Quotes from Robert C. Tucker

Does the mass give the leaders the program and its argumentation, or do the leaders give it to the mass?[163]

The great popular insurrections that broke out from time to time in Russian history show that the peasant, even at his most rebellious, tended to preserve a loyalty to the tsar or to the idea of being ruled by a tsar.

It is hard to believe that Lenin would not have won the case had his health permitted him to argue it before the court of the party congress. But when the

In no case did the leaders proclaim the movements to be in opposition to the tsar. They held, rather, that the tsar was on their side, or that some other member of the royal family was with them, or that they themselves were the tsar.

congress opened in mid-April, he was incapacitated. And the papers containing his recommendation on Stalin's removal from office remained unopened until some time after he died in January 1924.

This became the generally accepted Russian Marxist position.

Although Lenin did not directly take issue with it, his own outlook differed radically.

Its platform, subsequently published abroad, was suppressed inside Russia. Its efforts to arouse worker support by clandestinely distributing such materials as the text of Lenin's testament and by organizing street demonstrations in Moscow and Leningrad on November 7, 1927, the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, were foiled by the authorities.

eighteen-forties and fifties

Hence the abolitionist-minded intelligentsia, along with liberal elements in Russian society and within the bureaucracy, inclined not toward a constitutionalist program, realization of which would only strengthen the political influence of the landowners, but to the idea of a progressive autocracy.

In the wake of this action by the congress, some thirty of the opposition leaders, headed by Trotsky, were exiled to remote parts of the country in early 1928, Trotsky's place of exile being Alma-Ata, near the Chinese border.

hope in a dictatorship of the tsar, acting for the people and against the nobles.

Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a writer and critic who assumed intellectual leadership of the intelligentsia in the fifties, had in 1848 confided to his diary the thought that Russia needed an autocracy that would champion the interests of the lower classes in order to realize future equality. He added: "Peter the Great acted thus, in my opinion, but such a power must realize that it is temporary, that it is a means, not an end."[10]

Breakneck industrialization, with priority for heavy industry, and forcible mass collectivization of the peasantry would be the twin hallmarks of the revolution from above that Stalin inaugurated in 1929.

Lenin had no monopoly upon heroic leadership of the Bolshevik cause during the revolutionary period. Many others rendered exceptional service in saving the Revolution and constructing the new Soviet order. It is particularly noteworthy that Trotsky rose to great heights as the organizer of the Red Army and chief manager of its operations on the far-flung fronts of the Civil War.

the man of the future in Russia was the peasant, the muzhik; and economically backward, not-yet-capitalist Russia, blessed by the survival of its archaic village commune, might in fact be destined to lead the world to socialism.[11] Here in embryo was the socialist ideology of the Russian populist (narodrik) revolutionary movement that developed among the radical intelligentsia in the late fifties and sixties.

Lenin approved and relied heavily upon them as a source of funds to finance political activity. With his connivance they continued in the aftermath of 1905 despite the fact that a Menshevik-sponsored resolution forbidding them was passed at the party's Fourth Congress—the so-called Unity Congress—held in Stockholm in 1906.

Although these operations (known among the revolutionaries as "exes") aroused much opposition in the party, especially from the Mensheviks, Lenin approved and relied heavily upon them as a source of funds to finance political activity. With his connivance they continued in the aftermath of 1905 despite the fact that a Menshevik-sponsored resolution forbidding them was passed at the party's Fourth Congress—the so-called Unity Congress—held in Stockholm in 1906.

During the final moments of the congress, as its resolution on farm policy was being voted, an amendment was hurriedly inserted saying: "At the present time, the task of transformation and amalgamation of small individual farms into large-scale collective farms must be set as the party's fundamental task in the countryside."[

is generally accepted that the beginnings of Bolshevism as a separate movement within the Russian Social Democracy date from around 1903. But this development, as suggested earlier, is not to be satisfactorily explained by the conflict to which the movement owed its name. What gave Bolshevism its original impetus, indeed what brought it into being, was not the quarrel at the Second Congress; it was the appearance of What Is to Be Done?

One of the most notorious was a raid on the Tiflis State Bank in June 1907, which netted a huge sum of money for the Bolshevik treasury.

the nationality policy

Thus was Stalin's call for collective farming incorporated into official policy, causing the Fifteenth Congress to be described in later party histories as the "congress of collectivization.

What is remarkable is that Herzen, in the earlier years of Alexander II's reign (1855–81), combined this "Russian socialism," as it came to be called, with the theory of progressive autocracy. He called upon Alexander to be a "crowned revolutionary," and a "tsar of the land," and to continue Peter the Great's cause of reform by breaking with the Petersburg period as resolutely as Peter had broken with the Moscow period.