were likewise compelled to consider the agrarian program with more attention than it had hitherto received from Marxists in Germany and elsewhere in the west.
The problem of nationalism, too, had now to be faced by the Marxists. It became evident that the indentification of every kind of nationalist sentiment with chauvinism and official patriotism was fallacious. As long as the Marxists, living abroad, had little intercourse with the other refugees from Russia, a concrete internationalism among the members of the various Russian stocks was possible enough. But as soon as this international could engage in legalised activities in Russia, and as soon as the constitution guaranteed national as well as political freedom, the problem of language and the problem of nationality became actual for the Russian Marxists as it had become actual for the Marxists of other multilingual lands (notably for those of Austria-Hungary). Discussion concerning the language in which the proceedings of the duma were to take place, concerning the official language, concerning the language of public instruction, and so on, was now essential. As in the west, so in Russia, constitutional government first made people fully aware of the problems of nationality and speech, giving as it did an ocular demonstration that nationality is something more that a "reflex" of the capitalist economic order.
Hardly had Marxism, during the middle nineties, undergone general diffusion among the Russian intelligentsia, hardly had the one-sided philosophy of history of the narodniki been transcended, when the rise of revisionism ensued, and this not solely through the work of Bernstein. It was impossible that the inaccuracy of historical materialism and that the changes in the evolution of the Marx-Engels doctrine and of the social democracy should remain unnoted in Russia. The crisis in the Russian social democracy is the necessary outcome of the cleavage which the actual course of development forces upon Marxist theory. Historical empiricism does not conform to historico-philosophical deduction. Hence the vacillations, the inadequacies, and the perplexities of the Marxist leaders, above all during the revolution; hence, too, the insufficiency of the social democracy during the revolution and thereafter down to the present day. The Marxists gained the victory over the history of philosophy of the narodniki, but they were incompetent to understand the history of Russia in one of its most critical phases.
