The critical test for the political value and merit of a party is not how it conducts itself before the battle, and not even during the battle, but after it. Marx observed as long ago as his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon that the premature “self-satisfied howling about victory with which Messieurs the Democrats congratulate each other”† is a sure and infallible sign that a crashing fiasco for the revolution is imminent. In all modern revolutions, this has been a constant, a standard phenomenon, and of course the present moment is no exception—especially in reference to news of the latest manifesto issued by the tsar. Our German liberalism doesn’t go along with the idea of revolution, and it hasn’t for a long time, but all the more zealously does it assume the role of “self-aware” “victory howler,” one who sees as his most urgent task to persuade those who are fighting (and to do this at every even halfway suitable opportunity) to trust in faith, hope, and charity, and above all, to disarm. It goes without saying that there must unfailingly be present a “certain man” upon whom all hopes and aspirations from now on can be concentrated, a man who will set everything right, guarantee liberty, restore order, but above all among the miracles he will perform must be to bring peace to the land. Witte and peace—that is the magic political formula of German liberalism today, with which it wishes to calm the billowing waves of revolution and conjure them away.
The Mosse Daily cries out: “Russia now needs peace above all!”‡
“Russia needs peace above all!” explains the tsar’s premier [Witte], following the lead of the German Free Thinkers.§ He lectures to a deputation from the Petersburg press and in great haste forms a cabinet for the regime made up of former members of the government and new liberals “aspiring” to perform along the same old lines, once in office.
“Russia needs peace above all!” That is what the troop patrols explain, basing themselves on the tsar’s manifesto, to the crowds of demonstrating workers, and they leave the pavement covered with dead and wounded in Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw, Sosnowiec, Kiev, Kazan, Chișinău, Poltava, Bialystok …*
“Russia after the manifesto needs peace above all!” That is what the gangs of plainclothes police in Odessa declare as they contrive and plot their massacres against the Jews.
“Russia needs peace above all!” That is what the bands of Cossack cavalry shout, coming up from behind and carrying out a bloodbath among the unarmed and defenseless population.
And “Russia needs peace above all!” is what the Russian liberals will also declare today or tomorrow as well. That is why the commentaries of German liberalism about the events in the tsarist empire are worthy of note—because the stirrings in the soul of today’s down-at-the-heel Western European bourgeois liberalism reflect with unfailing accuracy the stirrings in the soul of “youthful” Russian liberalism. This Russian liberalism is something that grew out of the discontent and frustration of a section of the Russian nobility who were the owners of large landholdings, expressing their protests against arbitrary police rule and against an economic policy dominated by the chinovniki. And to a large extent, it even exceeds the incomparable German liberalism in its wretchedness. The few genuinely bourgeois and big-capitalist elements in Russia, which in the course of the latest revolutionary crisis joined the call for fundamental reform, for a “cultural reform” in the state structure, did not do so out of a Platonic love of “freedom,” but out of a very practical dissatisfaction with the turmoil and troubles that tsarism was no longer able to overcome. It is not the knout that bothers them anymore, but the opposite, the impotence and ineffectiveness of the knout against the “power of the street.” It is not against the regime of blood in itself but merely against its ineffectiveness, which has ultimately become unbearable for the bourgeoisie.
In addition, as a third element of the bourgeois freedom movement in Russia, there comes under consideration the wavering, inwardly uncertain stratum of the bourgeois-democratic intelligentsia, which by nature has “two souls contending in its breast”† and which in all its activity regularly swings like a pendulum between the “lovers of order” among the liberal nobility and the revolutionary workers’ movement. That such a dubious liberalism basing itself on such heterogeneous elements is an unreliable ally—that will probably make itself evident once again in the very next moment.
In revolutionary times people, classes, and events come to a head with remarkable speed. The tsar’s manifesto has produced nothing at all in the way of positive achievements, and yet it has already, as if overnight, brought about a major shift in the situation, in the constellation of forces on the field of battle. From all the partial news reports that have come from the empire of the bloodstained “constitutional” manifesto there emerges an approximate picture of the state of affairs from which one must conclude, guided by fighting instinct and historical experience, the following:
The Russian freedom movement now faces a profoundly serious and decisive moment. The news of the constitutional manifesto coming along with the news of rampages by the murderous gangs of tsarist thuggery will be used by the liberal elements to put the workers’ movement in paralysis, using the watchword, “peace and order.” And it will use this slogan of peace and order, as soon as tomorrow perhaps, in order to drown the revolution in blood under the leadership of the “liberal premier.” All of bourgeois society, with few exceptions, will take the manifesto as an excuse to arouse “hopes and expectations” following the tried-and-true example of our German “victory howlers” of liberalism. The revolutionary working class in Russia must march alone in its further path along the road ahead, relying solely on itself, its own strength, its own determination, its own tenacity, its own unwavering steadfastness and refusal to be frightened or intimidated. At this moment, for the class-conscious proletariat in the tsarist empire, as for the fighting proletariat everywhere and always, the watchword remains: “Keep your powder dry and your sword well sharpened!”*