The three companion volumes to this one carried Plekhanov the philosopher and the polemicist: the founding pamphlets of Russian Marxism, the demolition of the Narodniks (the Populists, who denied that Russia would take the capitalist road), the long war against the revisionists who wanted Marxism without its dialectics. Volume IV carries a different Plekhanov, and in some ways the most attractive one. This is the volume of Russian intellectual history — the fourth of the five, promised in the Publishers' Note as the one given over to "Russian philosophy and social thought." It collects the works in which Plekhanov, the first Russian Marxist, turned back to reclaim his own country's revolutionary past: the big monograph on the critic and revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevsky, worked and reworked across two decades; four studies of the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky; three on Alexander Herzen, the founder of the free Russian press abroad; and a closing sheaf of reviews on the "Westerners" and Slavophils. It is Plekhanov proving that Belinsky, Herzen and Chernyshevsky were the forerunners of Marxism in Russia, and that Marxism, as he put it in a sentence the introduction quotes, was their "lawful heir": "Our present views and aspirations are the organic product of the history of the Russian revolutionary movement."
First, the date, because the series exists to get this right and this volume is a trap for the careless. The spine and the copyright page agree on 1980 — "First printing 1980," the English translation new that year — and unlike Volume I, which went through printings in 1960, 1974 and 1977, this one really is a fresh English publication, appearing two decades after its predecessor. But the scholarly apparatus is not new. It belongs to the Soviet academic edition prepared by the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, the post-Stalin Selected Philosophical Works out of which the whole English series was quarried, and its editorial essay — by M. Iovchuk, a career historian of philosophy of that Institute — reads as a document of that project rather than of the Brezhnev year on the title page. The texts themselves span 1890 to 1913. Nothing in the volume was written later, and that fact, as we shall see, is not an accident of the material. It is the design.
The design is worth stating at the outset, because it differs from what the earlier introductions in this series found in the companion volumes, and the difference is the most interesting thing about the book. In Volume I, V. Fomina narrated Plekhanov's political fall as a bell curve — rising superlatives to 1903, then a clinical vocabulary of desertion and error, a single sentence for the First World War, a subordinate clause for October, and a burial near Belinsky. In Volume II, B. A. Chagin did something more drastic: he simply stopped the clock at 1903, ended his essay on Lenin, and let the war, the revolution and the death go entirely unmentioned. Iovchuk can do neither. He cannot stop the clock at 1903, because roughly half the texts in his volume were written after it. The 1909 edition of the Chernyshevsky book, the 1909 and 1910 and 1911 pieces on Belinsky, the 1911 and 1912 studies of Herzen, the 1913 essay "Chernyshevsky in Siberia" — all of them are what the Soviet apparatus calls the "Menshevik period," the years after the Bolshevik–Menshevik split of 1903, when Plekhanov sided with the Mensheviks (the minority who looked to alliance with the liberals). The clock has already run past the danger point on the first page of the contents. So Iovchuk adopts a third method, and it is the method this introduction is finally about: he prints the compromised works, and inoculates each one.
But begin where the book earns its place, because it earns it. Whatever the frame does to him, the Plekhanov of these pages is a great critic doing the thing he did best — reading a body of Russian writing forward, tracing in Belinsky and Chernyshevsky the materialism and the dialectics that would find their finished form in Marx, and doing it with a generosity of attention that is the opposite of a hanging judge's. The method is the one Volume II praised in his essays on Holbach and Helvétius: he rescues thinkers his own tradition had been content to patronise, locating exactly where they reached and exactly where their age stopped them. Of Chernyshevsky, held back from Marxism by the backwardness of serf-owning Russia and by twenty years of Siberian exile, Plekhanov writes the finest sentence of admiration in the volume: "you are surprised not that Chernyshevsky was behind Marx and Engels, but that he was so little behind them." The closing essay, "Chernyshevsky in Siberia," written in 1913 from letters newly released from the archives, states the verdict with a moving precision: "Chernyshevsky's thought was developing along the same path which led West-European thought to Marxism; but the unfavourable conditions of Russian social life prevented our great writer's thought from reaching the end of this path and it remained at the penultimate stage, i.e., the philosophy of Feuerbach." That is intellectual history of a very high order: it refuses both to inflate Chernyshevsky into a Marxist before Marx and to write him off as a mere anthropological materialist, and it grounds the whole judgment in the concrete backwardness of the society that produced him.
The same gift runs through the studies of Belinsky. "Belinsky and Rational Reality" (1897) — a product of the "clean" pre-Menshevik years — is a small classic on how a mind moves. It reconstructs, without contempt, Belinsky's notorious period of "reconciliation with reality," the episode when the young critic, misreading Hegel, briefly made his peace with Tsarist Russia; Plekhanov shows the reconciliation as a step forward and not backward, a groping after objective foundations that Belinsky lacked the developed Russia to complete. And Plekhanov's Hegel, in that essay, is drawn with a sympathy and a sharpness that few Soviet philosophy primers of the period could manage: "In his youth Hegel sympathised strongly with the Great French Revolution, but with time his love of freedom grew weaker and the desire to live at peace with the existing order of things became stronger, so that the July Revolution of 1830 made a painful impression on him." Best of all is a conjecture Plekhanov permits himself about where Belinsky, dead at thirty-seven, was heading: "we would permit ourselves to suggest that with time he would have become a zealous adherent of dialectical materialism." Plekhanov's love for these men is plain on the page — he calls Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done? by the enthusiasm it kindled in his own generation: "Who has not read and re-read this famous work? Who has not been enthralled by it, who has not become purer, better, brighter and bolder under its beneficial influence?" For most of these texts, in Julius Katzer's and R. Dixon's translations, this volume remains the only English home. A reader who wants Plekhanov on the Russian nineteenth century still has to come here, and will not be sorry.
Now the frame, and the method of inoculation. Iovchuk's essay is intelligent and, on the philosophy, scrupulous — it is not crude, and it is not falsification in the narrow sense. What it does instead is attach to every post-1903 text a warning that the reader is now handling damaged goods. The 1904–13 works, he writes, "bear the mark of the political sin which Plekhanov committed after the Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. (1903), when he went over to the Menshevik position." The errors in Plekhanov's history of Russian thought "manifested themselves mainly in his Menshevik period under the influence of political opportunism." The phrase "the works of the Menshevik period" recurs like a refrain, a stamp pressed onto each piece as it is introduced. The effect is to let the reader have the late Plekhanov while never letting him forget, for a paragraph together, that the late Plekhanov is not to be trusted. It is containment by perpetual asterisk, where Chagin's was containment by amputation.
To Iovchuk's credit — and the credit is real, the same order of editorial candour the companion volumes earned — the inoculation is at one point backed by genuine evidence, and the evidence is damning in a way the reader can check for himself. Iovchuk sets the 1890 articles on Chernyshevsky, written for the émigré paper Sotsial-Demokrat, beside the 1909 book Plekhanov made from them, and shows, following Lenin's own notes, that in revising his youthful text Plekhanov quietly cut its fiercest attacks on the liberals. Gone from 1909 was Chernyshevsky's charge, which Plekhanov had endorsed in 1890, that the liberals "are the same exploiters in politics as they are in the sphere of the economy," and that "it was for these exploitatory inclinations that Chernyshevsky hated them." Gone was Plekhanov's own barbed gloss, aimed at the revolutionaries of his own day "who, while calling themselves revolutionaries, pin all their hopes on a liberal 'society.'" Iovchuk draws the obvious conclusion: the cuts "are explained not so much by the fact that this time it was being published legally in tsarist Russia, but by the influence of the political opportunism and conciliatory tendencies of Menshevism." This is a small masterpiece of textual detective work, and it is honest against interest, because the volume prints the 1890 text with the excised passages restored, so that any reader can watch Plekhanov soften his own radicalism at exactly the moment his politics were softening toward the liberals. Lenin's point, which Iovchuk quotes his marginal notes to make, is the sharp one: gripped by the theoretical contrast between the idealist and the materialist view of history, Plekhanov the historian had come to overlook the practical, political, class difference between a liberal and a democrat — the very difference his 1890 self had hammered. Here the apparatus is doing real work: it shows the political drift registering in the man's own revisions, phrase by deleted phrase.
Which makes what the essay will not do all the more visible. The candour stops precisely where the companion volumes' candour stopped. For all the forensic care lavished on the difference between the 1890 and 1909 Chernyshevsky, the catastrophe that gives the whole story its meaning — Plekhanov's support for the Allied war effort in 1914, his public break with Lenin, his denunciation of the October Revolution as a violation of the laws of history, his death near Petrograd in 1918 — is nowhere narrated. The word "social-chauvinist" (the term for a socialist who backed his own government's side in the imperialist war) occurs exactly once, and it occurs in a subordinate clause, describing the Plekhanov of 1912–16 as one who "later became also a social-chauvinist." No wartime writing is named, dated, quoted or answered. The essay's own clock, having been forced by the material to run past 1903, is stopped instead at 1913, with "Chernyshevsky in Siberia," and it never ticks into the war. And the one book of Plekhanov's that would force the issue — the unfinished History of Russian Social Thought, on which he laboured from 1912 into the war years — is not merely condemned but excluded. Iovchuk stamps it in the abstract as reflecting "the liberal theory of 'state principles'" and as evidence that "in the final years of his life he abandoned Marxist views of history," and then rules that Plekhanov's legacy "must be studied and assessed not in terms of A History of Russian Social Thought" but of his earlier work. The reader is told the book is bad and told not to read it, and is given not one sentence of it to judge. Even within the "clean" period the selection quietly narrows the case: of the four Sotsial-Demokrat articles on Chernyshevsky, only the first, the general and philosophical one, is printed; the second, third and fourth, on his politics and economics and his utopian socialism, are dropped from the five-volume edition altogether.
So the three volumes give three solutions to one problem, and Volume IV's is the subtlest. Fomina muted the fall; Chagin removed it; Iovchuk brands the middle years and silences the end. In each case the object is the same — to preserve the philosophical Plekhanov by sealing off the political one — and in each case the giveaway is the asymmetry of specificity. Plekhanov's misreading of Feuerbach, his one-sidedness about Chernyshevsky's dialectics, his exaggeration of Western influence on Russian thought: all named, dated, tied to a page. Plekhanov's support for an imperialist war and his opposition to a workers' revolution: a single adjective in a dependent clause. That is not an essay running short of space. It is an essay that has decided what its reader may be trusted to weigh.
What the frame withholds, the reply tradition supplied, and for this volume it supplied it with an uncanny fittingness, because the reply is itself a piece of writing about Plekhanov and the history of Russian thought. In a note composed on 24 April 1922, four years after Plekhanov's death, as part of the preface to the first volumes of his own collected works, Trotsky drew the balance that Iovchuk's essay declines to draw. It reached English readers in the American Fourth International, vol. 4 no. 3 (whole no. 31), March 1943 — the year of composition, 1922, is what matters here, not the wartime reprint. It is not a demolition; it is a claiming. "This was a truly great man," Trotsky writes, and the estimate of Plekhanov's achievement is close to the Soviet edition's own: Plekhanov did not create historical materialism but "introduced it into Russian life," overcoming "the homegrown revolutionary prejudices of the Russian intelligentsia, in which an arrogance of backwardness found its expression." Where the note speaks directly to this volume is in two places the official essay could not match. First, Trotsky places Plekhanov exactly where the volume's subject-matter places him — inside the tradition he was writing about: "he remained entirely a representative of the old Russian school of publicists (Belinsky, Herzen, Chernyshevsky)," the very three whose forerunners' status this book was built to establish. And second, "into the history of Russian social thought he has entered as a great figure" — a sentence that lands on the title of Plekhanov's own last, condemned book.
For it is over that book, the History of Russian Social Thought, that the two accounts most sharply diverge, and the divergence is the whole argument in miniature. Iovchuk and Trotsky agree the book fails; they part on whether the reader may see how. Iovchuk stamps it "social-chauvinist" and turns the page. Trotsky opens it. He quotes the sentence from its introduction in which Plekhanov limits the class struggle to a nation's internal life and, between nations, substitutes "more or less friendly collaboration where the question of the defense of the country from external attack arises," and the bare moral maxim to which the fallen theoretician had reduced himself — "defensive war is a just war" (the companion Volume I introduction lays out these passages in full; the point here is only that Trotsky quotes what Iovchuk merely labels). And Trotsky, unlike the Soviet editor, offers a cause that is internal to Plekhanov rather than a stain applied from outside. Plekhanov was "a forerunner, the first crusader of Marxism on Russian soil," a theoretician without a party and without practice, marooned in Swiss émigré politics; and "this disturbance of the balance between theory and practice, which arose from the whole circumstances of Plekhanov's life, proved fatal for him." Already the 1905 revolution "took him by surprise." As far back as the Paris congress of 1889 he had declared that the Russian revolution would triumph as a workers' movement or not at all — from which it followed that a victorious revolution must place power in proletarian hands, a conclusion from which Plekhanov "recoiled in horror." The economism, the reading of every political question off the level of the productive forces, was not a stain on his method; it was his method, carried to its end. The earlier introductions in this series traced that same thread through Löwy and Mandel and Novack, who located the theory of permanent revolution in a break with precisely "the economism … of Plekhanov's Marxism"; Volume IV needs only to add that Trotsky's own hand had drawn it, in 1922, in an obituary that doubles as a reader's guide to this exact book.
None of which is a case against reading it. Quite the reverse — and here Lenin, the authority Iovchuk invokes on every second page, is the best witness. Lenin's judgment — quoted at the close of the companion Volume II — that no one can become a real, intelligent Communist without studying all of Plekhanov's philosophical writings, because nothing better has been written on Marxism anywhere in the world, is why all five volumes exist. But notice what Lenin does not do in these pages. Where Iovchuk records Lenin's private criticism of the 1909 Chernyshevsky, he also records that Lenin "evidently did not consider it necessary to criticise publicly the erroneous elements in Plekhanov's writings on Chernyshevsky, especially as Plekhanov was close to the Bolsheviks at that time in the defence of nineteenth-century revolutionary and materialist traditions." Lenin held his fire on Plekhanov the historian even where he disagreed, because on the ground that this volume covers — the defence of Belinsky, Herzen and Chernyshevsky against the liberal and mystical falsifiers of the Russian past — Plekhanov was still fighting the right enemies. That is the distinction the whole series turns on, and that this volume, read against its own introduction, makes as clearly as any: between Plekhanov the philosopher and historian, whom Lenin studied and Trotsky claimed, and Plekhanov the wartime politician, whom both fought. Iovchuk's essay honours the first by half-suppressing the existence of the second.
So read the book, and read the Belinsky and the Chernyshevsky first — the 1897 "Belinsky and Rational Reality" and the 1890 Chernyshevsky articles, where the young Plekhanov is at the height of his powers and none of the warnings apply. Then read the later, warned-against pieces, and watch, with Iovchuk's own honest apparatus as your guide, the political drift settle into the very words on the page. Then read Iovchuk's introduction, but read it for what it is: the third and most ingenious of three attempts, across three volumes, to keep in print the one great Menshevik a state descended from October could not do without — this time not by muting his fall, nor by cutting it away, but by printing his compromised years under a running caption and letting his ruinous ones simply stop being narrated at 1913. The book, once again, is more honest than the essay that frames it. It prints the sentences Plekhanov deleted; it prints the man Lenin studied and Trotsky claimed. What it will not print is the road from here to 1917 — and that road, as it happens, runs straight through the one book of Plekhanov's this volume names only to forbid.