and was arousing general interest. The reconstituted empire, led by Bismarck, deliberately took up the campaign against socialism in the name of legitimate monarchy, so that from this aspect Prussia is a more advanced Russia. A year before the organisation of the Černyi Pereděl, Bismarck had introduced the exceptional laws, and thus it came to pass that the first Russian social democrats had before them the example of German Marxism in a revolutionary mood, as they had expected and perhaps desired from the first.
None the less, the development of Marxism in Germany took the direction of reformist revisionism and parliamentarism, and by German influence the Russian Marxists were likewise urged in the direction of revisionism. As early as 1894, Struve declared that he was not wholly orthodox.
Apart from differences of tactics, the Marxists were distinguished from the socialistic narodniki in respect of the historical and philosophical explanation of the evolution of Russia, the chief problem being whether Russia was already in a position in which she would be able to realise the socialistic order, although the country had not passed through all the stages of economic evolution that were known to Europe. Above all it was a disputed point whether Russia would have to traverse a capitalist stage in order, in accordance with the Marxist law of evolution, to pass from capitalism to socialism.
Finally there was a struggle upon the philosophical plane. It is true that the Russian socialists and radicals were materialists; like Marx and Engels, they were disciples of Feuerbach; adhesion to Comte and positivism was common ground. But Marxism, with its historic or economic materialism, involved a distinct trend.
In addition, it was the so-called subjective method which separated the Russian socialists and radicals from the-Marxists. The Marxists adopted a thoroughly objectivist standpoint. Eliminating, or at least ignoring, the individual consciousness, they took the masses and the laws of their historical evolution as valid arguments for the realisation of socialism. The significance and the foundation of socialism were differently conceived in the two camps. The controversy was one of ethics versus history.
To-day when we speak of the narodniki we mean above all the philosophical defenders of the narodničestvo in this conflict with Marxism. But the term has a wide meaning
