27
IN MEMORY OF HERZEN
With Herzen, scepticism was a form of transition from
the illusion of a bourgeois democracy that is “above classes”
to the grim, inexorable and invincible class struggle of
the proletariat. The proof: the Letters to an Old Comrade—
to Bakunin—written by Herzen in 1869, a year before his
death. In them Herzen breaks with the anarchist Bakunin.
True, Herzen still sees this break as a mere disagreement
on tactics and not as a gulf between the world outlook of the
proletarian who is confident of the victory of his class and
that of the petty bourgeois who has despaired of his salva-
tion. True enough, in these letters as well, Herzen repeats
the old bourgeois-democratic phrases to the effect that social-
ism must preach “a sermon addressed equally to workman
and master, to farmer and townsman”. Nevertheless, in
breaking with Bakunin, Herzen turned his gaze, not to
liberalism, but to the International—to the International
led by Marx, to the International which had begun to
“rally the legions” of the proletariat, to unite “the world
of labour”, which is “abandoning the world of those who
enjoy without working”.
28
Failing as he did to understand the bourgeois-democratic
character of the entire movement of 1848 and of all the forms
of pre-Marxian socialism, Herzen was still less able to un-
derstand the bourgeois nature of the Russian revolution.
Herzen is the founder of “Russian” socialism, of “Naro-
dism”. He saw “socialism” in the emancipation of the
peasants with land, in community land tenure
29
and in the
peasant idea of “the right to land”. He set forth his pet
ideas on this subject an untold number of times.
Actually, there is not a grain of socialism in this doctrine
of Herzen’s, as, indeed, in the whole of Russian Narodism,
including the faded Narodism of the present-day Socialist-
Revolutionaries. Like the various forms of “the socialism of
1848” in the West, this is the same sort of sentimental
phrases, of benevolent visions, in which is expressed the
revolutionism of the bourgeois peasant democracy in Rus-
sia. The more land the peasants would have received in
1861
30
and the less they would have had to pay for it, the
more would the power of the feudal landlords have been
V. I. L E N I N
28
undermined and the more rapidly, freely and widely would
capitalism have developed in Russia. The idea of the “right
to land” and of “equalised division of the land” is nothing
but a formulation of the revolutionary aspiration for equali-
ty cherished by the peasants who are fighting for the com-
plete overthrow of the power of the landlords, for the com-
plete abolition of landlordism.
This was fully proved by the revolution of 1905: on the
one hand, the proletariat came out quite independently at
the head of the revolutionary struggle, having founded the
Social-Democratic Labour Party; on the other hand, the
revolutionary peasants (the Trudoviks and the Peasant
Union
31
), who fought for every form of the abolition of land-
lordism even to “the abolition of private landownership”,
fought precisely as proprietors, as small entrepreneurs.
Today, the controversy over the “socialist nature” of the
right to land, and so on, serves only to obscure and cover up
the really important and serious historical question concern-
ing the difference of interests of the liberal bourgeoisie and
the revolutionary peasantry in the Russian bourgeois revolu-
tion; in other words, the question of the liberal and the dem-
ocratic, the “compromising” (monarchist) and the repub-
lican trends manifested in that revolution. This is exactly
the question posed by Herzen’s Kolokol,
32
if we turn our
attention to the essence of the matter and not to the words,
if we investigate the class struggle as the basis of “theories”
and doctrines and not vice versa.
Herzen founded a free Russian press abroad, and that is
the great service rendered by him. Polyarnaya Zvezda
33
took
up the tradition of the Decembrists.
Kolokol (1857-67) cham-
pioned the emancipation of the peasants with might and
main. The slavish silence was broken.
But Herzen came from a landlord, aristocratic milieu.
He had left Russia in 1847; he had not seen the revolutionary
people and could have no faith in it. Hence his liberal
appeal to the “upper ranks”. Hence his innumerable sugary
letters in Kolokol addressed to Alexander II the Hangman,
which today one cannot read without revulsion. Chernyshev-
sky, Dobrolyubov and Serno-Solovyevich, who represented
the new generation of revolutionary raznochintsi,
34
were a
thousand times right when they reproached Herzen for these