Nothing is so fitting as a time of revolution for freeing our thinking at one blow in all directions from the vision-narrowing blinders of the cliché. Real history, like the creative power of nature, is much richer and more bizarre in its twists and turns than any pedant’s systematizations and classifications.
When the first tidings of the pilgrimage of the Petersburg workforce to the tsar reached ears outside of Russia, they generally stirred very mixed and undoubtedly despondent feelings. A strange image of primitive naivety, concurrent with great tragic threads, hidden behind a mystical, strange and estranging veil, was offered up to the realistic eye of the sober Europeans, who shook their head with regret at the calamitous deception of a whole people. It was only when the cannons were moved forward in the Vassilevsky Ostrov district, and only when we first realized the literally “bloody” earnestness with which tsarism received the peculiar procession of pilgrims, that we were forced to think of Paris, of the barricades, and of all the modern, western European reminiscences. And when we heard that in all other cities in Russia the rising took the accepted form of the general strike, including mass dissemination of Social Democratic pamphlets, we were entirely reassured that this was not an oriental caravan, but rather a modern, proletarian revolution. With all great respect for the aforesaid pamphlets, it would be a disastrous error to trick ourselves into believing that these writings alone transported the revolutionary moment into the political movement. In the Russian Revolution that we are experiencing right now, as elsewhere, the task has fallen to Social Democracy of formulating the revolutionary aspect of the proletarian rising, of guiding it towards clear expression, of liberating it from the confines of an elementary form of eruption. The revolutionary core has been present in all proceedings from the start—as present in the general strike that spread like the wind, as in the supplication of the Petersburg proletariat itself.
There is an illusion that what was actually to blame for the distressing political situation in Russia was a “misunderstanding” between the monarch and the people, a “misunderstanding” that was instigated and maintained by the systematic intrigues of “advisers” to the throne and by the entire court camarilla, who interposed themselves between the people and the misguided ruler, “the prince.” This illusion by no means needs to be regarded as an exotic outgrowth of Russia’s peculiar conditions and its dimly lit world of mysticism. It is not at all especially necessary for us in Germany to go hunting far out in the world to find an analogous example. There is, after all, an old but always new item that can be requisitioned out of the treasure chest of political wisdom that belongs to German liberalism, one which liberalism periodically narrates to itself and others, to the effect that the whole miserable state of affairs in Prussian Germany results mainly from the fact that the Kaiser is “poorly informed by his advisers,” which denies him the possibility of coming to an understanding with the people based on true inner feelings. Nothing in this profound conception is changed by the fact that in this case what they mean by “the people” is none other than the “Free Thinker” liberals themselves and the great pain they suffer over the fact that Jewish judges are not allowed into the upper levels of officialdom and other fundamental evils of the existing social order.
But there is a vast difference between the political weight of such illusions in the heads of the liberal bourgeoisie, who are in decline—and the upward-striving modern proletariat. The theory of the “prince misled by bad advisers” is an entirely adequate political expression of the aspirations that dwell in the hearts of the German Free Thinkers of today. The pleading knee-bending before the throne and the old wives’ chatter about the small blemishes that mar the beauty of this best of all possible worlds in which we live—that is the ultimate expression of liberal politics. When these are put together they produce a complete harmony and absolute equilibrium, which has guaranteed to the above-mentioned type of politics a hundred years of undisturbed existence, and always with the same lack of success, and yet it ensures that the liberals will evermore gaze hopefully upward, hoping that the heavenly dew of the Kaiser’s blessing will descend upon them, patiently wishing to themselves all the while that the liquid that was actually coming down on them from above was a little bit different.
On the other hand, a glaring contradiction exists between the myth of the “good prince”—between that and the historical aspirations and class interests of the modern proletariat. Those who were appalled from the very first moment by the humbly pleading attitude of the people in Petersburg, the people who were damp-eyed and with great ceremony carried images with the sign of the cross in their hands when they began their march to petition the tsar—the people who are so appalled have overlooked the essence of the matter while focusing on the outward appearance, the external spectacle, in particular, the fact that the humble “petition” that this mass of people was taking to the tsar consisted in nothing other than a request that his holy majesty would kindly with his own hands as supreme autocrat surrender all his powers and abdicate as monarch “of all the Russians.” It was a request to the autocrat to put an end to autocracy, a request to the wolf to please stop eating sheep, a request that from now on he should prefer tender vegetables instead of warm blood. It was a radical political program clothed in the form of a touching patriarchal idyll. It was an exertion of class pressure of the most modern kind by a proletariat that had become mature to the fullest extent, but it was decked out in the fantastic form of a colorful Bible-bangers’ procession, an “amen march.” And it was precisely this contradiction between the revolutionary essence expressing the interests of the proletariat and the primitive outer coating, the illusory tale of the “good prince,” which was bound to end up with the flaming sparks of revolution in the streets as soon as it was tested against reality.
But this test had to be made sooner or later. Despite the entire elemental lack of clarity among the mass of the people amid stormy times, the working class pressed for this conception to be tried out and tested in practice, and it took this seriously and even sacredly, whereas the liberal bourgeoisie always had a cynical and cowardly attitude toward their “articles of faith,” abandoning them on every suitable occasion. The Petersburg proletariat was serious about its faith in the tsar, and it was with astounding simplicity and great decisiveness that the workers headed for their destination in front of the autocrat’s palace. Here, however, it immediately became evident that the divine graciousness of the monarchical idea absolutely does not exist—and this holds true everywhere, not only in Russia—the monarchy cannot exist without its protective screen of being misled by “bad advisers,” by the court camarilla, and by the bureaucrats in general. Without this salutary screen of semi-darkness the monarch cannot hide himself from “his children,” the people, “his loyal subjects.” It was enough that the aroused masses had come to this idea, which was childish from the formal point of view, but in fact was frightening and dangerous—and it was enough that they should come to meet face to face with the “father of their country” and to try to make a reality out of the myth of a “social monarch” or a “social emperor.” And thus this movement, with the iron law of necessity, was transformed into a confrontation between two mortal enemies, a collision of two worlds, a clash between two historical eras.
Only the indestructibly bigoted narrow-mindedness of today’s Free Thinker rabble can indulge in the absurd idea that what was to blame for the revolutionary outcome of the episode on the Nevá [on January 22] was that Tsar Nicholas did not come out in a good-natured and kind way to meet with the “rabble” and lend his ear to their complaints. They are implying that if only he had done that, everything would have been fine. The theatrical performance of the Free Thinkers imagines that a hospitable reception for the proletarian procession was unfortunately disrupted by the blue pills* flying through the air. This presumably prevented the drama from ending with a truly liberal curtain call—a reconciliation between the “father of his country” and his beloved children, in which tears of joy would flow together from both sides with immortal expressions of good wishes. This is a blessedly moving piece of folk theater from the “Land of If Only” [Iffland]—just like the plays performed countless times by German liberalism ever since those glorious days of the memorable Mayor [Karl von] Rotteck of Freiburg in 1833 right down to the present times.*
The truth is that history has already played out this particular drama on one occasion, and, in fact, it played out the beginning of the show exactly according to the liberal recipe. On October 5, 1789, the proletariat of Paris, with the women in the lead, made a procession to Versailles, so that they could personally confront their thickheaded Capetian monarch, have a few words with him face to face, and bring him back to Paris. Initially this affair transpired in a wholesome spirit and everything was quite orderly. Louis XVI gave his assurances, though with somewhat trembling lips, that he did want to return to be with his beloved Parisians “full of trust and feelings of satisfaction,” and soon after that [in July 1790] a grand ceremony was held on the Champ de Mars, with oaths of mutual loyalty being exchanged along with the swearing of eternal vows. It seemed that the ceremony would never end; it was like a scene between a love-struck twelfth-grade boy and a blushing teenage girl beneath flowering lilac bushes. And yet this good-natured Louis XVI quickly evolved, in the course of his playacting with the people that had begun so idyllically, and, in the end, he totally and completely lost his fat head.
The Russian Revolution began differently, but it could easily have taken a similar turn. And one can grant to little Nicholas and his advisers that they judged more correctly than the German liberals, who are also advisers from a distant corner to an oppressive despotism, in that they grasped much more quickly the dangerous revolutionary content beneath the humble speech of the Petersburg proletariat—much more quickly, in fact, than many Western European Social Democrats, because the tsar and his advisers decided at the very first step taken by the proletarian petitioners to respond by using the last trump card of despotism.
If Nicholas and his beloved relatives and official colleagues wanted to learn something from the most recent events, the first thing they would learn is that they should not threaten the strikers and those who are openly engaged in struggle; they should not threaten such workers with “the most severe punishment up to and including the dungeon,” but they should undertake to foster the belief in the “good but misguided prince” and disseminate it more widely among the people. From such heretical false doctrine there would later arise at the appropriate moment the dangerous notion among the mass of the people that the “father of their country” should be confronted face to face and he should be “petitioned” for various things, the kind of things a person doesn’t like to hear, such as cutting off his own head.
And we ourselves can once again learn from the Petersburg example. Among the many lessons that come to us from the Russian Revolution is to separate the content from the often-contradictory external form in revolutionary mass movements, instead of mixing them together and confusing them with one another. If it should ever occur to the proletariat anywhere to march spontaneously to the honorable legislative assembly and to government buildings with fiery resoluteness and in the most polite way to request that the political helm of state be transferred magnanimously from the hands of the ruling classes into those of the working-class masses and that, otherwise, like the Petersburg workers “we would prefer to die,” and even if Pastor [Friedrich] Naumann himself marched at the head of the procession,* then we could calmly hang a placard upon the fortresses of capitalist wage slavery, the same placard that appeared resplendently on the plaza after the storming of the Bastille: “This is where the dancing was done.”