The first mass revolutionary uprising of the Russian proletariat against absolutism on January 22 in Petersburg has been “victoriously” put down; that is, drowned in the blood of thousands of unarmed workers, in the blood of slaughtered men, women, and children of the people. It is quite possible that for the moment—at least in Petersburg—a break in the revolutionary movement has set in, a pause to rest and recover. But the storm wave has flooded down from the north, from Petersburg, across the entire giant empire and has taken over, one after the other, all the larger industrial cities of Russia.
Anyone who expected the victory of the revolution at a single blow, anyone who now, after the “victory” of the blood-and-iron policy in Petersburg, might be inclined, depending on their partisan standpoint, either to give in to pessimistic despondency or to prematurely celebrate the “restoration of order”—such people would only reveal thereby that the history of revolutions, whose inner laws operate with iron necessity, is a history that remains for them a closed book sealed with seven seals.
An eternity passed—at least when measured against revolutionary impatience and the torments suffered by the Russian people—before it happened that beneath the centuries-old sheet of ice, the absolutist rule that covered the country, the fire of revolution was fanned into a bright flame. The revolution will certainly last for quite a long period of many struggles with alternating victories and defeats for the people, costing numberless casualties, before the bloodthirsty beast of absolutism, still dreadful even in its death agony, will finally be laid low. We must gird ourselves for a revolutionary epoch in Russia lasting not days or months but years, as with the Great French Revolution.
And indeed, all friends of civilization and freedom—which is to say, those of the international working-class movement—can celebrate even now with all their heart. In Russia, as of now, the cause of freedom has won, and the camp of international reaction, as of January 22, with the events on the streets of Petersburg, has already suffered a bloody defeat, the equivalent of the battle of Jena.† On that day [on January 22], the Russian proletariat as a class strode onto the political stage for the first time. There finally appeared on the battlefield the force that alone is called upon by history to hurl the tsarist system onto the rubbish heap, and is capable of doing it, and to raise the banner of civilization in the land of Russia, as in every land.
The running battle against Russian autocracy has been going on for nearly a hundred years. In 1825, there was a revolt in Petersburg led by youthful members of the upper aristocracy, army officers who attempted to shake off the chains of despotism. Tombstone monuments to this failed rebellion, which was suppressed with brutal force, can still be found today in the snowfields of Siberia, where dozens of the noblest martyrs were laid to their eternal rest. Conspiratorial societies and anti-tsarist plots were revived in the 1850s, and again “order” and the knout soon prevailed over multitudes of desperate fighters. In the 1870s, a strong party of the revolutionary intelligentsia* oriented toward the masses of the peasantry and developed a systematic campaign of terrorist attempts on the life of the tsar. They wanted to overthrow the political system by this means. It soon became evident, however, that the mass of the peasants at that time constituted a completely disunited and unreliable element on which to base revolutionary movements. In addition, it turned out that the physical removal of individual tsars was quite an ineffective method if one wanted to get rid of the system of tsarist rule as a whole.
After the decline and fall of the terrorist movement in Russia in the 1880s there descended upon Russian society for a while—and this was also true for the friends of freedom in Western Europe—a profound despondency. The ice sheet of absolutism seemed unbreakable and social conditions in Russia seemed hopeless. And yet there came into existence at precisely that time in Russia the very movement whose outcome was to be—the events of January 22 in Petersburg—the Social Democratic movement.
It was quite a desperate idea for the tsarist government, after its severe defeat in the Crimean War [1855–56], from the 1860s on, to try and transplant Western European capitalism into Russia. For financial and military purposes, however, bankrupt absolutism needed to have within its territory railroads and the telegraph, iron and coal, machines, raw cotton, and textile manufacture. It imported capitalism using every means of plundering the people and a reckless policy of high protective tariffs. It lovingly nurtured a capitalist class, and with it capitalist exploitation, and thereby gave rise to the proletariat and its outraged rebellion against exploitation and oppression. Without knowing it, with its own hands, tsarism was digging its grave.
The role for which the peasantry had proved unsuitable in Russia became the historical task of the urban industrial working class. This class became the vehicle of the freedom movement, the revolutionary movement. The unremitting subterranean work of education and enlightenment by the Russian Marxists of the Social Democratic movement over a period of twenty years brought to fruition what a century of the most heroic and courageous revolts by the intelligentsia had been unable to accomplish—to shake the age-old fortress of despotism to its foundations.
Now all the oppositional and revolutionary forces of Russian society can set to work—the elemental peasant rebellion, lacking clarity of purpose; the liberal dissatisfaction of the progressive landed nobility; the yearning for freedom among the educated intelligentsia, the professors, lawyers, and literati. All of them, relying on the revolutionary mass movement of the urban proletariat, can now help lead a huge army of fighters, the people as a whole, against tsarism.
But the power and the future of the revolutionary movement lies solely and alone with the class-conscious proletariat of Russia, because it alone has the understanding and is willing to sacrifice proletarian lives by the thousands on the battlefield of freedom. And no matter that the leadership of the uprising at the first moment fell into the hands of accidental figures, or that the movement might seem from the outside to be driven by all sorts of illusions, in fact it is the product of the enormous amount of work of political explanation that has been spread about by Social Democratic agitators among the ranks of the working class in Russia, by women and men who were not prominently visible.
In Russia, as everywhere in the world, the cause of freedom and of social progress now lies with the class-conscious proletariat. And it is in good hands!