Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

SELECT CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY 383

continues to move along the path she has followed since 1861 she will

lose the finest chance history has ever offered to a people and will undergo

all the fatal developments of the capitalist regime.' And defending the

chapter on 'Primitive Accumulation' in Capital he continued:

If Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation after the example of

the West European countries - and during the last few years she has

been taking a lot of trouble in this direction - she will not succeed

without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into prolet-

arians; and after that, once taken to the bosom of the capitalist regime,

she will experience its pitiless laws like other profane peoples.^99

In some marginal notes which he wrote on Bakunin's Statism and Anarchy

at the end of 1874 , Marx had already come to the conclusion that

Where the mass of the peasants are still owners of private property,

where they even form a more or less important majority of the

population... the following situation arises: either the peasantry hin-

ders every workers' revolution and causes it to fail, as it has done in

France up till now; or the proletariat. .. must as a government inaugur-

ate measures which directly improve the situation of the peasant and

which thus win him for the revolution; measures which in essence

facilitate the transition from private to collective property in land so

that the peasant himself is converted for economic reasons; the prole-

tariat must not, however, come into open collision with the peasantry

by, for example, proclaiming the abolition of inheritance or the abolition

of property.^100

Thus Marx did not rule out completely the possibility of Russia's by-
passing the capitalist stage of development and expressed great admiration
for Narodnaia Volya ('The People's Will'), the terrorist wing of the Populist
movement, whose express aim this was. Following the assassination of
Alexander II in 1881 by the Narodnaia Volya, Marx described the terrorists
as 'brave people with no melodramatic poses, straightforward, realistic
and heroic'. They were attempting to teach Europe that 'their method
of operation is specifically Russian and historically unavoidable and that
there is as little point in moralising argument for or against it as there is
in the case of the earthquake in Chios'.^101
Marx had much less respect for the populist exiles in Geneva (among
them Plekhanov and Axelrod) who were opposed to terrorism and pre-
ferred to concentrate on propaganda: 'in order to make propaganda in
Russia - they go away to Geneva! What a quid pro quo\ These gentlemen
are against all politico-revolutionary action. Russia must leap with a salto
mortale into a anarchist-communist-atheist millennium! Meanwhile they
prepare this leap with a boring cult of doctrine....^102 It was one of the