2) The Law of Combined Development

"In order to realise the Soviet state, there was required a drawing together and mutual penetration of two factors belonging to completely different historic species - a peasant war - that is, a movement characteristic of the dawn of bourgeois development - and a proletarian insurrection, the movement signalising its decline. That is the essence of 1917"

Bloody Sunday 1905

Feudalism and Czarism in Russia

The early Russian Marxists like Plekhanov and later Lenin, Trotsky and others in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) were faced with the problem of applying Marxism to the development of backward Russia.

For centuries, Russia seemed stuck in a poverty-stricken feudal regime where the mass of the population lived as poor peasants. They existed in mediaeval conditions, scraping a living on their meagre strips of land but largely working for the benefit of their rich landlords. This serfdom had not been officially abolished until as late as 1861.

Dotted amongst the vast tracts of land, the small cities that developed were mainly commercial and administrative centres, good at trade and consuming wealth but not at producing it.

In earlier centuries, Western cities had developed craft guilds on the basis of artisans and small-scale manufacturing industry. From these the radical bourgeoisie had grown, battling through the religious Reformation and social Revolution against the church and the feudal lords until their capitalist class had conquered power. Russia had no such struggle. Craft remained mainly linked to home industry, not really separated from agriculture and the peasantry.

The Czarist state rose above both the feeble feudal lords and the feeble cities with no strong bourgeois class to challenge its rule. The clergy and the nobility all played their part in supporting the huge Czarist bureaucracy which swallowed up ever greater proportions of the country's wealth.

The Law of Combined Development

However, as Trotsky often explained, such historical backwardness did not mean that Russia would then slavishly retrace the course of the advanced countries in an identical fashion, if a few hundred years late.

In order to try and compete with their international rivals, feudal Russia was forced to adopt some of the advances of the capitalist West and so 'skip over' some of the intermediate stages of development that a mechanical view of Marxism might predict.

Trotsky makes a comparison with indigenous peoples who “throw away their bows and arrows for rifles all at once, without travelling the road which lay between those two weapons in the past” (5).

Like any economically backward nation, Russia's lowly culture was forced to make leaps forward combining the most highly developed achievements of capitalist technique with the society of feudalism and Czarism, so producing a unique relationship of classes.

It was in these peculiarities, described by Trotsky as the "Law of Combined Development", that Marxism found the key to explaining the paradox of the Russian Revolution.

The Law had its clearest expression in the development of Russian industry. Under the influence of first trade and then massive European investment, industry rapidly leapt from peasant backwardness to embrace the latest achievements of capitalist development.

So in 1914, while 80% of the working population were still living on the land carrying out agriculture at the level of the seventeenth–century, some of the most modern factories in the world were to be found in Moscow and the capital Petrograd. 

For example, while in the USA at that time only 18% of industrial workers were employed in giant factories with a workforce of over 1000, in Russia the figure was 41%. In the Petrograd district 44% of industrial workers were to be found in these huge enterprises, in Moscow as many as 57%.

Russia was certainly still far more backward - with a national income per head 8 to 10 times less than in the USA, - but this modern industrial development did not disprove this backwardness, it dialectically completed it.

Workers at the giant Putilov factory (pictured in 1920)

Russia's uneven development had important political results. Firstly, the huge foreign investment meant that Russian industry was largely under the control of European banks and shareholders, particularly those of England and France. About 40% of industrial stocks were controlled by foreigners with the percentage far higher in the more modern sectors and in heavy industry. In their hunger for profits, these foreign capitalists not only did not support political change but often actively opposed it.

Trade and military pressure from the West strengthened the Czarist bureaucracy with which the possessing classes of Europe had to do business. It became a tool of the wishes of the European money markets and the military interests of the West.

The influence of European ideas did have some effect on the more liberal nobles who resented the absolute rule of the Czar. However, little came of their opposition as most of all they feared rousing the peasantry into revolt.

The belated and sudden growth of industry meant that there was no strong Russian bourgeois class to oppose the feudal regime. It also meant there were few middle-class layers to cushion the anger of the masses at the wealth of their exploiters.

However, the class where this sudden development produced the greatest change in political outlook was in the newly forming working-class. In Britain, the proletariat grew gradually through the centuries slowly adapting its ideas to the new environment and developing perhaps a rather conservative tradition. The Russian working-class on the other hand was shaped in a few decades of rapid change where their whole life became a sharp break with the past.

The Russian workers’ movement

Snatched from behind the plough into the cauldron of huge factories, the Russian worker showed a freshness and openness to revolutionary ideas that was rarely found in other countries. In many cities the proletariat was constantly being added to by new reserves from the country, linking the proletariat with the peasantry.

However, there was also another side to the coin. This sudden development also created difficulties for the workers’ movement like illiteracy, political backwardness and lack of organisational traditions.

Nevertheless, here was a workforce fresh to the horrors of modern industrial labour, oppressed by the absolute rule of Czarism, often working in huge factories such as the Putilov factory in Petrograd with 40,000 workmates to live, struggle and discuss with. It is not surprising that a Russian worker could reach bold revolutionary conclusions.

In this rich revolutionary soil, Russian Marxism developed. Confirming their belief in the proletariat, the Russian working-class took a leading role in the early struggles of the 1890s and up to the 1905 revolution.

Battling against the oppressive Czarist state, the youthful Russian proletariat learnt its first steps in a harsh environment. Strikes were forbidden by law, democratic rights virtually unknown. Small underground circles of revolutionists would attempt to hold illegal meetings and demonstrations, and distribute secretly printed or even handwritten leaflets and newspapers, only for the police to quickly uncover the groups.

Like Lenin, Trotsky and many others participating in the movement at this time, the arrested activists would be imprisoned or exiled, so much so that most of their local newspapers rarely got as far as issue number two, let alone number three!

From 1900 onwards Lenin, and other RDSLP leaders who had managed to escape from Russia, produced the newspaper ‘Iskra’ (‘The Spark’) from abroad and successfully smuggled it into Russia.

As in economics, ideas and organisation also followed the Law of Combined Development. Political strikes against government policy became a common weapon of the Russian workers, yet it was still rare in Western Europe.

With the weakness of liberal bourgeois opposition and the scattered and confused nature of the peasant movement, these revolutionary strikes became the battering-ram that the awakening opposition directed against the walls of Czarist rule.

The Russian proletariat adopted the weapons forged through long years of bitter experience by their European counterparts - trade unions, strikes, political parties. But it was ‘backward’ Russia that became the only European country in which a workers’ party supporting Marxism as a doctrine, the ‘Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party,’ or RSDLP, enjoyed powerful support.

What's more, in 1905, it was the Russian proletariat that first invented that key weapon of revolutionary organisation - the workers' council or "soviet".

The 1905 Revolution

The revolutionary events of 1905 were triggered by Russia’s disastrous war with Japan. The defeat had laid bare the rottenness of the Czarist autocracy and its generals. At the beginning of January, a city-wide general strike gripped Petrograd, called in response to the sacking of four trade unionists.

On ‘Bloody Sunday’, January 9th, an unarmed demonstration to the Czar’s Winter Palace was mowed down by his troops, leaving a thousand dead. This only deepened the strike wave which spread across all the main cities in the following months. This was accompanied by peasant land seizures and mutinies in the Black Sea fleet.

Over the course of the year, the factory inspectors reported that over 2.8 million workers participated in strike action, 1.8 million of these in political strikes. (This was out of an inspected workforce of only 1.5 million, those participating in several strikes of course counted more than once.)

Events culminated in the uprising of December 1905. Although defeated, it was an important dress rehearsal for the revolutions of 1917, awakening millions of workers and peasants and leaving important lessons for the future.

The new unheard of level of workers' activity required a new form of organisation - the soviet: the embryo of a workers' government according to Lenin. These workers' councils, invented to organise the general strike and the struggle for power, were an important step forward. Neither was the idea of soviets forgotten. The workers immediately returned to this form of organisation during the revolutionary events of 1917.

Comprising of elected deputies from each section of the workers in struggle, the soviet was a flexible way of judging the mood of the workers, able to rapidly respond to new demands, democratically debate ideas and to provide clear leadership at each stage of the movement.

Trotsky and the 1905 Petrograd Soviet

Trotsky, at that time outside the Bolshevik faction of the RDSLP, became President of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' Deputies and was afterwards exiled to Siberia. Not only the workers, but also the peasants and the revolutionary parts of the army had looked to the soviets for a lead.

The revolutionary forces of 1905 were also to learn from the defeat of the December uprising that the so-called 'liberal' bourgeoisie were not to be trusted. Having taken one look over the precipice of revolution, the capitalists had hurriedly backed away into the camp of reaction. This had left the way clear for the army to bloodily defeat the workers and peasants.

The liberals afterwards spent their time making speeches in the newborn but short-lived 'Duma', an ineffective assembly chosen from the votes of a limited and largely wealthy electorate. They gave their excuses to the monarchy for their insufficient opposition to the revolution, thus alienating themselves further from the masses.

The peasantry and the revolution

The Russian proletariat was such a small minority of the nation that it could only hope to lead a struggle against the Czarist state if it had the mighty support of the poor peasantry. This vast potential ally for the workers was facing a desperate situation thanks to the unequal distribution of land and the backwardness of agriculture.

Trotsky estimated that in 1905 about half of the privately owned land belonged to just 30,000 great landowners - covering an area equivalent to the land of 10 million peasant families. He commented that "these land statistics constitute the finished programme of a peasant war" (6).

Agriculture was held back by the inefficient methods of farming on small peasant plots using outdated technique. Again the law of combined development meant that the peasant had a desperate battle to try and match prices with those set by the productive farming methods of modern agriculture.

However, before history could pass on to more rational and intensive methods, the peasants saw that one last avenue might be open to them. They tried to rescue their situation by forcibly extending their lands at the expense of the landlord.

Scared by the peasant struggles that had accompanied the 1905 crisis, the landlords made some concessions to the better-off peasants through a large-scale selling-off of their land. Then, in 1906, the government introduced a law giving the rich peasants, known as "kulaks" (this was a nickname literally meaning 'fist' in Russian) the right to buy-off sections of the villages' communal land, even if the majority of peasants were against it.

This attack on the poor peasants was described by the then President of the Council of Ministers, Stolypin, as "banking on the strong ones". In other words, the government were trying to create a layer of wealthy capitalist kulak farmers in the country to provide a much needed point of support for the Czar's regime.

However, the measure created far more opposition than it ever gained support for the counter-revolution. It did lead to a boom in agriculture from 1908-12 but only drove the mass of the peasantry further into ruin, unable to compete with the cheap grain that the new farmers could produce.

Many sold up their bits of land to become landless workers adding further explosive material to the proletarian population. Some peasants sought refuge in co-operatives, supported and idealised by the rich "narodnik" intelligentsia, but these proved no solution, real power again belonging to the richest peasants within the 'commune'.

The peculiarities of Russia's combined development left the nation entering the twentieth century with a peasantry demanding a radical agrarian revolution but with the bourgeoisie, who history had given the task of leading such a change in Western Europe, too impotent to play such a role.

Marxism had always explained that the peasantry was divided into rich and poor, with each peasant having primarily their own individual interests at heart. It could not act as an independent revolutionary force like either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. It vacillated like the rest of this intermediate 'petty-bourgeois' layer, between these two classes looking for leadership.

What was to be unique about the Russian Revolution was that, for the first time in history, the peasantry was to be able to find a lead from a sufficiently strong and revolutionary proletariat. 

As Trotsky explains: "In order to realise the Soviet state, there was required a drawing together and mutual penetration of two factors belonging to completely different historic species - a peasant war - that is, a movement characteristic of the dawn of bourgeois development - and a proletarian insurrection, the movement signalising its decline. That is the essence of 1917" (7).