible achievement of democratic transformations.’ [5]
This was not just a passing thought, but the theoretical foundation of the entire position of Lenin and the Bolsheviks during the first revolution. How, therefore, did it differ from that of the Mensheviks?
The differences did not begin to show until it was a question of determining the role of the non-proletarian classes in the revolution and relationships with them. Starting off from the fact that the Russian Revolution would to begin with prepare the ground for the free development of capitalism – this concept was common to both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks – the Mensheviks concluded from it that leadership in the revolution must fall to the bourgeoisie. The Mensheviks combated in the most resolute manner the idea that the working class along with the peasantry must take power for the revolution to achieve its bourgeois democratic aims – if nothing more. According to the Menshevik conception, the role of the revolutionary working class and its party had to be the role of a left opposition. The Mensheviks compared the efforts of the working class to conquer power along with the peasantry to Millerandism, to the participation of the Social Democracy in bourgeois governments towards the end of the nineteenth century, and prophesied that any attempt to participate in government would be a disaster for the Social Democracy. On their side, the Bolsheviks demonstrated that, firstly, the Menshevik conception was completely schematic, and, secondly, that it was renouncing the radical victory of the bourgeois revolution. From the fact that the Russian Revolution was bourgeois in content it did not absolutely follow, they said, that the industrial bourgeoisie had to be its agent. The industrial bourgeoisie was too allied to Tsarism and feared the working class too much to be able to place itself at the head of the popular masses in the struggle against Tsarism. The entire history of the nineteenth century had already rendered it too conscious of its antagonism with the working class. But there was outside of the industrial bourgeoisie a bourgeois class whose interests cried out for the victory of the revolution. This was the peasantry. The Bolsheviks explained that the peasantry had to struggle against Tsarism up to the final victory if it wished to obtain the land. The peasantry is a bourgeois class. But is it a class which must destroy the edifice of Tsarism in order to achieve its bourgeois aims? This class is uneducated, and is beginning to take its first steps. The task of the Social Democracy must be to lead in struggle, not only the working class, but the peasantry as well. If the work of the Social Democracy were to be successful, if the masses of the people were to rise up against Tsarism, then the creation of a revolutionary government would be necessary, whose job it would be to lead the bourgeois revolution to its conclusion by a struggle against the forces of the old regime who could not be annihilated by a single blow. The Bolsheviks saw in participation in this common revolutionary proletarian government a guarantee of the achievement of the revolution; they reproached the Mensheviks with wanting to limit themselves to an oppositional role, and abandoning the leadership a priori to elements who did not want the final victory of the revolution, but sought for a compromise with Tsarism. The controversies between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks just before and during the revolution consequently involved different relations with the peasantry on the one side and with the liberal bourgeoisie on the other. These differences also posed the question of the role of the working class in the revolution, the question of knowing if the working class should take the leadership during the revolution, or if it should leave the leadership to the bourgeoisie.
Trotsky and Parvus [6] on the one side, and Kautsky [7] and Rosa Luxemburg [8] on the other, were already at this time expressing concepts differing from those of both tendencies of Russian Social Democracy. Beginning with Kautsky, who is now calling absurd and Utopian all those who dare to express a doubt about the correctness of Menshevik concepts, this is what he declared in reply to an inquiry from Plekhanov [Kautsky, The Driving Forces of the Russian Revolution and its Prospects, November 1906]:
”The questionnaire includes the following three questions:
‘1. What would seem to be the general character of the Russian Revolution? Are we confronted with a bourgeois revolution or a proletarian revolution?
‘2. Given the futile attempts of the Russian government to suppress the revolutionary movement, what attitude should the Social Democratic Party adopt with regard to the bourgeois democracy which after its own fashion is fighting for political freedom?
‘3. What tactic should the Social Democratic Party follow in the elections for the Duma, in order to exploit, without breaking the Amsterdam resolutions, [9] the forces of the bourgeois oppositional parties in the struggle against our ancien regime?
‘It does not seem to me that we can reply to the first of these questions simply in one sense or the other. The era of bourgeois revolutions, in other words, revolutions whose motor force is made up of the bourgeoisie, is over, even for Russia. Equally, in Russia the proletariat no longer represents an appendix and an instrument of the bourgeoisie as was the case in the bourgeois revolutions, but an autonomous class with its own revolutionary aims. But where the proletariat has appeared in this way, the bourgeoisie ceases to be a revolutionary class. The Russian bourgeoisie, to the extent to which it generally follows an autonomous class policy and is liberal, obviously detests absolutism, but it detests the revolution even more, and it detests absolutism above all because it sees in it the basic cause of the revolution; and to the extent to which it calls for political freedom, it does so above all because it hopes thereby to find the sole means of putting an end to the revolution.
‘Consequently the bourgeoisie does not make up part of the motor forces of the actual revolutionary movement in Russia, and to this extent we cannot describe the revolution as bourgeois.
‘But we cannot therefore conclude that it is a Socialist movement. It can in no way in fact lead the proletariat to sole power, to dictatorship. The Russian proletariat is too weak and insufficiently developed for that. Nonetheless, it is very possible that in the development of the revolution victory could be achieved by the Social Democratic Party, and it would do well to give its supporters confidence in this victory, because you cannot struggle successfully if you renounce victory beforehand. But it will be impossible for the Social Democracy to carry off the victory with the proletariat alone, without the help of another class. This is why, as a victorious party, it will not be able to go further in carrying out its programme than the interests of the class which is supporting the proletariat would allow.
‘Upon what class, however, can the Russian proletariat lean in its revolutionary struggle? If we only look at the surface of politics, we may perhaps consider that all classes and all parties who aspire to political freedom must simply cooperate to obtain it, and argue out their differences only after political freedom has been achieved. But any political struggle is basically a class struggle, and consequently also an economic struggle. Political interests are the result of economic interests; it is to defend these interests that the popular masses are rising, and not to attain abstract political ideas. Whoever desires to inspire the popular masses for the political struggle must show them at what point it is directly linked to their economic interests. Therefore these must not at any time pass into the background if the struggle for freedom is not to be halted. The alliance of the proletariat with other classes in the revolutionary struggle must therefore rest upon a community of economic interests if it wishes to be lasting and triumphant. The tactic of the Russian Social Democracy must also be founded upon such a community of interests.
‘But a solid community of interests for the entire period of the revolutionary struggle only exists between the proletariat and the peasantry. This must therefore provide us with the basis for the entire revolutionary tactic of Russian Social Democracy. Cooperation with liberalism can only be envisaged when it does not impede cooperation with the peasantry.
‘The revolutionary strength of Russian Social Democracy is based upon the existing community of interests between the industrial proletariat and the peasantry, as are also its chances of victory, as well as the limits of its possibilities for exploiting it.
‘We will not be able to win so soon in Russia without the peasants. But we must not wait for the peasants to become Socialists. Socialism can only be built upon the basis of big industry, and of large enterprises; it is too inconsistent with the conditions of small industry and small economic units for it to be born and maintain itself in the midst of a population whose majority is peasant. Once Socialism has become preponderant in big industry and in extensive agricultural exploitation, it can eventually by force of example convince the small peasants and induce them to imitate it, but it cannot originate from them. And the intellectual and material conditions for this are lacking in Russia even more than elsewhere. The Communism of the Russian village is completely linked with the land, and in no way means production in common. That is why it is impossible for modern exchange production to pass over to a superior mode of production on the basis of the rural commune. This requires at least the context of a great city, but Russian agricultural producers are absolutely incapable of production upon a national basis.
‘The present revolution would only lead in the countryside to the creation of a powerful peasantry on the basis of private ownership of the land, and consequently would widen the gulf between the proletariat and the possessing part of the rural population, such as already exists in Western Europe. It would therefore appear to be unthinkable that the present Russian Revolution would straightaway lead to the introduction of a Socialist mode of production, even if it did temporarily bring the Social Democracy to power.
‘But of course we could well see many surprises. We do not know how long the Russian Revolution will last, and from the forms it has now assumed, it does not seem to want to stop very quickly. We also do not know what influence it will exert over Western Europe and how it will fertilise the proletarian movement there. Finally, we do not know at all how the success of the Western European proletariat that would result from this would rebound upon the Russian proletariat. We would do well to familiarise ourselves with the idea that here we are touching upon entirely new problems and situations which do not correspond to any of the models already laid down so far.
‘We would best do justice to the Russian Revolution and the tasks that it sets us by considering it neither as a bourgeois revolution in the traditional sense of the word, nor equally as a Socialist revolution, but as an entirely unique process which would develop as far as the boundary which delimits bourgeois society from Socialist society, which would accelerate the dissolution of the one and prepare the formation of the other, and which would in any case make the whole of humanity of capitalist civilisation take a great leap forward in its development.’ [10]
We should compare these declarations of Kautsky’s with what he confidently wrote in his latest elaboration: Von der Demokratie zur Staatssklaverei [From democracy to state slavery] [11] (1921):
‘We are not blaming Lenin and his companions for considering capitalism as inevitable given the level of Russia’s development, but for only now recognising this after almost four years of having proceeded in the opposite direction with brutal energy, and having branded as traitors and renegades all those who already had a real understanding of affairs; but this was not difficult for those who had a Socialist training, since the Marxists had recognised and sketched out 10 years earlier the coming Russian Revolution as a bourgeois revolution.
‘Four years of blood, tears and ruins would have been spared Russia if the Bolsheviks had possessed the sense of the Mensheviks to limit themselves to what was possible, thus revealing their mastery.’
This honest fellow here seeks to create the impression that he had been a Menshevik, so to speak, from birth. But as the quotation above shows, he was not only solidly with the Bolsheviks on the decisive question of the understanding of the role of the bourgeoisie in the Russian Revolution, but where he departed from the Bolsheviks he went even further than they did by estimating as possible the passing over of the Russian Revolution to a direct struggle for Socialism. The respected Karl Kautsky can plead in his defence that his present ideas are the echo of Martov’s, and that in 1905-06 he had echoed Rosa Luxemburg.
Kautsky’s arguments of 1906 were the reflection of a tendency which had its representatives at the time of the first revolution in Trotsky, Parvus and Rosa Luxemburg, a tendency which, as we have said, was outside both of the factions of Russian Social Democracy. The representatives of this tendency pointed out that even if the peasantry represented a great revolutionary force which the working class must by all means attempt to develop and on whom it had to rely, it was not capable of carrying out an independent policy because of its social atomisation, its dispersion, and the low level of its development.
Whereas Lenin and the Bolsheviks talked about the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, the above-named Marxists laid down the formula of the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry. From 1905 onwards Trotsky posed the following questions in his article The Perspectives of the Russian Revolution [Results and Prospects]: [12]
‘The whole problem consists in this: who will determine the content of the government’s policy, which will form within it a solid majority? It is one thing when representatives of the democratic strata of the people enter a government with a workers’ majority, but it is quite another thing when representatives of the proletariat participate in a definitely bourgeois-democratic government in the capacity of more or less honoured hostages ... It is sufficient to try to imagine a revolutionary democratic government without representatives of the proletariat to see immediately the senselessness of such a conception. The refusal of the Social Democrats to participate in a revolutionary government would render such a government quite impossible, and would thus be equivalent to a betrayal of the revolution. But the participation of the proletariat in a government is also objectively most probable, and permissible in principle, only as a dominating and leading participation. One may, of course, describe such a government as the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, a dictatorship of the proletariat, peasantry and intelligentsia, or even a coalition government of the working class and the petit-bourgeoisie, but the question nevertheless remains: who is to wield the hegemony in the government itself, and through it in the country?’ [13]
Trotsky came down in favour of the hegemony of the proletariat in the government, and sought to show that in spite of the backwardness of social conditions, in spite of the low level of capitalist development in Russia, the revolutionary government would be forced to take transitional measures leading to Socialism:
‘The political domination of the proletariat is incompatible with its economic enslavement. No matter under what political flag the proletariat has come to power, it is obliged to take the path of Socialist policy. It would be the greatest utopianism to think that the proletariat, having been raised to political domination by the internal mechanism of a bourgeois revolution, can, even if it so desires, limit its mission to the creation of republican-democratic conditions for the social domination of the bourgeoisie. The political domination of the proletariat, even if it is only temporary, will weaken to an extreme degree the resistance of capital, which always stands in need of the support of the state, and will give the economic struggle of the proletariat tremendous scope. The workers cannot but demand maintenance for strikers from the revolutionary government, and a government relying upon the workers cannot refuse this demand. But this means paralysing the effect of the reserve army of labour and making the workers dominant not only in the political but also in the economic field, and converting private property in the means of production into a fiction. These inevitable social-economic consequences of proletarian dictatorship will reveal themselves very quickly, long before the democratisation of the political system has been completed. The barrier between the “minimum” and the “maximum” programme disappears immediately the proletariat comes to power.’ [14]
Trotsky is thus faced with the question of the relations existing between the political necessity which he describes and the state of the Russian economy. He replies to this by referring to the very high degree of Russia’s industrial concentration, to the concentration and very strong cohesion of the young Russian capitalism imported from abroad, and to the influence of the Russian Revolution upon the European proletariat:
‘Without the direct state support of the European proletariat the working class of Russia cannot remain in power and convert its temporary domination into a lasting Socialist dictatorship. Of this there cannot for one moment be any doubt. But on the other hand, there cannot be any doubt that a Socialist revolution in the West will enable us directly to convert the temporary domination of the working class into a Socialist dictatorship.’ [15]
Thus for him the Russian Revolution is the point of departure for the European proletarian revolution. He conceives of the Russian Revolution as one element of the permanent European revolution.
We will refrain from quoting in detail the concepts of Rosa Luxemburg, which hardly differ from those of Trotsky and shall only add one more point to the construction of this picture. Rosa Luxemburg already occupied herself with the perspectives of the Russian revolution just after the defeat of the revolution of 1905-06 in an article in which she polemicised against a book of the celebrated Menshevik publicist Cherevanin. [16] In this article, which appeared in 1908 in the Polish Marxist journal Przeglad Socjaldemokratyczny, she defended the thesis that even bourgeois revolutions such as those of the French Revolution, in order to attain even their limited bourgeois aims, had to go beyond them, and that the more a revolution deepened its development, the less could it be forced back by counter-revolution.
We have sketched out here the basic questions which already before and during the first Russian Revolution were posed to the vanguard of the Russian proletariat. As can be seen, these are the decisive questions of the destiny of the present Russian Revolution. The revolution of 1905–06 was the prologue to the revolution of 1917. All the classes which were to measure their strength 12 years later in other circumstances were already in struggle, and that is why all the questions to which we are in practice replying at present by the actions and the history of the Russian Revolution were already posed. The revolution of 1905-06 could not provide an answer to all the questions posed, since Tsarism succeeded, with the aid of European capital, in defeating the young proletariat and peasantry before the first Russian Revolution could spread its international influence sufficiently. The first Russian Revolution stimulated the international proletarian movement in an extraordinary manner. It placed the mass strike on the order of the day, and it is no accident that Rosa Luxemburg’s pamphlet The Mass Strike [17], which was written on the basis of the experiences of the Russian Revolution, is the first international document of the modern Communist movement, the point of departure for the revolutionary tendency of the German far left.
But the first Russian Revolution in many ways gave a clear and unequivocal response to those ‘accursed questions’ of our time. It showed in fact that, whatever the limits of the Russian Revolution, the bourgeoisie was already in Russia a counter-revolutionary factor at the time of the first revolution. From the first revolution, in fact, it contented itself with verbal concessions from Tsarism, and sought to conclude a compromise with it. When Tsarism succeeded in strangling the revolution only with the aid of European capital, whose attitude was determined, amongst other things, by the following fact: it knew that the Russian bourgeoisie did not want the fall of Tsarism, in spite of a show of opposition. However the Mensheviks, by linking their perspectives for revolution to a new upsurge of bourgeois opposition [18], even after the defeat of the first revolution, showed that they were suffering from congenital political blindness. The Russian bourgeoisie carried on a show of struggle against Tsarism in the Duma. But at the same time it was again seeking agreement with Tsarism on the terrain of Russian imperialism. Peter Struve [19], the foremost ideologist of Russian liberalism, became the prophet of the Greater Russia, and Paul Milyukov, the political leader of Russian liberalism, became the promoter of Russian policy in the Balkans, which along with the German policy in Turkey led to the 1914 war.
The war also buried under its ruins liberalism’s shows of struggle. During the war of 1914-17 the liberals were to make up the bulk of the patriotic forces of the Russian war. The revolution of 1917, which was no more than the uprising of the Russian popular masses against the devastating consequences of the Tsarist participation in the world war, had, from the start, also to be against the bourgeoisie.
However, the counter-revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie meant that the working class had to conduct a very hard struggle against the industrial bourgeoisie in order to fight Tsarism. The working class had to struggle against it step by step in order to assert its influence over the semi-proletarian and petit-bourgeois masses. At the same time it appeared that the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie corresponded not only with its attitude towards democracy, but that the struggle for democracy also developed from the social role of the proletariat, its struggle against capitalist exploitation. The proletariat didn’t even need to venture beyond the limit of the minimum programme to enter into struggle with the bourgeoisie. From the moment it began to struggle against the methods of primitive accumulation, which were then practised in Russia by capitalism, it came right up against the bourgeoisie. The struggle for the eight-hour day (bourgeois democracy is a nonsense if this demand is not satisfied, for a beast of burden, who is welded from dawn till late at night to the machine, obviously cannot take part in political life) led after the October Manifesto to the great struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, a struggle in which the bourgeoisie as a class was openly, clearly and unequivocally ranged on the side of Tsarism, from which it sought help against the proletariat. The antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie was shown as one of the most important driving forces of the Russian Revolution.
The revolution did not definitely impose itself on the village, but there it undermined the foundations of Tsarism as much as in the town. Over a large part of Russia it drove the peasantry to engage in an armed struggle against the nobility. The red cockerel made its cry resound over the lands of the nobles who had mobilised all the scorpions of the government against the peasants. Even though the class consciousness of the peasantry in the army was still too little developed to prevent the peasants from playing the role of executioner as regards their own brethren, the punitive military expeditions into the villages nonetheless undermined the old mentality in the army, just as in the village. Tsarism understood better than the Mensheviks the danger threatening it from the side of the peasantry. The Tsarist government after having hoped at the time of the elections for the first Duma in 1906 that the ignorant mass of peasants would form a counterweight to the city vote, sought after the first revolution to split them up in order to rely upon the rich peasants against the poor, and thus to be able, thanks to this new antagonism inside the peasant mass itself, to weaken and paralyse the force of its blows against the Tsarist state.
The new factor, which the Marxist analysis had not foreseen, was the form by which the working class organised itself as a revolutionary agent. Alongside political parties and alongside trade unions, Soviets instinctively arose. During the days of October 1905, at the time of the great shaking of Tsarism by the general strike, in some cities the Soviets were the organs of power, and the bourgeoisie had to capitulate before them in many places. They showed themselves in an embryonic way as organs of the struggle for power. Marxists explained their appearance by the absence of old trade unions solidly implanted in the working class, from which sprang the need for loose proletarian organisations. Even the Russian Marxists, not to speak of the European Marxists, did not then see that they were not only organisations of struggle against the bourgeois government, but also the embryos of the future organisation of proletarian power. It is entirely characteristic that the idea of Soviets had absolutely not penetrated the intellectual universe of the European Socialist movement, which was enlivened in so many things by the first Russian Revolution.
2. G.V. Plekhanov, Socialism and the Political Struggle, Selected Philosophical Works, Volume 1, London 1961, p.9. Radek was wrong about the date of this work, which was in reality published in 1883.
3. Iskra (Spark) was the name of the paper of the Russian Social Democrats founded in 1900. The Economists were those members of the party who wanted to restrict its activity to supporting the economic struggle, and refrain from raising political demands.
4. The Party of the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), the main party of the Russian peasants led by Victor Chernov, was founded in 1901.
5. V.I. Lenin, Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, Collected Works, Volume 9, Moscow 1962, pp. 28–9.
6. Alexander Israel Parvus (Helphand, 1867–1924) was the first Marxist to apply the theory of the Permanent Revolution to the concrete conditions of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century.
7. Karl Kautsky (1854–1938) was the main theoretician of German Social Democrat and of the Second International in the years before the First World War.
8. Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) was a leading theorist of German Marxism and leader of the Spartakusbund, and was killed during the German revolution.
9. The Congress of the Second International meeting in Amsterdam in August 1904 passed a resolution stating that Social Democrats ’cannot wish to take part in a government within the boundaries of bourgeois society’.
10. Karl Kautsky, Triebkräfte und Aussichten der russischen Revolution, Neue Zeit, 25 Jg., 1907, Volume 1 No. 10, pp. 331–3. [English version: The Driving Forces of the Russian Revolution and its Prospects in Neil Harding (ed.), Marxism in Russia: Key Documents 1879-1906, Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 352–403. – D.G.].
11. Karl Kautsky, Von der Demokratie zur Staatssklaverei. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Trotzki, Freiheit, Berlin, 1921, p. l28.
12. Which came out in Moscow in 1919 in his pamphlet Results and Prospects: On the Motor Forces of the Russian Revolution, Sovjetski Mir editions. Cf. The Permanent Revolution, New York 1969, pp. 29–122.
13. L.D. Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution, pp. 69–70.
14. Op. cit., pp. 101–2.
15. Op. cit., p.105.
16. Fyodor Andreyevich Cherevanin (Lipkin, 1868–1938) was a prominent Menshevik, and a member of his party’s Central Committee in 1917. [Rosa Luxemburg, Die Lehren der Drei Dumas, Przeglad Socjaldemokratyczny, Nr.3, May 1908, in Luxemburg, Internationalismus und Klassenkampf: Die polnischen Schriften, Berlin: Luchterland, 1971. This was a review of A. Tscherewanin, Das Proletariat und die russische Revolution, mit einer Vorrede von H. Roland-Holst und einem Anhang vom Übersetzer S. Lewitin, Stuttgart: Dietz, 1908. – D.G.]
17. Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, 1906.
18. Cf. Dan’s article Die Bedingungen des erneuten Aufschwungs des russischen Revolution, Die Neue Zeit, 25 Jg., Volume 2 No. 27, 1 April 1908, pp. 4–10, and No. 28, 3 April 1908, pp. 49–58.
19. Pyotr Bernhardovich Struve (1870–1944) was a prominent Russian economist who began as a Marxist and then moved over to the Cadets.
Last updated on 18.10.2011