Marx Picked the Wrong Countries: Why Revolution Came East and Reform Came West

On the last morning of January 1990, a queue formed on Pushkin Square in Moscow and kept forming all day. Something like 38,000 people stood in it, in a Russian winter, for hours, to buy a hamburger. The first McDonald's in the Soviet Union had opened. A meal there cost the equivalent of several days' wages and they queued anyway. That queue is the picture almost everyone keeps of how the whole argument ended.

The more interesting end is the other one. The man whose ideas that country had spent seventy years building itself around was quite specific about where his revolution would happen, and Russia was not on his list.

What Marx actually said

Marx's theory ran on stages. Feudalism produces capitalism, capitalism produces industry, industry gathers huge numbers of people into factories and cities where they have nothing to sell but their labour, and that class, the proletariat, eventually works out that it is the majority and takes over. Revolution was the last act of a mature capitalist economy, not a shortcut past one.

Which meant it should have started in the places furthest along. Britain, with its mills and its railways and its enormous urban working class. Germany, industrialising fast and with the best organised socialist movement in the world. Those were the candidates.

Marx himself got uneasy about this near the end. In February 1881 a Russian revolutionary named Vera Zasulich wrote to him asking whether Russia had to go through capitalism at all, or whether the village commune could be the starting point for something else. His reply allowed that it was possible. A year later, in the preface he and Engels wrote for the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto in January 1882, they put a condition on it in plain words. If the Russian revolution "becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other", then the commune could serve as a starting point for communist development.

The signal was sent in 1917. The West did not answer.

Russia in 1917

Look at the country the revolution actually arrived in.

Serfdom had ended in 1861, freeing more than 23 million people, which sounds like a clean break and was not. Peasants got allotments smaller than the land they had been working, often the worse land, and had to buy them from the state over forty-nine years. Those redemption payments were not cancelled until 1907. Two generations of villagers paid an instalment on their own freedom every year and still did not have enough ground to feed themselves without renting more from the landowner up the road.

By 1917 roughly four in five Russians were peasants. There were factories, and they had grown quickly, but the industrial workforce Marx had built his whole theory around was a small minority in a very large country. In Moscow around nine in ten industrial workers were still legally classed as peasants.

Then the war. By early 1917 Russia had something in the order of 1.7 million men killed and nearly 5 million wounded, with desertions running at tens of thousands a month. On 23 February in the old calendar, 8 March in ours, women queueing for bread in Petrograd came out onto the streets on International Women's Day and pulled the factories out with them. Within two days a quarter of a million people were on strike. Nicholas II abdicated on 2 March.

The safety valve that was not there

This is where the two halves of Europe separate, and it is less about economics than plumbing.

Russia had already had a warning. The 1905 revolution forced the Tsar to promise civil liberties and an elected assembly in the October Manifesto. Then the Fundamental Laws of April 1906 arrived and gave him the title of supreme autocrat, the power to veto anything, the power to rule by emergency decree, and ministers who answered to him rather than to the chamber. The First Duma sat for 73 days before he dissolved it. The Second lasted a little over three months. On 3 June 1907 the electoral law was simply rewritten to make a landowner's vote worth more and a peasant's worth less.

So a Russian factory worker or a villager who wanted a shorter day, or a piece of land, or bread, had no legal machinery that could deliver any of it. Petitions went nowhere. Parties were harassed. Strikes were broken. The state left one route open, and it was not the ballot box.

Lenin's amendment

Meanwhile the theory had a problem, and Lenin was the one who fixed it.

If revolution needed a big class-conscious proletariat and Russia did not have one, the sums did not work. In What Is to Be Done? in 1902 he cut the knot. Workers on their own, he wrote, develop only "trade-union consciousness", meaning they will fight for better pay and shorter hours inside the system rather than fight the system. Men doing twelve hours in a factory have no time to master political theory. So a small, disciplined, professional party of revolutionaries would carry the consciousness on their behalf and lead. The vanguard.

That is a much bigger revision than it looks. Marx had a class making its own history. Lenin had an organisation acting in the name of a class that was not yet there, which is what lets a revolution happen in a country with almost no proletariat, and what later made the party so hard to argue with.

He explained the other half in 1916. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism he argued that profits squeezed out of colonies let employers in rich countries buy off the top layer of their own workers, producing a labour aristocracy with too much to lose. It was a theory of why the West stayed quiet, and not a baseless one.

And when the Bolsheviks took power they did not lead with theory. On 8 November 1917 the Decree on Land abolished private landholding without compensation, and it was assembled out of 242 mandates that peasant communities had themselves drawn up that summer. They handed the villages the thing the villages had already asked for.

What Germany and Britain did instead

The industrial states had the same pressure and different plumbing.

Germany went at socialism with both hands. In October 1878 Bismarck banned social democratic meetings, publications, associations and processions outright. Then, having tried the stick, he built the first modern welfare state to go with it: health insurance in 1883, accident insurance in 1884, old age and disability pensions in 1889. He was not shy about why. "Whoever has pensions for his old age", he said, "is far more easy to handle than one who has no such prospect." A.J.P. Taylor thought it unfair to call it purely anti-socialist, since Bismarck had wanted something like it for years. Both can be true.

The ban failed completely. Social democratic votes went from 312,000 in 1881 to 1,427,000 in 1890, the law was allowed to lapse, and by 1912 the party took 34.8 percent of the vote and became the largest in the Reichstag. Then it argued about whether to keep revolution in the programme, and in practice built newspapers, unions and a parliamentary bloc.

Britain took the same road earlier and more grudgingly. The 1867 Reform Act brought in a large chunk of the urban working class, the 1884 Act extended it to most farm labourers. The Trade Union Act of 1871 gave unions legal standing, the Trade Disputes Act of 1906 protected the right to strike, and the National Insurance Act of 1911 covered sickness and some unemployment. None of it was generosity. Every piece was extracted by people who marched, struck, and in earlier decades were ridden down by cavalry for it. But it was extracted, which is the point. A British worker in 1911 could see a path from a grievance to a law, and it ran through a polling station rather than a barricade. That path is also where the modern left and right settled into their seats.

The land goes back

Neither system should get away clean here.

The peasants who took the land in 1917 kept it for barely a decade. Forced collectivisation began in late 1929, around a million households labelled as kulaks were deported, and the famine of 1932 and 1933 killed somewhere between 5.7 and 8.7 million people. A revolution that won the villages by promising them the soil took the soil back within fifteen years, and shot or starved the ones who objected.

The Western bargain worked, in the sense that the factory towns of Britain and Germany never produced the revolution Marx had booked them for. It worked slowly, unevenly, and partly on money taken from empires held elsewhere by force. Nobody in Manchester or Hamburg was consulted about that either.

The pattern underneath both is not complicated. Where people had a legal route to what they wanted, they took it, and the pressure came off gradually enough that nothing broke. Where every route was shut, the pressure stayed in the pipe until 1917.

The banner in the photograph at the top of this piece was carried down the Nevsky Prospect in June 1917 by ordinary people from ordinary streets. It reads, in part, all the land to the people. Seventy-three winters later their grandchildren were on Pushkin Square, queueing in the cold for a hamburger.

Sources

• Marxists Internet Archive, "Preface to the 1882 Russian Edition of the Communist Manifesto" (the exact wording of the condition Marx and Engels attached to a Russian revolution, dated January 1882).
• Wikipedia, "Vera Zasulich" (her February 1881 letter to Marx and his reply that Russia might bypass capitalism if a Western proletarian revolution came at the same time).
• Wikipedia, "Proletarian revolution" (Marx's expectation that revolution would begin in advanced industrial economies such as Germany and Britain).
• Wikipedia, "Vanguardism" (What Is to Be Done in 1902, the "trade-union consciousness" line, and the argument that factory workers had no time for Marxist theory).
• Wikipedia, "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism" (Lenin's 1916 case that colonial super-profits bought off a labour aristocracy in the rich countries).
• Wikipedia, "Emancipation reform of 1861" (more than 23 million serfs freed, allotments smaller and poorer than the land worked, forty-nine years of redemption payments, cancelled in 1907).
• Wikipedia, "February Revolution" (the 23 February bread protests and International Women's Day, 250,000 on strike, roughly 1.7 million dead and 4.95 million wounded, and the abdication on 2 March).
• Wikipedia, "State Duma (Russian Empire)" (the October Manifesto, the Fundamental Laws of April 1906 and the supreme autocrat title, the 73 day First Duma, and the 3 June 1907 rewriting of the electoral law).
• Wikipedia, "Decree on Land" (the 8 November 1917 abolition of landed proprietorship without compensation, drawn from 242 local peasant mandates).
• Wikipedia, "Anti-Socialist Laws" (the October 1878 ban on social democratic meetings and publications, its lapse in 1890, and the vote rising from 312,000 in 1881 to 1,427,000 in 1890).
• Wikipedia, "State Socialism (Germany)" (the 1883, 1884 and 1889 insurance laws, Bismarck's pensions quote, and A.J.P. Taylor's qualification of his motives).
• Wikipedia, "1912 German federal election" (the SPD taking 34.82 percent and becoming the largest party in the Reichstag).
• Wikipedia, "Reform Act 1867" (the enfranchisement of much of the urban male working class).
• Wikipedia, "Trade Disputes Act 1906" and "Liberal welfare reforms" (the protection of the right to strike and the National Insurance Act of 1911).
• Wikipedia, "Collectivization in the Soviet Union" (collectivisation from late 1929, about a million kulak households deported, and 5.7 to 8.7 million famine deaths in 1932 and 1933).
• Wikipedia, "McDonald's in Russia" (roughly 38,000 customers queueing for hours at the Pushkin Square opening on 31 January 1990).
• History.com, "First McDonald's opens in Soviet Union" (a meal costing the equivalent of several days' wages).