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Abstract
In the history of Russia’s development, there are clear, unchanging constants of empire, autocracy, and property as power (property/propertilessness). These are persistent structures that have existed over a long historical period, which are created by the state and society, and are upheld by tradition. On the one hand, they are restrictive, but on the other hand, they guide the direction of socioeconomic, sociopolitical, and cultural development, and also facilitate the emergence of the corresponding social actors (individuals or groups) and institutions. During the Russian revolutionary process, which spanned 1905–1922 and reached its apex in the October Revolution, an attempt was made to change these constants. However, this attempt failed, and Russia returned to its traditional path of development.
Notes
1. See, for example, A.B. Zubov, “Tsikly russkoi istorii” [The cycles of Russian history] Voprosy filosofii, 2005, no. 3; V.I. Pantin and V.V. Lapkin, Politicheskaia modernizatsiia Rossii: tsikly, osobennosti, zakonomernosti [Political Modernization of Russia: Cycles, Particularities, Laws] (Moscow, 2007); N.S. Rozov, Koleia i pereval: makrosotsiologicheskie osnovaniia strategii razvitiia Rossii v XXI veke [The Track and Pass: The Macrosociological Basis of Russia’s Developmental Strategy in the Twentieth Century] (Moscow, 2011).
2. A.S. Akhiezer, I.M. Kliamkin, and I.G. Yakovenko, Istoriia Rossii: konets ili novoe nachalo [Russia History: The End or a New Beginning] (Moscow, 2008), p. 269.
3. I.M. Kliamkin, “Zatukhaiushchaia tsiklichnost’” [A dimming cyclical], Gefter. http://gefter.ru/archive/6660.
4. A detailed study of the issue of property and ownership is provided by V.V. Bibikhin. Focusing on the latent polarity of what is owned and ownership, he notes that underneath the values of the physical and the legal, these concepts signify ideas of authenticity, ancestry, nativeness, and intimacy; that is, what is not owned by the individual, but instead owns him. V.V. Bibikhin, Sobstvennost’. Filosofiia svoego [Property: The Philosophy of Ownership] (St. Petersburg, 2012), pp. 99–102.
5. The Russian term is samoderzhets, which comes from the concept of samoderzhavie, which is usually translated as tsarist autocracy. It is a calque from the Greek, Αυτοκρατορία.—Trans.
6. Rada or Chosen Rada is a term used to designate a group of advisors who formed the informal government under Ivan IV, 1549–60. The zemsky sobor was the first Russian parliament of the feudal estates in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The term roughly means assembly of the land. Sudebnik is the code of laws composed by Ivan with the zemsky sobor.—Trans.
7. In 1721, Feofan Prokopovich in his “Spiritual Regulations” stated the following position: “The power of monarchs is autocratic power, which God himself commands to obey in all fairness.”
8. This fact does not make Russia unique. Many nations passed through the stage of active expansionism. However, unlike our country, their expansionism was, first, limited in time and, second, was based on a fundamentally different basis: a metropolis is a home, while a colony is not. In Russia, this division did not exist; although, it was to some extent captured in the earlier concept of the center versus the marginal and provincial, and is now present in the term regions.
9. The sudebnik of 1497 established a two-week period around Yuri’s Day as the only time of the year when the Russian peasants were free to move from one landowner to another.—Trans.
10. B.N. Mironov, Rossiiskaia imperiia: ot traditsii k modernu [The Russian Empire: From Tradition to Modernity] (St. Petersburg, 2014), vol. 1, p. 95.
11. V. Klyuchevskii, Tsar’ Ivan Groznyi [The Tsar Ivan the Terrible] (Moscow, 2011), p. 30.
12. A. Etkind, Vnutrenniaia kolonizatsiia. Imperskii opyt Rossii [Internal Colonization: The Imperial Russian Experience] (Moscow, 2013), p. 109.
13. In Imperial Russia, most peasants worked in obshchinas, communal village farms, as opposed to individually owned farms.—Trans.
14. B.N. Mironov, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 228.
15. The Constitutional Democrats (Cadets), who were close to the Octoberists, by the end of March 1917, rejected the idea of a constitutional monarchy after the abdication of Nicholas II and began to advocate for a democratic parliamentary republic.
16. On the eve of the October Revolution, the political situation forced the Bolsheviks to accept, and claim as their own, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party’s agrarian program. However, this did not prevent them from consistently attacking the program throughout 1918–22 with both legislation and direct violence in order to promote the idea of “socialist” (state) agriculture. For details, see S.A. Nikolsky, Vlast’ i zemlia. Khronika utverzhdeniia biurokhatii v derevne posle Oktiabria [Power and Land: The Chronicle of Enforcing Bureaucracy in the Country after October] (Moscow, 1990).
17. V.I. Lenin, Poln. sobr. soch [Complete Works], vol. 1, p. 498 [Abbreviated below as LCW].
18. Lenin, LCW, vol. 33, p. 83.
19. Lenin, LCW, vol. 33, p. 56.
20. It should be noted that, among other things, this was also necessary in the Paris Commune’s confrontation with the Vendée peasants.
21. The prodrazvyorstka was a Bolshevik policy and campaign of buying and/or confiscating grain and other agricultural products from peasants for a nominal fixed price according to specified quotas.—Trans.
22. N.I. Bukharin was incorporated into the top party leadership (later called the Politburo) in 1918, while E.A. Perobrazhensky was incorporated in 1920.
23. The past tense is used by the author as literary device, since the book is meant to be the memories of a person living in Soviet Russia in the second half of the twentieth century.
24. E.A. Perobrazhensky, Ot NEPa k sotsializmu. Vzgliad v budushchee Rossii i Evropy [From NEP to Socialism: A Look to the Future of Russia and Europe] (Moscow, 1922), pp. 119–20.
25. Ibid., pp. 137–38.
26. “Rural workers,” wrote Engels, “can get rid of their abject poverty only if the land, which is their primary source of their labor, is removed from the private ownership of large farmers, and the even larger feudal owners, and converted to social property collectively farmed by partnerships of rural workers.” K. Marx and F. Engels, Sochineniia [Works] (Moscow), vol. 16, p. 419. Ten years after Marx’s death, Engels concretizes their joint representation. According to him, changing the nature of production, urban and rural workers would alternately work in the factories and in the fields. “With regard to the working time, nothing prevents us during sowing or harvesting and generally whenever you need to quickly increase the workforce, to put to work as many workers as is needed. In the course of the 8-hour work day, we can have two or even three shifts, even if each worker only had to work every day just two hours at the special task; since we have enough people trained for such work, we can have eight, nine, ten consecutive shifts.” Ibid., vol. 39, p. 88.
27. A dessiatina is equivalent to 2.702 English acres or 10,925 square meters.—Trans.
28. N. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky, Azbuka kommunizma [The ABCs of Communism] (Moscow, 1920), p. 164.
29. V.V. Kabanov, Oktiabr’skaia revolutsiia i kooperatsiia (1917–mart 1919) [The October Revolution and Cooperation (1917–March 1919)] (Moscow, 1973), pp. 58–59.
30. V.P. Danilov, “Kooperatsiia dvatsatykh godov: opyt stanovleniia” [The Cooperation of the Twenties: The Experience of Formation], Chelovek i zemlia. Mirovozzrenie. Ekonomika. Sel’skokhoziaistvennaia praktika [Man and Land: Worldview. Economy. Agricultural Practice] (Moscow, 1988), p. 190.
31. Ibid., p. 191.
32. Kabanov, op. cit., p. 59.
33. Lenin, LCW, vol. 34, p. 308.
34. Lenin, LCW, vol. 35, p. 206.
35. Bol’sheviki u vlasti. Sb. st. Petr, [The Bolsheviks in Power: Collected Articles. Petrograd] (Moscow, 1918), pp. 201–2.
36. In March 1922, at the XI Congress of the RCP (b) Lenin said several things that a year earlier would have been unlikely. He seemed to challenge those comrades inclined toward so-called “war communism” to realize the obvious fact that “in the mass of the people we are still merely a drop in the bucket, and we can govern only when we properly express what the people realize.” In particular, “it is necessary to make it so that the normal course of the capitalist economy and capitalist circulation of wealth is possible, because it is necessary for the people, without this life is impossible.” Lenin, LCW, vol. 45, p. 112; 86.
37. Bibikhin, Sobstvennost’. Filosofiia svoego, p. 100.
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Notes on contributors
Sergey A. Nikolsky
Sergey Anatol’evich Nikolsky, doctor of philosophical sciences, is a professor at the State Academic University for the Humanities and a principal research associate and head of the Department of Philosophy of Culture at the Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences. E-mail: [email protected]