The People and the State - The People's Will

Here in Russia, history has created two main independent forces: the people and the State organization. Other social groups are still of only secondary significance in our country. Our nobility, for example, though the regime dragged it out into the light of day by the scruff of its neck, proved despite all its efforts to be absolutely incapable of forming a stable social group: after barely a hundred years' existence, it has now entirely effaced itself and dispersed, partly merging with the State organization, partly merging with the bourgeoisie and partly disappearing heaven knows where.1 The bourgeoisie, fostered by all the conditions of our life and at its very birth also operating beneath the wing of the regime [pravitelstvo], undoubtedly has more chance of a prolonged existence; if the general conditions of Russian life do not change, it will certainly soon comprise a formidable social force, and subjugate not only the popular masses but also the State itself. But this is still a question for the future. At the present time, our bourgeoisie still merely consists of an utterly disunited horde of predators; it has not yet produced either class consciousness, a world outlook, or class solidarity. The Western bourgeois is really convinced of the sanctity of the various principles upon which his estate is based, and will lay down his life for these principles. In our country, you will nowhere meet more cynical disrespect for those same principles than precisely in the bourgeois. Our bourgeois is not a member of a social estate [soslovie], but just an isolated predator, intelligent and unscrupulous in his methods, who realizes in his heart of hearts that he is acting without conscience or justice. Without a doubt, this is a temporary phenomenon, springing only from the fact that our bourgeois is a newcomer to the world. Soon, very soon, he will legalize his position: another few generations, and we shall see a genuine bourgeois in our country; we shall see rapacity raised to a principle, with a theoretical basis, a stable world outlook and a class morality. All this will certainly come to pass—but only in the event that a general overturn of our State and social relations does not cut at the very roots of the bourgeoisie. But we consider that such an overturn is very possible; and if it really does occur, then our bourgeoisie will leave the stage just as the nobility did, because in essence it is created by that same State.

In part, it is created by the State quite consciously and deliberately; in part it comes about as an inevitable consequence of the conditions into which the State is driving the people, which cannot fail to bring forth from the peasants a predatory social estate of kulaks.2

From the standpoint of the whole existing system, the peasant today is nothing, worse than nothing. He is a mere draught animal; a mere sheep, existing only so that the shepherd may feed off its flesh and clothe himself in its fleece and hide. Such is the principle of our State. The people counts for nothing, so far as individual or human dignity is concerned. Its economic interests are acknowledged only insofar as this is necessary for the State. The peasant must eat, drink, clothe himself and have a roof over his head only so that he may not die of starvation: so that he can work, bring money into the exchequer, provide able-bodied recruits for war, and so on. His intellectual and moral world have a similar significance. Not much more is required of the muzhik than of a horse; he must have enough intelligence to walk between the shafts and not slip the traces; he is required not to be restive and to recognize his master. Everything else is superfluous and even harmful. And we can see that just as economic and moral principles have been practised upon the muzhik for hundreds of years, practised by a powerful (in comparison with the muzhik himself) and highly intelligent association permeating his entire life. From top to bottom, all State, class and social relations are formed in accordance with these principles. The results are deadly indeed.

The peasant is humiliated, as downtrodden as the State could make him. Economically, he is reduced to a condition of penury: for the sake of a crust of bread, to satisfy the most animal (yet inexorable) needs, he is compelled to wage a bitter struggle for existence. His every thought must be directed to getting a rouble wherewith to pay his taxes, meeting his numerous obligations, feeding himself and his family, and resting in preparation for fresh labour. And this day after day; yesterday, today, and tomorrow; for his entire life. No time to live for himself, for the man; no time to think, nothing to think about. Such is the situation of the individual. Such too is the situation of the mir. For what purpose does the mir, the obshchina, exist?3 With what does it concern itself? Supplying recruits, collecting taxes, recovering arrears, forwarding contributions in kind—that is the life of the mir. And just as the peasant loses his individuality in an enforced pursuit of the rouble, so too does the obshchina lose its identity and become distorted, stifled by the regime in this sphere of exclusively fiscal and police obligations.

Such a situation is as if expressly designed to engender the kulak. In this milieu, there is no other alternative for an intelligent, energetic man who feels the need for a private life: he must either perish together with the mir, or become a predator himself. As a man of the mir, he is a beggar, a contemptible being, whom everyone orders about. As a predator, he at once rises into a special social estate which the laws do not mention, but which is recognized in practice. As a mir-eating kulak, he not only gets a chance to live pretty well in a material sense. For the first time, he becomes a man and even a citizen: the authorities and the priest alike esteem him, they will not start slapping his ugly face or mocking his human dignity; the law begins to exist for him. Can there be any choice here? We have still only taken the general picture, let us take the details. What will become of the intelligent and energetic peasant, if mir traditions remain unchanged? We have a candidate for the 'trouble-makers', the 'spreaders of disorder', the 'rebels'; a candidate for every kind of persecution, whipping, arrest, banishment, and worse. The humiliated, downtrodden, depersonalized mir is often incapable of giving even moral support in this grievous struggle; and in the majority of cases the kulak quite sincerely and deeply despises the mir for its impotence—despises it in the person both of its individual members and of the obshchina as a whole.

Thus the kulak is born. The hopeless situation drives the muzhik into servitude. And who is to blame for this? What else but the State's oppression: its economic oppression, which seeks to reduce the masses to a condition of material destitution and deprives them of any possibility of fighting against exploitation; and its spiritual oppression, which reduces the masses to civil and political destruction, demoralizing the people and throttling its energies. Remove this oppression, and at once you take away nine tenths of the possibility for a bourgeoisie to form.

Let us move higher up. The modern State summons a bourgeoisie to appear through the very fact of its existence; it also, in specific instances, brings it into the world quite consciously. We may recall the history of our industry. The handicrafts production of entire provinces was killed off, thanks to every kind of State protectionism for heavy industry. Branches of factory production were even created which, to this day, survive only by virtue of a protective tariff (for example, the cotton industry which destroyed popular handwoven linens). Whole principalities were created for mine-owners, and for a hundred years the Urals population was handed back into servitude, to capitalists incapable of running things even as well as the toilers themselves had done when they were left without landlords (in Pugachev's time).4 Railway construction in our country presents a spectacle that has no like in the world: all the tracks have been built with the muzhik's money, with money from the State which, for no obvious reason, has doled out hundreds of millions to various entrepreneurs. In just the same way, the muzhik's gold has poured out of the government's empty pockets to sustain stock-market speculation. This paternal tenderness of the regime with respect to the bourgeoisie is something which requires no proof at all, merely to be pointed out; and our purpose in pointing it out is to emphasize the fact that in our country it is not the State that is a creation of the bourgeoisie as in Europe, but on the contrary the bourgeoisie which is created by the State.

The independent role of our State is a phenomenon of extraordinary importance, since it means that in Russia the activity of the social-revolutionary party has to assume a quite particular character.5 Russia, generally speaking, constitutes a kind of vast manorial estate belonging to a firm entitled 'The Russian State'. Economic and political influence, economic and political oppression, here (as is to be expected) merge and reduce to a single juridical person: this very firm. In these conditions, economic and political reform are also quite inseparable from each other and merge into a single state-wide revolution. The direct source of popular misery, servitude and destitution is the State.* So as soon as we set ourselves the aim of freeing the people, providing it with land, educating it, introducing new principles into its existence or restoring the old traditional foundations of popular life to their original purity—in short, whatsoever aim we may set ourselves (provided only that it is in the interests of the masses) we must clash willy-nilly with the regime [pravitelstvo], which sees the people as its economic and political slave. Hence, in order to do anything for the people, it is necessary first of all to free it from the power of this regime, to break the regime itself, to do away with its seignorial power over the muzhik. Our activity accordingly assumes a political character. And the same thing really occurs, in practice if not in words, with every revolutionary group here, irrespective of its theoretical views; it occurs by virtue of the simple fact that the modern State is truly the greatest and most terrible enemy and destroyer of the people in all respects. Our socialist wages a political struggle as naturally as a man speaks in prose, without even having any concept of prose and poetry. Nevertheless, there is of course a great difference between understanding this fact—the significance of the modern State—and not understanding it. If we act consciously, then we shall direct all our blows against the regime and our entire strength will be put to productive, effective work. But if we strike at the regime only involuntarily, then, quite irrespectively of our wishes and intentions, first a huge proportion of our strength may be used up on vain and fanciful undertakings, and secondly the very blows we involuntarily inflict on the regime will only benefit the bourgeoisie and prepare an easier victory for it. . . .

* Please note that we always mean by the word 'State' specifically the modern Russian State. [author's note]

Translation by Quintin Hoare taken from Teodor Shanin's Late Marx and the Russian Road (pp. 219-223). All footnotes and in-text commentary belong to the editor and/or translator unless otherwise stated.

• 1The author dates the commencement of Russian nobility from the granting of the Charter of Nobility by Catherine II in 1785.
• 2For a definition of the Russian peasant commune, see pages 11-12 [of Shanin's Late Marx and the Russian Road—adri].
• 3Kulak (Russian 'fist') is an abusive description of a peasant exploiting his peasant neighbours and/or commune through usury, commerce, etc., and stressing the 'not properly peasant' (i.e. farming) main sources of income and/or personality traits of craftiness, stinginess, lack of neighbourliness. Often coupled with, or used synonymously with, miroed, i.e. 'a commune eater'. In the much later period of the 1920s, the word was adopted by the authorities as the equivalent of any 'rich peasant', defined by simple indices such as land held and horses owned.
• 4The largest popular rebellion of cossacks and peasants which incorporated at its peak also many of the serf-miners, serf-workers of the Urals as well as Bashkir pastoral tribesmen. The rebellion was defeated in 1774.
• 5The People's Will spoke of the 'social revolutionary party' (uncapitalized) as synonymous with themselves but often also as a broader concept, incorporating all of the radical camp within contemporary Russia.