| Category | Template | Form |
|---|---|---|
| Text | Text | Text |
| Author | Author | Author |
| Collection | Collection | Collection |
| Keywords | Keywords | Keywords |
| Subpage | Subpage | Subpage |
| Template | Form |
|---|---|
| BrowseTexts | BrowseTexts |
| BrowseAuthors | BrowseAuthors |
| BrowseLetters | BrowseLetters |
Template:GalleryAuthorsPreviewSmall
Special pages :
From Hermann Lopatin's Letter to Maria Oshanina
| Author(s) | German Lopatin |
|---|---|
| Written | 20 September 1883 |
Printed according to the book
Translated from the Russian
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 26
This excerpt from the letter by Hermann Lopatin, a Russian revolutionary, to Maria Oshanina, a member of the Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) Executive, recounts his talk with Engels, naturally in his own interpretation, which bears the stamp of his Narodnik views based on Utopian peasant socialism and revolutionary democratism directed against autocracy. However, writing under a fresh impression from the talk, Lopatin obviously gives an accurate account of some of Engels’ ideas. Lopatin and Engels met on September 19, 1883, several months after the former had escaped abroad from exile in Vologda. The excerpt was first published on Pyotr Lavrov’s initiative and with Engels’ permission in the book: The Foundations of Theoretical Socialism as Applied to Russia (in Russian), Geneva, 1893.
London, September 20, 1883
...I must let you know the result of my first meeting with Engels, because I think some of his opinions will be pleasing for you.
We talked a great deal about Russian matters, about how the cause of our political and social revival is likely to proceed. As was to be expected, our views were in total agreement; each of us kept finishing off the ideas and phrases of the other. He too believes (like both Marx and myself) that the task of a revolutionary party or a party of action in Russia at the present time lies not in propagating the new socialist ideal and not even in striving to realise this by no means fully elaborated ideal with the help of a provisional government composed of our comrades, but in directing all forces towards 1) either forcing the Tsar to convene a Zemsky Sobor,[1] 2) or by means of intimidating the Tsar, etc., causing profound disorder that would result in the convening of the Sobor or something similar. He believes, as I do, that such a Sobor would inevitably lead to a radical, not only political but also social reorganisation. He believes in the tremendous significance of the electoral period, in the sense of incomparably more successful propaganda than all books and whispered communications. He regards a purely liberal constitution without profound economic restructuring as impossible, and therefore does not fear this danger. He believes that enough material for the restructuring of society on new principles has accumulated in the real conditions of the people’s life. Of course, he does not believe in the instantaneous realisation of communism or anything like that, but only of that which has already matured in the life and heart of the people. He believes that the people will find themselves eloquent spokesmen to express their needs and aspirations, etc. He believes that no forces will be capable of halting this reorganisation, or revolution, once it has begun. Thus one thing only is important: to smash the fatal force of stagnation, to knock the people and society for a moment out of the state of inertness and immobility, to cause disorder which will force the government and the people to set about internal restructuring, which will stir up the calm popular sea and arouse the attention and enthusiasm of the whole people for the cause of a full social reorganisation. And the results will show themselves, precisely those results which are possible, desirable and practicable for the time in question.
All this is devilishly brief, but I cannot write in any more detail at the moment. Moreover all this may not be entirely to your liking, so I will hasten to convey to you with literal accuracy other opinions of his which are most flattering to the Russian revolutionary party. They are as follows:
“Everything now depends on what is done in the immediate future in St. Petersburg, to which the eyes of all thinking, far-seeing and perspicacious people in the whole of Europe are now turned.”
“Russia is the France of the present century. The revolutionary initiative of a new social reorganisation legally and rightly belongs to it.”
“...The collapse of Tsarism, which will destroy the last bastion of monarchism in Europe and put an end to Russia’s ‘aggressiveness’, Poland’s hatred of it and a great deal more, will lead to a completely different combination of powers, smash Austria to smithereens and arouse in all countries a powerful impetus for internal reorganisation.”
“...It is unlikely that Germany will decide to take advantage of the Russian disorders and move its forces into Russia to support the Tsar. But if it did do so, all the better. It would mean the end of its present government and the beginning of a new era. Annexation by it of the Baltic provinces is pointless and impracticable. Such seizures of opposite (?) or adjoining narrow littorals and bits of land, and the resultant ludicrous configurations of states, were possible only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but not now. Moreover it is no secret to anyone that the Germans constitute an insignificant reactionary minority there.” (I am adding this point for Y.P.[2] in view of her ultra-patriotic opinions on this point.)
“Both Marx and I find that the Committee’s letter to Alexander III [3] is positively excellent in its political essence and calm tone. It shows that there are people with a statesmanlike cast of mind in the ranks of the revolutionaries.”
May I hope that all this is sufficiently flattering and pleasing for you and that you will thank me for these lines? Do you remember that I said Marx himself had never been a Marxist? Engels told me that during the struggle of Brousse, Malon and Co. with the others, Marx used to joke: “All I know is that I am not a Marxist !”...[4]
- ↑ Zemsky Sobor—a central representative institution of social estates in Russia in the mid-16th-late 17th centuries. Its composition, convocation and sessions were not strictly fixed and changed in the course of time. The interest in the convocation of the Zemsky Sobor at the end of the 19th century was evoked by hopes of limiting autocratic power and of changing the political system with the help of such representative institutions.
- ↑ Yulia Petrovna—the pseudonym of Galina Chernyavskaya-Bokhanovskaya.— Ed.
- ↑ The reference is to the letter addressed by the People's Will Executive to Tsar Alexander III on March 10, 1881 (after the events of March 1 of that year, when Tsar Alexander II had been assassinated by members of the organisation). The Executive agreed to renounce violence as a means of struggle on two conditions: 1) a general political amnesty, and 2) convocation of representatives of all the Russian people "to reconsider the existing forms of state and public life". The elections to the proposed Constituent Assembly were to be held on the basis of universal suffrage and guaranteed freedom of the press, speech, assembly and election manifestoes. The Executive further stated that it would comply with the decision of the future People's Assembly.
- ↑ The reference is to the Marx's ironic comment in the early 1880s on some sectarian and dogmatic mistakes made by the French Marxists in the struggle against the opportunist trend—Possibilism. Recollecting it, Engels wrote to Paul Lafargue on August 27, 1890 (present edition, Vol. 49) that Marx had said about these mistakes: "All I know is that I'm not a Marxist."