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The Development of Capitalism in Russia

p The years that elapsed between the abolition of serfdom (1861) and the first Russian revolution of 1905 were described by Lenin as the "watershed of Russian history".

p This period was marked by the disappearance of the age-old feudal traditions which had characterised Russia before the great reform, and the emergence of new social patterns typical of bourgeois society. After the abolition of serfdom large factories sprang up in many parts of the country. Within the space of twenty years mechanised labour had already ousted manual labour throughout most of Russian industry.

p New industrial centres, apart from Moscow and the Urals, appeared on the map. Coal mining was developed on a large scale in the Donbas, and iron mining in the Krivoi Rog district. In the once barren steppe-lands of the southern Ukraine big metallurgical plants were built around which large towns grew up, such as Yuzovka (since renamed Donetsk), originally nothing but a small workers’ settlement for one of these plants in the steppes near the Sea of Azov. Old coastal towns such as Taganrog, Mariupol (since renamed Zhdanov) and Odessa also changed beyond recognition. By 1900 the industrial centres of the South already gave Russia more than half its pig iron, relegating the Urals, the original home of this industry, to second place.

p Russia was the largest country in the world. In the middle of the nineteenth century the Russian Empire occupied a ninth of the land area of the globe. This vast country possessed untold natural resources which owing to serfdom had remained unexploited. After the reform of 1861 thousands of miles of railways were built linking the central regions of the country with the remote borderlands, giving Russian industry easy access to the 518 mineral riches of the Caucasus, Kazakhstan and Siberia. Baku in Azerbaijan became a major oil centre, and later further oilfields were developed around Grozny in the North Caucasus. Copper mines were opened in Jezkazgan (Kazakhstan) where there were rich untouched deposits. Coal mining was also developed on a large scale in the Kuznetsk basin in Siberia.

p Russia’s fuel and mineral resources were boundless. In 1860 the population was about one-quarter of the European total, by 1900 almost a third. This represented a population increase of 80 per cent (from 74 to 133 million) for the 40 years from 1860 to 1900. Russian capitalists at that period had an unlimited reserve of labour at their disposal—millions of peasants, who either owned extremely small plots or who owned no land at all, were prepared to work on any terms. Last but not least, nascent Russian capitalism was able to turn to the industrial experience already amassed by the advanced capitalist countries of the West and learn a great deal from their achievements.

p From 1860 to 1900 industrial output went up more than 7 times while the equivalent figures for France and Britain were 2’/2 and just over 2 respectively. Russian pig iron output trebled in the course of a mere ten years (1886-1896). To achieve a similar rise France required 28 years, the United States 23 and Britain 22.

p The scale of concentration in industry was also greater in Russia than in the West. By 1890 almost half the total industrial labour force was employed at large factories with 500 men and over.

Yet as far as per capita production was concerned Russia still remained a long way behind the advanced capitalist countries. Britain produced roughly five times more pig iron a year per capita than Russia.

The Survival
of Feudal Practices in Rural Life

p Industrial development and urban expansion increased the demand for raw materials and foodstuffs. As a result agriculture and livestock-breeding were to assume an increasingly commercial character after the 1861 reform: more and more food was produced for marketing purposes.

p Poverty and land hunger drove the Russian peasants from the central regions of the country to the South and East. This migration led to the cultivation of extensive virgin lands in the Ukraine, the North Caucasus, on the East bank of the Volga and in Siberia. The native population of these regions, under the influence of the new Russian settlers also started to sow more cereals. 519 In a number of remote regions of the Asian part of the country, where the local tribes of hunters and herdsmen had no experience of arable farming Russian peasants carried out pioneer work in the cultivation of these new lands.

p The reform of 1861 had failed to do away with a good number of feudal practices in Russian rural life, and the most important of these was the continued existence of large landed estates. After the abolition of serfdom some landowners, in particular in western and southern regions, attempted to adapt themselves to the new economic relations which took shape as a result of the reform. They purchased machines, hired workers and started introducing capitalist methods of farming on their estates, transforming them into meat and grain factories. The majority of the landowners, however, especially those in Central Russia, showed no desire to renounce the advantages which went with their privileged position as owners of large landed estates. They preferred to hire out part of their land in small plots to land-hungry peasants on condition that the latter worked the remainder of their land for no remuneration or paid them half of their annual crop. This system of land tenure was very similar to that which had existed prior to the reform, when the peasants had paid fixed rents for the land they were allowed to work and performed specific labour services in return for it.

p Since the labour of those peasants who rented part of their land cost the landowners nothing, they saw no reason to purchase expensive machinery and introduce more up-to-date farming methods. The peasants themselves did not have the sufficient funds to do so, being in dire straits as a result of the crippling land rent and taxes they had to pay.

p As a rule the corn which the peasants still had at their disposal once they had settled accounts with their masters proved insufficient to provide them with a living until the next harvest, and they and their families were reduced to a life of semi-starvation. Children were frequently struck down by disease. Typhus, cholera and dysentery epidemics were frequent occurrences in the rural Russia of those days.

p Having so little money, peasants were unable to buy many manufactured goods. Since it was after all the peasantry that made up the bulk of the population, the low purchasing power of the peasant masses served to hold back the growth of the country’s domestic market. Thus vestiges of feudal practices in agriculture acted as a brake on economic progress in rural areas and in industry as well, hindering capitalist development in Russia.

p This is of course not to imply that all Russian peasants were exposed to equally hard conditions. Even before the reform rich 520 and poor peasants had lived and worked alongside each other, and after 1861 as commerce came to exert a greater influence on patterns of agriculture, the impoverishment of the vast mass of the peasants and the emergence of nuclei of rich peasants proceeded much more rapidly. The rich peasants who exploited hired workers came to constitute a new capitalist class, while the poor peasants whose tiny plots were not enough to feed themselves and their families were obliged to hire out their services. The poor peasants virtually ceased to be peasants in the true sense of the word, but rather agricultural labourers with individual allotments.

The old patriarchal way of life in rural Russia was disappearing fast. New groups with conflicting interests started to emerge in the Russian villages, and soon we find side by side an agricultural bourgeoisie and an agricultural proletariat. The number of the middle peasants decreased considerably. Confronted with ruin, the majority of them joined either the ranks of the urban proletariat or the hired labourers in the villages. Only a small number of this stratum of the peasantry succeeded in withstanding the fierce competition in the post-reform agricultural scene.

The Evolution of the Industrial Proletariat

p The growth of capitalist industry in Russia led to an increase in the number of hired workers, who made a break with agriculture and small-scale craft industry to come and work in the country’s large industrial enterprises. Gradually, a powerful new industrial proletariat emerged which was destined to play the leading role in the revolutionary transformation of society.

p A distinctive feature of the emergence of the industrial proletariat in Russia was the mass migration of the peasants to the industrial centres: as former patterns of rural life disintegrated, they flocked to the towns in search of work. Ruined craftsmen also ioined the ranks of the industrial proletariat, but the vast majority of factory workers were former peasants.

p While these new workers were now cut off from their former village homes, they kept in contact with their relations who had stayed behind in the villages. This close contact between workers and peasants was an important factor in shaping the deployment of class forces in the Russia of that time. It made possible the subsequent forging of a close-knit alliance between the working class and the peasantry.

p In no other European country was the working class subjected to such inhuman conditions as in Russia. Nowhere in Europe did the workers have such few rights or find it so difficult to legally 521 unite their forces in the struggle against the capitalists. In these intolerable working and living conditions, class consciousness and revolutionary fervour were soon to grow up in the ranks of the working class. The concentration of the country’s industrial proletariat in large-scale enterprises enabled the workers to put up a particularly stubborn and staunch resistance to capitalist exploitation.

p The Russian working class, closely linked as it was with the peasantry, was clearly destined to be a mighty ally and leader of the Russian peasantry. Russian industry was concentrated in the main in the central part of the country—in and around St. Petersburg, Moscow, Ivanovo and Tula. Yet when new industrial centres were opened up in the South and East of the country, Russian workers followed in the peasants’ footsteps in their exodus to the outlying parts of the country.

p Groups of industrial workers from among the local inhabitants of these regions also emerged, and as a result of close contact with the Russian workers soon came under their ideological influence. The proletariat of the Ukraine was made up of both Ukrainian and Russian former poor peasants. A large number of Russian workers were to be found in the ranks of the proletariat in the Baltic provinces, Byelorussia, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Such a situation was peculiar to the Russian Empire. There were no British workers in India or Dutch workers in Indonesia. In not one of the colonial empires did the proletariat of the mother country play such an important organisational role and exert such a wide influence on the liberation movement of the subject peoples as did the Russian proletariat in the peripheral regions of the Russian Empire.

The involvement of workers from the national minorities in the revolutionary struggle of the Russian proletariat was the vital condition for the creation of a united front of the peoples of Russia against tsarist colonialism and their inevitable national liberation as a result of the victorious Russian Revolution of 1917.

State Capitalism in Russia

p After the reform of 1861, capitalist developments were not only to be observed in the lower echelons of society but also in the subsequent policy of the tsarist government and the measures it introduced from above. The tsarist government had always striven to retain the political domination of the privileged nobility and gentry and to consolidate the empire’s economic and military might by improving communications and encouraging the construction of mines and factories. At this particular period it was 522 important for the government to encourage the concentration of capital and channel it into those sectors of the economy in whose development it had a vested interest.

p While protecting local industry from foreign competition by means of high tariff barriers, the government played an active role in the country’s economic life, placing large orders with the owners of big factories at advantageous prices, and at the same time allocating large sums to railway expansion. The State Bank granted loans running into millions to the powerful capitalists on very favourable terms. Individual capitalists soon owed the State Bank as much as five million rubles.

p The state treasury had controlled an important state sector in the country’s economy even tefore the reform of 1861, being the owner of large tracts of land and forests, mines and factories. After 1861, the state sector was also to assume a capitalist character. In addition, the tsarist government started to build railways at its own expense or buy up parts of the country’s railways that were private property. By 1894 more than half the country’s rail network was in the hands of the state. At the same time the state also acquired from private entrepreneurs various large railway engineering works and arms factories.

p Many civil servants and even ministers bought shares in capitalist enterprises. Since they thus had a personal interest in the profits of such enterprises they spared no effort to ensure them advantageous orders and long-term loans. Via these civil servants powerful capitalists were able to exert a definite influence on the policies pursued by the tsarist government.

p In order to accelerate industrial development the tsarist government later permitted the import of foreign capital, which proved a highly profitable undertaking for the foreign financiers who took advantage of this new concession. By the end of the nineteenth century this had led to French, Belgian, German, British and other takeovers of large industrial enterprises, in particular in the Russian mining and metallurgical industries.

These measures designed to promote industrial expansion did further capitalist development in Russia. Yet, at the same time, the introduction of capitalism "from above" blunted the initiative of the Russian bourgeoisie, which had grown accustomed to sops from the government. Besides, as a result of wide-scale investment from abroad, a significant part of industrial profits was leaving the country. The income derived from state factories and railways was spent by the tsarist government on undertakings which had little in common with the vital needs of the Russian people.

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Russian Culture at the End
of the Nineteenth Century

p The end of the nineteenth century saw a great flowering of literature, art and science in Russia. The writings of Lev Tolstoi (1828-1910) were to make a tremendous impact on men of all nations. The works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) and Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) were to become famous throughout the world. At this period Russia also gave the world the great music of Tchaikovsky (1840-1893), Moussorgsky (1839-1881), Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), and Borodin (1833-1887). The canvasses of realist artists such as Perov (1833-1882), Kramskoy (1837-1887) and Repin (1844-1930) were to exert a powerful social influence on the men of their times.

Leading lights in the sphere of the natural sciences at this time included Dmitry Mendeleyev (1834-1907) who devised the Periodic Table of the Elements, the outstanding physicist Stoletov (1839-1896), and the talented biologists Mechnikov (1845-1916) and Timiryazev (1843-1920).

The Populist Movement

p Peasant uprisings were still common occurrences even after the abolition of serfdom. Peasants now protested against the conditions resulting from this reform which in practice served the interests of the landowners. They were not prepared to reconcile themselves with the curtailment of their holdings and demanded the return of those lands which had been taken away from them and handed over to the gentry, and the liquidation of the completely unfeasible redemption payments. Peasant unrest kept flaring up and then dying down again all over the country as the people fought against obsolete feudal practices.

p The progressive Russian intelligentsia showed deep sympathy for the propertyless peasantry. Many of them were convinced that it would be but a simple task to rally together millions of peasants in a united uprising across the whole of Russia, do away with exploitation and ensure the people a life of happiness and freedom. Following in the footsteps of Chernyshevsky and Herzen, the new generation of the democratic Russian intelligentsia imagined that communes joined by all the inhabitants of each village would provide the nuclei of a socialist society in which the peasants would start living and working collectively. It was beliefs such as these that gave rise to the idea that an immediate transition could be made to socialism, by-passing capitalism, and also to a serious underestimation of the vital importance of seizing political power.

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p Meanwhile, the peasants, whose class and social consciousness were not at all developed, were not ready as yet for concerted action. There was no equality in rural communities and the interests of the impecunious masses had nothing in common with those of the peasants who lived well on the fat of the land. The working peasants’ only path to freedom from exploitation was to be found in an alliance with the industrial proletariat in a joint struggle led by the latter.

p A number of Russian revolutionaries were by now already familiar with the works of Marx and Engels. While living abroad they had had the chance to observe the rise of the labour movement in the countries of Western Europe and some of them had been eye-witnesses of the proletariat’s revolutionary battles, or even participated in them. In 1870 a group of Russian revolutionaries in exile in Switzerland had set themselves up as the Russian section of the First International. That same year the Russian revolutionary Herman Lopatin (1845-1918) was elected to the General Council of the International. With the help of his friends Lopatin translated the first volume of Capital into Russian. This work has since been translated into an enormous number of languages, but this Russian edition was the first translation to appear. Of this intelligent, bold and active revolutionary Marx had written: "There are few people I like and admire as much.”

p In 1871, at the instance of Marx, the General Council of the International, then in London, sent the Russian revolutionary Yelizaveta Dmitriyeva as its official representative to the Paris Commune. She succeeded in making her way to the besieged city and was to take an active part in the work of the Commune.

p Yet despite their knowledge of the activity and works of Marx and Engels, the Russian revolutionaries of this period had not yet fully accepted the ideas of revolutionary Marxism. The main reason for this was Russia’s backwardness: capitalist development was still at a very early stage and the industrial proletariat had only just come into being. Thus it was quite natural that many members of the Russian intelligentsia were still not in a position to appreciate the historical role of the working class and still persisted in their mistaken view that the main revolutionary force in Russia was the peasantry.

In 1874, about a thousand young Russians dressed in peasant attire set out for the villages—some in the hope of stirring up the peasants to revolt and organising a nation-wide uprising and others in order to propagate socialist ideas. This new offensive on the part of Russia’s revolutionary youth came to be known as the "going among the people”. Later those who had taken part in it and their sympathisers were known as Narodniki (from the word narod meaning people) or the Populists.

525

The Populists and Their Fight Against Tsarist Rule

p The peasants did not respond to the appeals of the Narodniki. They were not ready for an organised nation-wide uprising, and still less so for the adoption of socialist ideas. After this failure, some of the Narodniki lost heart and abandoned the movement while others decided to continue their propaganda work, setting themselves up as craftsmen, small traders or doctors’ assistants in rural areas for considerable periods. Realising the need to unite their efforts, these young revolutionaries set up a secret organisation known as Zemlya i Volya (Land and Freedom). They organised a clandestine printing press to publish their illegal journal which exposed the tsarist government’s policies as being quite incompatible with the interests of the people.

p Soon however many of the Narodniki were to lose faith in the effectiveness of their propaganda work in the villages. The most active among them who had failed to adopt correct tactics in their struggle were to advocate conspiracy against the tsarist government, regarding political assassination as the supreme method of struggle. They believed that the murder of a group of tsarist ministers and the Tsar himself would suffice to arouse panic in Russia’s ruling circles, after which seizure of state power would no longer present much difficulty. The Narodniki’s decision to embark on a path of political struggle was absolutely justified, but the type of political struggle which they chose was wrong. The idea that a number of terroristic acts and the assassination of various high-ranking officials would make it possible to change the state political structure was utterly groundless, as was to be borne out by subsequent events.

p In 1879, the Narodnik terrorists set up a new secret organisation called Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will). It was led by experienced revolutionaries including Andrei Zhelyabov, Sofia Perovskaya and Alexander Mikhailov. The members of this new organisation devoted their boundless energy and all their talent and knowledge to the performance of terrorist acts. They succeeded in assassinating a number of high-ranking state officials and then pronounced the death sentence on the Tsar himself. From that moment onwards, for a whole one and a half years Alexander II had a constant threat of death hanging over him. He was shot at when he went out for walks, mines were placed in royal trains and dynamite was even exploded on one occasion under the very dining room of his palace in the centre of St. Petersburg. The sympathies of progressives the world over were on the side of these valiant opponents of tsarist despotism, although by no means all of them approved of the Narodniki programme and tactics.

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p Finally on March 1, 1881, plans were made to assassinate the Tsar as he rode down one of the streets of St. Petersburg. The first bomb that was thrown at his coach blew it up and the second thrown by Ignaty Grinevitsky fatally wounded both the Tsar and his assassin. Both of them died within a few hours. The Tsar’s son and heir Alexander III left the capital for the royal palace of Gatchina outside St. Petersburg and surrounded himself with armed guards and police. Outside Russia the new Tsar was ironically referred to as "the prisoner of Gatchina".

p However, the political regime that held sway in Russia did not change. The tsarist government continued to pursue its former policies and merely took more active steps to repress revolutionary elements than before. It was in vain that the executive committee of Narodnaya Volya sent an appeal to the Tsar asking for an amnesty and a convocation of the people’s representatives in return for which they promised to put an end to their terrorist activity. The Tsar remained deaf to their entreaty, while the police subjected the revolutionaries to savage persecution. Soon all the main leaders of Narodnaya Volya were arrested and thrown into prison. Four of them were hanged and the remainder were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. By this time the organisation had collapsed completely and attempts to revive it proved unsuccessful. Lenin’s elder brother Alexander Ulyanov was to pay with his life for his participation in a subsequent attempt on the life of the new Tsar. He was arrested and executed before the plan came to fruition.

The fate of the Narodnaya Volya organisation and its members demonstrated that personal courage and determination were not enough to secure the success of a revolutionary organisation. Revolutionary theory showing the correct path to victory was essential, and the Narodniki had no such theory. Conspiracy and isolated assassinations were not destined to achieve revolutionary success.

The First Workers’ Organisations

p In the years when the Narodniki were spreading their propaganda in the villages, mass protest of the industrial workers was gathering momentum.

p Government officials and the police went all out to protect the interests of the capitalists, and the workers at this time were bereft of political rights. Any move of protest on their part against their employers was regarded by the police and the tsarist authorities as “insubordination” or “rebellion”. Strikes were considered as crimes against the state: strike leaders were arrested, 527 participants were dismissed from their jobs and literally thrown off the factory premises.

p Nevertheless, the number of strikes in Russia continued to grow together with a sense of the need for workers’ unity.

p Against this background of growing industrial unrest, in 1875 two secret organisations were set up—the South-Russian Workers’ Union in the port of Odessa and the North-Russian Workers’ Union in St. Petersburg. The first of these was organised by a Narodnik intellectual, Yevgeny Zaslavsky, and the second by two workers, the fitter Victor Obnorsky and the joiner Stepan Khalturin. The latter were representatives of that section of the progressive proletariat which did not approve of the Narodniki programme and tactics and who were eager to seek new forms of struggle. Obnorsky was widely read and had been abroad three times: he had had the opportunity to study the experience of workers’ organisations in Western Europe and had met various leaders of the international labour movement. Khalturin also went in for wide reading to educate himself. Both these men called for a high degree of organisation in the workers’ struggle, and urged the workers to campaign for their political rights. The ideas propagated by the First International left their mark on the action programme of the North-Russian Workers’ Union which they drew up.

p These two workers’ unions were the first independent revolutionary organisations of the Russian proletariat. They were to prove short-lived however; yet although they were soon crushed by the gendarmes, those of their leaders who escaped persecution continued to carry out revolutionary propaganda work among the masses, fostering closer cohesion of the proletariat and enhancing its political consciousness.

p With each decade the Russian labour movement grew considerably, and gradually workers’ protests became more organised. In 1885, eight thousand textile workers at the Morozov factory in Orekhovo-Zuyevo near Moscow came out on strike. A group of progressive workers led by a former member of the North-Russian Workers’ Union, Pyotr Moiseyenko, drew up the strikers’ list of demands. The main one was for the abolition of the system of arbitrary fines to which workers were subjected as their employers saw fit. A document containing the workers’ demands was handed to the provincial governor when he came to the factory with an escort of soldiers. When the governor gave orders for the workers’ leaders to be arrested the strikers came to the rescue of their comrades and a bitter skirmish followed. As a result more than 800 workers were exiled from the town and court action was brought against 33 of the strike leaders.

This strike at the Morozov textile mills put such fear of God 528 into the government that in the following year Alexander III promulgated a law limiting the fines which factory owners could demand from their employees. This was the first major concession wrested from the tsarist government by the labour movement. The working class of Russia was asserting itself and even reactionary journalists could no longer ignore what in alarm and trepidation they referred to as the "workers’ question".

From Populism to Marxism

p The previous history of the proletariat had been paving the way for its eventual assumption of the leading role in the Russian democratic movement. The increasing number of workers’ demonstrations, the determined strike battles and the active campaign to bring unity and cohesion to the labour movement were to exert a major influence on public life and the development of public thought in the country.

p After the Narodnaya Volya organisation had been dispersed a sizable group of the Narodniki gave up the revolutionary struggle and devoted their energies instead to the sphere of liberal enlightenment. Meanwhile, those who remained true to their revolutionary traditions, started to study the works of leading Western thinkers and the experience of political struggle in other European countries in their search for a sound revolutionary theory. After reading the works of Marx and Engels and observing the mounting tide of proletarian revolutionary protest these intellectuals started to centre their attention on the labour movement.

p In 1882, a former Narodnik, Georgi Plekhanov, translated the Communist Manifesto into Russian, and in 1883 in Geneva, Switzerland, he and his comrades founded the first Russian SocialDemocratic organisation which they called the Emancipation of Labour Group. The members were to carry out wide propaganda work and publish Russian translations of the major works of Marx and Engels and their own pamphlets destined to popularise Marxist ideas and expose the inconsistencies of the Narodniki programme and their misguided tactics. This development represented an important step forward from Populism towards Marxism.

Plekhanov and his comrades demonstrated that in Russia as in other countries the working class was destined to play the leading role in the revolutionary movement and that the path to victory demanded political struggle on the part of the working class and their seizure of state power. In his address delivered to the First Congress of the Second International in Paris in 1889, Plekhanov declared: "The revolutionary movement in Russia can

529 triumph only if it becomes a revolutionary movement of the workers.”

p The members of the Emancipation of Labour Group worked in close liaison with the revolutionary Marxists of Western Europe. Engels closely followed the advance of the revolutionary movement in Russia and welcomed the creation of the first SocialDemocratic organisation. Two years after its founding he wrote: "I am proud to know that there is a party among the youth of Russia which frankly and without equivocation accepts the great economic and historical theories of Marx. ... Marx himself would have been equally proud of this had he lived a little longer.”

p However there were a number of inconsistencies in the Group’s programme stemming from its members’ underestimation of the peasantry’s revolutionary potential and their exaggeration of opposition on the part of the liberal bourgeoisie, which while criticising the reactionary policy of the tsarist government could not bring itself to support the revolutionary movement because of its instinctive hostility to popular movements.

p Apart from the Emancipation of Labour Group which had its headquarters abroad, Social-Democratic groups started to spring up in Russia itself, first in St. Petersburg and then in other large towns.

One of these Marxist groups in the town of Kazan on the Volga numbered among its members a young student and ardent champion of Marxist revolutionary theory, Vladimir Lenin. It was he who was to deal the final blow to the influence of Populist ideas in the Russian revolutionary movement.

Lenin’s Early Revolutionary Activity

p Lenin was born in 1870, a year before the Paris Commune and five years before the first workers’ union was set up in Russia. His father, Ilya Ulyanov, was a teacher who devoted all his energies to the spread of education among the people, and his mother, who was also a teacher, was an extremely well-educated woman. She had a good command of French, English and German and was well-versed in world literature and classical music and imparted a deep love of knowledge to her children.

p Lenin spent his childhood in the small town of Simbirsk (since renamed Ulyanovsk) on the Volga. While still a schoolboy he was able to observe the hard living and working conditions endured both by the peasants who came to the river wharfs to earn money as stevedores and by the national minorities inhabiting the Volga area, such as the Chuvash and Tartars.

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p At the age of seventeen after completing his secondary education with flying colours, Lenin matriculated at Kazan University. Not long before that his elder brother Alexander had been executed for his part in an unsuccessful Narodniki conspiracy to assassinate the Tsar. When he heard of his brother’s death, Lenin resolved: "We will follow a different path.”

p Soon Lenin was expelled from Kazan University for his part in student politics and confined to a remote village. A police officer, instructed to interrogate Lenin, asked him patronisingly: "What on earth are you rebelling for, young man? Don’t you realise you’re up against a wall?" Lenin retorted sarcastically: "Yes, a wall, but a rotten one; one kick and it will crumble.”

While confined in isolation in the country Lenin did not lose heart. He read a great deal and studied the works of Marx and Engels. When he returned to Kazan he joined one of the local underground Social-Democratic groups and when he later had to move to Samara (now Kuibyshev) he himself organised a similar group there. After working on his own to prepare for his graduation exams Lenin graduated with high marks from the law faculty of St. Petersburg University where he had been enrolled as an external student. In 1893 he left Samara for the capital.

Scientific Socialism in the Labour Movement

p When Lenin came to St. Petersburg, there were as many as a score of underground Social-Democratic groups in the city. Yet although they were engaged in spreading Marxist ideas among the progressive sections of the proletariat these groups were not working in close collaboration with the mass labour movement. As soon as he started to take part in the propaganda work of the St. Petersburg Social-Democrats, Lenin delivered a number of lectures criticising the theoretical concepts adhered to by the Narodniki. These lectures were later to be collected in book form and published under the title What the "Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats. With this critique Lenin finally undermined the influence of Populist ideas, substantiated the principle that the leading role in the Russian revolutionary movement should be played by the working class, and pointed out the vital need to set up a united Marxist workers’ party. Staunch faith in the historic mission of the proletariat permeated this early work in which Lenin wrote: ”. . . then the Russian worker, rising at the head of all the democratic elements, will overthrow absolutism and lead the Russian proletariat (side by side with the proletariat of all countries) along the straight 531 road of open political struggle to the victorious communist 7 evolution."

p Lenin also devoted a good deal of his energies to political and ideological education work among the workers, spreading socialist ideas while rallying the workers to revolutionary action. He talked to workers about their problems, their living and working conditions and then wrote leaflets in which he described in simple language what goals the workers should set themselves in their day-to-day struggle against the capitalists. Following Lenin’s example, the members of other Social-Democratic groups also started to establish closer ties with the proletarian masses and play an active part in the labour movement.

p In the autumn of 1895, at the instance of Lenin, all the SocialDemocratic groups in St. Petersburg united in a new organisation, the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. This was an important step towards the creation of a revolutionary Marxist workers’ party in Russia. Soon afterwards formerly scattered Social-Democratic groups in Moscow, Tula, Rostov-on-Don and other industrial centres in Russia united in more powerful close-knit organisations. The Social-Democrats, who by this time were taking an active part in the industrial strike movement, tried to instil it with greater political organisation and consciousness. Gradually scientific socialism was to be adopted as the revolutionary theory of the labour movement.

The tsarist police soon managed to hunt down and arrest Lenin, but his comrades still at liberty continued to follow the course which he had plotted. In 1896 they organised a mass strike in the St. Petersburg textile mills involving 30,000 workers. This strike was the largest and best organised that the Russian proletariat had yet seen. It had a tremendous impact on Russian society as a whole, demonstrating as it did the strength of the working class and the correctness of Marxist revolutionary theory. Workers in other countries started collecting funds to help the Russian strikers.