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The Political Thought of Vera Zasulich

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Jay Bergman
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Compared to Lenin or Plekhanov or Martov, Vera Zasulich is a relatively minor figure in the Russian Revolutionary pantheon. She is remembered more for shooting Trepov in 1878 than for anything else she accomplished in her lifetime. Vera Zasulich created no party, conceived no doctrine, established no personal following. Her political thought is not without originality or interest, however, and an examination of her ideas reveals how radical dogma equating poverty and virtue was able to fascinate Russian intelligenty possessed by an altruism which demanded that the affluent and educated help redistribute the material and intellectual resources of society. Teaching illiterate workers the rudiments of education in the 1860s, preaching revolution among the peasants of southern Russia in the 1870s, and disseminating Marxist theory in the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s helped assuage the guilt Zasulich had accumulated as a woman of education and refinement.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , June 1979 , pp. 243 - 258
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1979

References

1. Aksel'rod, L. I., Etiudy i vospominaniia (Leningrad, 192S), p. 37.Google Scholar

2. Plekhanova, R. M., “Stranitsa iz vospominanii o V. I. Zasulich,” Gruppa “Osvobozhdenie Truda”: Iz arkhivov G. V. Plekhanova, V. I. Zasulich i L. G. Deicha, vol. 3 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1925), pp. 84–85.Google Scholar

3. Trotsky, Leon, Lenin: Notes for a Biographer (New York, 1971), p. 41.Google Scholar

4. For example, Kravchinskii, Sergei, Underground Russia (London, 1883), p. 108–9.Google Scholar

5. The essay is reprinted in Zasulich, Vera, Sbomik statei, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1907), 2: 313–71.Google Scholar

6. Ibid., p. 324.

7. Works by Berdiaev that Zasulich found especially infuriating were his Sub “'ektivizm i individualism v obshchestvennoi filosofii (St. Petersburg, 1901) and “Bor'ba za idealizm,” Mir bozhii, 10, no. 6 (June 1901), from both of which she quoted extensively in her essay.

8. Zasulich, Sbornik statei, 2: 332-33.

9. Ibid., p. 352.

10. Ibid., p. 370.

11. Ibid., pp. 349-50.

12. Ibid., p. 350.

13. Ibid., p. 344.

14. It is noteworthy that, in 1896, Zasulich composed a biography of Rousseau in which she tried to demonstrate that Rousseau had been a proto-Menshevik among the monarchs and aristocrats of his day in his view that only the lower classes acting in concert could eliminate disparities of wealth and opportunity (see V. I. Zasulich, Zhan-Zhak Russo, reprinted in Zasulich, Sbornik statei, 1: 1-144).

15. Zasulich, Sbornik statei, 2: 344.

16. Ibid.

17. Written in 1889 to coincide with the convocation of the Second International, the essay is reprinted in ibid., 1: 245-318.

18. Ibid., p. 317.

19. Originally published in Sotsial-demokrat, 1892, no. 4; the essay has been reprinted in Zasulich, Sbornik statei, 2: 111-47.

20. Ibid., p. 119.

21. Ibid., pp. 120-21.

22. For Aksel'rod's views in this regard, the reader should refer to his “Ob “edinenie rossiiskoi sotsial-demokratii i eia zadachi,” Iskra, no. 55 (December 15, 1903), and ibid., no. 57 (January 15, 1904).

23. V. I. Lenin, Chto delat'f, reprinted in Lenin, V. I., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed., vol. 6 (Moscow, 1959), pp. 30–31, 124-27.Google Scholar

24. There is reason to believe that Zasulich argued this point strenuously because she had seen in her dealings with Nechaev in the late 1860s how one man's duplicity ultimately robbed his circle of all moral rectitude; in her mind, a judgment of Nechaev was also a judgment of the society he promised to create. Like Zasulich, both an accomplice and a victim of Nechaev's intrigues, Mikhail Bakunin drew from this experience the same conclusion (which he sometimes ignored)—that a revolutionary party is not simply an instrument of liberation but an embryonic model of that liberation as well ( Lehning, Arthur, ed., Michel Bakounine et ses relations avec Sergej Necaev, 1870-1872: Ecrits et matériaux [Leiden, 1971], pp. 117 and 126).Google Scholar I am indebted to Professor Marshall Shatz for calling Bakunin's views to my attention.

25. Zasulich, V. I., “Revoliutsionery iz burzhuaznoi sredy,” Sotsial-demokrat, 1890, no. 1, cited in Zasulich, Sbornik statei, 2: 29.Google Scholar

26. Zasulich, V. I., “Kar'era nigilista,” Sotsial-demokrat, 1892, no. 4; reprinted in Zasulich, Sbornik statei, 2: 146.Google Scholar

27. Ibid., pp. 3-14.

28. Ibid., p. 15.

29. Ibid., p. 51.

30. Zasulich letter to Engels, April 10, 1890, in Percpiska Marksa i Engel'sa s russkimi politicheskimi deiateliami (Moscow, 1947), p. 260.

31. Zasulich, Sbornik statei, 2: 359-60.

32. Cited in Reshetar, John S. Jr., A Concise History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York, 1964), p. 3.Google Scholar

33. Jay Bergman, “Vera Zasulich and the Politics of Revolutionary Unity” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1977), pp. 225-28, 246-49, 266-78.

34. Nikolaevskii, B. I. and Potresov, A. N., Sotsial-demokraticheskoe dvizhenie v Rossii: Materialy (Moscow, 1928), p. 11 Google Scholar; Krupskaia, Nadezhda, Reminiscences of Lenin, trans. Verney, E. (New York, 1970), p. 55.Google Scholar

35. Zasulich, V. I., “Organizatsiia, partiia, dvizhenie,” Iskra, no. 70 (July 25, 1904), p. 5.Google Scholar

36. 36. Ibid.

37. Plekhanov, G. V., “Pis'mo k odinnadtsati ‘perevodym’ rabochim,” Pravda, no. 83 (April 10, 1913).Google Scholar

38. Zasulich, V. I., “G. V. Plekhanov i likvidatory,” Luch, no. 88 (April 18, 1913), p. 1.Google Scholar

39. Plekhanov, G. V., “V. I. Zasulich, likvidatory i raskol'nichii fanatizm,” Pravda, nos. 129 and 130 (June 7 and June 8, 1913)Google Scholar; Zasulich, V. I., “Po povodu odnogo voprosa,” Zhivaia zhizn, no. 8 (July 19, 1913), pp. 2–3Google Scholar; Lenin, V. I., “Kak V. Zasulich ubivaet likvidatorstvo,” Prosvcshchenic, 1913, no. 9.Google Scholar

40. For example, in his otherwise excellent biography of Stalin, Adam Ulam maintains (incorrectly, in my opinion) that “as one looks at the two branches of Russian Marxism until the fateful days of 1917, one finds a striking similarity of views and, for the most part, of tactics” ( Ulam, Adam, Stalin [New York, 1973], p. 51).Google Scholar

41. Zasulich, “Po povodu odnogo voprosa,” pp. 2-3.

42. Pipes, Richard, Russia under the Old Regime (New York, 1974), p. 281–318.Google Scholar

43. Zasulich, V. I., “Sotsializm Smol'nogo,” Nachalo, 1918, no. 2; reprinted in Zaria, 1922, no. 9-10, pp. 285–86.Google Scholar

44. Ibid., p. 286.