B. Bauer's Pamphlets on the Collision with Russia

Source: MECW, Volume 15, p. 181;
Written: by Marx in January 1857;
First published: in Russian, in Letopisi marksizma, 1928.

This unfinished work by Marx is devoted to the criticism of Bruno Bauer’s views on foreign policy and especially his view of the role of Tsarist Russia in the destinies of European peoples. Bruno Bauer, a “Young Hegelian”, was a political radical. In 1854, during the Crimean war of 1853-56, he published several pamphlets in which he analysed the events of the war and the preceding history of the foreign policy of the European states. He came to the conclusion that the western powers were a failure, and that Russia was becoming the arbiter in European affairs. Back in 1855 Marx and Engels intended to come out against his “arrogant stupidity”, and this manuscript which he wrote in January 1857 was an attempt to realise the intention. In it Marx criticised in the main Bauer’s two pamphlets La Russie et l'Angleterre (which was published in Scharlottenburg in June 1854 and was a translation from the German edition Russland und England) and Die jetzige Stellung Russlands (also published in Scharlottenburg in October 1854).