Introduction: The Polarization of Russian Marxism (1833–1903)

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Leninism: Marxist or Populist?

In the years 1902–5 Vladimir Akimov and Vladimir Lenin stood at the opposite poles of Russian revolutionary Marxism. Lenin, as the leader of the Bolshevik faction, had opted for a ‘maximalist’ interpretation of Marxist thought—a full-blooded socialist régime in Russia as an immediate goal. For Akimov (the major spokesman of the so-called ‘Economist’ faction), Marxism demanded before all else the belief that the workers must master their own fate. The ‘kingdom of freedom’ could only be built on the broad foundations of popular initiative. A socialist revolution, as distinct from a revolutionary coup or an anarchic jacquerie, could be carried through only by a working-class confident in its own self-made and democratically-run organizations, in its own knowledge and ambitions. And to lay such foundations required time, patience. Both men were revolutionaries because both saw in the Tsarist autocracy an insuperable barrier thrown across the road of historical advance. But profound disagreement about the post-revolutionary future led to their diametrically opposed interpretations of party history, of Marxist doctrine and of the principles of party organization.

The full implications of this dispute only became apparent after the February Revolution of 1917 when Lenin's call for the immediate establishment of a proletarian dictatorship clashed with the caution of the Mensheviks who, together with the right-wing Bolsheviks led by Kamenev, urged that a longer period of parliamentary government was required to enable the proletariat to prepare itself for power. But Lenin successfully asserted the primacy of political initiative over the dictates of socio-economic ‘realities’. It was against his voluntaristic interpretation of Marxism that Bukharin, too, was twice to argue a ‘deterministic’ alternative.