provide a firm inductive foundation for these basic doctrines, engaging in a statistical and historical study, and attempting to show that the economic and social conditions of the eighties and nineties furnished support for their outlook. It was the especial merit of Voroncov that, in contrast with Juzov, he aimed at the inductive verification of his teaching by the use of statistics, especially those furnished by the zemstvos.
The Marxists, for their part, were engaged in the onerous task of effecting a scientific survey of the history of Russia's economic evolution. Having secured as accurate statistics as possible concerning the economic conditions of Russia (number of factories, operatives, etc.) and concerning the position of the various classes, and having studied the development of industry and commerce, they endeavoured to prove, and indeed succeeded in proving, that Russia, notwithstanding the mir, notwithstanding the artels and the home industries, was already carrying on its economic life on a capitalist basis, and that the proletarianisation of the operatives and peasants was by now far advanced.
This criticism and counter-criticism of the narodniki (Voroncov, Nikolai-on, Karyšev, etc.) and the Marxists (Plehanov, Struve, Tugan-Baranovskii, etc.) was the chief concern of Russian theorists and politicians and of the wider circle of the intelligentsia during the early and middle nineties. The liberals took sides against the narodniki, although they were not in all points in agreement with the Marxists.[1]
- ↑ The utterances of Marx and Engels upon the question discussed in the text are not without importance. These two writers were no less hostile towards absolutist Russia than had been the European liberals of 1848. As previously recounted, Marx became personally acquainted with a number of Russians, and the influence of these could not fail to confirm him in his unfavourable views. In the first volume of Capital (1867), Marx engaged in a vigorous polemic against Herzen. In the second edition (1872), this adverse passage was suppressed; Marx commended the Russian translation of Capital, spoke favourably of the before-mentioned works by Ziber, and extolled Černyševskii for his critique of Mill. As early as 1870, in Marx's letter to the Russian section of the International in Geneva, a word of praise had been given to Černyševskii and to Flerovskii (Condition of the Working Classes in Russia). In his letters to the Russian editor and translator of the first volume of Capital, Nikolai-on (Danielssohn), Marx, in 1873, declared himself opposed to Čičerin's theory concerning the origin of the mir. In 1877, Mihailovskii, writing in the "Otečestvennyja Zapiski," basing his views on Marx's history of European capitalism, had anticipated a sinister future for Russian economic evolution. Writing, however, to the editor of this periodical, Marx declared that if Russia should continue to pursue the path entered in 1861, that country would rob itself of the finest opportunity that any nation had ever had of eluding all the vicissitudes of capitalistic organisation. Marx further declared in this com-
