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ABSTRACT
In October 1906 G. V. Plekhanov sent a questionnaire to the leaders of international Social Democracy, requesting their opinion about the class character of the Russian Revolution and the tactics which followed from this analysis for the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He received 12 responses, which overwhelmingly supported the Menshevik position: the Russian Revolution was not socialist, at most it was bourgeois revolution with socialist elements; the boycott of the Duma was considered an error and cooperation with the parties of the bourgeois opposition, essential. The exception to this rule was the reply of Karl Kautsky. While Kautsky’s answer was cautious enough for both Lenin and Trotsky to consider it as a confirmation of their theories, it categorically rejected the possibility of a coalition with the bourgeoisie, the posture favoured by Plekhanov, and therefore constituted a clear refutation of the Menshevik prospects on the Russian Revolution.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on Contributors
Paula Avila is an assistant professor of contemporary history at the National University of Cordoba, Argentina. She is the author of “Fuerzas Motrices y Perspectivas de la Revolución Rusa: Karl Kautsky, 1906” [Driving Forces and Perspectives of the Russian Revolution: Karl Kautsky, 1906] (Izquierdas, Santiago de Chile, No. 24, July 2015, 246–83).
Daniel Gaido is a researcher at the National Research Council (Conicet), Argentina. He is the author of The Formative Period of American Capitalism (Routledge, 2006) and co-editor, together with Richard B. Day, of Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record (Brill, 2009); Discovering Imperialism: Social Democracy to World War I (Brill, 2009) and Responses to Marx’s “Capital”: From Rudolf Hilferding to Isaak Illich Rubin (Brill, forthcoming).
ORCID
Daniel Gaido http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9660-4834
Notes
1. The years of revolution (1905–7). All classes came out into the open. All programmatical and tactical views were tested by the action of the masses. In its extent and acuteness, the strike struggle had no parallel anywhere in the world. The economic strike developed into a political strike, and the latter into insurrection. The relations between the proletariat, as the leader, and the vacillating and unstable peasantry, as the led, were tested in practice. The Soviet form of organization came into being in the spontaneous development of the struggle. The controversies of that period over the significance of the Soviets anticipated the great struggle of 1917–20. The alternation of parliamentary and non-parliamentary forms of struggle, of the tactics of boycotting parliament and that of participating in parliament, of legal and illegal forms of struggle, and likewise their interrelations and connections—all this was marked by an extraordinary wealth of content. As for teaching the fundamentals of political science to masses and leaders, to classes and parties alike, each month of this period was equivalent to an entire year of “peaceful” and “constitutional” development. Without the “dress rehearsal” of 1905, the victory of the October Revolution in 1917 would have been impossible (Lenin Citation1993, 10–11).
2. The resolution passed by the International Socialist Congress in Amsterdam, held in August 1904, stated: “The Congress repudiates to the fullest extent possible the efforts of the revisionists, which have for their object the modification of our tried and victorious policy based on the class war, and the substitution, for the conquest of political power by an unceasing attack on the bourgeoisie, of a policy of concession to the established order of society” (De Leon Citation1904, 96).
3. The questionnaire was published on page 206 of Sovremennaia zhizn (Modern life), no. 11 in 1906. Although Plekhanov lived in Geneva, he was the editor of that Moscow journal, and in this capacity published the questions and the answers he had himself selected (Baron Citation1995).
4. Lars T. Lih argued that Kautsky and all the participants in the 1902–7 debate on the Russian Revolution (whose documents we have translated in the anthology Witnesses to Permanent Revolution), with the sole exception of Trotsky, rejected the perspective of a socialist revolution in Russia and held fast to a perspective which he idiosyncratically calls “democratic revolution in Permanenz”—a concept alien to Marxism (Lih Citation2012). This is a misreading of the historical record. The debate turned around the question of the dual nature of the Russian Revolution, which was “neither a purely bourgeois nor a purely socialist revolution but rather a sui generis [of its own kind] historical phenomenon combining bourgeois and proletarian features,” and which “would simultaneously complete the series of bourgeois revolutions inaugurated in 1789 and begin a new round of proletarian revolutions leading to socialism’s international triumph” (Day and Gaido Citation2013, 402–3).
5. “The general sociological term bourgeois revolution by no means solves the politico-tactical problems, contradictions and difficulties which the mechanics of a given bourgeois revolution throw up” (Trotsky Citation2010, 75).
6. In 1897, less than 13% of the population of European Russia lived in towns, as against 41% in France, 54% in Germany, and 77% in Great Britain. Peasants still comprised some four fifths of the total population. According to the 1897 census, only 25% of men and 10% of women outside the cities were literate. According to official statistics, a total of 2.2 million workers were employed in mining and manufacturing industries in 1900. If one includes those not subject to the factory inspectorate, a figure of approximately two and a half million is obtained. To this one may add another half a million employed in transport and approximately 300,000 building operatives in urban areas, making 3.3 million in all. This represented 2.5% of the total population of 129 million in 1897. Prior to 1906 any independent labour organization, such as a trade union, was expressly forbidden by law. Until 1905, a strike, even if unorganized, was also a penal offence, for which those held responsible could be detained for a period of eight months (Keep Citation1963, 1–10).
7. The democratic constitutional party (popularly known as Cadets, by its initials in Russian) was created in October 1905 and its principal leader was Pavel Miliukov. To their right stood another bourgeois party, the “Union of October” or “Octobrists,” led by Alexander Guchkov and created after the Tsar promised, in his “October 1905 Manifesto,” to create a constitutional monarchy and organize elections to the State Duma.
8. This paragraph included in Trotsky’s article “Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution,” shows the coincidence between Lenin and Trotsky on this issue. Both believed that not only landlords but also the most prominent members of the bourgeoisie would oppose the revolution, since both shared common interests as exploiters linked through the banking system (Trotsky [Citation1939] Citation1969).
9. These forewords appear in English translation in Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record (Day and Gaido Citation2009, 570–80).
10. One of Kautsky’s more general arguments however (cf. Parliamentarism) is that the petty bourgeoisie was pushing radically for a democracy with which the bourgeoisie could not cope, which might throw into question use of the terms “bourgeois democracy” and “bourgeois democratic tasks”: i.e., that the bourgeoisie was (and is) not particularly interested in democracy at all.