Free The Red Flag: A History of Communism by David Priestland Page B

thousands of officials, including several ministers – one author has estimated that over 17,000 people died as a result of terrorism in the twenty years before 1917. 25 Meanwhile the
okhrana
(secret police) fought back, often very effectively. In 1908 it emerged that one of the terrorist leaders was none other than an undercover police agent – Evno Azef.
    The temper of politics changed, however, with the devastating famine of 1891. The tsarist state’s failure to deal with the crisis encouraged educated society to take its place and organize famine relief. It now seemed imperative that socialists become involved in peaceful reform. However, it proved impossible to return to the politics of Lavrov and the 1870s. Russia was industrializing rapidly, and the famine had destroyed any lingering idealism about the countryside. The old agrarian socialist consensus that the peasant commune was Russia’s gift to world socialism, and that suitably modernized it would become the germ of the ideal society, was damaged beyond repair; agriculture and the peasantry appeared now to be irremediably backward, the embodiment of Russia’s
aziatchina
, and a new revolutionary class would have to be found. It was this lacuna that explains the attractiveness of Marxism. The principles of Marxism provided an alternative to the tsarist hierarchy, but also promised a new vanguard – the working class – and a path out of backwardness. Moreover they appeared to be ‘scientific’ and Western. As the revolutionary and friend of Lenin, Nikolai Valentinov, remembered:
    We seized on Marxism because we were attracted by its sociological and economic
optimism
, its strong belief, buttressed by facts and figures, that the development of the economy, the development of capitalism, bydemoralizing and eroding the foundations of the old society, was creating new forces (including us) which would certainly sweep away the autocratic regime together with its abominations… We were also attracted by its
European
nature. Marxism came from Europe. It did not smell and taste of home-grown mould and provincialism, but was new, fresh and exciting. Marxism held out the promise that we would not stay a semi-Asiatic country, but would become part of the West with its culture, institutions and attributes of a free political system. The West was our guiding light. 26
    The ‘Marxism’ adopted by the Russian socialists was firmly of the Modernist variety: a backward Russia would have to endure capitalist development first and as such socialism was a long way away. This was not immediately apparent when Marx was first translated into Russian. When
Capital
was delivered to Skuratov, one of the two tsarist censors deputed to read half of it in 1872, he reported: ‘it is possible to state with certainty that very few people in Russia will read it, and even fewer will understand it’. 27 He concluded that it could be published, arguably the most important mistake made by the censors since
What is to be Done?
appeared nine years before. The Russian edition of the work – the first translation from its original German – was an extraordinary hit among the Russian reading public, massively outselling its Hamburg predecessor. But Skuratov was right that not all would understand it, at least initially. Both agrarian socialists and official, pro-regime newspapers welcomed it, as a warning of the capitalist nightmare of child labour and satanic mills. Yet even though Marx himself seems to have been persuaded in the 1880s that Russia could avoid capitalism and preserve the commune, the message of
Capital
was the exact opposite: capitalism was inevitable. And in 1883, this became the doctrine of the first Marxist organization in Russia, ‘The Liberation of Labour’, founded by the exiled revolutionary Georgii Plekhanov. Plekhanov abandoned the old Russian agrarian socialist faith in the peasantry and declared firmly that Russia would not be ready for socialism until it had