Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

45 2 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY

second half of 1877 ) though they were not accurate in predicting its

outcome. Marx was 'highly elated over the strong and noble performance

of the sons of Mahomet'.^93 Both Engels and himself gave full support to

the Turks on the grounds that 'we have studied the Turkish peasant -

i.e. the mass of the Turkish people - and got to know him as uncon-

ditionally one of the bravest and most moral representatives of the Euro-

pean peasantry',^94 and that 'the defeat of the Russians in European Turkey

will lead directly to revolution in Russia'.^95 For Marx

this new crisis is a turning point in European history. Russia - and I

have studied her circumstances from original Russian sources, both

official and unofficial - was already on the threshold of a revolution

with all the elements ready. It will duly begin with constitutional games

and then there will be a fine explosion! Unless mother Nature is

particularly unkind to us then we will still experience this joy.^96

The eventual defeat of the Turks he blamed on the treachery of Britain
and of Austria (whose dissolution he correctly saw as inevitable),^97 and on
the failure of the Turks to produce their own revolution.
After the failure of the Turkish war to shake the Tsarist system, Marx
pinned his hopes more and more on the possibilities of some revolutionary
movement inside Russia. He had studied conditions in Russia in great
detail - particularly in preparing Volume Three of Capital; with the
success there of the first volume of Capital, it was natural that the growing
Russian resistance movements should turn to him for advice - advice that
he readily gave them. Extensive political activity was made possible by
the liberal policies of Alexander II following the emancipation of the serfs
in 1861. The most radical types of activity were various branches of
Populism - their essential characteristics being a will to act as the catalyst
of a revolution based on the broad masses of the peasantry, and a desire
to check the development of capitalism by finding a specifically Russian
alternative.^98

This question had been opened in 1874 by an open letter from
Tkatchev, a Populist follower of Blanqui, which accused Engels of undere-
stimating the revolutionary potential of the obchtchina, the traditional
peasant commune. Engels' reply gave the impression that he considered
a capitalist stage of development absolutely necessary for Russia: one of
the leading Populist theoreticians, Mikhailovsky, attacked this position in
1877 - claiming that Capital involved a condemnation of the efforts of
Russians who worked for a development in their country which would
by-pass the capitalist stage. Marx, whose views were more subtle and
more ambivalent than Engels', replied himself in a letter to the journal
Notes on the Fatherland. He rejected Mikhailovsky's charge: 'If Russia