This is a good book, and it should be said plainly at the outset, because most of what follows will be a quarrel with its frame rather than its scholarship. Andrei Anikin set out to trace the history of Russian socio-economic thought from Pososhkov, the self-taught merchant who wrote his Book on Poverty and Wealth under Peter I, through the Smithian professors of the early nineteenth century, Radishchev, the Decembrist economists, Herzen and Chernyshevsky, down to the Populist theorists Vorontsov and Danielson and the first Russian Marxists. He does it with learning, sympathy and a novelist's eye for the person inside the doctrine. For an English reader this is very nearly the only door into a tradition that Russians have argued over for a century and a half, and Anikin holds it open generously. Where he reads a thinker closely — Chernyshevsky's economic essays, Sieber's reading of Capital, the difference between Danielson and Vorontsov that both sides usually blur — he is worth reading and often the only guide in English. That is the first thing to establish, and the ground of everything else: this is genuine scholarship, not apparatus prose, and it deserves to be met as such.
Two strengths carry the book and are worth naming before the criticism, because they are what a reader gains from it. The first is Anikin's grasp of censorship as the shaping condition of Russian thought, not a footnote to it. "The censor haunted the Russian printed word like a spectre," he writes, and he means it structurally: a prohibition on writing about serfdom that "lasted for about thirty years," a repression that "obliged many authors to remain silent, and the bolder and more skilful to write by implication," a whole literary-political genre — the thick journal where economics sat beside fiction — evolved to slip past the censor. He grounds this in Lenin's own account of the "accursed Aesopian language" he was forced into when he published Imperialism, and the effect is to make the reader see the thought and the repression as a single object. The second strength is the human one. Anikin insists on the cost. "Russian social thought and economic science begins in the Peter and Paul fortress," he writes, and he keeps the ledger: Pososhkov dead in prison, Radishchev exiled and driven to suicide, Pestel hanged, Chernyshevsky sentenced to penal servitude, Herzen and the rest in emigration — "A martyrology," he calls it, and does not look away. This is what he means by "the powerful humanist current in Russian thought," and it is the book's real subject: not a doctrine assembling itself, but people paying for ideas. A history of Russian thought as "a living process of cultural interaction" rather than a ledger of foreign borrowings is exactly what the subject needed in English, and Anikin supplies it.
Anikin was a serious Soviet historian of economic thought. The book announces its own companion volume — A Science in Its Youth, his study of the pre-Marxian Western economists, which ran through four Russian editions between 1971 and 1985 and appeared in English from Progress in 1975 — and describes the present work as the deliberate completion of that earlier one, the Russian half he had first left out. The two books share a method and a temper: biography braided into the history of ideas, a refusal of rhetoric, a fondness for the "curious facts about a bygone age." He is, in the best sense, a man of the archive. When he writes that he was "somewhat surprised to discover that no detailed biography" of Danielson or Vorontsov exists, you believe he went looking.
The spine says 1988, and the temptation is to read the book as a child of glasnost — freer air, the archives opening, the reassessments then convulsing Soviet historiography. Resist it. The English edition is a 1988 object; the book inside it is older, and its intellectual frame predates the thaw it appears to belong to. The only Party congress cited anywhere in it is the Twenty-Fourth, of 1971. There is no Twenty-Seventh Congress, no Gorbachev, no perestroika; the words "restructuring" and "acceleration" occur, but as ordinary English, not as the slogans of 1986. The chapter on the Third World rests on the Soviet development theorists of the seventies — Ulyanovsky, Brutents, Khoros — and on the doctrine of "non-capitalist development" that belongs to that decade. The density of the book's own citations peaks sharply in the middle 1970s. Only the footnotes reach later: a handful of references to editions of 1985, 1986 and 1987, an apparatus lightly refreshed on a manuscript conceived a decade before. So this is a détente-era synthesis in a glasnost jacket. It matters, because it means the freedoms one might expect of 1988 — the naming of what the twentieth century did to this heritage — are simply not on offer. The book stops, by design, at the young Lenin in 1900, and everything that the tradition it honours would suffer after 1917 lies on the far side of a wall the book does not cross.
The organising idea is stated in the opening pages and carried out to the last. Anikin quotes Lenin, from 1920, on how "revolutionary Russia" arrived at Marxism "through the agony she experienced in the course of half a century of unparalleled torment," through "the errors and disappointments of revolutionary thought in Russia" — and takes this as his charter. The history of Russian thought becomes the pre-history of Bolshevism. Every thinker is placed on a single road and graded by how far along it he got. Chernyshevsky is praised as "the only other man in Europe who approached this task" — the fusion of classical economics with socialism — "from a similar position and at the same time as Marx." Sieber, the Kiev economist whose second edition of his Ricardo book Marx annotated, "should be seen as a major forerunner of Russian Marxism." The final chapter is titled, without irony, "In Lieu of a Conclusion: The 1890s and the Young Lenin." The book is a genealogy, and its terminus is fixed before the first chapter opens.
This is worth naming precisely, because it is the reflexive point in a scholarly key. The standard against which every thinker is measured — Marxism-Leninism as realised in the Soviet state — is the one thing in the book never itself examined. Herzen's "limitations," Anikin writes, "consisted above all in the fact that Herzen did not grasp the natural inevitability of capitalist development in Russia." Herzen "could not accept" Marxism's "basic postulates." The Populists were "objectively" outside "the main current of the revolutionary movement." In each case the yardstick is assumed and the thinker found wanting against it; the yardstick is not asked to account for itself. A history written this way can be immensely learned about its subjects and wholly incurious about its own premise.
And yet — here honesty cuts toward the book, not away from it — the forerunner genealogy is not a Soviet invention, and the tradition from which this introduction is written built the same one. In 1925, on the twentieth anniversary of the first revolution, Trotsky drew the identical line: "Without Radishchev there would not have been Pestel. Without Pestel, no Zhelyabov. Without Zhelyabov we would not have had Alexander Ul'yanov. And without Alexander there would not have been Vladimir" — and concluded that "In Leninism live the Decembrists, the teachers of the 1860s, the Populists and the People's Will." The revolutionary heritage of Herzen, Chernyshevsky and the Narodniks is claimed by the whole of the movement that came out of October, ours included. So the objection to Anikin cannot be that he honours these men as ancestors. It is that he honours them as a finished genealogy — a ramp whose top is known and whose whole meaning is the arriving — rather than as a living argument whose questions stayed open and, in some cases, are open still.
The live nerve of the whole subject is the quarrel between the Populists (Narodniks — the agrarian socialists of the 1870s) and the first Russian Marxists — Plekhanov's break with Populism in the 1880s, Lenin's What the "Friends of the People" Are in 1894. It is here that a Soviet author is most under pressure to flatten a real debate into a morality play, and it is here that Anikin is at his most interesting, because he mostly does not.
He gives the Populists their due as men and as thinkers. Of Danielson and Vorontsov he writes that "we can never question their personal integrity and democracy, their desire to find for Russia the path to socialism." Vorontsov was "a serious researcher and a brilliant polemicist," "a worthy opponent for the early Russian Marxists"; "Russian peasant democracy found in Vorontsov the most talented exponent of its ideas." This is not the tone of a hatchet. More striking still, Anikin turns the same critical instrument on the Marxist side. Plekhanov, he says — quoting the Soviet economist Pashkov approvingly — having freed himself of the belief in a peasant socialist revolution, "then completely disregarded the peasantry as a revolutionary force." Plekhanov "applied to Russian populism the criterion of West European utopian socialism," and this "fell far short of a full appreciation of its social content and historical significance." Against Plekhanov, Anikin sets the authority of Lenin, who "repeatedly demanded that account be taken of the historically genuine and progressive content of populism." A Soviet book that corrects the founder of Russian Marxism for being too hard on the Populists, in the name of Lenin's more generous later reading, is not doing the crude thing. It is doing something a serious historian should do.
But the frame reasserts itself at the verdict. The Populists' socialism, Anikin writes, was "objectively speaking... petty-bourgeois"; "objectively speaking, they found themselves outside the main current of the revolutionary movement." The little word "objectively" does the work the argument should do: it converts a contested political judgement into a fact of nature, delivered from the standpoint of the side that won. "Only the Russian Marxists at the end of the century," he writes, "formulated a historically promising approach to this long-standing problem." Everyone else was, at best, on the way.
And there is one chapter where the teleology stops being an academic habit and becomes something with a policy behind it. "Non-Capitalist Development" lifts the nineteenth-century debate out of its century and sets it to work on the present. "The question of the link between the ideology of Russian populism and modern populist trends in the Third World," Anikin writes, "is of very great interest," and he pursues it through the Soviet development theorists of the day. The Narodnik dream of skipping capitalism becomes the Soviet doctrine of the 1970s that former colonies can advance to socialism under the tutelage of "the Soviet Union and the socialist countries gathered around it" — quoting Ulyanovsky, that "non-capitalist development, which means a socialist orientation, has, in reality, become one of the main paths of social and economic progress." Sun Yat-sen, Nkrumah, Cárdenas, Sékou Touré's Guinea, Ben Bella's Algeria, Tanzania are enrolled as latter-day Narodniks who, at their best, "shift to Marxism-Leninism." Here the past is not being understood on its own terms at all; it is being made to ratify a contemporary geopolitics. This is the sharpest edge of the forerunner method — history graded not merely by proximity to Marx but by service to the foreign policy of the Soviet state — and it is the one place where the book's scholarship is bent to a use its subjects would not have recognised.
Set beside Anikin's settled outcome, the revolutionary-Marxist reading of the same quarrel treats it as unfinished business — and, tellingly, reaches several of Anikin's own better judgements without his teleology. In "Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution" (1939) Trotsky summed the matter up in a way that refuses to hand Plekhanov a clean victory: "Narodnikism, in the wake of the Slavophiles, proceeded from illusions concerning the absolutely original paths of Russia's development, and waved aside capitalism and the bourgeois republic. Plekhanov's Marxism was concentrated on proving the principled identity of the historical paths of Russia and of the West. The program derived from this ignored the wholly real and not at all mystical peculiarities of Russia's social structure." That last clause is the crux. Plekhanov's anti-Populist Marxism was not simply correct; it was one-sided in the opposite direction, so fixed on proving Russia would travel the ordinary capitalist road that it lost sight of what was genuinely peculiar in Russian development — above all the weight of the peasantry, the very thing the Populists had grasped and the very thing that would return, transformed, in Lenin's strategy and in the theory of permanent revolution. The debate was not closed by Plekhanov's polemics; it ran on into 1905, 1917 and after.
The remarkable thing is how close Anikin comes to this himself. His correction of Plekhanov on the peasantry is, in substance, the same observation. What he lacks is permission to follow it where it leads — to say that the Marxist victory over Populism was a victory that left a real question standing, rather than the terminus of a road. The difference between the two readings is not the respect paid to the ancestors, which is common ground. It is that one treats the quarrel as a court case long since decided and the other as an argument the twentieth century reopened at terrible cost.
Nowhere is the common ground clearer than over Chernyshevsky, who is not a target of this tradition but a shared possession of it. Lenin took the title of his own founding pamphlet, What Is to Be Done?, from Chernyshevsky's novel. Plekhanov wrote the first Marxist study of him — the N. G. Chernyshevsky that Anikin rightly names in his opening paragraph as one of the books that first carried Russian thought to the West. Anikin's own chapters on Chernyshevsky are among his best: patient with the economic essays, alert to the censorship that forced the man to "write by implication," unwilling to reduce the novelist to the economist or either to a precursor. When he insists that Chernyshevsky "did not simply copy Georges Sand and Fourier, but wrote a profoundly original work," he is defending Russian thought against exactly the "cocktail of ideas" condescension — the tallying of "English Influence," "French Influence," "German Influence" against a thin residue of "Native Currents" — that he skewers in his introduction. On this, Anikin and the tradition this series writes from are on the same side.
The record here needs less correction than most volumes in this series, because Anikin mostly is not falsifying; he is selecting, and the selection is the frame. Two things are worth marking.
First, to Anikin's credit, he foregrounds figures the Soviet apparatus of his day often preferred to leave in shadow. Plekhanov is one of them. Across the Progress philosophy textbooks of exactly this period — Afanasyev's Marxist Philosophy (1980), Frantsov's Philosophy and Sociology (1975), Krapivin's What Is Dialectical Materialism? — the founder of Russian Marxism is named zero times each, even where the revolutionary democrats are credited, because his Menshevism after 1903 made him awkward. Anikin, by contrast, gives Plekhanov ninety-odd pages of attention and a warm portrait, "a human firework of erudition and wit." That he does so is a small act of scholarly integrity worth registering. The companion Progress edition of Plekhanov's Development of the Monist View of History, republished in 1980, is the natural place for a reader to go next.
Second, and unavoidably, the wall at 1900. A book that traces this heritage to the young Lenin and then stops cannot tell you what became of the heritage. Chernyshevsky wanted the peasant commune saved; the Populists staked everything on the peasant as the bearer of a Russian socialism. Within a generation of the point where Anikin lays down his pen, the peasantry those men loved would be collectivised by force and the commune abolished from above; the Old Bolsheviks who were the living end of his genealogy would be shot; Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rakovsky would go the way the book cannot mention because the book ends before they enter it. Trotsky appears exactly once in Anikin's hundred and thirty thousand words, and only inside the title of a Lenin article in a footnote. Stalin does not appear at all — which, for a book ending in 1900, is chronology and no reproach. But the structural silence is not chronology. By closing the story at the moment of triumph, the forerunner method spares itself the one question its own frame ought to force: whether "the victory of socialism in Russia," which Anikin invokes as the settled meaning of the whole preceding history, delivered to the peasant and the worker what Herzen and Chernyshevsky and Vorontsov had wanted for them. That is the reflexive test this scholarly book quietly fails — not by lying, but by ending in time to avoid asking.
None of this is a reason to do without Anikin. It is a reason to read him alongside a tradition that honours the same ancestors and keeps the argument open. Trotsky's 1922 essay on Plekhanov — the "first crusader of Marxism on Russian soil," whose greatness and whose fall lay in the same fact, that he was a theoretician without a revolution to apply the theory in — is the counterpart to Anikin's portrait and the sharper for being written by a rival. "Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution" (1939) restates the whole Populist–Marxist quarrel as Anikin will not: a three-cornered argument, Plekhanov's, Lenin's and Trotsky's, in which no party simply won and the peasant question Plekhanov dismissed came back to decide everything. For the fate of the peasantry after the genealogy's triumphant close — the commune Herzen dreamed of and the collectivisation that destroyed it — there is The Revolution Betrayed (1936), which reads the Soviet outcome by the standard of what the revolution had promised, exactly the standard Anikin's frame declines to apply.
Read that way, Anikin's book is not diminished but completed. He has recovered a heritage and read much of it with real love. What he could not do, in 1988 as much as in 1975, was ask what that heritage became. This introduction is written in the conviction that honouring Herzen, Chernyshevsky and the Populists means keeping their questions open — not laying them to rest at the foot of a monument.