p It is now ten years since the most important programmes of the seventies appeared. Ten years of efforts, struggle and sometimes bitter disappointments have shown our youth that the organisation of a revolutionary movement among the peasantry is impossible under the present conditions in Russia. As revolutionary doctrines, Bakuninism and Narodism are antiquated and are now received with joy only in the conservative-democratic literary camp. Their fate will be either to lose their distinctive features altogether and merge with new and more fruitful revolutionary trends or to congeal in their old form and serve as a buttress for political and social reaction. Our propagandists of the old type have also disappeared from the stage. But that is not the case with the theories of P. N. Tkachov. Although for full ten years "every day has brought us new enemies and created new social factors hostile to us”, although the social revolution "has encountered" in that time certain considerable “obstacles”, Russian Blanquism is now raising its voice with particular force and, still confident that "the contemporary historical period is particularly favourable for the carrying out of the social revolution”, it is continuing to accuse all “dissenters” of moderation and meticulousness, repeating in a new key the old refrain: "now, or in a very remote future, perhaps never! or "we have not the right to wait”, or "let each one gather his belongings and hasten to set out”, and so on. And it is this strengthened and, if we may so express it, rejuvenated Tkachovism that everybody has to deal with who would like to write about the present “differences” in Russian revolutionary spheres. All the more must it be taken into account in the study of "the *ate of Russian capitalism".

p I have already said more than once that Mr. Tikhomirov’s article "What Can We Expect from the Revolution? " is only a new and supplemented edition—though at the same time inferior many respects—of the social and political views of N. Tkachov. If I have not been mistaken in determining the 168 distinctive features of Russian Blanquism, the literary activity of the "Narodnaya Volya party" boils down to a repetition of Tkachov’s teachings in different keys. The sole difference is that for Tkachov "the time we are passing through" referred to the early seventies, while for the publicists of the "Narodnaya Volya party" it coincides with the late seventies and early eighties. Completely lacking what the Germans call the "sense of history”, Russian Blanquism has very easily transferred and will transfer this concept of the particularly favourable “time” for the social revolution from one decade to another. After proving a false prophet in the eighties, it will renew its prophecies with an obstinacy worthy of a better fate ten, twenty or thirty years later and will go on doing so right up to the time when the working class finally understands the conditions for its social emancipation and greets the Blanquist doctrine with Homeric laughter. For the dissemination of Blanquism every moment of history is favourable except a time which is really favourable for the socialist revolution.

p But it is time to define more exactly the expressions I use. What is Blanquism in general? What is Russian Blanquism?

p P. L. Lavrov hopes, as we have seen, that "the majority of the members" of the Emancipation of Labour group "may any day now be in the ranks of Narodnaya Volya”. He affirms that "Mr. Plekhanov himself has already undergone a sufficiently great evolution in his political and social convictions for us to have reason to hope for new steps on his part in the same direction".^^124^^ If the "Narodnaya Volya party" professes—as far as can be judged by its literary works—the Blanquist standpoint, it turns out that my “evolution” too is taking place "in the same direction”. The Marxism which I profess at present is consequently but a purgatory through which my socialist soul must pass to obtain final rest in the lap of Blanquism. Is that so? Will such an “evolution” be progressive? How does this question appear from the standpoint of modern scientific socialism?

p "Blanqui is first and foremost a political revolutionary,” we read in an article by Engels,^^125^^ "a socialist only in feeling, who sympathises with the people in their sufferings but has no special socialist theory of his own and proposes no definite measures for social reorganisation. In his political activity he was mainly a so-called ‘man of action’  [168•*  who was convinced that a small number of well-organised people who choose the right moment and carry out a revolutionary attempt can attract the popular masses with one or two successes and thus carry out a 169 victorious revolution. During the reign of Louis Philippe he could naturally organise such a group only, of course, in the form of a secret society and what happened then was what always happens when there is a conspiracy. The people forming it, wearied by continuous restraint and vain promises that it would soon come to the final blow, ended by losing all patience and ceasing to obey, and then one of two things remained: either to allow the conspiracy to fall to pieces or to start the revolutionary attempt without any external occasion. An attempt of that kind was made (on May 12, 1839) and was suppressed at the very outset. This conspiracy of Blanqui, by the way, was the only one that was not discovered by the police....

p "From the fact that Blanqui viewed every revolution as a Handstreich by a small revolutionary minority, it naturally follows that a revolutionary dictatorship must be established after a successful upheaval; naturally not a dictatorship of the whole revolutionary class, the proletariat, but of a small number of those who have carried out the Handstreich and who themselves were previously subject to the dictatorship of one or a few of the elect.

p "The reader sees,” Engels continues, "that Blanqui is a revolutionary of the old generation. Such conceptions of the course of revolutionary events have already grown too obsolete for the German working-class party, and even in France they can arouse sympathy only in the least mature or least patient workers."

p Thus we see that socialists of the latest, scientific school consider Blanquism as an already obsolete standpoint. The transition from Marxism to Blanquism is not impossible, of course—all sorts of things happen—but on no account will it be acknowledged by any Marxist as progress in the "political and social convictions" of any of their fellow-thinkers. Only from the Blanquist standpoint can such an “evolution” be considered progressive. And if the honourable editor of Vestnik Narodnoi Voli has not radically changed his views of the socialism of Marx’s school, his prophecy concerning the Emancipation of Labour group is bound to puzzle every impartial reader.

p We see further from this quotation from Engels that Tkachov’s conception of the "forcible revolution" as something “imposed” on the majority by the minority is nothing but Blanquism which could be called the purest if the editor of Nabat had not taken it into his head to try to prove that in Russia there is no need even to impose socialism on the majority, who are communist "by instinct, by tradition".

The distinctive feature of the Russian variety of Blanquism is therefore merely the idealisation of the Russian peasantry 170 borrowed from Bakunin. Let us now pass on to Mr. Tikhomirov’s views and see whether they come under this definition or are a new variety of "Russian socialism".