Recent days have brought a highly interesting and significant announcement from Russian liberalism, one that is quite relevant in that it sheds a bright light on class and party relations inside the tsarist empire in the midst of revolution.
Mr. Pyotr von Struve,† who is the literary representative and intellectual head of liberalism in Russia, has published an Open Letter to Jean Jaurès in Jaurès’s newspaper L’Humanité. In this Open Letter, Struve, in the light of what might be called the definitive military collapse of tsarism,‡ lays out, so to speak, the political platform of the Russian liberal party.
What the Russian people need most of all at this moment, according to this “leader” of Russian liberalism, is a—“strong government”! Mr. Struve believes he cannot emphasize enough the urgent necessity for “a strong government” and reiterates this theme many times with variations in different keys, and indeed this necessity is based on two pressing tasks that urgently require solution at the present time in the tsarist empire. First, the establishment of order; and second, and above all, the conclusion of an advantageous peace with Japan as well as the beginnings of a beneficial and at the same time “strong” foreign policy for Russia. These noble aims are more than can be handled by the present-day mindless and corrupt chinovniki of absolutism—who, according to Mr. Struve, are hopeless§ and have caused the entire current unholy mess. Therefore what is needed to counteract this is a government made up of men with moral authority, and such gems are oh-so-easy to find and oh-so-close at hand, so that all his bloodstained Majesty need do is stretch out His Excellent hand and—here Mr. Struve makes a humble and respectful bow and whispers modestly: “I am not saying that I dare to hope that Your Majesty would place your trust in me; I am merely saying that Your Majesty needs, if such be Your Will, only to lift one little finger and in the most peaceful way your humble and obedient liberal servants would take over the portfolios of Trepov and Bułygin and would conclude a splendid peace with Japan, reconcile Russia with England, and restore calm among the revolutionary ‘rabble,’ who indeed, as I wrote in January, are not yet mature enough for political life, and I would …” But Mr. Struve promises so much, so many beautiful things, as future government minister under Tsar Nicholas II that we cannot by any means quote all of them here.
By the way, the quotation given above is not exactly accurate. Mr. Struve says all this, but in slightly different words: “Theoretically and abstractly speaking, nothing stands in the way to prevent the revolution from forming a government in the most peaceful way, in just as peaceful a way as [French President Émile] Loubet did yesterday when he called on M. [Maurice] Rouvier to take the place of M. [Émile] Combes, or just as peacefully as [British King] Edward VII might do tomorrow by asking Mr. [Henry] Campbell-Bannerman to replace Mr. [Arthur] Balfour. Nicholas II is as well acquainted as we are (or if he is not, he can make such acquaintance tomorrow), with the men who can be called to take the rudder for Russia, and that would mean the creation of a strong, popular, and authoritative government, a government of radical reforms. One need only convene a congress in Moscow of delegates from the zemstvos analogous to the April congress, and this congress would soon make known to Nicholas II the names of men who would enjoy the confidence of our country as a moral authority. Men who are necessary in order to form a strong (emphasis by Mr. Struve himself—R.L.) government. May Nicholas II accept the program of these men and entrust them with the helm of state. Because today Russia needs not only freedom but also the formation of a government that would be compatible with freedom and with order.”
Aside from the emphasis on a “strong” government and on “order,” in the outpouring above there is also a proposal that is particularly worth noting—that the government of the “revolution” be selected from the zemstvo congress! Since the beginning of openly expressed revolutionary unrest, and in particular since the Petersburg bloodbath, there has been a single unceasing call by the revolutionaries and by all oppositional elements—for a Constituent Assembly made up of elected representatives of the people based on universal, equal, and direct suffrage and the secret ballot. It is taken for granted by the fighting working class that the only government that can emerge from this revolution is one created by such a universally representative assembly and one that would be supported by it.
Now it turns out that, according to this liberal gentleman, the liquidation of the revolution can go ahead in a “peaceful and simple” way, that instead of an assembly representing the people, all that is needed is to call a zemstvo congress, that is, to summon merely the class representatives of the landowning nobility, and ministry would be formed from among these noble owners of landed property.
Further on, Mr. Struve—who it should be noted introduced himself at the beginning of his Open Letter emphatically and on an official basis as “the representative of the liberal-democratic party”—develops an extensive foreign policy program worked out in minutest detail. In good form, he passes the test as a future leading statesman and diplomat, showing that he stands as firm as a rock against the shameless demands of the slant-eyed yellow devils, yet at the same time, wise as a serpent, he proposes an alliance with Japan and, sly as a fox, also suggests reconciliation with the arch-enemy England, all the while extending a warm hand to his friend Jaurès, advocating a reaffirmation of the Franco-Russian alliance,* a reaffirmation that would assure France’s rule over Cochin China.† And then he turns this new Quadruple Alliance—Russia, Japan, England, and France—against the Triple Alliance, that is, against Germany, which has been leading the Triple Alliance in its parade march into Asia Minor—because Mr. Struve wants the main base of his future foreign policy to be centered precisely on the Black Sea region.‡ Inasmuch as the leader of zemstvo liberalism wanted to make a display of his capability as an up-and-coming statesman, he has undeniably accomplished this with his barroom-style political outpouring circling the globe, and in the process he has also displayed the necessary dose of bigoted narrow-mindedness required of a statesman in that he is completely blind to the international trends in the world market, which have been moving with fatal logic, shifting the center of gravity of world politics and the focal point of world crises to the Far East. As a “strongman” he promises to redirect Russian diplomacy, to shove it back into the worn-out children’s shoes of “Near East policy,” fighting over the Bosporus.
There is something entirely different, however, which constitutes the most important aspect of the barroom-style political effusion [Kannegiesserei], described above. Mr. Struve’s entire program centers on foreign policy, and Mr. Struve states explicitly that it is his purpose to turn the attention of all influential fighters for freedom in Russia to these problems. Today, there is no more certain or tried-and-true way of confusing the opposition to tsarism, of weakening and demoralizing it at the present moment, than to turn its gaze away from the problems of the internal upheaval, of the internal fight against absolutism, of internal class and party developments, and to turn it toward questions of foreign policy in the interests of the “fatherland we all have in common.” Here the future liberal statesman is engaging in unfair competition, sticking his nose into the business of the present-day statesman of the knout.
The betrayal of the revolution, and of liberalism itself, by the bourgeois-liberal parties is nothing exactly new in history. To this day, every modern revolution in France and in Germany has seen the history of betrayal of the fighting people by liberal men of prominence. But, up to now at least, the betrayal did not begin until after the first victories of the revolution, when the liberal bourgeoisie already had a taste of power. What is new in the Russian Revolution is that liberalism already feels itself to be at the helm even before the slightest concession has been made. The Russian liberals have become “strong” statesmen and “men of order,” not after arriving at the Paulskirche,* but while they are already in exile in Paris—and while in Petersburg Trepov is still the master of the house! Here, once again, an iron materialist law of history is manifested in noteworthy fashion, as is the “shooting-the-breeze nature” [Windbeutelei] of all “ideologies” that lack firm roots in the material interests of social classes. The present behavior of zemstvo liberals stands at so much lower a level than the behavior in earlier times of the German liberals that it reveals to what an extent agrarian zemstvo liberalism, in its innermost essence, is an economically reactionary phenomenon even compared to the ever so cowardly and half-hearted liberalism of the bourgeois owners of large-scale capitalist industry. This latter type of liberalism is entirely lacking in Russia as a class phenomenon. The Russian Revolution has come along much too late, like a late-arriving baggage train. The devil takes the hindmost—in history, too.
For a long time now in the ranks of our German comrades, a belief in the power of Russian liberalism has been dominant, a belief that had a negative effect on a correct evaluation of the ongoing revolutionary proletarian movement in Russia and its tactics. That’s how it was in January,† when several socialist factions, among them the terrorist SR Party, the national socialist Polish Socialist Party, and some other small groups met in a “bloc” with Struve’s party in Paris. Many [SPD] comrades—and even the central organ [Vorwärts] among them—were rather surprised and very concerned about why the Russian, Polish, and Jewish Social Democratic parties categorically refused to take part in this supposed “gathering of forces.”
The present turn taken by “Struvean” liberalism will, one hopes, show the advocates of “bloc” politics that precisely the interests of the struggle and of the revolution require not an alliance with such ambiguous elements, but a sharp, clear, independent working-class policy which from the very beginning would not take a friendly and trustful stand toward liberalism but would remain on the qui vive‡ with a watchful attitude.
In conclusion, here is a brief note ad personam. Mr. Struve is a former Social Democrat and a former Marxist who took the donkey’s bridge of “revised” Marxism to cross over to the promised land of liberalism. His present case is one more example that if a socialist makes a leap away from the firm and principled worldview of Marxism, there is no stopping. Usually, one takes a fall far deeper than the bourgeois democrats and reformers. Mr. Struve has for a considerable length of time, as we have experienced, been regarded as an unreliable element even by the left-leaning bourgeois democrats in Russia, and from being a representative of liberalism he has evolved into being a representative merely of the extreme right-wing nobility. That is how classes and parties are unceasingly being differentiated in Russia, and this is one of the surest and most gratifying signs that the fire of revolution in the tsarist empire is not dying down but is tirelessly spreading, eating away at everything around it, so that in a matter of moments it will lick up and devour objects even when no burst of flame blazes forth with a loud crackling sound to catch the attention of the entire world.