May & June

On May 5, 1818, in the Prussian town of Trier, a child named Karl was born into the family of Jewish lawyer Heinrich Marx, a birth that proved to be of great consequence for the course of human history.

The birth went unnoticed in Russia, of course. Even in the 1840s, when Marx’s rallying cry, “Proletarians of the world, unite!” began to gain traction in Western Europe, Russia paid little attention. And why should it? At that point, you could just about count Russia’s proletarians on the fingers of one hand.

In 1848, when Marx published his pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, Russia remained an island of calm amid a sea of European unrest. “Mount your horses, gentlemen! There’s revolution in Paris,” Nicholas I is purported to have exhorted officers of his guard at a ball that year. Russia’s defenders of order did not make it to Paris, but, at the request of the Austrian emperor, they did help suppress an uprising in Hungary.

Nicholas strongly believed that monarchs had to stick together and prevent the revolutionary contagion from spreading. He took great pride in the fact that, in 1848, as the rest of Europe was in turmoil, there were no barricades being built in the streets of Russian cities and that he, the monarch, sat securely on his throne. The tranquility that reigned in Russia was, for Nicholas, clear evidence that his country was following the correct course, unlike the dissolute West.

In 1849, when a small group of rebels was discovered in St. Petersburg, they were treated with a heavy hand. In fact, calling the group “rebels” is quite a stretch: the Petrashevsky Circle was made up of journalists, philosophers, and writers who met in the home of Mikhail Butashevich-Petrashevsky to discuss how to best organize a just society, to plan the publication of books about socialism (they might eventually have gotten to Marx, but in 1849 they were nowhere near that point), and to print copies of Belinsky’s famous letter to Gogol, an eloquent statement of progressive values. One member of the group was Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who was only just beginning to gain a literary reputation. The group’s sins were considered sufficiently egregious to warrant the staging of a mock execution: the members of the group were tied to stakes and faced a firing squad, fully believing they were about to die. At the last minute, their sentences were commuted to forced labor.

Several years later, as Nicholas I approached death, he was able to contemplate the causes underlying Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Crimean War and ask himself whether he had chosen the right path for his country during his thirty-year rule and, ultimately, whether Russia could remain a flourishing place of calm in the absence of freedom.

Russia then entered a new and tumultuous phase, most notably marked by the liberation of the serfs (1861), among numerous other reforms. An important feature of this era was the incredibly rapid spread of socialist ideas among the younger generation, although this was not yet Marxist socialism. In the dozens of discussion groups that were formed in Moscow and St. Petersburg, young people read socialist thinkers and dreamed of a society with no private property, no state, and where people would live in blissful freedom in communes.

Around the same time, a well-known psychological phenomenon began to take hold. People often interpret their shortcomings as potential virtues. This is perfectly understandable. It is not easy to see yourself as foolish, weak, and insignificant. Rather than foolish, how much more pleasant it is to see yourself as having a “special way of thinking,” and, rather than being weak, as possessing a “special brand of spirituality.” This is how Russia’s young Narodniks came to the conclusion that Russia’s economic backwardness was an advantage rather than a failing (based on the word narod – the folk or the people – Narodnichestvo was a purely Russian form of populism practiced by educated young Russians in the 1860s and 1870s that involved going into the countryside to help the peasantry understand the need for revolt).

Ironically, there was a certain affinity between the ideas of these revolutionarily inclined and passionate young people and those of the authorities they so despised. Nicholas I and his associates and descendants saw Russia’s difference from the West as a clear advantage: the West had revolutions, socialism, and individualism, while Russia had calm, stability, and sobornost (a tendency toward communalism and collectivity).

For Russia’s nineteenth-century revolutionaries, the country was more ripe for socialist revolution than Europe specifically because of its backwardness. Europe had capitalism, a well-developed system of private property, and the oppression of man by man. As far as oppression went, Russia was holding its own, but it was not doing as well when it came to legal frameworks bolstering private property, and the peasants were used to living in communes that managed land and decided important questions collectively «всем миром» (literally “by the whole world”) – in other words, through a general meeting. How was this any different from socialism?

While European revolutionaries had a powerful bourgeoisie to contend with, the situation in Russia, as the Narodniks saw it, required a different approach. All they needed to do was overthrow the tsar. After that, transforming life in Russia would be perfectly simple. The peasants may never have heard of socialism, but they would immediately grasp and appreciate its central principles. They were sure to welcome the revolutionaries with open arms.

The Narodnik’s high hopes that the peasants could be incited to revolt were cruelly dashed, leaving an entire generation of revolutionaries in a tragic state of stunned disappointment. Hundreds of enthusiastic young men and women had traveled out into the countryside with the idea that the peasants were “elemental socialists” with whom their attempts to foment revolution would immediately resonate. Instead, the peasants immediately reported these young idealists to the police. They were not about to rise up against the tsar! In their despair, a number of Narodniks traded in their populism for terrorism.

Meanwhile, in 1868, the First International, an organization that brought together a wide range of revolutionary groups, adopted a resolution mandating that Marx’s Das Kapital be translated into as many languages as possible. In Russia, Herman Lopatin soon began translating the work into Russian. Back then, Marx’s ideas still seemed exotic and foreign to most Russian revolutionaries, but with time, this attitude changed.

Disappointed in the Russian people, the Narodniks decided to take another approach to promoting the cause of the insufficiently socialist peasants. The late 1870s in Russia saw an upsurge in terrorism, culminating in the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. The regicides were hung, and the new tsar’s domestic policies took a ruthlessly oppressive turn.

Instigating the peasants to revolt and terrorism had both proven futile – what was to be done? Posed with this quandary, revolutionaries began to gradually turn toward Marxism. By then, this began to make at least some sense, since there were now a lot more workers in the country, and the Marxist version of socialism, which envisioned paradise on Earth being brought about by workers, began to look more appealing.

The first Marxist groups began to appear in Russia, and Georgy Plekhanov, who was living in emigration in Geneva, began to write the first Marxist works in Russian. Meanwhile, a certain Vladimir Ulyanov, who would later adopt the pseudonym Lenin, was creating the League to Fight for the Liberation of the Working Class. Socialists of every conceivable stripe and creed began to proliferate in Russia. To simplify a very complicated picture, it could be said that some of these socialists continued to adhere to their former, albeit somewhat revised, views, according to which the main revolutionary force in the country was the peasantry, which happened to constitute the vast majority of the population. If they were not yet rising up against the government, it was only a matter of time and propaganda. Others, the fastest growing brand of Russian socialist, considered the peasants to be “petty bourgeoisie” – the most insulting label a Marxist could conceive of. For them, there was no counting on the peasants; it was the working class that had to be educated and organized. In Marx’s famous works “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.”

One minute these various groups of socialists would unite, and the next they would be at each other’s throats, only to come together again to read underground literature, found parties, theorize, and hold illegal May Day gatherings (маёвки). Together, they were sent into exile (from which they rather easily escaped) and went into emigration, where they sat together in the cafes of Paris and Zurich, waiting until the time was ripe.

In 1917, the time was ripe. The tsarist government collapsed, and a vast array of parties, organizations, and political movements was able to make its case to the Russian people. Of course, most of them did not have very long to make that case.

A little more than a year later, in May, 1918, socialist was fighting socialist.

The Bolsheviks had managed to seize power, but they had many opponents: monarchists, liberals (who wanted power to go to the Constituent Assembly that the Bolsheviks had dissolved), Cossacks and other former officers of the tsarist army, peasants (who did not much like having their grain expropriated), and many more. The summer of 1918 started with the SR (Socialist Revolutionary) Party (which had always rested its hopes on the peasants, and on terrorism) heading a campaign throughout Siberia and the Volga region against their former socialist comrades, the Bolsheviks, who had levied onerous taxes on the peasantry and goaded poor peasants to attack the more prosperous ones.

In May of 1918, when passions were running high in Russia and military conflicts were erupting one after another, the Czechoslovak Legion emerged as a force to be reckoned with. The legion was made up Czechs and Slovaks, many of whom had been taken prisoner or deserted while fighting in World War I as part of the Austro-Hungarian Army but had absolutely no desire to lay down their lives for the detested Hapsburgs. Before the Provisional Government collapsed, the Czechoslovak forces were used as part of Russia’s war effort, but when the Bolsheviks came to power, Russia left the war, and it was unclear what to do with the Czechs and Slovaks. They were put on trains headed for Vladivostok, as part of a roundabout effort to get them back to Europe. Their relations with the Bolsheviks deteriorated to the point that rumors started flying that they would be returned to Germany and Austro-Hungary, where they would be tried as deserters. On May 25, 1918, Trotsky threw a spark into this powder keg by ordering that the Czechoslovak troops be disarmed, provoking them to rise up in rebellion.

The Czechoslovaks joined forces with socialist governments that existed in Siberia at the time and, instead of heading eastward toward the Pacific, turned around and started to storm Bolshevik-held cities of the Urals and the Volga region. During June and early July of 1918, the SRs (who by then looked like moderates compared to the Bolsheviks, despite their terrorist past) came close to gaining power. As the SR troops approached the cities and villages along the Volga, they rose up one after another against the Bolsheviks, who had been oppressing and plundering them. The SRs almost prevailed in this battle between socialists, especially as, on July 6, there was an SR uprising in Moscow, and, a few days later, many of the Bolshevik units fighting them came close to switching sides.

What if the SRs had won? It is hard to know whether they would have instituted a more moderate regime, something akin to the social democratic movements that took shape in the West, or instituted a dictatorship no less ruthless than the Bolsheviks. In any event, that did not happen. One socialist party crushed the other, and by the end of that summer, the SRs had to withdraw from the Volga region and the Urals. They began to be a target of ever-increasing suspicion from the other anti-Bolshevik political forces. People started to say (quite reasonably) that the Bolsheviks and SRs were cut from the same cloth, and that the SRs could hardly be counted on to help bring about a victory for the less radical forces. In any event, by the fall of 1918, the SR governments of Siberia had been overthrown and the era of Admiral Kolchak, who had little patience for socialist views, began.

The Bolsheviks won the Civil War and defeated, destroyed, or expelled from the country all of the forces opposing them – their former socialist brothers, the liberals, and the monarchists. In the 1920s, a number of SRs and Mensheviks were put on trial. Many of them had spent time with Lenin and Trotsky ten or fifteen years earlier, dreaming of revolution and the total restructuring of the world. These former comrades were loaded onto prison trains along with all the other “enemies of Soviet power.” It was a harsh, totalitarian, and unbending socialism of the Leninist-Stalinist brand that had triumphed.

By the end of the first couple of Five Year Plans, the economic model was fully formed: there was no room for the bourgeoisie, and millions would pay with their lives for the creation of this model. Stalin’s interpretation of Marxism was proclaimed the only true one, and it was best not to subject the crazy ideas of a tyrant about “building socialism in one country” (rather than throughout the entire world, which had been the dream) and about “intensifying the class struggle throughout the period that socialism is being built” (which, of course, required repression, arrests, and executions) to critical analysis.

It would be decades before a new interpretation of Marxism emerged in Eastern Europe. Eventually, in 1968, the Prague Spring shook the foundation of Communism, and Alexander Dubček proclaimed that Czechoslovakia would build “socialism with a human face,” which meant a multiparty system, freedom of expression, open borders, and other liberalizations that were absolutely unacceptable to the ossified Kremlin regime.

Throughout early 1968, the reforms that were part of the Prague Spring came one after another. By May, at the same time that, in Paris, students of the Sorbonne were starting to build barricades and shout the slogans of Lenin, Marx, Trotsky, and Mao, throughout Czechoslovakia political discussion groups were flourishing and the parties that had been eliminated by the communists were being reestablished.

Back in Russia, intellectuals followed what was happening in Czechoslovakia with bated breath. Transistor radios were an essential part of the lives of any educated family back then. Families would spend their evenings in the kitchen, gathered around the radio, trying to make out (despite the crackling and rumbling caused by the jammers, which were making an all-out effort to block the signals) what was happening there, in that socialist country that suddenly seemed so unlike their own? Could what was happening in Czechoslovakia hold a kernel of possibility for changes not only there, but in the Soviet Union as well?

What would have happened if Soviet leaders had recognized the potential of this alternative vision of socialism? Would the Soviet Union have been able to peacefully evolve into a more moderate political system? We will never know.

The old men of the Politburo had lost their “human faces” so long ago that the whole idea of “socialism with a human face” struck them as an egregious heresy. The Soviet tanks that rolled into Czechoslovakia dashed not only the hopes of the Czechoslovak people, but of the Soviet people as well.

Another twenty years passed, and by the spring of 1988, perestroika was in full bloom. In May, the law “On Cooperation” was enacted, permitting cooperatives to engage in any legal activity and representing a major step toward a free market. Later that month, a former sworn enemy of the Soviet Union, US President Ronald Reagan, arrived in Moscow. Most Soviet citizens still did not have the freedom to travel abroad, but the country was beginning to open up to the rest of the world. On June 1, Gorbachev and Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, putting a virtual end to the arms race. Glasnost became a household word. It would be more than a year before Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago would be published in the USSR, but May 1988 saw publication of a novel with a “scandalous reputation,” Doctor Zhivago, which had been banned for thirty years and had caused its author, Boris Pasternak, to endure hounding by the authorities.

In June of 1988,  an event took place that would have been inconceivable in previous decades: celebration of the millennium of Rus’s adoption of Christianity. Greater religious freedom was being afforded. Another incredible event was Russia’s first ever beauty pageant:  The Moscow Beauty. In the past, beauty pageants had been treated as a sign of Western decadence.

But perhaps the most important event of that surreal summer of ’88 took place in late June: the Nineteenth All-Union Conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This gathering featured, not for the first time, nor the last, clashes between those who advocated continuing the reforms and conservatives. This party conference demonstrated that the disgraced Boris Yeltsin actually had a huge number of supporters, making it perfectly clear that a storm was brewing within the ruling Communist Party, which was still the only officially recognized party. It continued to swear by the names Marx and Lenin, but these were increasingly empty oaths. Those idols would soon be knocked from their pedestals, and the country the Bolsheviks had created would enter a new era.

Finally, the man born in Trier in 1818 would no longer hold sway over the course of Russian history.