Late Marx and Russian peasants: an aside concerning ‘deviations’^*

* Editorial Note: The Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) is republishing Teodor Shanin’s ‘Marxism and the vernacular revolutionary traditions’ – alongside this introduction to the 1881 letters of Vera Zasulich and Karl Marx and the letters themselves – as one of the journal’s contributions to various initiatives worldwide in 2018 marking the 200th birthday of Karl Marx.

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Notes

* Editorial Note: The Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) is republishing Teodor Shanin’s ‘Marxism and the vernacular revolutionary traditions’ – alongside this introduction to the 1881 letters of Vera Zasulich and Karl Marx and the letters themselves – as one of the journal’s contributions to various initiatives worldwide in 2018 marking the 200th birthday of Karl Marx.

1 Central to that line of argument were the works and views of B. Chicherin adapted in Marx’s time by A. Wagner and in later generations by P. Miliukov, K. Kocharovskii, etc., as well as by G. Plekhanov and I. Chernyshev in the marxist camp. This view was often referred to as the ‘state school’. It was opposed by an equally impressive list of scholars and political theorists of whom N. Chernyshevskii and I. Belyaev were paramount to Marx’s own generation. Marx himself spoke up sharply against Chicherin.

2 Marx wrote the passage in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), referring to France, but deleted it in the reprint of 1869.

3 Marx and Engels, Sochineniya (Moscow 1961), vol. 32, p. 158. This sentence was removed by Marx in later editions of the text.

4 See Shanin (1983), part 2.

5 How much all that still aches can be best exemplified by a short aside from P. Konyushaya, Karl Marx I revolyutsionnaya rossiya (Moscow 1975), where after a stream of invectives against the multiplicity of ‘falsifiers of Marx’, i.e. everybody who discussed him outside the USSR, tells us that Plekhanov ‘based his argument on the position formulated by Marx in his letter to “Otechestvennye Zapiski”’ (p. 357). She forgets to inform us when, where and how.

6 David Ryazanov, see Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road, Part Two. For contemporary Western equivalents of that view see Marx and Engels (1952), The Russian Menace to Europe, p. 266, and on the left, J. Elster in K. Marx, Verker I Utlag (Oslo 1970), p. 46.

7 Plekhanov’s speech at the Fourth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party in 1906 stated it explicitly. On the other hand, the year 1905 also saw the appeals of the Saratov Bolsheviks and of Nikodim (A. Shestakov, the chief of the agrarian section of the Bolsheviks’ Moscow committee) against Lenin’s new agrarian programme, treated by them as ‘capitulation’ to the populist petty bourgeoisie.

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Teodor Shanin

Teodor Shanin is a professor emeritus at the University of Manchester, Fellow of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the Russian Federation, and President of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. He was a co-editor (together with Terence J. Byres and Charles Curwen) of the Journal of Peasant Studies in 1973–1975.