Jan Waclaw Machajski by Marshall S. Shatz

Author:Marshall S. Shatz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Jan Wacław Machajsk, intellectuals, anti-intelligensia, Russian Revolution
Published: 1989-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5: The "Workers' Conspiracy" and the Russian Revolutionary Movement

At the beginning of 1906, Machajski arrived in St. Petersburg and proceeded to organise a small band of his followers in the capital. Their primary objective was to persuade the workers to repudiate the political program of the socialist parties - a "bourgeois revolution" to replace autocracy with a parliamentary democracy - and instead to insist on the immediate satisfaction of their economic demands. Briefly, at least, Makhaevism achieved a measure of visibility as an organised movement, although in fact a variety of groups and individuals professing Makhaevist ideas had been appearing on the Russian scene for several years before this.

Before tracing the activities of the Makhaevists themselves, we have to turn our attention to that aspect of Russian life with which they were primarily concerned: the relations between workers and intelligentsia in the labour and revolutionary movements. In the two decades or so before the 1905 revolution, both of these movements were preoccupied with this crucial issue. The workers, striving to organise so as to press their demands for improved wages and working conditions, often had to avail themselves of the organisational skills and communications resources the intelligentsia alone could provide, especially at a time when most forms of labour association were illegal and had to be conducted underground. The revolutionary intelligentsia needed a mass base to use as a lever for prying loose the tsarist autocracy. The populists having been rebuffed by the peasantry in the 1860s and 1870s, a sizeable part of the intelligentsia adopted Marxism in the 1880s and 1890s and sought to rally the industrial workers under the banner of Social Democracy. The two social elements were drawn to each other by mutual need and, so it seemed, mutual interest.

As their contacts grew, however, the social and cultural barrier that separated the Western-educated stratum from the mass of the population in the society at large replicated itself in the relations between intelligenty and workers in the underground organisations. This is not to say that reciprocal trust and co-operation were unattainable; representatives of the two groups did work together productively and harmoniously. Even at the best of times, however, relations between them were fraught with a considerable degree of underlying tension which could erupt in outbursts of anti-intelligentsia hostility. So insistently does anti-intelligentsia sentiment recur throughout this period, in fact, that any attempt to treat it exhaustively would not only go well beyond the scope of the present work but would amount to a virtual recapitulation of the history of the Russian labour movement and of the Russian Social-Democratic party. My purpose here will be to examine some of its principal manifestations and their relationship to Makhaevism. The Makhaevists were unique in placing anti-intelligentsia sentiment at the very centre of their doctrines and agitation, but they were by no means alone in giving voice to it. Machajski's attack on the intelligentsia drew attention precisely because it probed at one of the most painful spots in the development of Russian socialism.

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