Socialists shared the democratic goals of the liberals as well as the philosophical logic underpinning liberal democracy: that political and social change ought to promote the freedom and dignity of the human person by removing the social, cultural and political constraints that hindered the full development of the individual. But socialists approached this ideal with the radical insistence that only a transformation root and branch of all social and political relationships, and of the values informing these, could set Russia on the path to true emancipation. Indeed, dissatisfied with the anomic logic of liberal individualism (though many Russian liberals also worried about the dangers of excessive individualism), socialists favoured linking self-realisation with communal notions of solidarity and interdependent interests.
Various underground socialist organisations emerged in the early years of the century. Populist socialists were organised after 1901 around the Socialist Revolutionary Party (the SRs) andpartly represented after 1906 by the Trudovik (Labourist) faction in the State Duma. Ideologically, they viewed the whole labouring narod, the common people, as their constituency, and socialism as a future society embodying, above all, the ethical values of community and liberty. Marxists, who were increasingly numerous and influential and organised around the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party, believed they possessed a more 'scientific' and rationalistic understanding of society and history. Socialism, for Marxists, was the historically certain, and more rational and progressive, successor to capitalism, and the industrial proletariat alone, not some idealised 'people', was the social class whose interests and efforts would bring this new order into being. This simple divide between populists and Marxists inadequately suggests the intricate divisions among socialists, though. Populists differed among themselves over issues such as the use of terror, the actual vitality and theoretical importance of peasant communalism and whether and on what terms to ally with liberals. Marxists differed among themselves - often with considerable rancour - over questions of organisation (how centralised and authoritarian the party should be), tactics (such as whether workers should ally with other classes), strategy (whether Russia was ready for socialism) and philosophy (e.g. the relative importance of ethics and revolutionary faith versus scientific reason).[11]
The intellectual differences between two leading Marxists, Vladimir Ul'ianov (known by his party pseudonym Lenin) and Iulii Tsederbaum (Martov), illustrate some of the diversity and complexity that lay behind party programmes. In many ways, Martov fitted well into the long history of the Russian intelligentsia, especially in his passionate preoccupation with the idea of justice. When he discovered Marxism, he found compelling not only Marxist arguments about the natural progress of history and the centrality of the working class but the moral idealism embedded in this rationalist ideology: an end to inequality and suffering, injustice and coercion and Russia's humiliating backwardness as a nation.[12] Lenin also approached politics with passion, but his was a passion more of reason than of moral sensibility, focused more on the goal of liberation than on the uplifting process of struggle. Indeed, Lenin repeatedly made it clear that he despised the political moralising so common to Russian socialism. For Lenin, the revolution was a matter of rationality and discipline not the romantic heroism of the struggle for justice, goodness and right.[13]
These different sensibilities were reflected in different approaches to key political notions. Everyone, it seemed, from liberals to radical socialists, embraced democracy. Martov - and perhaps most Russian Marxists in the pre-war years - was attracted to Marxism precisely for its democratic promise. They believed that political representation and civil freedoms were goods in themselves, though necessarily needing to be supplemented by the democracy of social rights. Lenin, by contrast, was among those who embraced social and political democracy as a goal, but not for its own sake. Rather, Lenin argued, Bolsheviks viewed political democracy as having mainly instrumental value, as enabling workers more effectively to fight for socialism. Along similar lines, while Martov was among those who believed strongly in what might be called the consciousness-raisingbenefits ofthe experience of struggle (hence his opposition in 1903 to Lenin's advocacy of a vanguard party limited to disciplined professional revolutionaries), Lenin emphasised the centrality in raising consciousness of imposed rationality and leadership. As he famously argued in What Is To Be Done (1902), left to themselves workers were unable to see beyond the economic struggle and understand that their interests lay in overthrowing the existing social system.[14] If socialists were to do more than 'gaze with awe . . . upon the "posterior" of the Russian proletariat',[15] Lenin wrote in his characteristically biting style, it was necessary to create a party (and later critics would suggest that this was the kernel of Lenin's approach to the Soviet state) of full-time revolutionaries to direct the mass movement, who embodied the full consciousness that the masses lacked and were obedient to party discipline. In practice, these differences were not absolute. By the eve of the war, both parties were to be found playing large and similar roles among workers: helping to establish and lead workers' organisations and spreading socialist ideas among workers, students and others through underground publications and everyday agitational talk. And the results were impressive. Though these parties had relatively few members, and large numbers of workers could not understand what they saw as the pointless and harmful squabbling between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, the influence of socialist ideas among workers, students and others was considerable. But as the popularity of socialism grew, so did the variety of motivating logics and approaches.
Across the political spectrum, from liberals to socialists, the 'woman question' was an essential, if frequently unsettling, issue in debates about democratic change in Russia. If, as most agreed, democratic change meant creating a society in which the dignity and rights of the individual were respected and individuals were able to participate actively in the public sphere, the situation of women was clearly in dire need of change. Women were widely viewed as morally and intellectually different and weak and women's civic roles and personal autonomy were circumscribed. Since the mid-1800s, however, such patriarchalism had been persistently challenged by activist men and increasingly by publicly active women. Often paired with programmes for the emancipation of all people, activists targeted the particular humiliations women endured: sexual harassment, domestic violence, prostitution, lack of education, lack of training for employment, lower wages, undeveloped social supports for maternity and childcare, lack of legal protections and civil rights.
The movement for women's emancipation gained particular force and urgency during and after the 1905 Revolution, as women, though not given the vote, were often heard at meetings appealing for respect as human beings and for equal rights as citizens, and as a series of women's organisations and publications emerged to promote the cause. As a movement, the struggle to improve the situation of women was as divided as the larger political world; and it divided that world. On the one hand, many activists fought directly to overcome women's inferior status, and spoke of the particular sufferings of women in public and private life. On the other hand, many women, especially socialists, argued that feminism, which focused on women's particular needs, risked fragmenting the common cause, which must be to free all people from the restrictions of the old order. Only as part of this 'larger' cause, it was said, could women be emancipated.[16]
11
Haimson, TheRussianMatxists;OliverRadkey,
12
Israel Getzler,
13
V I. Lenin, 'Who Are the "Friends of the People"' (1894),
14
VI. Lenin,
16
Richard Stites,