JONATHAN FRANKEL

Voluntarism, Maximalism, and the Group
for the Emancipation of Labor (1883-1892)

Until recently Marxism was described by most Western historians as a doctrine radically opposed to Russian revolutionary populism. It was argued that in adopting Marx’s doctrine of economic determinism, Plekhanov and his Group for the Emancipation of Labor were bound to reject point by point the ideology of Zemlia i volia and Narodnaia volia.

For the populists—so runs this widely-held thesis—capitalism in Russia was a feeble growth of uncertain future, but the Marxists saw it as deeply and securely rooted. The peasant commune, depicted by the populists as the sure basis of the future socialist society, was described by the Marxists as disintegrating and hopelessly fragmented between rich and poor. For the populists, Russia was unique, destined to move directly from feudalism to socialism; for the Marxists, Russia was simply one more latecomer to the capitalist stage of European history. The proletariat, secondary in populist thought, was represented as the only true revolutionary class by the Marxists. A tightly-knit band of conspirators, the populists saw terror as the main revolutionary weapon while the Marxists, believing that the proletariat had to make its own revolution, rejected terror and demanded the patient preparation of organized conscious action by the masses. The populists dreamed of a socialist coup in the immediate future; the Marxists argued vehemently that it would be suicidal for the socialists to seize power prematurely, at the bourgeois stage of socio-economic development. A prolonged stage of parliamentary democracy had to separate the bourgeois from the socialist revolution.

In short, the populists were voluntarists and maximalists: they believed that history could be dominated by the human will and that the coming revolution would therefore be socialist. But Marxist doctrine exalted the objective laws of socio-economic development, confident that they worked surely, albeit sometimes slowly. As a forceful example of the way in which Western authors have tended to present this clear-cut dichotomy, we can take the analysis made by Isaac Deutscher in his Stalin: A Political Biography. “Plekhanov,” he wrote,

made the confident forecast that capitalist industrialism was about to invade Russia and destroy its patriarchal feudal structure and the primitive rural communes on which the Narodniks wanted to base their socialism. An urban industrial working class, he argued, was about to grow up in Russia and would fight for industrial socialism very much on the western European pattern. The vision of a peculiarly Slavonic rural socialism springing straight from pure feudalism was Utopian. . . . The fundamental dispute was widened by a controversy over tactics. . . . The Marxists would have nothing to do with terroristic methods. . . . They set their hopes on the industrial proletariat that would act against autocracy en masse; but since the proletariat was still numerically far too weak to act, they had no choice but to wait until the growth of industry produced the big battalions of workers. Meanwhile, they could only make propaganda, enlist converts to socialism, and set up loose groups of like-minded people.¹

Here, then, all is sharp and clear. But qualifications and reservations suggested over the last few years have tended to blur such hard-and-fast dividing lines. The process of revision began, perhaps, when Solomon Schwarz and Richard Pipes each published studies highlighting the fact that Marx and Engels had on occasion conceded to the populists that Russia could pass directly from feudalism to a communist social order; that the peasant commune could serve as the fulcrum of this radical transformation; that the socialist intelligentsia could well overthrow Tsarism single-handedly and that it might even seize power without any ill effects.² In itself, of course, awareness of the negative attitude shared by Marx and Engels towards the Russian Marxism of the 1880s did not call for any radical revision of the basic idea that in Russia the Marxists and populists held diametrically opposed ideologies. If Marx encouraged Narodnaia volia and if Engels reacted critically to Plekhanov’s major Marxist treatise, Our Disagreements, this could mean simply that, interested in the overthrow of Tsarism at any price, they had chosen to remain neutral in the dispute between the two Russian camps or even to side with the more effective populist wing against their own bookish disciples. “It is quite impossible,” concluded Pipes, “to determine whether in Russian matters, Marx himself was a ‘Marxist’ or a ‘populist.’”³ And Schwarz goes even further: “We cannot avoid the conclusion that Marx took his stand on the populist concept—basically on the version which Chernyshevskii had developed.”⁴

But the revisions did not stop here. John Keep and Samuel Baron pointed out that in its early publications, at least, Plekhanov’s Group for the Emancipation of Labor had itself advocated many of the theses traditionally regarded as characteristically “populist.”⁵ Leadership by the revolutionary intelligentsia, conspiratorial methods of party organization, the advocacy of Jacobin methods, and the idea that in Russia the coming bourgeois regime would be overthrown before it could consolidate itself—all these planks had somehow been fitted into the platform of the Group side by side with its more familiar “Marxist” theses.

The relationship between populism and Marxism in Russia thus emerges as far more complex than is generally assumed. And an examination of the studies on early Russian Marxism published in the USSR in the 1920s does little to dispel the confusion. One school, represented by Bystrykh and Rakhmetov, for instance, followed the same line of thought as most Western and emigre historians seeing the Group as the obvious forerunners of Menshevism. The Group, after all, had regarded “popular representation and universal suffrage as the most reliable road to socialism” and Aksel’rod, in particular, was clearly dedicated to the “Menshevik” view of democracy as an end in itself.⁶ Vaganian, on the other hand, devoted much of his lengthy biography of Plekhanov to proving by constant reference to his writings that he had anticipated all the “maximalist” and “Jacobin” elements in Lenin’s thought.⁷ In short, if Marx in Russian affairs was not a “Marxist” then the Plekhanov described by Vaganian and, to a lesser extent, by Baron and Keep, was certainly no “Plekhanovite” in the normal sense of that term.

However, should we in reality accept this paradox at its face value? Can we attribute the Group’s deviations from “Plekhanovism” to inconsistency? Or, rather, do we have to fundamentally revise our conception of what Plekhanov and his comrades actually meant? No doubt, they did not always display that power of logical and incisive thought on which they prided themselves. “Plekhanov,” writes John Keep, “was caught in a conflict between his head and his heart.”⁸ Or as Baron puts it: “It is apparent that Plekhanov’s system embraced elements both of voluntarism and determinism which he did not succeed in reconciling.”⁹

No doubt, too, it is possible to write off the populism of the Group as the natural weakness of that transitional period when Narodnaia volia was still a force and the Marxists had yet to find their feet. The leading Soviet historian of the party in the 1920s, V. I. Nevskii, concentrated on this point, explaining that it took some years for the ex-populist members of the Group to free themselves from their former prejudices. “The Group,” he wrote, “did not perfect its program at one fell swoop.”¹⁰ This same thesis was developed— albeit with a different gloss-by Plekhanov himself, writing some thirty years after the formation of the Group. In the years 1883-84, he explained, the Group had outwardly accepted various populist theses only in order to convert the rank-and-file following of Narodnaia volia to Marxism. “In order to propagandize our own ideas,” he wrote in 1910, “we took our stand on their point of view.” ¹¹

But, granted that there were elements of compromise and inconsistency, it is surely misleading not to give at least equal weight to the factor of conscious ideological commitment. In 1903 David Riazanov argued that the seemingly extraneous or contradictory “populist” elements in the first works of the Group should be regarded, rather, as an integral part of Russian Marxist thought at its most powerful.¹² In its first decade, he suggested, the Group had made its greatest efforts to apply Marxist categories to the peculiarities of Russian life and, as a result, their analysis had been at its most realistic and effective. Later attempts to “universalize” Russian Marxism had weakened the movement, blinding it to its surroundings.

Clearly, a number of questions have to be faced before deciding to what extent the Group’s dualism was merely contingent, superfluous to its Marxism, and to what extent it was essential. What were the voluntarist and maximalist elements in the program of the Group? How, if at all, did it reconcile these, its “populist” ideas, with its evolutionary and determinist philosophy? Which of these ideas were dropped, which retained or developed even further?

Of all the “voluntaristic” doctrines which found their way into the Group’s ideological arsenal, the support of terrorism is perhaps the most curious and also the most transient. Plekhanov had, after all, parted company with Zemlia i volia in 1879 as a result of his opposition to terror. The sensational successes of Narodnaia volia and the abject failure of his own Chernyi peredel subsequently led him to modify his earlier stand, but he could never work up any enthusiasm for assassination as a political weapon. Even so, the first program of the Group produced in 1884 declared that with regard to the assassination campaign as such it had no quarrel with Narodnaia volia, that it “recognizes as essential the terrorist war against the absolutist government.”¹³ This laconic statement hardly signified enthusiasm, but even so it conceded far more to Narodnaia volia than did the program prepared in St. Petersburg late in 1884 by the Blagoev group, or Party of Russian Social Democrats, which dismissed political assassination as strictly of marginal value. “Of political terror as a system designed to force concessions from the government,” read the Blagoev program, “we have to say that it cannot be regarded as effective under given conditions where there is no strong labor organization to force home its attacks.” ¹⁴

It must have come as a welcome surprise to the Group to discover active revolutionary circles in Russia which gave such priority to the creation of a powerful workers’ movement that they rejected terrorism. And this fact probably encouraged Plekhanov, when composing a new program in 1885, to solve the problem by simply ignoring the assassination campaign. The program of 1885 stated unequivocably that the primary weapon of the revolutionaries was “agitation among the working class,” and “terror” was now mentioned only as a possible by-product of the revolution itself.¹⁵ In later years, Plekhanov was to explain that assassination was a perfectly legitimate weapon in the hands of the revolutionaries but one which under normal conditions should not be used for fear of diverting attention from the central goal—the organization of the proletariat into a revolutionary force. In effect, the “terrorist” phase of the Group was over by 1885.

The problem of what role to assign the intelligentsia in preparing the future revolutions was more complex. The Group believed that the intelligentsia had to fulfill an essential and major function in the movement because it could grasp with more ease than any other social group the principles of scientific socialism. By its very nature, it was ideally suited to guide the workers in the direction demanded by the laws of history. In the first program of the Group this belief was boldly stated: “On the socialist intelligentsia falls the obligation to organize the workers and to prepare them actively for the struggle. . . . The Group for the Emancipation of Labor is convinced that not only the success but the very possibility of a purposeful movement of the Russian working class is dependent on the efforts of the intelligentsia in its midst.” At the same time, however, the Group could not evade the fact that the socialist intelligentsia as yet showed little inclination to adopt its Marxist approach, and the program therefore added a cautionary note: “The intelligentsia must first adopt the viewpoint of contemporary scientific socialism.” ¹⁶

Here, of course, was the crucial issue. An intelligentsia prepared to apply Marxist principles could accelerate Russia’s progress towards its two coming revolutions; an intelligentsia that rejected those principles would only confuse the workers and so delay the natural advance guaranteed by objective socio-economic developments. Thus there was a built-in ambivalence in the attitude of the Group towards the revolutionary youth, a potential force for—but also a major threat to-historical advance. The Group was often sorely tempted to dispense with the services of the intelligentsia and to rely solely on the forces of the urban proletariat. In its program of 1885, it side-stepped the problem, omitting all mention of the intelligentsia, not specifying who would form the party leadership. And here, again, the views of the Blagoev circle probably influenced Plekhanov’s trend of thought, for the program of the Blagoevtsy clearly stated that the spontaneous “movement of the people” would be decisive and would act largely in independence of any revolutionary high command. ¹⁷

Yet even though the Group on this occasion evaded the issue, the problem of who was to organize and head the revolutionary movement would constantly recur. More and more disappointed by the apathy of the student youth, the Group in the late 1880s frequently turned to the “worker intelligentsia” hoping to find and win over a new generation of Khalturins and Obnorskiis. Their writings of the years 1885-92 were often marked by a distinctly hostile tone towards the intelligentsia. “Among the revolutionaries drawn from the ‘youthful intelligentsia,’” Plekhanov explained to the workers in 1889, “there are many gentlemen who even . . . assert that [the working class] simply does not exist. Others admit its existence but add that all the workers are very stupid and uneducated and that therefore it is not worth paying attention to them.”¹⁸ Would it not be more sensible to rely on the workers who, after all, were the chosen instruments of history? “The Russian worker,” wrote Plekhanov in 1892, “cannot but be a westerner just as the Russian intelligent could not be anything but an ‘isolationist’ [samobytnik]-at least hitherto.”¹⁹

In contrast to the repudiation of terror, this change-over foreshadowed by the program of 1885 was neither complete nor permanent. With the new influx from the revolutionary intelligentsia into the revolutionary movement in the 1890s, the Group began to swing back, if not exactly to its original position of 1883-84, then at least to a policy centered largely on the intelligentsia. The campaign of the late 1890s against mounting “economism” and “revisionism” could hardly be won without the active participation of the “orthodox” intelligentsia. Thus Plekhanov could now write that the intelligentsia, “the revolutionary bacillus, is duty-bound to develop the class consciousness of the working class.”²⁰ For his part, Aksel’rod declared that the Russian proletariat “taken en masse is sunk too deep in general barbarism and ignorance to be able, while still in the clutches of absolutism, to rise to the heights of a conscious revolutionary force absolutely independently and without some outside help.” And deliberately enough, Aksel’rod now recalled the fact that for the Group in its early years “the idea of organizing a labor party in Russia was most closely linked for the Group with those political and social ideas and goals which then—as now—stirred all the democratic elements of our intelligentsia.” ²¹

In organizational terms the idea of the intelligentsia as guide of the proletariat tended to imply a highly centralized party, custodian of longterm proletarian interests, while the idea of history as the direct driving force of the proletariat tended to imply a loose-knit party sensitive to immediate proletarian demands. Thus, the Blagoev circle was careful in its program to emphasize that the party was to be organized along decentralized lines. As the Blagoevtsy wrote in a letter to Plekhanov’s Group: “We are indeed socialist revolutionaries but we take our stand only on the basis of the real and actual demands of the workers themselves. . . . Another characteristic of the organization itself is that we strive for the greatest possible reduction of centralization . . . and that we grant as much independence as possible to the various groups and individuals.”²² In fact, we have here something close to those “loose groups of like-minded people” which Deutscher described as typical of Plekhanov’s political outlook. However, Plekhanov himself never accepted the logic of the argument that Marxist doctrine by its very nature demanded broadly-based decentralization.

On the contrary, the Group’s program of 1884 called on the intelligentsia to “undertake at once the organization of the workers of our industrial centers . . . in secret circles linked together by one well-defined socio-political program,”²³ while the 1885 program explained that the secret circles had to be “tightly bound together as one unit.”²⁴ In essence, Plekhanov never changed this view of party organization. Even when he had repudiated terror and temporarily despaired of leadership by the intelligentsia, he remained firmly wedded to the idea of maximal centralization. “What we want,” he wrote in 1893, “is to found a mobile and militant organization on the model of Zemlia i volia or Narodnaia volia—an organization which acts anywhere and everywhere it can deal a blow at the government.”²⁵

Plekhanov’s centralism was largely a product of his belief that the Russian Marxists could have only one immediate political goal—the overthrow of the autocracy. But how, in fact, did the Social Democrats of the 1880s envision the coming anti-tsarist revolution? The Blagoevtsy made it clear that they expected the revolution to develop from a series of more or less spontaneous conflagrations spreading almost unaided from village to village and town to town. According to this scheme of things, the role of the party was to be strictly auxiliary. “It is impossible to say,” they stated in their program, “what form this people’s movement will take, but it is our task to regulate as far as possible the course of the revolution, to guide its forces . . . by coordinating the peasant revolution with the political movement of the workers and intelligentsia in the [urban] centers . . . ; the initiative must be with the population itself.”²⁶ Anticipating waves of popular unrest and violence as the prelude to a total revolution, the Blagoevtsy considered it within the realm of possibility that at the last moment the tsarist regime would liberalize itself. In contrast, Plekhanov evidently believed that it was the duty of the party to plan and initiate the revolution. Thus the 1885 program states that

the struggle against absolutism is obligatory even for those workers’ circles which constitute the embryo of the future Russian labor party. The overthrow of absolutism must be their first political task. . . . Tightly knit together, these organizations, not satisfied with random clashes against the regime, will rapidly go over at the right moment to a general and decisive assault against it. And they will not hesitate to use even so-called terrorist acts if these seem necessary in the interests of the struggle.²⁷

The workers’ section of Narodnaia volia had developed this same line of thought in its program of 1880 which declared that “only the social revolutionary party in its entirety can fall upon its enemies with a hope of victory.” ²⁸

The image of revolution as a well-prepared action to be organized from above recurs elsewhere in the Group’s statements. Combined with the concept of leadership by the intelligentsia, it is to be found in Plekhanov’s famous speech to the Paris Congress of the International in 1889: “Our revolutionary intelligentsia must adopt the views of present-day scientific socialism, spread them among the workers and, with the aid of the workers, must take the bastion of the autocracy by assault.”²⁹ This military-like approach which pictures the intelligentsia as officers, the workers as soldiers, and the revolution as a well-planned battle should be seen as an integral part of Plekhanov’s thought in the 1880s just as the more famous statement which followed in his Paris speech—”the revolutionary movement in Russia can triumph only as the revolutionary movement of the workers.”

That the underground party could both prepare and direct the revolution was an idea suggested not only by Plekhanov but also, at times, by Aksel’rod. Thus, in 1884 Aksel’rod could write of the “power which a group of three or four hundred people with an advanced socio-political standpoint can represent in a moment of free-moving social upheaval.”³⁰ Again, in an article of 1889, he dwelt on the great strategic significance of the fact that the industrial workers were centered in the major cities: “It is in the capital where the Tsar and his ministers live and in the towns where the main governmental offices are to be found that the final defeat of tsarist power can be executed. . . . It is here that the forces for the assault against it can be concentrated.”³¹ In 1892, comparing the revolutionary possibilities in Germany and Russia, he pointed out that while the Hohenzollern regime stood firmly on a broad base of active middle-class support, Tsarism rested “primarily on the inertia, lack of organization, and backwardness of the population. Therefore,” he concluded, “if Russia had a well-run organization of energetic revolutionaries (such as that of Narodnaia volia or Zemlia i volia) which could gain popularity among only a few thousand Petersburg workers, it would have greater chances of victory in a military clash with the government than would the Social Democrats in Germany.”³² Looking back on the 1880s from a post-1905 vantage point, Plekhanov was to recall that, debating against the narodovol’tsy, he had frequently summed up the Marxist case in a nutshell: “Give us 500,000 politically conscious workers and nothing will remain of absolutism.”³³ Clearly, however, the publications of the time suggest that the Group would have opted for a figure infinitely lower than half a million.

It seems probable that the failure of the socialists to unleash revolution even at the time of the great famine had a sobering effect on the Group. After 1892, at least, no more was heard of revolution to be planned or manipulated from above. And in later years Plekhanov could write scornfully that “anybody who can ask himself seriously, as Lenin does, in which month we must begin the armed uprising is, of course, much closer in tactical matters to Mr. Tikhomirov or to Tkachev than to the Group for the Emancipation of Labor.”³⁴ If all had gone smoothly, therefore, the earlier speculations of the Group might well have sunk gradually into oblivion only to be unearthed by post-revolutionary historians. But this was not to be. In 1897 Aksel’rod republished the 1885 program, implying that it was still in force as the platform of the Group and that it was to be regarded as the official credo of the Russian Marxist movement. At its inception in 1895, the Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad had formally recognized the ideological authority of the Group. Thus, the new generation of Social Democrats was brought face to face with the earliest concepts of the Group, and the resulting clash, in which Prokopovich bluntly repudiated the 1885 program, became the immediate cause of the economist schism. A decade later, the first publications of the Group again became the center of public controversy when their purpose was disputed in a vituperative debate between Kamenev, Martynov, and Plekhanov.

Both Prokopovich in 1898 and Martynov in 1909 argued that, strictly speaking, the Group in the 1880s had held views on party organization and on the coming revolution which were alien to Marxism. Two aspects of the Group’s early writings struck them as being particularly anachronistic. The Group, they wrote, had exaggerated both the importance of the intelligentsia and the power of a tiny conspiratorial party to bring down the tsarist regime. “A program suited to intellectuals seeking out the workers,” declared Prokopovich in 1898, “is not suitable for the workers themselves defending their own ‘self-chosen interests.’” And of the Group’s hopes for the overthrow of Tsarism, he wrote: “It is always possible ‘to fall’ on the autocracy even without taking account of the forces and means at hand. But what will such an ‘assault’ produce?”³⁵

Ten years later, but following the same line of thought, Martynov was to ask how Kamenev could read into the Group’s early writings the concept of “the hegemony of the proletariat” in the bourgeois revolution. The Group, he pointed out, had believed that the workers could not organize an effective mass or class party under tsarist conditions and that at most the intelligentsia could set up a network of workers’ cells “to take the bastion of the autocracy by storm.” In short, the Group could not conceive of a really “independent role for the proletariat prior to the revolution” and, in this sense, Plekhanov’s speech of 1889 represented a concept of revolution little different from that of Blanqui. ³⁶

It is, of course, striking that on both these controversial points, the Blagoevtsy had followed a line far more acceptable to these latter-day critics than that of the Group. Commenting on this fact, the Soviet historian N. L. Sergievskii suggested that in the 1880s the Group was out of tune not only with the Blagoevtsy but with nearly all the Social Democrats at work within Russia.³⁷ The explanation would seem to be that while the Marxists inside Russia took the German Social Democratic Party as their natural prototype, Plekhanov was influenced equally by the Communist Manifesto, by Zheliabov (the martyred leader of Narodnaia volia) and Guèsde (the dominant French Marxist whose revolutionary temperament he admired).

Called upon to defend the Group, Plekhanov developed one line of argument against Prokopovich in 1900 and another against Martynov in 1910. In his Vademecum he declared that there could be no clash of interests between the party of scientific socialism and the real interests of the working class. True, the Group had demonstrated that the intelligentsia could destroy the tsarist regime only with proletarian help—and hence had taken the intelligentsia as its starting point-“but in our eyes the worker was never a simple weapon for the attainment of aims foreign to him. . . . Our program was written in the spirit of Marx. But a program written in the spirit of that man cannot be a program of political exploiters.”³⁸ Clearly, Plekhanov had in mind the passage in the Communist Manifesto which states that the communists “always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole,” that they are “the most advanced and resolute section of the working class parties, . . . that section which pushed forward all other . . . and [has] the advantage of clearly understanding the line of the march.”³⁹ It was highly characteristic of Plekhanov to feel that a successful reference to Marx decided the argument in his favor. Furthermore, countered Plekhanov, the idea that the Group had advocated “a military assault on Tsarism” was based on nothing more than a false interpretation of one stray quotation from Aksel’rod.

But what was at issue was, as noted above, not one out-of-the-way reference, but a number of statements in well-publicized sources which pictured the coming revolution in terms of an armed assault led by the party on the tsarist governmental machine. This point, made by Martynov in his article of 1909, provoked Plekhanov to formulate the full-scale reply earlier denied to Prokopovich. All references to the apparently Blanquist declarations made by the Group in the 1880s were, Plekhanov now argued, irrelevant to an understanding of what the Group actually thought in those years. The fact was, he explained, that “at that time we did not count on the revolution as something for the near future.” The revolution would come only after “a more or less prolonged process of the economic development of Russia.”⁴⁰ Therefore, the historian should simply write off all those passages which spoke of leadership by the intelligentsia, of armed assault on the regime, of the imminent overthrow of Tsarism. “This,” he concluded, “answers the entire question. . . . What you encounter there are not my own views but the revolutionary conceptions of those times long ago which I took into account in order to bring the reader over to my own way of thinking.”⁴¹

This approach was astonishing (as Martynov and Riazanov were quick enough to point out on various occasions). Plekhanov, famous in the history of the revolutionary movement for his devoted defense of orthodoxy, now claimed that important passages in some of his best-known Marxist works did not represent the Group’s ideology but that of their populist opponents. It was hard not to see in this argument simply a polemical maneuver neatly designed to put an end to all further discussion. As to the specific issue—did the Group really consider a revolution possible in the immediate future?—it can only be said that they often wrote as if they did and that it seems more logical to accept at face value what they said at the time than what Plekhanov said in his disavowals twenty and thirty years later. In an article of December, 1881—when he was already largely converted to Marxism— Aksel’rod actually declared that “we are now evidently living through the eve of a major revolution.” Three years later he repeated this statement almost word for word.⁴² And in an article of 1885 written for the Blagoev circle Plekhanov expressed the same idea in only slightly veiled terms: “We are living on the eve of important events and the Russian working class must appear as an active participant in these events and not as a sorry mass of slaves.”⁴³ In sum, Riazanov certainly had adequate grounds for his judgment of 1903 that “the first Social Democrats were distinguished by no less naivete than the revolutionaries of the ’70s. They did not see the revolution as something far distant and, just like the narodovol’tsy, they were in a hurry to create the force on which to pin their hopes.” ⁴⁴

It was in fact partly because the Group regarded imminent revolution as possible that it found itself attracted to elitist concepts of organization-leadership by the intelligentsia, an ideologically monolithic and closed party, a revolution at least partially planned in advance. In the 1880s there was as yet no autonomous labor movement and it was logical to regard Zemlia i volia and Narodnaia volia as the most effective models for an underground organization preparing revolution. Broader perspectives only appeared with the emergence of an embryonic “trade-union” movement in the mid-1890s, and eventually both Aksel’rod and Vera Zasulich were to decide that the new realities demanded new—less centralized and more open—forms of organization. Plekhanov, too, became increasingly hostile to the thought of planned revolution, but he clung to the idea of a tightly-knit, highly selective party, thus placing himself on Lenin’s side at the Second Party Congress of 1903 and again during the so-called liquidationist crisis of 1909-11.

The belief that the autocracy was toppling encouraged the Group to toy not only with voluntaristic ideas of organization but also with maximalist visions of revolution: the notion that although Russia was still barely industrialized, the socialist revolution could follow hard on the heels of, or even merge with, the constitutionalist and bourgeois anti-tsarist revolution. Clearly, if the overthrow of Tsarism were regarded as far distant, there could be no point in worrying about the nature or timing of the subsequent socialist revolution. In her famous letter of February, 1881, to Marx, Vera Zasulich said that if Russia had to follow exactly the same path as the West, then

it only remains for the socialist as such to busy himself making more or less speculative estimates of how many decades it will take for the land of the Russian peasant to pass into the hands of the bourgeoisie and of how many centuries it will perhaps take for capitalism to attain the same stage in Russia that it has in Western Europe.⁴⁵

Conversely, if the Russian socialists could regard the unique peasant commune (obshchina) as the ready made cornerstone of the future communist society, then they would not have to wait for economic evolution, but could throw themselves on the tsarist regime, confident that victory was attainable, socialist society an immediate possibility.

In 1881, Vera Zasulich was still a populist. But, contrary to what is often thought, the adoption of Marxism by Zasulich, Aksel’rod, and Plekhanov in the years 1882-83 did not make this dilemma any less real for them. If Tsarism were to be overthrown in the near future, the Social Democrats too would have to decide whether or not to exploit the weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie and press ahead with a socialist—or at least a social—revolution. In fact, both Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich made it clear enough in their writings of 1883-85 that they expected the socialist revolution to follow shortly after the establishment of the bourgeois regime. Thus, in Socialism and the Political Struggle, Plekhanov explained that even though the two revolutions could not actually coincide, “it depends on us to bring [them] close together.”⁴⁶ In 1884 Vera Zasulich wrote: “The immediate future in Russia belongs to the growth of capitalism, but only the immediate future.”⁴⁷ And in Our Disagreements, Plekhanov again developed this theme: “Our [populist] intelligentsia argues that it is possible to dispense totally with one phase of social development . . . because it does not appreciate the fact that the duration of that phase can be shortened. . . . Our capitalism will fade without having fully flowered.” ⁴⁸

Plekhanov and Zasulich advanced a number of arguments to buttress their maximalist or quasi-maximalist prognosis. Doctrinally, the idea of the rapid transition from a backward or feudal economy to a society organized on socialist lines had ample backing from Marx himself. And in Socialism and the Political Struggle Plekhanov quoted approvingly the opinion formulated by Marx and Engels in 1882 that “if the Russian revolution were to serve as the signal for a workers’ revolution in the West in such a way that the two revolutions were to complement each other, then the existing form of Russian land ownership could serve as the starting point for communist development.”⁴⁹ Could it “enter the head of any populist,” asked Plekhanov, to deny the validity of this judgment? And he concluded that “the stupid prejudice about his [Marx’s] extreme ‘Westernism’ is thus shown to lack all semblance of truth.”⁵⁰

But even more important than Marx’s brief comments on the prospects of Russian socialism was Plekhanov’s reading of the Communist Manifesto. There seems to be no doubt that Plekhanov was immensely influenced by the Communist Manifesto because the Russia of the 1880s could then be regarded as having reached the stage of economic and political development attained by Germany in the 1840s. In both cases, the “feudal” landowners and the autocratic monarchy constituted the enemy common to the bourgeoisie and to the nascent proletariat alike. Therefore, argued Plekhanov, “we must follow the wonderful example of the German communists who, in the words of the Manifesto, went ‘together with the bourgeoisie in so far as it was revolutionary’,” but never ceased to develop the class consciousness of the proletariat. “In this way,” he pointed out, “the communists hoped [as stated in the Manifesto] that ‘the German bourgeois revolution would serve only as the direct prologue to the workers’ revolution.’”⁵¹

The Manifesto not only gave the stamp of ideological orthodoxy to the more messianic tendencies of the Group, but also suggested how its maximalism could be reconciled with belief in the primacy of economic causation. In the Manifesto we read that the “communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany” because “that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilization and with a more developed proletariat” than existed at the time of the English and French bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ⁵²

Pursuing this line of thought, Plekhanov and Zasulich stressed the crucial idea that in Russia at the time of the anti-tsarist revolution, the proletariat would be relatively strong and the bourgeoisie politically ineffectual. The proletariat would therefore be able to seize the initiative in a way barred to it in the French Revolution, for instance, but foreseen by Marx in his analysis of the German situation in the 1840s. “The development of capitalism in Germany,” wrote Plekhanov in 1884, “found the working class at a higher level of development than had been the case in England or France and so the resistance to capitalist exploitation was swifter and more decisive. The German communists did not even consider the possibility of their having to wait upon capitalism.”⁵³ Or as he put it in Socialism and the Political Struggle: “If the German bourgeoisie ‘came too late,’ then the Russian came later still and its reign cannot last long.” ⁵⁴

This same theme was taken up by Vera Zasulich who explained that as Russia benefited from the latest industrial techniques developed by the West, its capitalism progressed incomparably faster and its life-span would therefore be much shorter. “These borrowings, this constantly growing influence of Western Europe on the trend of our development . . . exclude the possibility of our going through those same consecutive stages of development characteristic of England or France.” To recognize that “economic factors are basic in history” does not mean to ignore the fundamental differences between various countries for, in reality, the sum of factors influencing the character of a country’s development is “infinitely varied.”⁵⁵

Vera Zasulich and Plekhanov also gave full play to the other factor which, according to the Communist Manifesto, could open the door to socialist revolution in a semi-feudal country—the “advanced conditions of European civilization.” The Europe of the 1880s was, after all, even riper for an international proletarian revolution—that is, far more industrially developed— than that of the 1840s. In Western Europe, wrote Zasulich, “the days of capitalism are already numbered. The socialist revolution in the West will put an end to capitalism in Eastern Europe too.”⁵⁶ And in the previous year, 1883, Plekhanov had already advanced this same idea: “The influence of international relations on the development of society in every civilized country gives us the right to hope that the social liberation of the Russian working class will follow very quickly on the fall of absolutism.”⁵⁷

Given so wide a measure of consensus between the Group and Narodnaia volia in the years 1883-85, it is only natural to ask what nonetheless divided them. The Group’s 1884 program narrowed the area of disagreement to two points: “the so-called seizure of power by the revolutionary party” and “immediate activity by the socialists among the working class.”⁵⁸ That as Marxists the Group should lay major stress on work among the industrial proletariat was only to be expected, although it should not be forgotten that in their heyday (1880-81) the narodovol’tsy devoted considerable effort to recruiting support from the working class. The area of disagreement here was, in reality, narrow enough.

The Group’s opposition to “the so-called seizure of power” requires more comment. As we have seen, the Group frequently supported the idea of a socialist revolution following hard on the heels of the bourgeois revolution. Nevertheless, Plekhanov was adamant in his opposition to proposals that these revolutions could coincide or merge. The revolutions had to be separate, the one acting as “the prologue” to the other. Plekhanov apparently had two considerations in mind here. First, it would take a period of freedom, however short, for the underground skeleton organization to form into a truly proletarian party capable of establishing a class dictatorship. Second, if the revolutionaries were eager for an alliance with the liberals against the autocracy, they had to distinguish between their minimal program, a democratic republic (acceptable to the liberals), and their maximal program, the proletarian dictatorship and socialist revolution (abhorrent to these same liberals). Thus, Plekhanov was free to unleash his barbs at Tikhomirov, the major spokesman of Narodnaia volia in the years 1883-85, who specifically advocated that the revolutionaries seize power in the initial stages of the anti-tsarist revolution and begin at once to reconstruct the socio-economic life of Russia. “The dictatorship of a class,” wrote Plekhanov in 1883, “is as different from the dictatorship of a group of revolutionary raznochintsy as heaven from earth.” ⁵⁹

Here, then, we seem to have a truly clear-cut difference between Plekhanov and Narodnaia volia, but even so two reservations have to be made. Plekhanov’s attacks on Tikhomirov hardly applied to all the leaders of Narodnaia volia. Zheliabov had come out specifically in favor of the idea that the revolutionaries distinguish sharply between their immediate aim—political freedom—and their final goal, socialism. In short, Plekhanov’s quarrel was more with Tikhomirov’s wing of Narodnaia volia than with the party as a whole. Again, in addition to the idea that only the proletariat as a fully conscious and well-organized class could attempt to initiate socialism, Plekhanov, as we have seen, also defended the apparently contradictory idea that, given luck, the interval of bourgeois rule would be extremely short. However, as Tikhomirov asked, if “a worker fit for class dictatorship hardly exists” in contemporary Russia⁶⁰ how was an entire class fit for this task to emerge almost overnight?

Plekhanov’s reply to Tikhomirov provides us with the key to his mode of thought when making political predictions. “Mr. Tikhomirov,” he wrote in 1884, “does not understand that a worker incapable of class dictatorship can yearly and daily become more and more capable of it.” ⁶¹ This statement foreshadowed his rebuff to Martynov in 1910 in which he declared that the Group had expected the revolution to result from a “more or less prolonged process of economic development.” Such a process, he then pointed out, was more than nil and less than infinity.⁶² In both cases, Plekhanov presented an argument which was watertight both logically and doctrinally but which was almost meaningless politically. Between nil and infinity, after all, stretches the entire range of political choice. Plekhanov, however, preferred to leave all the options open. It is thus hardly surprising that, from the first, Plekhanov’s attitude to the coming revolutions has been interpreted in such radically different ways.

Despite all that has been said hitherto, however, there was undoubtedly one major point of disagreement between the Group and the populists. They held opposing views of what socialism actually meant. When Tikhomirov said that the first task of the revolutionary regime would be “to begin the socialist organization of Russia,” he apparently envisaged above all the distribution of the landed estates among the peasant communes. In populist thinking, following the Proudhonist tradition, this was a rudimentary form of socialism. But for Plekhanov, socialism meant not only equality and nationalization, but the administration by the community—that is, by the state—of the means of production and distribution. “The question of expropriation,” wrote Plekhanov, “leads to the question of the exploitation of the confiscated estates.” The fact that the commune would now be responsible for the partition and repartition of all the land in its area did not lessen the capitalist nature of the village economy, for each peasant would still be responsible for his own share and would pocket his own profits. “It is unfortunate,” explained Plekhanov (echoing Marx’s attack on Proudhon), “that Russian socialism as presented by Mr. Tikhomirov thus stands much closer to the socialism of the petty bourgeoisie than to that of the workers.” ⁶³

Given this emphasis on a strictly Marxist definition of socialism, the statements of the Group that the socialist revolution was close at hand were all the more surprising. As Plekhanov himself put it: “Will the majority of our peasantry vote for communism? Even Mr. Tikhomirov does not expect this. At its level today and in the near future, the people could not and would not know how to build a communist society.”⁶⁴ Yet scattered across the Group’s publications of 1883-85, we find reaffirmations of the idea that if the political revolution were not too long delayed then the peasant commune could be saved from disintegration and thus be “of the greatest service to Russia,” as Zasulich wrote, in the building of socialism. She herself clearly felt that the peculiarly Russian traditions of land-holding would enable a socialist regime to coax the reluctant peasant to accept collective production and egalitarian distribution. “Given broad preparatory propaganda,” she concluded, “the government could win the sympathy and understanding of the mass of the peasant population, rely in the practical sphere on the remnants of the communal institutions, and so immediately adopt the broadest measures of the most decisive character.”⁶⁵

But Plekhanov—here anticipating Lenin by twenty years—had little faith at this stage in persuasion alone:

When the time comes for the final victory of the labor party over the upper classes, then it and it alone will take the initiative in the socialist organization of national production. Under its influence—and on occasion under its pressure-the village communes, still preserved, will really go over to a higher communist form. But, protest the populists [samobytniki], the small-holders will put up powerful resistance to the labor party. Very probably this is true, but there will be somebody to fight this resistance. The emergence of the class of small-holders will be matched by the growth in number and in power of our revolutionary proletariat which will of course give life and movement to our cumbersome state machine. There is nothing terrible about opposition when there is a historical force capable of defeating it.⁶⁶

In this passage, we see signs of voluntarism and maximalism actually outdistancing that of Narodnaia volia which, after all, was peasant-oriented and, in the last resort, willing to adjust its dreams to those of the peasants, the vast majority of the population.

The years 1883-85 represented the high point of the maximalist tendency in the thinking of Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich. Even in that period, the third member of the Group, Pavel Aksel’rod, apparently did not share the idea that Russia could radically shorten the transition to socialism. Strongly influenced by the development of the German Social Democratic movement, he clearly hoped that after the overthrow of Tsarism, Russia would enter an open-ended period of parliamentary politics and capitalist economics in which the Russian Social Democrats could build up a powerful and representative labor party.

This same position was adopted by Vera Zasulich in the late 1880s. In an article published in 1890 she explained why she had abandoned her earlier hopes that Russia could avoid a lengthy period of capitalist development. At one point, she admitted, she had believed that “in its struggle against the autocracy our revolutionary movement . . . would adopt the point of view of the Communists fighting for political freedom in 1848 not as an ultimate goal, but as the first step in that social revolution which they had made their objective.” But the failure of the revolutionary youth to adopt scientific socialism and build up a powerful underground movement among the proletariat had put an end to these dreams. Now, she concluded, even after the fall of the autocracy the socialist revolution would be far distant:

The [communist] revolution is not carried through at one stroke, with one rising, but is an entire more or less prolonged process during which the proletariat grows, educates and organizes itself, taking part in every struggle . . . but remaining an opposition and not a governing party because, for the socialists, the premature seizure of power at a time when a major part of the proletariat itself remains unorganized would mean not victory but a delay in the ultimate triumph.⁶⁷

In this passage, Vera Zasulich presented the essentials of the “minimalist” approach which was later to characterize the mainstream of Menshevism.

Plekhanov was more reluctant to abandon his maximalist positions in toto, although he frequently modified them. Even in Our Differences he had toned down one of the themes presented a year earlier in Socialism and the Political Struggle-the idea that the Russian revolution would be guaranteed a socialist character by the outbreak of a proletarian revolution in Europe. This idea had been eagerly exploited by Tikhomirov to show that the attainment of socialism in Russia was not dependent on the development of capitalism. If the socialists could rely on aid from abroad why did they have to wait until the Russian proletariat was ready for revolution and then for power? Clearly irritated by the boomerang effect of his own-and Marx’s-argument, Plekhanov took pains in his second book to explain that a European socialist revolution would exert little positive impact on Russia unless she already possessed a well-organized proletarian party which could join forces with the international movement. The French revolution of February, 1848, he wrote, “met with a positive response in almost all the countries which were similar to France in their social structure. But the wave it raised broke against the barriers of peasant Europe. Watch out that this same thing does not happen with the future revolution of the proletariat.”⁶⁸

Of itself, this qualification did not indicate a repudiation of the “maximalist” option, but towards the end of the 1880s Plekhanov, like Vera Zasulich, was clearly coming to the conclusion that the direct road to socialism no longer had any place in Russian Marxist thought. Indicative of this decision was his approach to the peasant commune. The Group in its first years had repeatedly referred to the fact that the commune could be preserved by state intervention and that it could serve as a basis for socialism. But at the end of the decade Plekhanov made it plain that in his view there was only one route to socialism: the disintegration of the commune, the formation of a rural bourgeoisie, the emergence of a large rural and urban proletariat.⁶⁹ This viewpoint, of course, had always been implicit in Plekhanov’s Marxist writings, but earlier he had taken care to keep in reserve an alternative prognosis.

Even now, however, it would be erroneous to think that Plekhanov, following Vera Zasulich, had come to share Aksel’rod’s belief in parliamentary constitutionalism as the natural form of government for the post-tsarist “bourgeois” period. In contrast to his two comrades, Plekhanov still wanted to be able to choose between two alternative blueprints for the coming revolution, one moderate and political, the other all-embracing and social. Although he now regarded rapid transition to socialism as utopian, this did not exclude the possibility of some kind of radical dictatorship. Thus, in his first booklet on the famine of 1892, Plekhanov had held out the possibility of an alliance with liberals, with a parliament and a constitution as their common goal. But in his second booklet, On the Tasks of the Socialists in the Struggle Against the Famine, he toyed with the idea of the Social Democrats putting themselves at the head of a rising of the land-hungry peasantry. They would not be content with the calling of a national assembly [Zemskii sobor] but if necessary would immediately undertake to drive out its more conservative members, “to purge” the assembly “with a new revolutionary sweep of the hand.” The Marxists would at once demand “the full expropriation of the large landowners and the conversion of the land into national property.” In the years 1883-85, too, the Group had mentioned the possibility of “nationalizing” the land but at that stage they apparently had had in mind primarily its conversion into farms to be run by the state. Plekhanov now made it clear that he was thinking in terms of land distribution either among the peasants individually or via the communes. “A mighty revolutionary movement will emerge,” he wrote, “which we could not desert without betraying the principles of socialism.”⁷⁰ Land distribution, he explained, would not delay the development of capitalism in Russia; the rapid disintegration of the commune would continue unabated, but the socialists would have established themselves, sure of peasant gratitude, in an impregnable political position.

In developing this radical alternative to constitutionalism, Plekhanov had in mind first and foremost the course of the French Revolution moving inexorably from constitutional monarchy to Jacobin dictatorship. “What,” he asked, “would the calling of a Zemskii sobor mean? It would mean the same as the calling of the Estates General at the end of the last century in France-a recognition by the government of its lack of viability, a concession torn from it by the irreversable march of historical events, the prologue of revolution.” ⁷¹

In addition to the model of the French Revolution, another influence may well have been at work. At least one Soviet historian⁷² has pointed to the similarities in tone between Plekhanov’s second booklet on the famine and the Address sent by Marx and Engels to the Communist League in 1850, but only published by Engels in 1885. It seems almost beyond doubt that Plekhanov was attracted to the idea stated there that “above all things, the workers must counteract . . . the bourgeois endeavors to allay the storm and must compel the democrats to carry out their present terrorist phrases. . . . Far from opposing so-called excesses, instances of popular revenge against hated individuals or public buildings . . . must not only be tolerated, but the leadership of them taken in hand.”⁷³ It should be remembered that the Group’s program of 1885 had declared that at the time of the revolution the Social Democrats “would not hesitate to use even so-called terrorist acts if these seemed necessary in the interests of the struggle.”⁷⁴ Plekhanov frequently returned to this idea, explaining that “the terror of 1793” was far more effective and justified than that of 1881 or as he sometimes put it: “Against Russian despotism dynamite is not a bad method but the guillotine is better still.”⁷⁵

It is clear that these “Jacobin” tendencies of Plekhanov were utterly out of tune with the entire attitude of Vera Zasulich and Pavel Aksel’rod as it had developed in the late 1880s. In a letter of 1893 Plekhanov said specifically that Aksel’rod had the right “to restrain” his [Plekhanov’s] “Jacobin leanings” whenever these seemed to be getting out of hand.⁷⁶ But they remained a persistent element in Plekhanov’s way of thought at least until his breach with Lenin at the end of 1903.

In sum, then, Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich, at least, did not assume that their conversion to Marxism called logically for a radical revision of populist thinking on the forms of revolutionary organization, strategy and tactics or even of populist thinking on the transition to socialism. For them, Marxism implied a new approach to philosophy-and, in particular, to the philosophy of history, to economics, and to sociology. They were now firmly committed “Westerners” in opposition to the more extravagant “Slavophile” leanings of many populists; they played down the power of the individual to alter fundamental historical processes; they gave clear priority to the proletariat over the peasantry as the class which would ensure revolutionary victory and build socialism; above all, they welcomed the growth of capitalism where the populists had feared it. It was logical to draw the conclusion (as the Group did) that, for the revolutionaries, the city had priority over the village and work among the proletariat over terrorism. But the first of these ideas had been upheld in practice by Narodnaia volia and the second by Chernyi peredel. In fact, while Plekhanov, the populist of 1879, had split Zemlia i volia rather than adopt a policy centered on assassination, Plekhanov, the Marxist of 1884, specifically stated that his new Group accepted assassination as a weapon in the fight against Tsarism.

In reality, the organizational model adopted by the Group was that of Narodnaia volia and Zemlia i volia: a tightly-knit, strictly selective, highly centralized party led by the intelligentsia. Hopefully, the revolution would be sparked off and directed by the revolutionaries, and the post-tsarist bourgeois regime would be overthrown by the socialists before it had time to consolidate itself. In other words, their Westernism, their proletarian-centeredness, and their belief in the inevitability of capitalism by no means implied for the Group that Russia was bound to follow the path of Germany, France, or England, but simply that no country was exempt from the working of universal economic laws. The revolutionaries had to understand how these general laws interacted with the specific conditions of Russian life and exploit their understanding in order to ensure a socialist revolution in the near future. Logically, of course, it was possible to draw far more “revisionist” conclusions from Marxist doctrine, and those who took the German Social Democratic movement as their model were inclined to go much further than Vera Zasulich and Plekhanov in rejecting populist modes of organization and thought. Thus, the Blagoev group in their program of 1885 openly opposed terror, advocated a decentralized movement, argued that the revolution would be almost entirely spontaneous and that, given Russian conditions, the transition to socialism would be long and drawn out. But in the Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich of 1883-85 it is reasonable, as Sergievskii has pointed out, to see not only the pioneers of Russian Marxism but also the heirs of the narodovolets, Zheliabov. Like him, they saw socialism not as a far-distant dream, but as a practical program; yet like him, too, they did not think it wise for the socialists to attempt to seize power in the early stages of the coming revolution.

It is true that the maximalism of Zasulich and Plekhanov was short-lived and that the influence of Social Democratic thinking in Germany came to have a greater and greater hold over the emergent Marxist movement in Russia. But it should be remembered that it was in the “maximalist” years, 1883-85, that Plekhanov produced his two most influential Marxist studies of the revolutionary situation and his two draft programs for the Group. Furthermore, Plekhanov himself clung doggedly to two tenets from these early years: one, the party organization, he believed, had to remain highly centralized, doctrinally homogeneous, the avant-garde, supported by the labor movement but not under its control. Second, even when Plekhanov came to regard the peasant commune as hopelessly doomed to disintegration and socialism as therefore far distant, he did not reconcile himself to bourgeois parliamentarianism as the only possibility but advanced his “Jacobin” alternative: a social revolution of the peasants under socialist leadership, and the overthrow of constitutionalism.

In the last resort, it did not fall to Plekhanov to develop the voluntarist, maximalist, and “Jacobin” strands of his thought. His arguments were usually double-edged and in both revolutions (1905 and 1917) he employed the anti-Blanquist blade of his sword. But he was not allowed to forget the existence of the other side. Thus, writing in 1903, Riazanov argued that the Social Democrats would have to subject the post-autocratic Constituent Assembly to militant demonstrations and street violence. Even if the revolution were confined to Russia, there was no reason why the socialists should be satisfied with constitutional government. Here was Plekhanov’s “Jacobin” alternative. “Our motto,” wrote Riazanov, “is revolution in permanentia, not order in place of revolution but revolution in place of order.” But it was reasonable to hope for more than this. “If the revolution of the Russian proletariat will serve as the signal for the European proletariat then our revolution will only be the direct prologue for the social[ist] revolution.”⁷⁷ Basing himself explicitly on the early writings of the Group, Riazanov had thus anticipated by more than two years Trotsky’s ideas on permanent revolution.

Until 1914, of course, Lenin was more cautious and was careful never to go beyond the “Jacobin” alternative. Socialism, he wrote in 1894, could not be the immediate aim of the Social Democrats, but a thorough-going economic revolution was possible. “Land nationalization,” based on “the complete expropriation of the nobles’ estates,” had its place in the minimal Social Democratic program.⁷⁸ The immediate goal had to be the maximal economic transformation possible given Russia’s semi-feudal stage of development—an approach hardly designed to win liberal support in the struggle against Tsarism, and therefore increasingly shelved by the Group during the 1890s. But with his booklet of 1894, Lenin made it clear that he was a natural heir to the “Jacobin”—and ultimately to the maximalist—elements in the Group’s program.

____________

This article, which was written specifically for the present volume, has meanwhile appeared in somewhat different form in Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique, No. 9, 1968.