Russian socialists. Russian socialism. What to do and how to do it? Tactical formula for success

From the editor : We bring to the attention of readers the thoughts of the co-chairman of the St. Petersburg branch of the All-Russian creative movement “Russian Lad” Sergei Aleksandrovich Stroev, the motivation for which was the awareness of the fact that in the event of an aggravation of the socio-political situation in Russia, radical forms of protest that have pronounced anti-capitalist and anti-globalist character. At the same time, ideological models alien to our national character may be presented as an alternative to the existing world order, and the conscious incorporation of openly provocative models into the ideological space is not excluded. In this situation, in the opinion of the author, it is very important to develop an ideology of Russian socialism, based on traditional, and not imported from outside, values ​​inherent in the consciousness of the healthy part of our people. We think that the article will be of interest to readers, although the author shares Marxist ideology. Published with minor abbreviations.

The first factor that must be taken into account is that the main conflict of the current stage of development of world civilization is the contradiction between the level of productive forces, which has reached or almost reached the post-industrial information stage, and the persisting capitalist nature of production relations. This conflict is manifested in the fact that the spread of capitalist property rights from specific physical things to information objects, technologies and knowledge leads to a sharp limitation of the dissemination and development of knowledge, often to the blocking and conservation of advanced technologies, to the monopolization of production spheres and, as a consequence, to the cessation of competition and development, to conservation and stagnation. This is a conflict well described by Marxist theory, in which outdated production relations, incompatible with the new stage of development of the productive forces, strive to preserve themselves by artificially stopping progress.

The flip side of the stoppage of progress caused by the monopolistic principles of “intellectual property” is that instead of the already realistically achievable automation and robotization of production with a sharp reduction in the volume of socially necessary human labor, production is often simply transferred to undeveloped countries with cheap labor. This not only slows down the progress of the productive forces, but also makes the civilized world extremely vulnerable and dependent on the global periphery, and creates dangerous distortions in the economies of advanced countries, fraught with a threat to their leadership.

It is quite obvious that the current capitalist system is, for this reason, uncompetitive. Its imaginary stability is determined only by the fact that today it has no competitors, since it has acquired a total, universal, worldwide character.

Already based on this, it is clear that the country that, having sufficient means of strategic deterrence (nuclear weapons and modern means of delivering and protecting them), today would competently and effectively carry out a radical reform of the principles of “copyright” and “intellectual property”, will almost automatically would become a leader in global development. If only simply because it would remove the main existing barrier to the free development of knowledge, which turns into the main and direct productive force. This strategic point has already been repeatedly noted by us in a number of previously published works (S.A. Stroev “The Communist Movement in the Post-Industrial Era: New Questions and New Answers”, “Civilization Alternative”, “The Limits of the Possible”, “Project of the Unification Program of the People’s Patriotic movement of the East Slavic peoples”, “Towards a new edition of the Communist Party Program”, “Critical comments on the draft new edition of the Communist Party Program presented by the Program Commission”, etc.).

The second factor to consider is<...>is that even in modern conditions, and, even more so, in the conditions of the development of scientific and technological progress freed from the shackles of monopolies of “intellectual property” and long-term “patent law”, the limiting source of vital benefits will not be human labor (largely replaced by automatic technology), but the presence of irreplaceable natural resources. This means a significant redistribution of the world's main contradictions and the end of the objective basis for the ideology of internationalism.

This means that citizenship is now expressed, first of all, in participation in the rights of collective ownership of irreplaceable natural resources, hereditarily transmitted to common descendants, and in the responsibilities for the collective protection of this property. From whom? First of all, from the transnational world corporations and structures of the global world ultra-monopoly capital, as well as those forces, clans, groups and individuals within the country who have linked their interests with the world transnational capital and, thereby, automatically dropped out of the national-civil community, associated, first of all, with the interests of protecting their collective property as a necessary resource for life reproduction and reproduction of the means of life reproduction. Secondly, competing national-state entities will be preserved and will not be absorbed by a single world capitalocracy as a trans-territorial direct power of corporations. Thirdly, from migrants who would like to settle on the territory of the indigenous people and receive a share in the benefits of “natural rent” - to the detriment of the interests of the indigenous population who own these benefits.

Thus, the distribution of “natural rent” in the post-industrial era becomes the same key policy issue as the distribution of surplus value was in the industrial era. The political effectiveness of this issue, even despite the control of capitalocratic mechanisms over the media and other means of shaping public opinion, was very clearly demonstrated during the 2003 election campaign in State Duma Russian Federation. We would like to remind you that the Rodina bloc, clearly hastily formed just before the elections as a loose coalition of practically independent political figures, had at that time neither a serious organizational base, nor significant financial, hardware or information resources, nor a well-established political brand, nor a stable electorate , nor any special breakthrough political technologies, received completely unexpected success only and exclusively thanks to the slogan of “natural rent”.

It seems likely that sooner or later scientific and technological progress will make it possible to replace irreplaceable natural resources with renewable artificial analogues and, thereby, remove the limits of resource limitations. However, it is quite obvious that this will happen significantly later than high automation of the production of finished products based on natural raw materials will be achieved. In other words, for a certain (and perhaps quite long) period of time, humanity will have to exist in conditions where it is the possession of ever-decreasing natural resources that will determine who has the necessary means of life reproduction and who does not.

The third factor is that the current level of hyperconsumption is determined by the viciousness of the reproduction of the capitalist system and produces nothing but senseless and unnecessary labor costs, the monstrously irrational processing of irreplaceable natural resources into environmentally harmful waste, and the spiritual, intellectual and cultural degradation of society. A necessary condition for the transition from unbridled consumption to reasonable sufficiency and prudent savings is a change in the lifestyle paradigms transmitted to society and, first of all, a fundamental severance of the connection between the level of consumption and social status. A necessary (though not sufficient) condition for this is a fundamental change in the prevailing relations of production.

However, a change in the nature of industrial relations is a necessary prerequisite and condition for all three points listed above. In fact, neither the removal of monopolistic barriers to “intellectual property,” nor, moreover, the real nationalization of natural resource rent, is fundamentally impossible without a transition from capitalist market production in the paradigm of maximizing profit extraction to socialist planned production in the paradigm of meeting social needs. That is why, in accordance with the apt and precise slogan in its aphorism, first formulated by the leader of Russian communists G.A. Zyuganov, Russian socialism is truly the answer to the Russian question. Let us emphasize that the word “Russian” in the definition of “Russian socialism” answers primarily not the question “which?”, but the question “whose?” That is, we are talking primarily not about the peculiarities of the social structure or the national specifics of social relations, which fundamentally distinguish Russian socialism from German, English, Cuban or Chinese socialism, but about the fact that Russian socialism is socialism built by Russians, for Russians and in interests of the Russians, and only then (fourthly) - taking into account the national, mental, religious, cultural, historical characteristics of the Russians, geographical, climatic and geopolitical characteristics of Russia.

The phrase “Russian socialism,” as is known, historically dates back to A.I. Herzen, and in his works it meant, first of all, socialism growing out of the traditional Russian peasant community and workers’ artel. Formally, this version of the development of socialism from patriarchal social institutions, bypassing the stage of capitalist alienation and individualism, contradicts Marxism - but only formally.

At first glance, today the question of the role of the peasant community in the transition to socialism has lost all political relevance and has become exclusively a matter of academic history. That is, the content of the concept of Russian socialism today (in the meaning that we - the communists of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation - put into this phrase) at first superficial glance does not have any historical continuity from Russian socialism in the sense that A.I. put into this concept. Herzen. Actually this is not true.

The key principle that unites the Russian socialists of the era of A.I. Herzen and N.G. Chernyshevsky, the Bolsheviks-Leninists and modern Russian socialists - supporters of G.A. Zyuganov - is the answer to the fundamental question about the possibility of a socialist revolution in conditions of the objective impossibility of revolution purely proletarian - that is, the kind that K. Marx and F. Engels predicted for Western Europe. During the time of V.I. Lenin, the problem was the underdevelopment of capitalist relations and, consequently, the small number, underdevelopment, economic and political immaturity of the Great Russian proletariat. Today, the problem is that the victory of the counter-revolution has overthrown the former socialist Russia (with, if not an absolutely classless, then at least a weakly differentiated society in the class sense) into the state of a “third world” country, into the colonial raw material periphery of the developed world, into “banana republic” - only with a cold climate and oil instead of bananas. Integration into the global market as a raw materials region naturally led to the progressive and catastrophic deindustrialization of the country. The direct social consequence of this was a sharp reduction in the working class and scientific and technical intelligentsia, the collapse of Soviet labor collectives, mass desocialization of the broad masses, one side of which is the petty-bourgeoisification of former Soviet workers (transition into the category of small traders, shuttle workers, employees of trading and intermediary firms, “ office plankton" and workers in the various services sector), and on the other hand - their lumpenization (transition into the category of the unemployed or living in casual earnings, loss of permanent housing, mass alcoholism and drug addiction).

At the same time, the further the “natural” process of Russia’s integration into the world market system develops, the more its specialization in raw materials deepens and aggravates within the framework of the global division of functions. Consequently, more and more with each subsequent year, the tendencies of deindustrialization of the country and, as an inevitable direct consequence, desocialization and marginalization of its population grow and intensify (the term “declassification,” which we have repeatedly used to describe this process, is in fact not entirely accurate and represents a certain simplification, since the starting point for the modern state of Russia was not the class society of developed capitalism, but the quasi-classless society of late Soviet socialism (more precisely, not about declassification, but about the extreme weakness and disruption of the processes of class formation despite the restoration of capitalism).

Thus, the objective reality consists not simply in the extreme weakness of the modern Russian proletariat, but in the fact that from the further “natural” course of development of capitalism within the framework of the current trajectory, we can only expect a further even greater weakening of the Russian proletariat, its numerical reduction, fragmentation, replacement by temporary foreign workers (guest workers) - up to its complete or almost complete disappearance, with the exception of the raw materials-extracting industries. And, taking into account the fact that workers in the primary industries, firstly, are geographically remote from large cities and, therefore, cannot directly participate in politics (which, as we know, is done mainly in capitals), and secondly, they can be thanks to super-profits raw materials corporations are sufficiently fed, and, thirdly, they may well be gradually replaced by the same foreign guest workers - in fact, we can talk about the loss of the qualities of a class by the proletariat and its transformation into a limited social stratum.

The vicious circle closes. Without a socialist revolution, it is impossible to reverse the trend of raw material comprador deindustrialization of the country. But the more this tendency worsens, the objectively weaker is the social-class basis of the proletarian revolution and the less possible it is. How to break this vicious circle? In February 2004, in the article “Russian socialism - the doctrine of victory”, published on the website “Russian socialism - a revolutionary line”, founded earlier in 2003, we proposed an answer to this question: “ ... the class amorphism of the masses is not accidental, and we do not have the slightest reason to expect the emergence and class formation of the proletariat from the development of current Russian capitalism. This dogmatic attitude towards waiting for the proletariat is utopian, reactionary and extremely dangerous for our cause. It does not take into account the very essence of modern Russian capitalism: its coloniality, its completely raw material and non-productive nature, its appendage in relation to the developed world. The proletariat that the dogmatists are waiting for will not come. There will remain a small layer of workers in the raw materials-extracting industries - completely financially secure, well-fed and far from any revolutionism. The rest of the population will gradually and systematically be reduced to nothing - most likely, even without any serious bloody excesses, simply due to a reduction in the birth rate. And, having drawn a logical conclusion from this situation, we again return to the same thing: since there is no and will not be class formalization, the entire emphasis must be placed on the national liberation doctrine. The ideology, goals, slogans of the revolution must be national, not class" In the same place: " Before us is the example of Cuba, where the national liberation socialist revolution was carried out precisely by nationalists».

This answer, which we have laid as the basis for the doctrine of Russian socialism in the modern political sense of this concept, has direct and immediate continuity both from Herzen’s Russian socialism and from Russian Bolshevism in the sense that in a situation where scientific class analysis indicates the objective impossibility of class proletarian revolution, the choice is made in favor of a socialist revolution in a different (non-proletarian) form, and not a rejection of the revolution or a passive expectation of the “maturing of the proletariat” as a prerequisite for a “correct” (“according to the books”!) proletarian revolution.

On July 3 of the same 2004, at the X Congress of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Party Leader G.A. Zyuganov presented the Political Report of the Central Committee “We survived. A difficult march lies ahead!”, which actually became one of the key program documents of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. This document, in particular, notes: “ A socialist revolution in Russia is still possible. In modern conditions, it can take place as a result of the national liberation struggle. The national liberation revolution, due to our characteristics, will inevitably be anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist, anti-globalist in nature. Under these conditions, Russian communists must as quickly as possible master the new ideological space of popular, still spontaneous “Russian socialism.” To lead this movement, give it scientific validity, political purposefulness, organization, combativeness and strength ».

In order to fulfill the task set by the Central Committee to master the ideological space of Russian socialism and give it scientific validity, in the fall of 2007 we prepared and published the work “Three Components of the Russian Question”, later published in a shortened and revised version on the Central website of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. In this work, three key aspects of the Russian question were highlighted - 1) the physical survival of the Russians as a Nation in conditions of actual genocide, 2) the preservation and retention by the Russians of collective property in their hands (primarily natural resources, as well as those created by national labor in the Soviet period industrial, energy and transport facilities) as a necessary means of survival and further development and 3) restoration of Russian national power and statehood. The key idea of ​​the work was that a necessary and absolutely mandatory condition for solving each of these three problems is Russia’s exit from the world market system and the abandonment of the capitalist economy of profit maximization in favor of a planned socialist economy of ensuring life reproduction.

Indeed, the development of capitalism as an objective process is inevitably associated with the process of consolidation, expansion and merging of markets, first within nation states, and then - the whole Earth. This process cannot be reversed or fixed at any stage, just as it is impossible to drive a grown oak tree back into an acorn. Therefore, at the current level of development, it is fundamentally impossible to create a capitalist system limited by national boundaries. For Russia, this means, under the conditions of capitalism at its present stage, the absolute inevitability of the “leakage” of industrial production and Agriculture to those countries where they are more profitable due to climatic features, and due to the cheapness of labor. Consequently, under capitalism, Russia (even regardless of the ethnic composition of its government and state apparatus) is doomed to the role in which it can only, due to its geographical, climatic and historical characteristics, be profitable within the framework of the world market system of division of labor - to the role of raw materials producer region. With the inevitable further reduction of the population to the number of workers required to ensure this function (from 15 to 50 million) and genocide (in one form or another) of the remaining “economically inexpedient” population. There can be only one alternative to this - exit from the world market system and from the world system of division of labor, which, in turn, requires as a necessary condition the rejection of profit as the goal, meaning and criterion of production efficiency and reorientation towards ensuring life, well-being and prosperity Russian Nation.

This is, in general terms, the concept of Russian socialism, which, as noted above, can be adapted, with not too significant amendments, for other peoples and countries. This concept really allows, if implemented, to emerge from the collapse into which the logic and impersonal mechanics of capitalist relations are driving and have practically driven humanity.

Sergey Alexandrovich Stroev, co-chairman of the St. Petersburg branch of the All-Russian creative movement “Russian Lad”, candidate of biological sciences

The time has come to talk about Russian socialism - the political-economic concept put forward by Russian populists and Socialist Revolutionaries of the 19th-20th centuries - Herzen, Mikhailovsky, Lavrov, Chayanov. The archetypal core of the Socialist Revolutionary concept is Kant’s philosophical theory: “man is not a means, but an end.” From this almost Buddhist koan or aphorism of the first Christians “ethical socialism” was born. Instead of the idea of ​​drowning people and entire classes in blood, it was proposed to think about socialism as a way of transforming man and people into “something greater than himself.”
This is how the Socialist Revolutionary concept of a New Peasant Socialist Russia was born. Through heroic Russian socialism and attention to the needs and diseases of peoples, it was planned to make the planet fraternal, dear and similar to the Sun.

For some reason, this promising political term ended up in the New Scythian dossier of the 21st century and does not want to leave it anywhere. Although the study of this exciting phrase adds mystery to us. Because the “Russian socialism” of the Narodniks and Socialist Revolutionaries was oriented towards socialist construction in peasant Russia after the victory of the revolution.

Dream of a Revolution of Life

Before the revolution of 1917, the communities really resisted both the emerging capitalism in the countryside and the remnants of the tsarist-noble feudal system. A century of social experiments in our country has demolished both the subject, the object and the method of “Russian socialism”. The importance of peasant communities (if the surviving collective farms can be considered such) in Russian social and economic life is approaching zero. Those. from a theoretical point of view, populist “Russian socialism” is nothing more than a beautiful emblem.
However, the “signifier,” divorced from the “signified,” itself in an extraordinary way fascinates the Russian man of the 10s. XXI century. Hypothetical referendums and opinion polls give the model of “Russian socialism” 70% of popularity among voters. What do these electors want, and what does the populist and Scythian social model have to do with this paradox?
It can be assumed that our “collective mind” dreams of “mobilization socialism”, when everything in Rus' for a short time became common, when true warmth and sacred light of the human soul, friendship and brotherhood shone like hares between the most distant people in years of need and despair . Something that Russian society is completely deprived of today. The Secret Power of the Russian Soul.
The era of success of the Socialist Revolutionary economic model of artel socialism (developed by the economist and sociologist Tugan-Baranovsky), “Chayanov’s cooperatives” and “self-financing” (NEP, Kosygin reforms, “Perestroika”) are not particularly memorable to Russian people. True heroes and Sunny Russians emerge from the “Soviet mobilization”. Pavka Korchagin and the positive characters of “The Eternal Call” are considered the personification of valor, daring, honor, brotherly love, nobility and invincibility. They represent a “moral imperative”, a passionary model. This is despite the fact that “How the Steel Was Tempered” has not been shown for 20 years and (under this government) will not be shown on Russian central television.
Russian Socialism is today an aesthetic slogan, not a political doctrine. This is a euphemism for a Scythian horseman in a budenovka. But for our business this is more of a plus than a minus. Images and dreams among the Scythians are primary, and social and economic models are their derivatives. This is how the true subjectivism of the Sunny Russian is embodied.
The main thing is to return to our people the warmth of the soul and indescribable happiness - to be brothers and sisters in an endless sacred country! A country filled with vital energy as much as possible! Genuine Russian Socialism!

And the soldiers are sailing somewhere,
Hiding bayonets in the shadows.
And completely their own guys
Immediately it’s as if they weren’t
It's like they don't look alike
On our own, on those guys:

Somehow everything is becoming more friendly and stricter,
Somehow everything is more precious to you
And closer than an hour ago.
(Alexander Tvardovsky"Vasily Terkin. Crossing")

Peasant kingdom

But let's approach the Russian-socialist theme from a different angle. Archetypes of the collective unconscious, coinciding (according to Carl Jung) with the people's soul, are preserved in the depths of the ethnic subconscious for centuries and are even transmitted genetically. (They are called “genetic archetypes”).
The majority of the population of the Russian Federation and the countries of the Commonwealth live in cities and megalopolises, but mentally they still remain peasants, because nothing can be done to tear out the thousand-year-old occupation of agriculture from national identity. Neither industrialization, nor dispossession, nor devastation of the Russian countryside.
People dream of their lost country.

How can we not love this land?

Where I have been given the opportunity to live for the rest of my life,
And this blue and this green,
And a secret path in the rye!
I feel good in your expanses,
My love, my land.
Russian peasant woman in palms
In the spring I nursed you...

(Levashov - Lazarev, song from the film “Peasants”)

In the 50s and 60s of the last century in the USSR there was a revenge of these hidden forces, a short, poorly formulated response of Klyuev’s Secret Rus' to the clutches of Bolshevik modernization. The political answer was not fully formulated; it trailed behind the tail of Marxist ideology. But…
But, he was.
For a short time we saw Russian Socialism, it jumped out like a diamond from a mine and consecrated Eurasia and the whole world with its heart-shaped faces. And then it went out again, like a coal in a cold oven.
In the fifties of the last century, Russian peasants first came to power in Russia. It’s as if we all dreamed of a real Peasant Kingdom from folk tales and epics about Razin and Pugachev. People from the village appeared as exemplary subjects and “patterns” to follow, the first among Soviet people. And their latent aspirations immediately received formalization in the politics, economics and culture of the USSR, and the whole world. Because it was they who made the USSR-Russia a global power. At the head Soviet Union A Kursk man sat on the “golden royal table” Nikita Khrushchev. The main and central writer of the country was the Smolensk peasant Alexander Tvardovsky. And after him, refined and bright peasant writers: Rasputin, Shukshin, Belov, Abramov, narrator Shergin. Well, the Gzhat boy with a childish smile rose above all others Yuri Gagarin. The serious beauty Valentina from the village of Bolshoy Maslennikovo made the first and last female space flight alone.
The centuries-old dream of the Narodniks and Socialist Revolutionaries, who dreamed that the country would one day be ruled by Russian peasants, came true. Hundreds of years before this were not Russians and not peasants, but here it was as if a fairy tale had galloped across Rus'...
The Peasant Kingdom, in many ways chaotically and unconsciously, tried to express “Russian socialism.”
First of all, they destroyed prisons and prisons, hated by the peasants of thousands of Russian generations. Millions of prisoners returned home.

The Eurasians were liberated Pyotr Savitsky and Lev Gumilyov, leader of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party Irina Kakhovskaya.
The repressed peoples returned to their homeland.

Geoeconomics and geopolitics of the Peasant Kingdom
The second abolition of serfdom took place, an unprecedented thing - the villagers got their passports back and were allowed to travel around the country! It was impossible to imagine anything like this under the Stalinist regime!
Then socialism itself began (because under Lenin and Stalin we, of course, had state capitalism). The supreme power, perhaps for the first time in millennia, turned its face to the people. Mass free housing construction began. Universal health care and education were then raised to unprecedented heights.
The country was divided into macroregions-economic councils. They were the ones who gained real economic power. Thus, the main lever and purse for potential separatism was knocked out of the national elites of the union and autonomous republics. Now the national republics were responsible for the cultural and memorial heritage of the peoples, i.e. were busy with their main and necessary business. And in the USSR a complex asymmetric organization arose on a national-regional principle.
Ideas of populist statisticians Kolosovsky, Alexandrov, anthropogeographer Veniamin Semenov-Tianshansky by replacing clumsy sectoral management in the country-universe with regional zoning, they gave the Soviet Union a real economic surge. It turned out that doing things ourselves, without looking around at Moscow all the time, was profitable and attractive for enterprising and active people in Soviet industry.
The times of the “Khrushchev Thaw” turned out to be the last attempt to not just “bring life” to our village. In fact, the collective farmers of the virgin lands were proclaimed the “advanced vanguard” of the entire Soviet civilization. “The man took off” and began to play leading roles in the country with pleasure and purpose. Agriculture was briefly at the center of the Russia-Eurasia “agenda.” Film "Ivan Brovkin on Virgin Lands" Lukinsky about the life of a tractor crew has gained incredible popularity. Leonid Kharitonov— the leading woman of Russia was recognized as the standard of the Russian man. Thousands of women dreamed of having children “from such “Ivan”!
It’s as if the film crew had reached the “numenous point” of the collective unconscious of the people.

Brigades of virgin lands are not collective farms at all in the ordinary meaning of the word. The collective farm is a zone of occupation of the peasant community by the communist state. The Tselinniki managed an artel, although they did not call themselves that. The private, “Kurkul” attitude to work was not encouraged, but the role of the state in managing the artel was reduced to the minimum of the seven-year plan. Social and labor initiative reigned in the artels. In virgin enthusiasm we recognize and epiphanies Kropotkin and economic calculations Kondratieva. But experts will also name the exact ideological source of “artel” or “mob” socialism. This is the economic program of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, developed by a member of its Central Committee Sergei Rybin-Lugovoy, who headed in the 20s. Russia's largest artel "Anthill". Both Kropotkin and Rybin recognized the artel as the original Russian way of managing. But it blossomed during the development of the Virgin Lands.

Khrushchev believed that the initiative of the virgin lands would give the country people of a new character. Active socialist, strong-willed, free and open, like the steppe. In fact, Virgin Land was planned as a testing ground, a special land that would produce not only bread, but also the type of future Soviet man.
The official (albeit informal) ideology of the USSR in the fifties and sixties was not Marxism and not the “cult of the black earth” (as one might expect from the former “lapotniks”), but Russian Cosmism. The idea of ​​unity and conquest of the Universe, formulated Gagarin-Fedorov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Vladimir Solovyov and Vladimir Vernadsky excited and inspired Soviet youth. Young aircraft designers and nuclear scientists, writers and geologists raved about it. The banner of Russian Space turned the USSR into the most attractive country-model for the people of the whole world to follow. The first Soviet cosmonauts did more for this than thousands of tanks and airplanes. In the sixties, it became terribly fashionable in the world to look up to Russians!
In foreign policy, the Soviet Union adopted the original Socialist Revolutionary concept of the national liberation struggle of the peoples of the world for the freedom to live on their own land according to their own laws. This bore enormous fruit when Western colonial empires collapsed. All over the world, the Russian was looked upon as the Liberator and Deliverer from European and American oppression and slavery.
The advantage of the United States over the USSR in nuclear weapons seemed catastrophic; the Americans had tens of times more warheads and, in the event of a real conflict, were preparing to actually destroy the impudent Peasant Kingdom.
General Secretary and Chief Man Nikita Khrushchev began a foreign policy more like playing dice with devils in a cemetery. Through eccentric antics and personal PR campaigns on enemy territory (within the United States), through the most severe mutual blackmail of the “Carribean crisis,” ours came out with a profit. The cunning Russian man essentially deceived and intimidated geopolitical enemies, having very weak cards in his hands.
We are far from idealizing the Thaw or Khrushchev personally. But if we judge objectively, we can isolate that the “populist idea” first sprouted through state (in this case, Bolshevik-Marxist concrete). And the principles of the Russian understanding of Socialism began to crystallize, like amazing flowers of salt around a banal nail thrown into the magical Lake Elton.

Socialist Revolutionary revenge

Nikita Khrushchev with his complete lack of classical education (and Lenin had a university degree, and Stalin- seminar) embodied the “Chvengurov dream” of Plato’s character Kopenkina. This worthy red knight dreamed that all the grains of the alien Romano-Germanic civilization, all its weeds and barren flowers, would be swept away from Russia, as from the steppe. And so that the Earth itself gives birth to the New and Other, Native. Yours.
The poetic image is beautiful, but not entirely true. Khrushchev and the “peasant network” that suddenly soared over Russia, like a net taken out of a dark river, had an ideology or crypto-ideology.

The seeds of “land and freedom,” scattered by the Socialist Revolutionary Party throughout the “high streets,” villages and farmsteads of our Plain, could not help but take root and yield a harvest. 40 years after the defeat of the Socialist Revolutionary parties.
Towards the end of his reign, Nikita Khrushchev made an administrative and political decision that shocked the Soviet bureaucracy, and was perhaps the main reason for his resignation. The peasant tsar demanded to divide the Communist Party into urban and rural!
Which takes us back to July 6, 1918 - to the dashing times of the dawn of red power. When the “worker” Soviet party of the Bolsheviks “ate” the “peasant” Soviet party of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. And Khrushchev actually proposed to restore the peasant party!
Such revolutionary decisions do not arise from voluntarism or insanity (which was attributed to the General Secretary by his own political Chaldeans who overthrew Khrushchev). We state that Nikita Sergeevich and the “secret peasant network” had a fairly clear plan of internal and external priorities, a unique vision of the future of Russian Civilization. Eurasian populists and New Scythians call this system “Russian Socialism”, and its roots go back to the populists of the 19th century, to the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Scythians of 1918, to the “peasant poets” and left-wing Eurasians.
The man on the Kremlin throne with the juicy surname “Khrushchev” is directly related to our doctrine. It’s another matter that, due to his peasant-populist temperament, Nikita Sergeevich hid and fussed and hid his own political views to the last possible opportunity.
There is evidence of Khrushchev’s Trotskyist views and connections during the era of steep party struggle in the 20s. But there was no real “Trotskyism” (except for the violent and often clumsy methods of “permanent revolution”) in Khrushchev’s “peasant-space” program. He partially continued the state policy that he inherited from the draconian regimes of Lenin, Stalin and the Romanov dynasty: in the Novocherkassk execution of workers, in raising taxes, in the persecution of religion, we will never discern either Mikhailovsky or Spiridonov.
But a man born in the Kursk village of Kalinovka could not help but assimilate with his mother’s milk the slogans of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, understandable and pleasant to the village people. Because everything that Khrushchev did during the “thaw” (all his personal, and not state “know-how” inherited from Stalin) in one way or another coincides with the Socialist Revolutionary ideological baggage. And there is nothing surprising here. The Narodniks “went among the people” for decades, millions of people were members of the Social Revolutionary parties, social revolutionary philosophers, statisticians, sociologists, economists and writers did a fantastic job of formulating the actual Russian socialist aspirations, dreams, covenants and orders of Peasant Rus'. And what other kind of socialism could the Russian peasant, who finally took power over the vast land, understand and build?
But the historian of “Scythianism” Yaroslav Leontyev recently brought us not even a confirmation of our guesses, but an information bomb:
The young man-light-Nikita began his political career in 1918 in the Yuzovsky (Donetsk) squad of left Socialist Revolutionaries! How Sergey Yesenin... When the party “ordered to live long”, he remained with the Bolsheviks. But as soon as the “Bolshevik fire”, burnt out completely by Stalin’s imperial policy, weakened... The flame of secret peasant Rus', hiding like a scarlet heart flower under the fur coats of the state peat bog, saw the light and burst out!

Makhno at Khrushchev's dacha

A peasant populist desperate flash from underground struck the world and with the beams of Russian spaceships illuminated the celestial sphere to the threshold of Venus and Mars! And burned like Gagarin! A spark from the rims of a peasant who had gathered for the Moon set his cart on fire. The horses carried and burned into the stratosphere the centuries-old dream of the Russian people about the Peasant Ecumenical Kingdom. About the ringing “forty forty” over the planet Russian Socialism.

Sociologist Alexander Prokhorov indicates the similarity of the political fate of Khrushchev and Paul I. They wanted to develop society, but society no longer wanted to “play active.” They tried to “fascinate” the ruling elite into feats comparable to the first crusades, but the party and noble aristocracy did not want and did not trust new revolutions. Both Pavel and Nikita really wanted to help (and did a lot) to improve the lives of ordinary people. But at the decisive moment of the struggle for power, the people did not support them.
What is the tragedy of passionaries on the throne, among lazy and deceitful courtiers, at the head of a people tired of fighting and building.
After all, as we have already indicated, Russian Socialism The element we are studying exists only at a very high electrical voltage. If it’s weak, you’ll never see it or get it!
Khrushchev, who contributed to the withdrawal of the Soviets from Stalin’s suspended animation, who encouraged the self-organization of the population into squads, construction brigades, brigades and TOSs, still remained the sovereign of officials. The central bureaucracy, which hated to death the economic initiative of the economic councils and virgin lands, and the free morals of the “thaw” drove out its leader like a tsar Oedipa.

Our crypto-Socialist-Revolutionary and crypto-Scythian Nikita Khrushchev, thrown out by the “heroes of stagnation” from the peasant “Tsar Mountain”, lived out his days at the party dacha. They say that he went there to see him Vladimir Vysotsky, and together they discussed the fate of national art. Under Khrushchev, all these bards and poets, as continuers of the work of akyns, ashugs, gusans and blind guslars, sang like nightingales. And supposedly grandfather Nikita read poetry to the young bard Nestor Makhno. He could afford it. A general who lived in the midst of the Battle of Stalingrad on Mamayev Kurgan. A native of the Left Socialist Revolutionary squad of bandit-workers to this day in Yuzovka (Donetsk). Born on the Kursk magnetic anomaly, in the very womb of peasant Rus'.

Curse me, curse me
If I lied to you even a word,
Remember me, remember me
I fought for the truth, for you...
For you the oppressed brotherhood,
For the people humiliated by power,
I hated swagger and lordship,
There was a machine gun with me.
And a cart flying like a bullet,
Checkers up, stunned “get up!”
Why did they turn away from me?
The ones I gave my life to?
There is not a word of reproach in my song,
I don't dare blame people
Why do I feel so lonely?
I can’t tell or understand.
(Nestor Makhno)

Nikita Sergeevich died on September 11, 1971, on the Day of the Beheading of John the Baptist. 30 years before this date, in Orel, in the Medvedevsky forest, the leader of the party of left socialist revolutionaries, Marusya Spiridonova, was shot. 11 September. Those who understand the signs of sacred chronology will understand everything at once.
And in December 1971, the poet-symbol of the last Russian peasant cultural revolution, Alexander Tvardovsky, died, hunted down by the best Brezhnev chain writers. And Vasily Shukshin was finally banned from filming “Stepan Razin”. The chest of the “national spirit” slammed shut.

Communism, 1980

The main flag of “Khrushchev’s mobilization” was still neither space, nor an industrial breakthrough without the Gulag and not Tselin. The Tsar-Muzhik considered his main task to be “building communism during the lifetime of the current generation.” This was the main project, all the pathos of red propaganda revolved around it, on a dream, like economic “seven-year plans” were wound up on an axis.
From a historical perspective, the industrially underdeveloped and sparsely populated Eastern Bloc was inferior to the industrial and demographic power of the West. Smart people realized this back in the 60s. How the dashing troika will sooner or later get tired of chasing a good-quality stagecoach drawn by twelve horses. An emergency push was needed. It was necessary to create technologies that could revolutionize the world. Descendants of Russian peasants, new Kulibins and Lomonosovs Such technologies were invented back in the sixties. Thermal and flying power plants producing free energy, prototypes of “nanobots”, blueprints of “Buran”, “org weapons” Spartak Nikanorova, plans for lunar and underwater cities and farms. The implementation of these projects would radically change the face of the world, bring the USSR into technological leadership and, oh yes, would allow the Soviet people to touch the communist abundance of goods and services. Actually, it was planned that robots would work, and human comrades would provide services to each other. The USSR was going to be the first to enter the era of post-industrial society. But to launch projects that are still relevant today, emergency mobilization of the entire society is necessary. It was mobilization that Khrushchev and the young “cosmists” from Akademgorodok, Dubna and Baikonur demanded.
The leaders who replaced Nikita committed a real civilizational betrayal. They went with the West for the 1972 Big Deal. The Soviet Union provided Europe with oil and gas, becoming its “raw materials appendage” and part of the global economy. In exchange, our society was given the opportunity for long-awaited peace in the Cold War race, a strange truce came, called by the electric battery word “discharge.” The ingenious Russian communist technologies were put on the shelves, and the West and the United States concentrated and made their capitalist post-industrial breakthrough.
We will not discuss the further economic collapse of the USSR. After all, this article is about Russian Socialism.
We are extremely interested in how its implementation was imagined at the time of the proclamation of the “immediate construction of communism”?

Ant Country

One day Beria asked Nikita Khrushchev: “How do you see communism?” Nikita Lavrenty Pavlovich's answer made him laugh. Of course, how could the Kursk “smerd” see the quintessence of socialism: “There should be a lot of meat, milk, our people were starving, they should not need any food or clothing.” Beria considered himself an intellectual, and Khrushchev considered himself a “boar” and a “collective farmer.” He later paid bitterly for his contemptuous underestimation.
And according to Khrushchev’s reservation, like a drop of wine from a jug, we, in a structuralist way, can judge what the Russian peasants put into the mysterious word “communism”, what they filled this political-economic category with.

The men understood socialism and communism as Paradise, as the Far Away fairy-tale kingdom, where there are “rivers of milk and jelly banks.” Where the ridges are made of meat, and cucumbers and corn are the size of a house (as in “Sunny City” Nikolai Nosov). In this Belovodye, life is easy and satisfying; only miracle animals or invisible miracle machines work there (so invisible that the potatoes and fish themselves are placed on the table). “Smart ovens” bring ready-simmered pies and kulebyaks into the light of God.
So that there would be, as in a royal house, a table always set, always with seven different dishes: bread, meat, apples and other similar things... In the Kingdom, one must only remember to thank the invisible owners and provide magical services to the miraculous animals from time to time. Yes, and don’t eat the whole dish, but bite off a piece. That's all. A Russian man will live under communism, like Christ bosom.
In search of the Secret Righteous Kingdom, our peasant has been from the beginning of Rus'. Old Believers-masons from Altai, Molokans and Doukhobors from the calcareous rivers of Armenia, Pomors from the Chilly Sea could tell a lot about the journey for the Bird of Good Luck to Lollipop, to Lukomorye, to the City of the Holy Spirit, to White India.
The Russians supported the Socialist Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks, because the commissars, as if for children, promised to show the people this Magic Land.
In fact, the entire life of “our man” is built on the search for the sacred kingdom. Mom and grandmother told us about him in childhood. And the grandfather told the hero of Tvardovsky’s poem Nikita Morgunk.

The long road leads to where it should be

Muravia is an ancient Muravian country.
The earth is the same in length and breadth
You sow one bob and it’s yours!
And don’t ask anyone, just respect yourself,
If you go to mow, mow, if you go, go!
And Ant is faithful to all the peasant rules!
Ant-Muravia Good country!

And Khrushchev’s namesake wandered as long as he had strength in his legs, looking for people’s peasant happiness in the elusive expanses of Russia. Watching creaky carts carrying kulaks and their families to Solovki, wandering among gypsies and former priests, among poles and tractors, weddings and funerals, watchmen and apple orchards, having lost a good horse, getting drunk on blue smoke, meeting either Stalin or Napoleon riding on a horse, having thought through all Russian thoughts, Nikita sadly returns to the collective farm...

There is no Muravskaya country, they say. How so? And just like that.
There was a Muravskaya country and there is no such thing.
It disappeared, it was overgrown with grass and ants.

Tvardovsky's characters do not calm down, they continue to joke. In war, in hell, in vague thoughts about their native burnt village, they continue to search for the Country-From-Which-Life-Flows. Ant - sown with the fertile grass-ant of eternal spring.

Gift of a Dead Hero

Red Chevengur, the Kingdom of the Golden Cockerel, the Chinese side of Green Freshness is dreaming, knocking, and breaking through to us from our national dreams.
In a frost-covered, homeless land among the most terrible war of soldiers Vasily Terkin receives the accordion of their deceased commander as a gift from the tankers. Tired, exhausted, frantic and hungry Russian people, stuck in a military traffic jam, suddenly receive an injection of the elements of pure life, as if hopelessly sick with scurvy absorb the arrival of millions of vitamins under a heavenly drip. Free happiness comparable to the descent of the Holy Spirit onto a motorcade.
Accordion plays:

The fighter just took the three-row,

It’s immediately obvious that he’s an accordion player.
First things first, first things first
He threw his fingers from top to bottom.

Forgotten village
Suddenly he started, closing his eyes,
Sides of the native Smolensk
Sad memorable motive,

And from that old accordion,
That I was left an orphan
Somehow it suddenly became warmer
On the front road.

From frost-covered cars
The people walked as if on fire.
And who cares
Who plays, whose accordion...

And forgotten - not forgotten,
This is not the time to remember
Where and who lies dead
And who else should lie.

And to whom the grass is alive
Then trample on the ground,
To come to my wife, to the house, -
Where is the wife and where is that house?

Dancers for a couple

They suddenly rushed from the spot.
Breathed in frosty steam,
The tight circle warmed up.

- Have fun, ladies!
Don't step on your toes!

And the same driver runs,
For fear of being late.

Whose breadwinner, whose drinker,
Where did you come to court?
He shouted so loudly that they parted:

- Give it to me, otherwise I’ll die!..

In the dance, as if in a ritual game, as if a country lost in childhood is being taken out of a grandmother’s casket. Vasily Terkin received a magical accordion as a gift from the deceased. The instrument is obtained from the World of the Dead according to all the canons of the Russian epic, because in the fairy tale, the “samoguda harp” is made of human veins.
Vasily Terkin's accordion is Russian Socialism. The gift of Russian ancestors, grateful heroes living in a free, bright country beyond the fields, behind the forests, behind the mountains. Where to go, you won’t get there, where to jump, you won’t get there...
A gift from relatives who suffered for the holy all-Russian cause, filled with sweet porridge Pot-Vari. Like a copper cauldron of the fate of a Scythian king Arianta he generously feeds our people with the elements of the purest life. Harmony, like a Flying Ship, carries exhausted Soviet soldiers to the Kingdom of Heaven. Breathes into them an irresistible Force. Grants a “golden label” for victory in an initially lost war.
“Magic technologies” of communism from the same series. They are like the Cornucopia of the S-Side. They are like a radio for communicating with Russian generations that have gone into the distance...
One day the ancestors (according to prophecy Nikolai Fedorov) will be resurrected. One day they will help the Sunny Russian build the Kingdom of God on earth.
After all, Russian Socialism has not gone away - it is a vital part of our identity, selfhood. It is eternal as long as Russians live on the planet. Russian Socialism is in each of us! Between 70 and 90 percent of domestic voters are still ready to vote for him.

This is not a collective insanity or a whim. After all, the Russian peasant is by nature rational, tight-fisted and straightforward. He understands cosmism as a concrete thing:
If this virgin land is developed, then we need to fly and plow New Earth! Find the treasured planet Ant!

And he went, he went to work,

Advancing and threatening
How can he come up with something?
Which is impossible to say.

As if on a holiday in the evening
The floorboards are bending in the hut,
Jokes, sayings
He sprinkles it at his feet.

Russian socialism...
In my opinion, everything is just beginning!
Let's dance, build and fly!

Pavel Zarifullin

In the 30s of the XIX century. ideas of utopian socialism begin to develop in Russia. Utopian socialism is understood as the totality of those teachings that expressed the idea of ​​​​the desirability and possibility of establishing such social order, where there will be no exploitation of man by man and other forms of socialist inequality.

Utopian socialism differed from other utopias in that the idea of ​​general, true equality was born and developed in it. Supposed to build this ideal society on the basis of or taking into account the achievements of material and spiritual culture that bourgeois civilization brought with it. A new interpretation of the social ideal: coincidence, combination of personal and public interests. Socialist thought took special forms in Russia, developed by Russian thinkers who wanted to “adapt” the general principles of socialism to the conditions of their fatherland. The inconsistency was manifested primarily in the fact that the main form of utopian socialism in Russia naturally turned out to be peasant socialism (“Russian”, communal, populist), which acted as an ideological expression of the interests of revolutionary and democratic, but still bourgeois development.

The founder of Russian socialism was Alexander Ivanovich Herzen (1812-1870). Herzen associated his spiritual awakening with the Decembrist uprising. The “new world” that opened up to the fourteen-year-old boy was not yet clearly conscious. But this uprising awakened in Herzen’s soul the first, albeit still vague, revolutionary aspirations, the first thoughts about the struggle against injustice, violence, and tyranny.

“The awareness of the unreasonableness and cruelty of the autocratic political regime developed in Herzen an insurmountable hatred of all slavery and arbitrariness” 7.

Herzen was of great interest in the philosophy of history. In the early 40s he comes to the conclusion that where there is no philosophy as a science, there cannot be a solid, consistent philosophy of history. This opinion was associated with the idea of ​​philosophy that he formed as a result of his acquaintance with the philosophy of Hegel. He was not interested in the theoretical basis of philosophy; it interested him insofar as it could be applied in practice. Herzen found in Hegel's philosophy the theoretical basis for his enmity with the existing; he revealed the same thesis about the rationality of reality in a completely different way: if the existing social order is justified by reason, then the struggle against it is justified - this is a continuous struggle between the old and the new. As a result of studying Hegel's philosophy, Herzen came to the conclusion that: the existing Russian reality is unreasonable, therefore the struggle against it is justified by reason. Understanding modernity as a struggle of reason, embodied in science, against irrational reality, Herzen accordingly builds an entire concept world history, reflected both in the work “Amateurism in Science” and in the “Letters on the Study of Nature.” He saw in Hegelian philosophy the highest achievement of the reason of history, understood as the spirit of humanity. Herzen contrasted this reason embodied in science with unreasonable, immoral reality.

In Hegel's philosophy he found justification for the legitimacy and necessity of the struggle against the old and the final victory of the new. In Herzen's work, the idea of ​​the rationality of history was combined with socialist ideals, bringing German philosophy closer to French utopian socialism. The point of connection between socialism and philosophy in Herzen’s work is the idea of ​​the harmonious integrity of man. The idea of ​​unity and being was also considered by Herzen in socio-historical terms, as the idea of ​​​​unifying science and the people, which will mark socialism. Herzen wrote that when the people understand science, they will go out to the creative creation of socialism.

The problem of the unity of being and thinking appears on another level - as a revolutionary practice, as a conscious act, as the introduction and embodiment of science in life. He saw the mastery of science by the masses as a necessary condition for the establishment of socialism. Since science contains the germ of a new world, one has only to introduce it to the masses and the cause of socialism will be secured. Herzen's socialism was utopian. Arguing in this way, he even raised in general terms the question of the possibility for Russia to be the first to embark on the path of radical social transformation: “...maybe we, who have lived little in the past, will be representatives of the real unity of science and life, word and deed.

Essentially, this hope was not based on any factual data; his references to the special qualities of the Russian national character were not serious.

Herzen's use of abstract philosophical ideas to justify revolution and socialism means that philosophy here ceases to be philosophy itself. It becomes a social doctrine, a theory of the revolutionary struggle for socialism. The forward movement of thought consisted in the recognition of the pattern of struggle in society and the need for rational education of the masses with science. Having mastered Hegel's dialectics, he realized that it was the “algebra of revolution,” but he went further to historical materialism.

At the end of the 40s, Herzen connected all his thoughts about future socialist development with Western Europe. Revolution of 1848-49 was the most important event in Herzen's life. He perceived the revolution as the beginning of a socialist revolution. But what happened before Herzen’s eyes in Paris in 1848 did not at all coincide with his idea of ​​a socialist revolution. The mass of the people was not ready for the immediate organization of a truly new republic. The result was defeat. Herzen was overcome by doubts about the possibility of the rapid implementation of socialism, but he still hoped that the people would soon rise to fight again and put an end to the old civilization forever. But Herzen's hopes were not justified. Having perceived the uprising of the Parisian proletariat in June 1848 as the beginning of the “dying” of Europe and postponing the establishment of socialism in Western European countries to the indefinitely distant future, Herzen did not stop searching for opportunities to achieve the great ideal.

Herzen found the state most capable of social transformation in his homeland. “Faith in Russia saved me on the brink of moral death...” - said Herzen 8. The Russians are significantly behind Europe, historical events swept over these people. But this is his happiness. “The Russian people have preserved their mighty soul, their great national character” 9. He fixed his gaze on the Russian community. “The community saved the Russian people from Mongol barbarism and from imperial civilization, from European-style landowners and from the German bureaucracy. The community organization, although greatly shaken, resisted government intervention; she lived happily until the development of socialism in Europe” 10. In the patriarchal community, Herzen saw a means of radical social transformation, a real element of socialism. Herzen developed the theory of “communal”, “peasant”, “Russian” socialism as an integral, complete doctrine. He believed that the combination of Western European socialist ideas with the Russian communal world would ensure the victory of socialism and renew Western European civilization.

The ideas of “Russian socialism” were first presented by Herzen in the article “Russia” (Aug. 1848), written in the form of a letter to G. Herwegh. The term “Russian socialism” itself arose much later: Herzen introduced it only in 1866 in the article “Order triumphs!” “We call Russian socialism that socialism that comes from the land and peasant life, from the actual allotment and the existing redistribution of fields, from communal ownership and general management - and goes together with the workers’ artel towards the economic justice that socialism in general strives for and which science confirms 11.

Herzen did not leave a story about exactly how the turn to a new view took place in his thought, how the main principles of the theory of “Russian socialism” took shape and developed. The general answer to this question is known: “Russian socialism” arose as a result of the spiritual drama experienced by Herzen during the revolution of 1848, as a result of disappointment in the possibility of the imminent victory of socialism in Western Europe and the desire to find other possible ways to realize the socialist ideal.

In the development of ideas, two main stages can be distinguished: the 50s and 60s. The milestone between them is 1861. This division does not fully reflect the development of “Russian socialism”. Within each period there were certain milestones that made it possible to trace this development in more detail.

The pre-reform period (1849-1960) in the development of the ideas of “Russian socialism” begins in 1849 because the first more or less systematized presentation of them in the article “Russia” dates back to this year. The fifth letter from the series “Letters from France and Italy” (December 1847) is interesting. Herzen expresses regret over the absence in Europe of a “village commune” similar to the Russian one, and exclaims: “Long live, gentlemen, the Russian village - its future is great” 12.

In the work “Russia”, Russia represents in modern Europe a young people, full of strength, a people who have no past, but everything is ahead. There is no reason to believe that in its further development Russia must go through all the phases through which the peoples of Western Europe went. These peoples have “developed” to certain social ideals. Russia in its everyday life is closer to these ideals than Western Europe: “...what for the West is only a hope towards which efforts are directed is for us already a real fact from which we begin” 13. Such a “real fact” corresponding to the ideal of Western Europe is the Russian rural community. This community, however, needs some development and change, since modern form it does not represent a satisfactory solution to the problem of the individual and society: the individual in it is suppressed, absorbed by society. Having preserved the land community throughout its history, the Russian people “are closer to the socialist revolution than to the political revolution” 14. What socialist did Herzen find in the community? Firstly, democracy, or “communism” (i.e. collectivism) in managing the life of a rural artel. At their meetings, “in peace,” the peasants decide the general affairs of the village, elect local judges, a headman who cannot act contrary to the will of the “peace.” This general management of everyday life is due to the fact - and this is the second point characterizing the community as the embryo of socialism - that people use the land together. They cultivate it together, share meadows, pastures, and forests. This communal land use seemed to Herzen the embryo of conscious collective ownership. Herzen also saw an element of socialism in peasant rights to land, i.e. in the right of every peasant to a plot of land, which the community must provide him with for use. He cannot and has no need to pass it on by inheritance. His son, as soon as he reaches adulthood, acquires the right, even during his father’s lifetime, to demand a land plot from the community. A peasant who leaves his community for a while does not lose his rights to the land; it can be taken away from him only in the event of expulsion - this is decided by a secular gathering. If the peasant at will leaves the community, he loses the right to the allotment. He is allowed to take his movable property with him. This right to land seemed to Herzen a sufficient condition for the life of the community. It excluded, in his opinion, the emergence of a landless proletariat.

Community collectivism and the right to land constituted, according to Herzen, those real embryos from which, subject to the abolition of serfdom and the elimination of autocratic despotism, a socialist society could develop. Herzen believed, however, that the community itself does not represent any socialism. Due to its patriarchal nature, it is devoid of development in its present form; For centuries, the communal system has lulled the people's personality; in the community it is humiliated, its horizons are limited to the life of the family and the village. In order to develop the community as the embryo of socialism, it is necessary to apply Western European science to it, with the help of which only the negative, patriarchal aspects of the community can be eliminated.

“The task of the new era into which we are entering,” Herzen wrote, “is to develop an element on the basis of the science of our communal self-government to complete freedom of the individual, bypassing those intermediate forms through which the development of the West necessarily went, wandering along unknown paths. Our new life must weave these two inheritances into one fabric in such a way that a free individual will have the earth under his feet and so that the community member will be a completely free person” 15. Thus, Herzen did not consider Russia’s path to socialism through the community as an exception to the experience of global development. He considered the possible rapid implementation of socialism in Russia, first of all, as an aid to the world revolution; after all, it is impossible without the destruction of Russian tsarism, without the emancipation of Russia. Europe is never destined to be free." 16 But Herzen notes that in Russian life there is something higher than the community, and stronger than power. He sees this “something” in the “internal” force, not fully aware of itself, which “independent of all external events and in spite of them, preserved the Russian people and supported their indestructible faith in themselves.” Now the idea of ​​the absence of a firmly established “past” in Russia becomes one of the most important principles of “Russian socialism.”

Developing the theory of “Russian socialism,” Herzen thought that he had finally managed to actually substantiate socialism. Having seen in the community the material embryo of a society of social equality, Herzen believed that he had overcome the utopianism of the former socialists, that from now on not only the justice and reasonableness of socialism was proven, but also the possibility and reality of its actual implementation. Herzen writes: “...I see no reason why Russia must necessarily undergo all phases European development“I also don’t see why the civilization of the future should invariably be subject to the same conditions of existence as the civilization of the past” 17.

The article “Russia” is the first sketch of the ideas of “Russian socialism”, just a sketch, a quick sketch, designed mainly to draw attention to the problems posed in it, to awaken interest in Russia and point out the need for its study. With him, Herzen’s activities began, aimed at “introducing Europe to Russia.”

One of the major milestones of this work is marked by the book “On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia. Herzen begins the first chapter “Russia and Europe” with a mention of the article “Russia” and says: “... our views have not changed since that time” 18. The main thing in this work by Herzen from the point of view of the development of the ideas of “Russian socialism” is that here for the first time, and in essence the only time, the author tries to substantiate his idea in such a systematic and consistent manner with the course of historical development of Russia. In an attempt to provide a historical substantiation of the ideas of “Russian socialism,” Herzen argues that Russia has “two reasons for living: the socialist element and youth.” In the book he tried to prove this thesis about the organicity, strength, and non-crushing nature of the “socialist element” of Russian life - the rural community. Herzen believed that the history of Russia up to the present time is only “the history embryonic development Slavic state”, “the path to an unknown future that is beginning to dawn on us” 19. This thesis occupied an important place in the theory of “Russian socialism”. But in the internal history of the country, in the development of social forms and political institutions, the strengths and capabilities of the Russian people were not revealed with sufficient completeness. This shows the entire course of Russian history. Autocracy and serfdom are two main factors of Russian life, which removed the people from active participation in the social and political life of the country and fettered their forces. The idea of ​​the “youth” of the Russian people, which Herzen tried to prove here, was essentially a form in which the consciousness of the contradiction between the fact of the economic and political backwardness of the country and the potential possibilities of broad, progressive development was expressed.

Thanks to the rural community, Russia turned out to be more capable of socialist transformation than the West.

Herzen simply states here the fact that the community survived in the course of Russian history, and concludes that the existence of the community ensures the country's transition to a new, social social order. Two ideas developed in this book were of significant importance for the theory of “Russian socialism”. This is, firstly, the assertion that the antagonistic socialist structure characteristic of modern Russia was not originally characteristic of the country. It is the result of the enslavement of the peasants and arose, in essence, as a result of the legalization of serfdom under Peter I. By the fact that Peter I finally tore the nobility away from the people and granted them terrible power over the peasants, he instilled in the people the deepest antagonism that had not existed before, and if he was, but only to a weak degree. Later, in the book “Baptized Property,” Herzen wrote: “The unity of Russian life was torn apart by Peter’s coup. The two Russias became hostile against each other from the beginning of the eighteenth century. On the one hand there was governmental, imperial Russia, rich in money, armed not only with bayonets, but with all the administrative and police tricks taken from Germany; on the other hand, Rus' is “the black people, poor, arable, communal, democratic, unarmed, taken by surprise, defeated, in fact, without a fight 20.” This view of the origin of socialist transformations in Russia led to an unequal semantic conclusion. Its consequence was a revolutionary demand to eliminate the existing “bifurcation” of Russia.

From the point of view of the development of the ideas of “Russian socialism”, the assessment of the Decembrist movement contained in the book “On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia” is interesting.

Considering this movement as the first, truly revolutionary opposition to the autocracy, Herzen sees in its failure not only evidence of the strength that Russian absolutism has to fight the revolution, but mainly a consequence of the “complete gap” between the “two Russias.” After the defeat of the Decembrists, no illusions were possible: “the people remained indifferent spectators on December 14.”

The great question of Russian social development for Herzen was to reunite the connection between the “two camps”; he believed that to resolve this issue, it was necessary to involve land ownership in the revolution; the peasant can and wants to be free only by owning his own land. This is how Herzen outlines the idea of ​​“the right to land” as the basis for the rapprochement of the “two Russias”. The idea will occupy an important place in his “Russian socialism”.

Further development of the ideas of “Russian socialism” can be found in Herzen’s letter to J. Michelet “Russian people and socialism” (1851). Here Herzen repeats previously expressed thoughts about socialism: “about the youth” of the Russian people, about their right to the future, about that this right is based on the facts of the existence of a rural community corresponding to socialism “about the liberation of the land”, the destruction of serfdom as the beginning of the socialist revolution in Russia. Starting from this article, the theory of “Russian socialism” is based not only on the fact of the existence of a rural community in Russia as a “socialist element” in the Russian social system, but also on the conviction of a certain role of this fact for the future destinies of the country. This role is associated with the fact that Russia is a rural, agrarian country, and it will remain so in the future. In this letter, one of the important provisions of “Russian socialism” was formulated for the first time, that “the man of the future in Russia is a man, just like a worker in France 21.”

Such views on the prospects for historical development in Russia are associated with a number of utopian features of the theory of “Russian socialism”, first of all, an underestimation of the importance of industrial development in Russia and a misunderstanding of the progressive role of Russian cities.

Three articles by Herzen entitled “Russian serfdom” (1852) are devoted to the problem of serfdom. From the point of view of the development of the ideas of “Russian socialism”, this work of Herzen is interesting in two respects: firstly, in its polemics with Haxthausen on questions about the nature of rural communal Russia: and, secondly, in raising questions about the development of Russia along the path to socialism perhaps without the formation of a class of landless proletarians. Haxthausen argued that the entire social and political life of the Russian people is based on the patriarchal principle, that the Russian people were originally a nomadic, pastoral people and only later switched to agriculture. He considered the main thing in patriarchal life to be respect for the head of the community, since the Russian people could not exist without a head - the tsar; The Russian people love the authority of the head of the family, the elder, the tsar. Herzen refuted his opinion about the rural community, the political structure of Russia and the character of the Russian people.

The development of the ideas of “Russian socialism” in articles on Russian serfdom consisted, first of all, in upholding the idea of ​​the Russian rural community as a “socialist element”, contrary to the opinion about the “patriarchal” nature of the community, at the same time it meant asserting the incompatibility of the free development of the community with serfdom 22 "

In “Russian serfdom,” for the first time, notes of polemic begin to sound, directed not against the understanding of the community in the spirit of the “official nationality,” but against the liberal-Western “denial” of the community. He writes in this work that the community is blamed for its incompatibility with personal freedom. But is there really a lack of this freedom felt before the abolition of St. George’s Day... Didn’t mobile communities develop along with permanent settlements - a free artel and a purely military community of Cossacks? The unruly rural community left quite wide scope for personal freedom and initiative. Cossack communities did not absorb or suppress the individual 23.”

In the article “Baptized Property,” Herzen writes that “that Russian life found in itself the means to partially compensate for this deficiency. Rural life formed next to the stationary community, the arable, peaceful village, a mobile community - the military community of the Cossacks 24.”

He noted the special character of the Russian peasant, determined by the communism of his communal structure and his village self-government. Communism of the Russian village lay, according to Herzen, at the basis of the Russian social order. Unity, expressed in a communal structure, will save the Russian people. But in both works he stipulates that socialist aspirations cannot find satisfaction either in the communal structure of the Russian village or in the “republican” structure of Cossack settlements.

The destruction of the community (and it is inevitable in the case of the liberation of peasants without land) would lead to the emergence of 20 million proletarians, moreover, rural proletarians, who, in his opinion, are not revolutionaries at all, like their urban counterparts. Those are wrong, he argues, “who would rejoice at the formation of the proletariat, because “We would see in it a piece of revolutionary development; it is not enough to be a proletariat to make a revolution.” These arguments by Herzen express the idea characteristic of “Russian socialism” about the possibility of avoiding in Russia the development of a landless proletariat, and thereby the insecurity of life, which is inseparable from existence.

Herzen's main concern was how to help the revolution at home from afar. To this end, he founded the Free Russian Printing House in London in 1853, which marked the beginning of the Russian uncensored press, where they began to print and distribute individual works and leaflets that contributed to the development of the political self-awareness of Russian society.

The means of Herzen’s propaganda were both the work “On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia” and the epic book “The Past and the Duma”, work on which lasted 6 years (1852-1858).

At the end of June 1853, the first proclamation “St. George's Day! St. George's Day! with the subtitle “To the Russian nobility.” The proclamation amazingly combined elements of noble revolutionism with revolutionary democracy. Herzen wrote that there is no “fatal necessity” for every step forward for the people to be marked by piles of corpses. Baptism of blood is a great thing; every success must certainly pass through it 25.”

The new orientation of Herzen’s works towards the Russian public will not appear immediately. In the magazine “English Republic”, a work will appear that has occupied an important place in the development of “Russian socialism”. It was written in the form of letters to an Englishman and published under the title “The Old World and Russia.” Many of his thoughts are repeated in this work. We are talking here about the youth of the Slavs, about the Russian people as an “agricultural” people, about the rural community as a “socialist element” of Russian life, about the need to preserve the community and develop the “personal principle,” about the role of the nobility in the development of revolutionary ideas in Russia. But the most important thing is that these “Letters” are known in the history of Russian thought for the “classical” formulation of the question: “should Russia go through all phases of European development or will it have to take a different path towards socialism.

These are the first milestones on the path of philosophical and historical substantiation of the main idea of ​​“Russian socialism” - the idea of ​​​​the possibility of a non-capitalist path of development of Russia. But this is just the beginning of such a justification, just a few thoughts and considerations. Herzen associates the possibility for Russia to bypass certain phases of European development with the fact that these phases can, should and actually be experienced by Russia, but in a special manner, Russia went through these phases, so to speak, ideally, in the consciousness of its advanced ideas. “Russia,” he writes, “made its revolution in the European school. The nobility together with the government form a European state within a Slavic state. We have gone through all phases of liberalism, from the English constitutional worship of '93. The people do not need to begin again this sorrowful work already done by Russia 26.”

Educated Russia must now dissolve among the people. Russian progressive thought reached socialism in politics, materialism and the denial of all religion in philosophy. Socialism, Herzen argues, “has again brought the revolutionary party to the people.” In Herzen’s reasoning presented in this article, there are the beginnings of two very significant ideas for “Russian socialism” and its further development. Firstly, an attempt to philosophically explain the possibility for Russia to bypass some stages of the European history of development, based on the relationship between the personal and the historical. Secondly, the approach to the idea that mastering the socialist ideas of Western Europe is a necessary condition for Russia to come to socialism without repeating the history of the path of Western European countries, and the idea of ​​​​the need to establish a connection between the conclusions of Western science, assimilated by the advanced nobility and the people aspirations. He believed that some features of anarchism were preserved in Russia. Herzen highly appreciated the role of the Russian non-bureaucratic nobility. He wrote that “these people are the most independent people in Europe, they have reached socialist ideas in politics, reason in science, denial and skepticism in philosophy 27.”

In “Letters” Herzen draws the prospects for a future revolution. “The state and the individual, power and freedom, communism and egoism - these are the pillars of Hercules of the great revolutionary epic. Europe offers flawed and wild solutions. The revolution will provide a synthesis of these solutions. Socialist formulas will remain vague until life realizes them. At that time, he imagined the future system - socialism - as a society without government.

Herzen emphasizes that without the assistance of Western socialist ideas, the Slavic peoples will never gather their strength and move from communism to conscious socialism.

He writes: “The artel and the rural community, the division of profits and the division of fields, the secular gathering and the union of villages into volosts governing themselves - all these are the cornerstones on which the temple of our future free communal life is created. But these cornerstones are still stones, and without Western thought our future cathedral will remain with one foundation 28.”

In 1855, the almanac “Polar Star” began to be published. The highest achievement of Herzen’s revolutionary educational activities was the publication together with N.P. Ogarev of the newspaper "Bell" (1857-1867). Revolutionary agitation for the abolition of serfdom begins to come to the fore in Herzen's activities.

“The peculiarity, the originality of Russia,” Herzen believes, is the rural community, which has existed for centuries.” He considered a peasant revolution in Russia quite possible and imagined it in the form of a new Pugachevism. But he definitely stated that he preferred the peaceful path of eliminating serfdom, that the experience of the revolution of 1848 inspired him with “disgust from bloody coups.” Herzen turns his attention to the Russian educated nobility. He believed that it was in the layer of a certain nobility that the germ and mental centers of the coming revolution were hidden.

In 1857, in the theory of “Russian socialism,” the idea of ​​the “right” of peasants to land was finally formed. The liberation of the peasants in Russia can and should be carried out as liberation with land; Herzen says that the peasant only wants to receive worldly land, which he acquired with the right to work. “The Russian peasant does not believe that worldly land can belong to something other than the world; he rather believes that he himself belongs to the earth, rather than that the earth can be taken away from the world. This is extremely important."

Thus, by the time of the peasant reform of 1861, the main ideas of Russian socialism had been developed and repeated many times. The main components of the theory at the end of the 50s were: recognition of Russia’s special path to socialism compared to Western European countries; the belief that Russia is more capable of social revolution than these countries; assessment of the rural community as the embryo of a socialist organization and indications of those qualities that make it possible to see such an embryo in it; the assertion that the liberation of the peasants with the land should be the beginning, the first step of the socialist revolution.

The pre-reform period was characterized by Herzen's greater concentration on the socio-economic aspect of the theory.

After the reform of 1861, Herzen’s hopes for the destruction of serfdom, which would open a direct path for the country’s development towards socialism, did not come true. The “liberation” turned out to be half-hearted, the discontent of the peasants was quite obvious. In the journalism of the 60s, revolutionary-democratic tendencies and a premonition of a peasant revolution are becoming more and more evident. One of the significant shifts in Herzen’s thoughts after the reform of 1861 was the abandonment of hopes for the middle nobility as the ideological and organizational ferment of Russia’s movement towards “Russian socialism.” Proving that after the reform Russia did not lose the opportunity to transition to socialism, bypassing capitalism, constitutes an important aspect of the development of the theory of “Russian socialism” in the 60s. The post-reform decade introduces additions to the theory. Two of Herzen’s works of this period are interesting - “Letters to a Traveler” (mid 1865) and the article “Towards the End of the Year”. Herzen outlines two paths of movement towards socialism - “for the West, socialism is the setting sun, for the Russian people it is the rising 29.”

The final study at the end of the 60s, which became a necessity for the development of the theory, encountered serious difficulties in the matter of economic, social and political life in Russia. It became increasingly difficult to study this life abroad, especially since Kolokol’s living ties with Russia were weakening every day.

The last time Herzen addressed the issue of socialism and the socialist revolution was in his letters “To an Old Comrade.” The question of the means of social transformation constitutes the main theme of the “letters.” There is only one serious question of our time, Herzen argued, - this is the question of socialism.

And yet Herzen’s “Russian socialism” was a utopia, a mistake. He did not understand that it was impossible to jump directly from relations that were primitive in form, but feudal in essence, to socialism. It is impossible because socialism for its construction requires significant material and technical development, which would give society the opportunity to solve social problems.

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE OF THE RF

Federal State Budgetary Educational Institution of Higher Professional Education

"STATE UNIVERSITY OF MANAGEMENT"

Institute: Public Administration and Law

Specialty: State and municipal administration

Course work

By discipline: "DPV-7"

On the topic: "Russian socialism in the works of P.L. Lavrov"

Completed:

Karaseva M.A.

Moscow 2012

Introduction

1.1 Biography

1.3 Attitude to art

Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction

Lavrov's deep interest in socialism was explained not only by his personal friendship with Marx and Engels, but also by the rapid growth of the authority of socialism among the working class and progressive intelligentsia of Europe and Russia. In one of his letters to comrades in 1886, Lavrov wrote with great joy that “everywhere, from Chicago to Scandinavia, where the organization of a workers’ party is possible, before the enormous predominance of the followers of Marx, supporters of scientific socialism, various traditional social groups are completely disappearing.” In essence, everything that matters in the socialist movement, recognizing oneself as a follower of Marx or denying it, has no other theoretical basis than the teaching bequeathed by the great socialist, recently deceased, to his disciples and followers. The true, healthy knowledge of this teaching is alive in this task of our time. Therefore, in the modern theoretical literature of socialism, only work related to the development, understanding of this teaching, or disputes regarding some of its points can be of significance."

Not without the influence of socialism, Lavrov subsequently revised some of his old views. In the additions to the Historical Letters, he, like Marx, rejected the view that “ideas rule the world.” “Without a clear understanding of the economic process of production, exchange and distribution of wealth,” Lavrov wrote, “a historian can never become a historian of the masses, who are predominantly subject to the conditions of economic support.” Lavrov also wrote about Russia there that “a social revolution is being prepared by itself in Russia, as in the entire civilized world, by the very successes of the capitalist system.” Consequently, Lavrov already recognized the capitalist development of Russia as a fact.

Lavrov also understood that “underneath the diverse and motley phenomena of history, the common lining has always been and remains the struggle of classes for economic interests.” He wrote: “For the majority of our contemporaries, socialism consists precisely in the inexorable struggle of labor with capital, in the struggle of two economic classes, increasingly sharply opposed to each other, in a struggle that is ever growing both in intensity and in the breadth of its spread.”

Lavrov propagated the ideas of Marx's "Capital" in the magazines "Forward" and "Bulletin of the People's Will", expounded Marx's views on economic development, although he did not understand the historical mission of the working class as the gravedigger of capitalism. He accepted Marx’s idea that under the socialist system conditions would be created under which state power would begin to wither away.

Lavrov denounced the class basis of the state, pointing out that the bourgeois state was created by the ruling classes to protect their interests, “to preserve the opportunity to exploit and rob the masses of the people.” But at the same time, Lavrov erroneously deduced the origin of the state from the natural need of people for personal and public safety. He did not distinguish qualitatively between “power” as the subordination of one class to another and as subordination within homogeneous class organizations.

Lavrov considered the socialist revolution an inevitable consequence of the struggle of the exploited against the exploiters. But he did not see the objective basis of this struggle - the conflict of productive forces and production relations. Being a member of the First International, having correctly defined the character of the Paris Commune as a proletarian revolution and considering himself a supporter of the teachings of Marx, he still remained an ideologist of populism and did not understand the essence of Marx’s teaching about history as an objective process and about the historical mission of the proletariat.

Lavrov's scientific work, in which the author placed the main emphasis on the social concept, which was characteristic of the first responses to the works of the populists. In the works of Marxist authors, attention was paid to the socio-economic nature of populism, and the entire socio-philosophical concept of philosophers was viewed from this angle.

However, it seems important and relevant to dwell in more detail on the consideration of the subjective method, its role and place in the modern theory of knowledge.

The object of the study is Lavrov’s social and philosophical views.

The subject of the study is the subjective method as a way of cognition of social processes, in which the observer (subject of cognition) puts himself in the position of the observed.

The sources of the research, first of all, are the works of P.L. Lavrov, dedicated to social methodological and historiosophical problems, as well as epistolary heritage, memoir literature about him by his contemporaries and followers, research papers domestic pre-revolutionary, Soviet and post-Soviet historians of philosophical, social and socio-historical thought and a number of foreign authors.

The purpose of the work is to identify the role and significance of “Russian socialism” in the works of P.L. Lavrova.

In this regard, the tasks can be formulated as follows:

identify, substantiate and meaningfully analyze the objective historical context of Lavrov’s socially significant ideas;

establish the ideological sources of Lavrov’s social and historiosophical views;

determine the meaningful meaning and significance of the subjective method in Lavrov’s social philosophy;

explore, on the basis of Leninist criticism, the fundamental difference between populism and Marxism on a number of pressing social problems;

Chapter 1. History of the emergence and formation of socialist views P.L. Lavrova

1.1 Biography

A nobleman by birth. Father, Lavr Stepanovich, was a participant in the Patriotic War of 1812, a personal friend of A.A. Arakcheeva, retired artillery colonel. Mother (nee Gandvig) is from a Russified Swedish family. He received a good education at home, and since childhood he spoke French and German (his reading circle included books from his father’s French library). In 1837 he entered the artillery school in St. Petersburg (1837-1842), where he was considered the best student of M. Ostrogradsky, academician of military sciences. After graduating from college in 1842, he remained with him as a tutor. He independently studied literature on the social sciences, in particular became acquainted with the works of utopian socialists, wrote poetry and showed exceptional abilities in mathematics and a thirst for knowledge in general, without which “man is nothing... he is naked and weak in the hands of nature, he is insignificant and harmful in society" - From the diary

In 1844, after graduating from the higher officer classes, he was left at the school as a tutor in mathematical sciences, which marked the beginning of his military teaching career - at the St. Petersburg Mikhailovsky Artillery Academy (from 1858 - colonel and professor of mathematics), at the Konstantinovsky Military School (from 1860 tutor - observer). During the Crimean War he was near Narva, although, as he wrote in his autobiography (from a third person), “he did not happen to participate in any military operations.” In 1847, Lavrov married a widow with two children, titular councilor A.Kh., who was reputed to be a beauty. Loveiko (née Kapger; German by birth), which deprived him of financial support from his father. The need to support a large family (Lavrov had four children of his own) and an acute lack of salary forced him to write special articles for the Artillery Magazine and earn extra money as a tutor. After the death of his father (1852) and older brother Mikhail, life in material terms becomes more secure.

Lavrov studied the latest European philosophy, published his poems with A.I. Herzen in the collection “Voices from Russia”, participated in the work on the “Encyclopedic Dictionary”, published a lot on a wide range of issues: philosophy, sociology, history of social thought, problems of public morality, art, literature, public education.

In 1860, his first book, Essays on Questions of Practical Philosophy, was published. Lavrov believed that a moral person inevitably comes into conflict with an unjust society. An ideal society in relation to the individual may be a system based on a voluntary union of free and moral people.

In the 1860s. took an active part in literature and social work and in the student movement, became close to N.G. Chernyshevsky, was part of the first "Land and Freedom". After the assassination attempt by D.V. Karakozov against Alexander II was arrested, found guilty of “dissemination of harmful ideas”, “sympathy and closeness to people known to the government for their harmful direction” (Chernyshevsky, Mikhailov and professor P.V. Pavlov), and in January 1867 sentenced to exile in Vologda province (Totma, Vologda, Kadnikov), where he lived from 1867 to 1870. In Totma he met A.P. Czaplicka, a Polish woman arrested for participation in the Polish uprising of 1863-64, who became his common-law wife (d. 1872).

While in exile, Lavrov wrote his most famous work, “Historical Letters.” The “Historical Letters” contained a call to “critically thinking” and “energetically striving for truth individuals”, especially young people, to wake up, understand the tasks of the historical moment, the needs of the people, help them realize their strength and, together with them, begin to create history, to fight against the old world, mired in lies and injustice. "Historical Letters", being a socio-political work, came out when the revolutionary intelligentsia, especially young people, were looking for new opportunities to apply their forces to participate in the liberation of the people: the hopes of N.G. Chernyshevsky's belief in a popular uprising after the abolition of serfdom was not justified; "theory of realism" D.I. Pisareva, with her cult of natural science, did not promise quick results; conspiratorial activities of "People's Retribution" S.G. Nechaev was used by the government to discredit the “nihilists.” Therefore, in the conditions of the late 1860s - early 1870s. this work of Lavrov became a “thunderclap”, one of the ideological incentives for the practical activities of revolutionary intellectuals.

In 1870, with the help of G.A. Lopatina fled to Paris, where he contacted the Western European labor movement and joined the First International. In order to organize assistance to the besieged Paris Commune, he traveled to London, where he met K. Marx and F. Engels. In 1873-1877. edits the magazine "Forward" and the biweekly newspaper of the same name (1875-1876) - organs of the direction of Russian populism, the so-called "Lavrism", headed by Lavrov. After the assassination of Alexander II, he became closer to the Narodnaya Volya and in 1883-1886. edits with L.A. Tikhomirov "Bulletin of the People's Will".

Lavrov, without breaking ties with the revolutionary movement (he edited “Materials for the history of the Russian social revolutionary movement”), devoted the last years of his life to writing theoretical works on the history of human thought: “Tasks of understanding history” and “The most important moments in the history of thought.” His legacy, which has not been fully identified (825 works, 711 letters are known; about 60 pseudonyms have been revealed), includes articles in the Russian legal press, political poems, including the well-known “New Song” (the text was published in the newspaper “Forward!” , 1875, No. 12 of July 1), which later received the name “Workers’ Marseillaise” (“Let’s renounce the old world...”), which A.A. Blok called among “the most disgusting poems, rooted in the Russian heart... you can’t tear them out except with blood...”.

Lavrov died in Paris; buried in Montparnasse cemetery. His last words: “Calling... live well. It’s ending... my life is over.”

1.2 Lavrov’s philosophical views

In his philosophical views, Lavrov was an eclectic who tried to combine the systems of Hegel, Feuerbach, F. Lange, Comte, Spencer, Proudhon, Chernyshevsky, Bakunin, and Marx into one teaching. The main feature of his mosaic worldview was positivistic agnosticism. The populists, represented by Lavrov, took a step back from Chernyshevsky - from materialism towards positivism.

As a historian and sociologist, Lavrov was an idealist and subjectivist. He assessed the process of historical development from the point of view of a subjectively chosen moral ideal. History is ultimately made at will by an educated and moral minority (“critically thinking individuals”). Therefore, the first task of revolutionary leaders is to develop a moral ideal, the implementation of which they should strive for in their practical activities. Lavrov gave his ideal the following formulation: “Development of the individual in physical, mental and moral terms, embodiment of truth and justice in social forms.”

The moralizing and academic nature of Lavrov's socio-political program made him the leader of the right wing of Russian revolutionaries in the 1870s. Revolutionary upsurge of the 1870s. led to Lavrov's rapid loss of popularity and the transition of hegemony in the revolutionary movement to Bakunism. Calling for the unity of all socialist trends, Lavrov sought to include elements of Marxism in his system. Despite this, Lavrov’s socialism was typically populist in nature (the doctrine of special paths for the development of Russia, the peasantry as the bearer of the socialist ideal, etc.). However, the connection of the Lavrists with the international labor movement, their great attention to work among urban workers led to the fact that Lavrism played some role in training personnel for the first Social Democratic circles in Russia.

1.3 Attitude to art

In matters of art, Lavrov initially (in the 1850-1860s) took the position of pure art. In the 1870-1880s, Lavrov began to value art from the point of view of compliance of its content with the ideals of the revolutionary intelligentsia (article "Two Old Men", 1872 - about V. Hugo and J. Michelet - etc.), without ceasing to talk about "harmony forms." Reactionary art is recognized by him not only as harmful, but also as having no aesthetic value. Lavrov was one of the first to study revolutionary and workers' poetry (articles "Lyrics of the thirties and forties" - about Herweg, Eb. Elliott and others, 1877).

In the 1890s. Lavrov takes the point of view of denying art as an independent superstructure: the only task that, in his opinion, will remain for art is “decorating vital and scientific needs.” This dynamics of Lavrov’s views on literature made itself felt in articles devoted to the phenomena of Western European literature (in addition to the mentioned articles - “Lessing’s Laocoon”, 1860, “Michlet and his “Witch””, 1863, “G. Carlyle”, 1881, “ Longfellow" and "Shakespeare in Our Time", 1882), which are also of interest in the sense that they reveal Lavrov’s literary-critical method. Blaming the writer for “the lack of passionate and lively participation in the interests and issues of our time” (Longfellow article), Lavrov was mainly based on the work of such authors with a social bent as V. Hugo, G. Herwegh, W. Whitman and others, giving they are not devoid of social and political acuteness characteristics.

Lavrov was a nobleman who left his class and went over to the side of the peasantry. The noble past introduced unique notes into Lavrov's populist ideology - the theory of paying the debt to the people for the privileged position of oneself and one's ancestors.

1.4 Socialist views of L.P. Lavrova

The life, work and creativity of Pyotr Lanrovich Lavrov (1823-1900) are inextricably linked with the Russian liberation movement. He dedicated all his diverse knowledge and his enormous and brilliant talent to him. He was an irreconcilable fighter against the autocracy and the bourgeoisie. Through his selfless struggle for the cause of socialism, Lavrov earned himself universal love and respect among the revolutionary youth of Russia, who listened to his opinion with great attention. His famous “Historical Letters,” according to G.V. Plekhanov, had almost the same success as the most significant works of the great Russian revolutionary democrat N.G. Chernyshevsky *. Lavrov’s poem “Let’s Renounce the Old World,” published in the newspaper “Forward” on July 1, 1875, became a revolutionary anthem and inspired several generations of Russian revolutionaries to fight.

Lavrov’s activities were not only of national Russian significance, but also influenced the development of the international socialist movement. Lavrov was a member of the First International, an active participant in the Paris Commune, insightfully seeing in it a major historical phenomenon, “when the proletariat first decided to be itself at the moment of a successful uprising.”, when “socialist workers of all countries, regardless of all differences and discord, could and did recognize your common cause"

Lavrov was an ardent and convinced supporter of international socialist solidarity. “The internationalism of all socialists,” he wrote, “is for the new era an axiom that does not require proof, and a mandatory commandment of the socialist creed.”

Noting the international significance of Lavrov’s activities, G.V. Plekhanov said at his grave on the day of the funeral: “And if his suffering because of his convictions is enough to ensure him the sympathy of all honest people, then his service to socialism ensures him the ardent sympathy of socialists of all countries.”

For many years, Lavrov helped the leaders of the international proletariat maintain close ties with the Russian liberation movement. In one of his letters to Lavrov, Engels calls him a recognized representative of the Russian revolutionary emigration and an old friend of Marx b. Friendship with Marx and Engels had a great influence on Lavrov’s worldview. But, recognizing the faithfulness of Marxism for the West, Lavrov linked the future of Russia, due to the weak development of capitalism in it and the absence of the proletariat, with the peasant revolution. Only in the last years of his life did he come to the conclusion about the need to spread Marxist teachings in Russia among industrial and rural workers. Engels, like Marx, considering Lavrov his comrade in the revolutionary struggle, reproached him for eclecticism.

The weaknesses and contradictions of Lavrov’s views were deeply analyzed by V.I. Lenin. At the same time, Lavrov’s revolutionary and propaganda activities were highly appreciated by the leader of the Russian proletariat. In 1902 V.I. Lenin wrote about the brilliant galaxy of revolutionaries of the 70s, that they were the forerunners of Russian social democracy along with Herzen, Belinsky and Chernyshevsky 6. Lavrov, a “veteran of revolutionary theory” 7, a versatile educated scientist, mathematician and anthropologist, also belonged to this brilliant galaxy , teacher and historian, philosopher and sociologist, literary critic and publicist.

Russian socialism laurels

Chapter 2. Analysis of the doctrine “Russian socialism” in the works of P.L. Lavrova

2.1 Development of the ideal of socialist morality

In his work “Development of the Ideal of Socialist Morality” P.L. Lavrov argues that moral teachings in our time are far from devoid of objective indications as to the direction in which advanced personal and social ideals can be sought. A developed personality can realize its dignity only in a social system that allows for the mutual development of personalities on the basis of the broadest criticism; in a system that allows and even requires inclusion in universal cooperation for the general development of all individuals possessing the same human dignity, i.e. all people. A developed personality at every historical moment, in the name of his development and his conviction, is obliged to direct all his forces to support the party, which strives most directly to eliminate all obstacles to the diversified development of all individuals and to unite the largest possible share of humanity into a solidarity community, without creating obstacles to joining this is the hostel and the rest of the share in a more or less distant future.

The principles that unite larger or smaller portions of humanity into a solidary whole constituted the most characteristic stages of its history.

At the first steps of social life, we meet tribes that are undoubtedly hostile to one another, with the closest connection of the personalities of each tribe, absorbed by the power of custom, which contained in an undifferentiated state everything that later became isolated as a form of community life, compulsory law, and religious ritual. Personal affect, personal interest played an insignificant role in front of this suppressive element, which changed its forms under the influence of external forces, but did not change its suppressive essence. These forms had many external similarities with what later became part of the social ideal of socialism, but the lack of criticism, the lack of conscious independence of the individual deprived them of any progressive meaning, and in them, as they were, there was no incentive to merge the warring tribes into more a vast solidary whole.

Activity under the influence of a consciousness of self-interest, on the one hand, destroyed the strength of the usual connection within individual tribes; on the other hand, in the name of the same consciousness, these tribes, merging forcibly or voluntarily, formed, under convenient circumstances, more or less extensive nationalities with historical civilizations. On the basis of economic needs, political forms, religious teachings, forms of artistic creativity, forms of community life were determined, which isolated nationalities and at the same time retained many features of an undifferentiated, semi-conscious ordinary life, so that the structure of primitive historical civilizations appears to a large extent still as if dominated by a new, more complex custom, but a custom that already provided significant scope for activity in the name of personal, family, class interests, and therefore within historical nationalities caused a continuous struggle of these interests, mainly on economic grounds, but with the undeniable influence of social forces, once brought to life by economic clashes, but now participating in history as independent drivers of individuals. Just as much as these different interests, in their opposition, gave historical nationalities less solidity within than primitive tribes, just as they took away from the enmity between nationalities - carried over into this period from the previous period of ordinary life - that acute, unconscious character which the struggle between groups of people retained from zoological world. Wars now ended not always with the death of the defeated nationality, but often with the adaptation of several nationalities to life together, as members of one political whole with a predominantly economic and ceremonial nature; in other cases, these clashes were resolved by the transition of national differences into caste or class within the same state; in a more developed form - into the dominance of a unifying law over nationalities that have preserved the difference in cultural forms. Economic dependence and economic ties arose between independent nationalities and states; political treaties and temporary or more permanent federations were established; Borrowings occurred in the forms of culture, technology, art, and in the field of theoretical ideas. The expansion of relations made the isolated life of the nationality less and less possible; but at this stage of historical evolution, solidary humanity, universal cooperation of people for universal development was least conceivable, since the life of each society was imbued in its essence with competition) of personal, family, class, caste interests, and the emerging international law was limited to a truce between hostile national state wholes, waiting only for an opportune moment to resume the war and subjugate the weaker to the stronger.

Nevertheless, the aforementioned expansion of relations inevitably evoked the idea of ​​uniting people in the name of universal principles, in addition to the differences in customs and national legends. Since economic competition, which lay at the basis of all others, was the least distinguishable from the ideas about this difference, then all the first attempts at universalism in humanity took place and should have taken place on the basis of those products of human thought that, growing out of original economic interests, lived now with an independent life and overshadowed the basic economic motives in the minds of people with their higher forms.

People of theoretical thought, the product of the most distant both from their economic source and from unconscious submission to custom and tradition, most mastered the practical methods of thought and therefore naturally came earlier than others to the idea of ​​a universal wisdom, alien to racial, tribal, political and cultural divisions and which contained, in a still undifferentiated state, exceptional knowledge, exceptional worldview and exceptional morality. But it was precisely the exclusivity that was an inevitable element in the idea of ​​the sage (who could be both a Greek and a Scythian), which opposed this sage to society and, due to his removal from public life, which in the future, as we saw, was bound to disfigure his ideal - it was precisely this exclusivity that took away the attempt to unite humanity on this basis has no immediate future.

From the world of competing nationalities and states, the concept of a universal state grew most directly. As soon as critical thought developed the concept of an impersonal law, of “written reason,” embodying unconditional and dispassionate justice, then such a state rose before minds as the ideal of a universal community of society, allowing, under the auspices of the praetor’s edict, all the diversity of culture, all the vastness of competition between personalities. interests, any development of theoretical thought, but an ideal that stops all harmful struggles between individuals. At the same time, legal thinkers turned a blind eye to the origin of political forms from economic conditions; that these forms have always combined power with economic dominance; the fact that if they, once developed, could compete with economic forces and even sometimes give rise to new similar forces, then nevertheless solidary political relations between people could be established only on the basis of economic solidarity; finally, that with the existence of general economic competition, not only a universal, but simply a vast state inevitably presupposed the exploitation of the entire population by a minority standing at the helm of government, therefore, something completely opposite to “general cooperation for general development.” Fortunately for mankind, a world state, even approximately, never succeeded, and could not succeed, to be realized by those who aspired to it.

The largest attempt at universalism was based on an element that might seem least capable of it. Nothing divided nationalities in their cultural forms more than religious beliefs, which seemed to have merged with the very essence of this separation. But since in the exercise of thought in criticism and in its struggle against the domination of various layers of custom, the greatest exercise took place in the sphere of theoretical thought, and in order to combat custom to any degree successfully it was necessary to inevitably undermine its sanctification by beliefs, then in a natural way it was religious beliefs that most likely entered into the process of interpretation, explanation, evaporation of the strictly religious element in favor of the philosophical and moral, so that by imperceptible transitions this former citadel of national isolation became in different places capable of turning into a doctrine of belief that should embrace “both the barbarian and the Hellenic,” capable of bringing the Japanese closer to a Ceylonese and disregard all state, national and racial boundaries. The apparent success of universalism in this case was helped by two more circumstances. Firstly, although the forms of religions were initially developed from economic needs, in their development under the influence of the process of creativity and religious affect, the impulses in this area could most successfully fight the impulses of elementary interests and the dominance of economic competition; therefore, the main obstacle to general cooperation for general development, arising from this competition, could most likely be forgotten under the influence of religious motives. Secondly, religious thought, as the lowest level of theoretical thought, was most accessible to the masses, and at the stage of the evolution of thought, which is now being discussed, only it could become the soil that unites the universalistic aspirations of people of different theoretical and moral development. The ideal of the unity of all believers in the same dogmas, acting in accordance with the instructions of the same moral commandments and interconnected by one worldwide organization of the church hierarchy, was set by Buddhism, Christianity and Islamism as something that should be feasible.

2.2 Socialist morality

Thus, the socialist moral ideal turns out to be not only not contradictory to the progressive moral ideal, as it logically developed in humanity, but the only possible fulfillment of the requirements for the individual: the unhindered development, development and implementation of his dignity in life; for society: extending the possibility of development to more and more individuals and developing social forms that allow general cooperation for general development.

This ideal only applies more sharply and definitely to the particular questions presented in this area by our society, in the form in which actual history has developed it, with numerous experiences in it of old, familiar forms of life and old habits of thought. It more sharply and definitely does not recognize the right to remain in this sphere for anything excluded by criticism from the sphere of the ideal of a developed personality and progressive society.

“Everything that restricts the area of ​​criticism is objective evil. Any habits that are contrary to criticism are certainly vicious. Everything that contributes to it is good. Everything that destroys or weakens the firmness of conviction is evil. Every habit of acting not according to conviction is vicious. Everything that contributes to the strengthening of a critically thought through conviction is good. Everything that prevents the free embodiment of a deliberate conviction, which does not constrain the similar conviction of others, is evil. Any submission to conditions that constrain conviction, if it is not due to necessity, is vicious. Everything that facilitates the free expression of convictions, their conscientious competition and implementation there is good in life" (1870) 15.

On these elementary truths available developed people of all periods, the socialist ideal has developed more definitely and sharply demands arising from the logical conditions for the existence of a just society and the logical analysis of the means for its implementation.

“Legal and ordinary morality are not the essence of justice,” proclaimed the preachers of the social revolution, “They are only modified forms in which, with their historical growth, an incomplete understanding of justice is mixed with the animal impulse of predation, with the selfish calculation of the strong, with senseless respect for ancient custom, with stupid fear of a mysterious tradition. The forms of legality and ordinary morality had to be contradictory, because this product of historical progress was constantly changing in the quantity and quality of the elements it contained under the influence of historical events, passions, hobbies, delusions, beliefs, and only little by little from it stood out the only moral element contained in it, the element of justice. To everyone constantly talking about incompatible contradictions in the historical understanding of justice, social revolutionaries answer: what you are talking about is not justice precisely because there are contradictions in it, but in these motley historical products have one element that is consistent and harmonious. He is the justice that we are trying to isolate from old teachings and implement in the future system through a social revolution.

In this future kingdom of justice, only those ideals that were formulated piecemeal and fragmentarily in the previous moral mottos of the leading parties can be realized. Only in it are true freedom, true equality, true brotherhood possible; only in it is the greatest social benefit realized; only that which brings this kingdom of justice closer is a matter of social salvation. In the work for the realization of this kingdom is the only historical progress, the only humanity. All those working for this realization are brothers in a common cause. Love for them, love for humanity, which can only be saved through this realization, is the only meaningful love, and it is the emotion that evokes justice. It is this love that says to every revolutionary socialist: sacrifice everything for your brothers, for those who work with you to found the future kingdom of justice, for those millions who will enter this kingdom. She says: bring the truth to the ranks of those who have not yet been touched by the preaching of social justice, teach those who do not know, explain to those who are mistaken: they are possible workers in the creation of the future kingdom; they are your possible brothers; in the name of justice, sacrifice everything in order to increase their number, and in this case, the motives of love coincide with the demands of justice. But the same love for humanity causes hatred of everything that interferes with the implementation of the kingdom of justice; the same love calls a person to an inexorable, irreconcilable struggle against principles hostile to this realization. Just as it requires sacrifices to help the brothers, in the same way it requires sacrifices for the great struggle for the highest ideal of justice. Only he knows how to love who knows how to fight against the evil that threatens what he loves above all.

The basis of a fair life can only be common labor for the benefit of all. Only society can serve as a means of implementing justice, and the individual must direct all his strength to its implementation - therefore, for the benefit of society. She can enjoy morally only in the process of social progress. It can only develop in the development of a just society. In its sphere of moral activity it has nothing of its own, separate, that it would have the right to oppose to the public good. Therefore, clearly understood and morally developed egoism is reborn in her into a passionate desire to enjoy the highest pleasure of labor for social development; it degenerates into the conviction that every personal pleasure of a developed person is continuously connected with this highest pleasure, that everything taken away freely from society is taken away from one’s own highest good.

From this follow several provisions of specifically socialist morality. Idle pleasure is shameful. It is criminal to use social benefits without corresponding work for the benefit and development of society. It is criminal to receive from society even a little more than what you have earned through your labor for its benefit. But it exists only for your all-round development and this is the only thing you have a right to in it. On your part, all your forces, as a single force, are barely sufficient to support and strengthen the process of social development, which constitutes your highest pleasure and highest social duty. Therefore, you must give all your strength to society and be content with only what is necessary for your existence and for your development. Limit all personal needs so that a large share of your strength and resources falls in favor of your highest need - the need to develop morally in order to better contribute to social development. Limit what you need to take from society for your existence. Develop in yourself the ability to enjoy the common good and give yourself selflessly to this pleasure.

Once these principles of socialist morality are established, everything else follows from them as a logical consequence, and a socialist who does not derive these consequences shows only a lack of logical consistency in his thought.

The kingdom of justice, which we are obliged to establish, for which no sacrifices should be spared, for which we must go to an inexorable struggle, is the kingdom of universal labor for the common good. Who can create it? Only those who even now fulfill his covenant, those who work. Consequently, the only foundation of the future society is the class of workers; The only brothers of the socialist are workers and those who are able to understand that only labor is the basis of a just social system.

The enemies of this system, the enemies of every socialist, are idle exploiters of other people's labor, greedy monopolists of social wealth, monopolists of pleasures, means of development, and social forces. These are all the forces of modern society that support monopoly and exploitation in all its forms. These are modern states that are preventing the advent of the only moral kingdom, the kingdom of universal labor and justice. This is the entire modern social order, which puts pressure on the worker, enriches the idle exploiter, and develops all forms of monopoly.

So, in the name of justice, in the name of love for humanity, in the name of the only logical morality, the convinced socialist is obliged to work for the social revolution, for the overthrow of the entire modern political and economic system through a revolution organized among his brother workers and carried out by their explosion against their enemies.

The social revolution is a victory in the war against monopoly in all its forms, in the war against the modern social system in all its branches. And this daily war, without sparing either oneself or others, is the moral duty of a socialist-revolutionary in the present era, and we have just said that every logical socialist must be a revolutionary" (1875). Thus, the moral teachings developed by humanity in its progressive evolution, inevitably led, through an analysis of the concepts of development, of conviction, of justice and by examining the conditions for the implementation of these concepts, to those demands for the restructuring of society on an economic basis that constitute the peculiarity of socialism, and to the inevitability of the struggle for the implementation of the socialist ideal of personal activity and the social system, which determines the task of the socialist-revolutionary.

Moral issues are inevitably complicated by technical issues. A developed and convinced socialist-revolutionary faces different formulations of his common task in different countries. The solidary union of representatives of labor, ever expanding and strengthening in the struggle against representatives of monopoly property, can and must alone build that kingdom of justice, which is the goal of socialism. This is true everywhere. But the existing legal and economic environment seems to be prepared in very different ways for this revolution.

2.3 The inevitability of social revolution

We see that socialism is “a social theory that has in mind such a restructuring of society that would make it possible for general cooperation for universal development; would make possible the gradual spread of this cooperation to all of humanity; and the basis of the theory was the consciousness that both of these conditions are feasible only on the economic basis of universal labor and the elimination of monopoly property."

This theory, as it turns out, was not invented by some solitary thinker in the depths of his office, but was set before the peoples as a fatal historical task in the process of the historical revolution, which first united individual wild and semi-wild tribes into historical nationalities, then connected these nationalities with universal tasks, sought correct setting these last tasks in the wisdom of thinkers, in the legal forms of statehood, in the supernatural creations of religion, until finally people of critical thought were convinced that this task is solvable only on the basis of satisfying economic interests, without which the solidary development of humanity in other directions becomes impossible.

Proof of the need to resolve the most important historical issues of progress precisely in this direction was the realization that under the diverse and variegated phenomena of history, the common lining has always been and remains the struggle of classes for economic interests, a struggle, at first unconscious or semi-conscious, which often took the form of defending the old custom or the introduction of something new, changing the forms of political power, the struggle for fantastic beliefs, for the right of the individual to develop, expand their knowledge, live according to their convictions, the struggle for freedom of speech and thought, and only in our time has it appeared to thinkers with complete certainty of the opposing interests of capital and labor.

This struggle of classes in our time is a fact to which it is impossible to close one’s eyes and for which one must seek an outcome in the present formulation of the historical question. As long as this struggle exists, not a single moral task of personal development, social solidarity, or fair living can even be posed correctly. A significant proportion of the strength of each individual is absorbed exclusively by the animal struggle for existence, the elementary struggle to defend his personal dignity. A significant share of social forces is spent on competition between individuals, between groups of individuals. In the individual, the elements that hold together social solidarity and the desire for cooperation for mutual development are fatally atrophying. In societies, the traditions of the previous connecting principles between individuals are atrophying and new principles arise with difficulty, lacking the strength to develop and strengthen. Personal dignity increasingly strives to return to the moral ideal of the savage, to defend oneself and defeat others in the struggle for existence, eliminating the binding force of royal custom that held together the society of primitive savages. Justice becomes an illusion, since in the constant struggle for existence, for enrichment, for preserving his monopoly wealth from general competition, a person does not have the opportunity to weigh the dignity of others, to defend it from his enemies: every individual of one economic class is a social enemy for the individual of another class, which it is impossible for her to treat fairly; every individual of the same class is a competitor, therefore a personal enemy, with whom solidarity is unthinkable as long as this competition is a fatal condition of the social order. People of moral conviction, people of progress must direct all their efforts to stop this struggle, or their conviction is hypocritical, their concept of progress is meaningless.

But doesn’t this struggle constitute a fatal sociological condition, just as death and decrepitude are fatal biological conditions? This is asserted by the defenders of the modern order, accusing socialists of harmful utopian dreams.

If it can be eliminated, then can it not be gradually reduced by a slow change in the existing structure of society, through reforms from within it, preventing the inevitability of huge class clashes, bloody revolutions, or at least reducing their tension, their severity and the inevitable social suffering ?

This is believed and preached by various legal reformists, who even in our time admit the possibility of harmonious aspirations of capital and labor, believers in the power of universal voting, in which the names of the elected representatives of the proletarian worker and his patron fall into the same ballot box, believers in the power of reproduction schools and political education among a population chronically hungry and absorbed in eternal competition and the eternal struggle for existence.

If modern society In some countries, an economic opposition of classes has already developed such that it does not allow us to hope for a reduction in the fierce struggle and suffering caused by it, then are there no countries and peoples for which the social revolution would have the opportunity to take place under less harsh conditions, using the very forms that in former times, supported solidarity between people at the lower levels of civilization, were erased and destroyed by historical evolution in countries where it more purely developed new social forms, but remained in a more or less changed form where the flow of history was not so violent and rapid?

This is denied by many socialist theorists, while others affirm it, pointing out that in the biological processes of evolution, in forms that appeared later, there is an acceleration of the process, a reduction in some of its phases; pointing in particular to the pedagogical effect of some individuals and peoples on others, and the experience of predecessors, sometimes very slow and difficult, is significantly reduced in time and in difficulties for individuals and peoples who benefit from the results of EVOLUTION developed by others.

This is not the place to examine the arguments put forward by the defenders and opponents of each of these provisions. My work here is only an analysis of the moral obligation of a convinced socialist in view of the current state of affairs, and from this point of view I will only touch on the provisions mentioned.

A convinced socialist, by his very conviction, cannot admit that the economic struggle between individuals, economic competition, is something fatal that could be put in parallel with the biological processes of decrepitude and death. Therefore, for him the first objection does not exist. But this conviction is not a blind, uncritical conviction. It is based on numerous data provided by the psychology of individuals and the history of societies. The whole world of affects of affection, hatred, vanity, pride stands before the psychologist as a witness to a person’s ability to neglect his economic interests under the influence of affect. The entire history of religious beliefs testifies to the possibility for an individual to forget about any competition of interests in view of the creations of religious fantasy. Numerous communities of tribes left out of history, even more numerous families in those cases where custom did not allow economic discord to arise in them or when sincere affection bound their members into a truly harmonious family, finally, found in all periods of history and even in our time truly friendly communication between people - all this provides vivid examples of the possibility of real hostels, in an environment in which economic competition did not exist. With so many exceptions, a socialist has the right to consider as a critically acquired result his conviction in the possibility of a system based on general cooperation for universal development, conditioned by universal labor and the absence of monopoly property as two requirements that eliminate, in its main foundations, the exploitation of man by man and the struggle of their economic interests.

Without going into polemics regarding the following two provisions, we can say that the moral duty of a socialist in a controversial state of issues is to bring the socialist system of society the fullest possible triumph as quickly as possible and with the least possible suffering for society. The more complete this triumph is, the less obstacles the further development of mankind will encounter. The sooner it is accomplished, the greater the number of individuals will be able to defend their moral dignity and participate in the progressive process of development. Consequently, these very conditions coincide with the requirement for a possible reduction in social suffering. Only by taking into account this task of reducing suffering in a number of generations, one has to assess the amount of suffering brought by the revolution to one generation experiencing it, without forgetting the basic position that development or even the possibility of development for society must, from a moral point of view, be purchased by society, whatever price has to be paid for this development.

Chapter 3. Assessment of the relevance of the doctrine “Russian socialism” in the works of P.L. Lavrova

3.1 Relevance of the teachings of P.L. Lavrova

In February 1870, after three years of exile, with the assistance of G.A. Lopatina Lavrov fled to Paris, where he entered the circle of outstanding scientists and was accepted as a full member of the Parisian Anthropological Society, founded by the “father of modern anthropology” Broca, and as a member of the editorial board of the journal “Revue d” anthropologie” (“Anthropological Review”). When the war between France and Prussia began, Lavrov worked in a military hospital detachment of the National Guard; after the proclamation of the republic, on September 4, 1870, he “spoke at various rallies and meetings” 21 and in the fall of 1870 became a member of one of the sections of the First International.

The heroic struggle of the communards from the day the Paris Commune arose until its fall was the focus of Lavrov’s attention. Personally connected by friendship with members of the International - the leaders of the Commune Varlin, Malon, Chalen, Victor Clément and Charles Gerardin, Lavrov was the first in the European revolutionary press (in the Belgian weekly Internationale) to publish two correspondence dated March 21 and 28, 1871 about the Paris Commune as about the proletarian revolution on 22 and early May

g. went to Brussels, then to London to help organize military assistance to the Commune. He brought to the General Council of the International, headed by Marx, that large sum of money, which, although it could not be used for the requested military support, since Paris was soon forced to surrender, but gave the Council the opportunity for a long time to help numerous communards, hiding abroad after the fall of Paris.

Returning to Paris on the 20th of July 1871, Lavrov actively helped the Communards taking refuge in Paris, getting them passports and organizing their escapes from France, and also helped restore ties between the General Council of the International and the French socialists.

After the defeat of the Commune, Lavrov often returned to the question of its enormous historical significance. In a letter to E.A. Stackenschneider dated October 10 (22), 1871, he writes that the Commune revealed a new, “bright type of state. Now this type has been temporarily realized. The possibility of management from workers has also been proven”25. Lavrov apparently took this idea about the Commune as a new type of state from Marx and developed it in 1875 in the article “The Paris Commune of 1871” 26, and then in 1879 in the book “The Paris Commune”, which, according to V. .D. Bonch-Bruevich, “Vladimir Ilyich considered K. Marx the best after the Civil War in France.”

This book by Lavrov also contains interesting material about the enormous influence of the Commune on the Russian liberation movement. Lavrov writes that the Russian socialist movement of 1873 and the following years was indirectly caused by the impression made on Russian minds by the events of the Paris Commune. “This event finally taught us, Russians, a lot of things that without it would have gone, perhaps, unnoticed.”28 To confirm these thoughts, Lavrov cites an excerpt from a greeting sent to Paris on March 18, 1879 by Russian workers from Odessa. This passage says: “We are working in our homeland for the same great goal for which so many of your brothers, sisters, fathers, sons, daughters and friends died in 1871 on the barricades of Paris. We anxiously await the arrival of that historical moment when and we will be able to rush into battle for the morals of the working people, against the exploiters, for the triumph of mental, moral and economic freedom. You were right when in 1871 you said that you were fighting for all mankind."

But, despite his familiarity with Marxism and sympathy for the class struggle of the proletariat, Lavrov for a long time adhered to populist ideals in relation to Russia, where, in his opinion, due to the underdevelopment of capitalism and the absence of the proletariat, revolutionary tasks stand differently. It seemed to Lavrov, like most populists, that until capitalism was consolidated, the only salvation for Russia was a peasant socialist revolution. The idea of ​​such a revolution was widely promoted in the magazine published by Lavrov in Zurich and London, and then in the newspaper “Forward”, which played a major role in the propaganda of socialist ideas in Russia. According to the memoirs of V.D. Bonch-Bruevich, V.I. Lenin “read Lavrov’s thick magazine “Forward” very carefully during his emigrant years in Geneva.”

These publications published many articles by Lavrov about the peasant movement in Russia, about student unrest, about the growth of the Russian bourgeoisie, articles exposing the instability of Russian liberals. These articles, which were later included in the book “About the Samara Famine” (1873-1874), contained a study of the situation of agriculture and the peasantry, based on a mass of official and literary materials, criticism of government and zemstvo measures against hunger and the tsar’s tax policy and government spending. The entire system of autocratic power and the bourgeois system was exposed. Lavrov also exposed preachers of “small deeds” and demanded the use of all legal activities for revolutionary propaganda of socialism, which “should simultaneously serve as a weapon of agitation against the government.”

Without sharing the anarchist doctrine of Bakunin, his disdain for the action of the masses, Lavrov, in his policy statement “Forward!” wrote: “In first place we put the position that the restructuring of Russian society must be carried out not only for the purpose of the people’s good, not only for the people, but also through the people. A modern Russian leader must. leave. the outdated opinion that revolutionary ideas developed by a small group of a more developed minority. The future structure of Russian society. must translate into action the needs of the majority, which they themselves have recognized and understood."

Diligent “going to the people” in 1873-1876. did not produce the results expected from it. All this forced Lavrov to reconsider his attitude towards the current political struggle in Russia.

Since the spring of 1880, together with G.V. Plekhanov, N.A. Morozov and others, he began the publication of the “Social Revolutionary Library,” which included the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (translated by Plekhanov) with a special preface by Marx and Engels, written at Lavrov’s request. "Wage Labor and Capital" by Marx. "Workers' Program" by Lassalle, "Paris Commune" by Lavrov. "The Essence of Socialism" by Schaeffle with notes by Lavrov and others.

Founded in Russia in 1881, the "Red Cross Society of the People's Will" elected Lavrov and Vera Zasulich as representatives of its foreign departments, and in the spring of 1882 he received an invitation to become one of the editors of the "Bulletin of the People's Will".

Lavrov believed that the Narodnaya Volya party “remains socialist, recognizes the importance of socialist propaganda and primarily directs its attacks against the Russian government only as the main obstacle to the spread of socialist ideas in Russia”32. As is known, the heroism of the Narodnaya Volya revolutionaries was highly valued by Marx and Engels. Regarding the publication in the newspaper Narodnaya Volya of the preface to the Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Engels wrote to Lavrov on April 10, 1882: “We are proud to be its collaborators.”

Lavrov’s big mistake was that he disapproved of the Marxist group “Emancipation of Labor”, founded in September 1883 in Geneva by Plekhanov, who fought for the creation of a Social Democratic Labor Party in Russia, for its criticism of the views of “Narodnaya Volya”. While welcoming workers' political parties in Western Europe, he continued to place hopes in a peasant revolution in Russia even when many Narodnaya Volya members in the largest Russian workers' centers moved to work among the proletariat.

In his speech at the First Congress of the Second International in Paris in July 1889, speaking about Russia, Lavrov highlighted groups and circles that shared the principles of the former organization "People's Will",

Believing that they lack “only unity and a centralized organization. He questioned the possibility of creating a political workers’ party in Russia because in Tsarist Russia “legal conditions” do not allow this. He spoke in the same spirit in the article “On Program Issues” in the “Flying leaflet of the “Group of Narodnaya Volya”” No. 4 dated December 9, 1895: “Those of the Russian Social Democrats who boldly assert that the organization of such a workers’ party is possible in today’s Russia have only to answer: try it, and if you succeed, you will accomplish a great thing. But for me this is an impossible task, requiring childish blindness and almost complete ignorance of Russian legal conditions. The organization of the Russian workers' party has to be created under the conditions of the existence of absolutism with all its delights. If the Social Democrats could do this without at the same time organizing a political conspiracy against absolutism with all the conditions of such a conspiracy, then, of course, their political program would be the proper program of the Russian socialists, since the emancipation of the workers would be accomplished by the workers themselves. But it is very doubtful, if not impossible."

IN AND. Lenin sharply criticized this position of Lavrov for identifying the concept of political struggle with the concept of political conspiracy. Based on the experience of the St. Petersburg “Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class,” V.I. Lenin showed that even under the conditions of Tsarist Russia, a revolutionary workers' organization could be the greatest political factor. “Leading the class struggle of the proletariat, developing organization and discipline among the workers, helping them fight for their economic needs and win one position after another from capital, politically educating the workers and systematically, relentlessly pursuing absolutism, hounding every Tsarist bashi-bazouk who makes the proletariat feel the heavy paw of the policeman government, - such an organization would be at the same time both an organization of a workers’ party adapted to our conditions and a powerful revolutionary party directed against absolutism.”

Lavrov stopped doubting the possibility of success of the Social Democrats in Russia only three years before his death, in 1897, as evidenced by V.D., who visited him at that time. Bonch-Bruevich. Lavrov told him: “The Marxist movement in Russia is becoming stronger and stronger. I don’t doubt for a minute that our labor movement is developing and will develop even more. The entire economy of our country speaks for the fact that only this movement has a truly broad future.” No matter how much we would like and wish that the peasant masses were all with us, these masses are not with us now and will not be for a long time, but the workers, they have already become social democrats, this is their native element. I think this “It’s my duty to speak and I’ll tell you: since you belong to the Social Democrats, you are on the right path.”

From 1870 until the end of his life (he died in Paris on January 25 (February 6), 1900), Lavrov was in exile. But all this time he lived in the interests of Russia. At the end of 1875, he published in the newspaper "Forward" a list of socialist newspapers in thirteen languages, indicating their addresses and the cost of a subscription for three months, so that Russian revolutionaries who were temporarily abroad could read the socialist workers' press. Until his last days, Lavrov read abstracts and lectures in Paris in the Russian "Workers' Society", at meetings organized by the Russian Students' Fund, in the "Society of Russian Youth", at meetings of Polish socialists and in a circle of Russian propagandists of socialism.

Until his death, Lavrov did not stop his scientific studies. He published several articles in French in Broca's anthropological journal.

His “Anthropological Studies”, “Anthropologists in Europe”, “Civilization and Wild Tribes” were published in Russian magazines. Lavrov’s works on anthropology were highly appreciated by the famous anthropologist Academician D.N. Anuchin.

Lavrov is also known as a major historian for his works: “History of urban and rural structure in Western Europe”, “Political types of the 18th century”, “Medieval Rome and the papacy in the era of Theodora and Marotia”, “The eve of great revolutions”, “The era of the emergence of new peoples” in Europe", "The Role of Science during the Renaissance and Reformation", "Review of the History of the Russian Revolutionary Movement", "Populists Propagandists", "Paris Commune of 1871", "Essays on the History of the International", etc. Analysis of these works and their place V historical science- subject of special research.

A man of high culture and broad outlook, Lavrov was also a great connoisseur of literature and art. He is the author of such works as “Lessing’s Laocoon”, “Michlet and his “Witch””, “Two Old Men” (Michlet and Hugo), “Lyricists of the Thirties and Forties” (Herwegh, Elliott, etc.), “ Foreign Literary Chronicle" (Hugo, Zola, etc.), "Thomas Carleil", "Shakespeare in Our Time", "Henry Wadsworth Longfellow" and others. In his articles, Lavrov expressed deep judgments about art and literature and their role in social and spiritual life.

Like the revolutionary democrats, he sought to place art at the service of society. He was an enemy of “pure art”, alien to the pressing issues of life. “Only that writer, artist or scientist,” he wrote, “really serves progress who did everything he could to apply the forces he acquired to the spread and strengthening of the civilization of his time.”

3.2 Impact of Lavrov's views on the future

The motive of truth-seeking also permeates the work of another, perhaps the most popular representative of Russian populism in the last third of the last century - Pyotr Lavrovich Lavrov, whom I have already mentioned. Moreover, this motive is so clearly expressed in him that he even forms the basis of the solution - not a little, but the very secret of all the conquests of mankind. “In the determination of an individual,” wrote P.L. Lavrov, “to fight for what he considers the truth, no matter how incredible it may be, in the determination to die for his convictions, the secret of all the conquests of mankind is kept.”

For people who are not sufficiently familiar with the heated discussions of Russian philosophers of various directions at the beginning of the century about “truth-truth” and “truth-justice,” it may seem that in this case we are not talking about important philosophical concepts, but rather about exercises in belles lettres , about the search for bright, journalistically sharpened literary images. This is wrong. And it is no coincidence that one of the largest Russian philosophers and one of the founders of the modern philosophy of existentialism, N.A. Berdyaev, opened the famous collection “Vekhi”, which at one time challenged the revolutionary wing of the Russian intelligentsia, with the article “Philosophical truth and intellectual truth, by its very name ( inspired, by the way, by the above quotation from Mikhailovsky), this article was intended to mark the divide between the “Vekhoites” and the rest of the Russian intelligentsia, who, as he argued, succumbed to the temptation of the Grand Inquisitor from Dostoevsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov”, who demanded the abandonment of truth in the name of happiness of people. “With the Russian intelligentsia,” wrote N.A. Berdyaev, “due to its historical position, this kind of misfortune happened: the love for equalizing justice, for the public good, for the people’s welfare paralyzed the love for truth, almost destroyed interest in the truth.” Without denying the well-known advantages of traditional Russian truth-seeking with its focus not on truth in general, but, first of all, on truth-justice, N.A. Berdyaev, in his essay, brilliant in form, put forward a different system of priorities, arguing that “now we spiritually need recognition of the intrinsic value of truth, humility before the truth and readiness to renounce in its name.” And it was precisely this spiritual need that, in his opinion, was hampered by Marxism, which underwent a populist degeneration in Russia, subordinating objective truth to the subjective class point of view.

After the tragic collapse of the Soviet Union, the rejection of ideology in general and Marxist ideology as official, in particular, a somewhat justified and obvious interest in Russian religious and secular philosophy arose. Since 1989, publications devoted to the work of thinkers began to appear in print. In 1995, a collection of articles was published dedicated to the Lavrov Readings, a scientific conference associated with the 170th anniversary of the thinker’s birth.

Interesting works by A.I. Yudin, in which the author touches on many problematic issues in the creative heritage of the authors, making the following conclusion: “The search for the concept of progress by Lavrov and Mikhailovsky took place at the level of philosophical and methodological theories of social development. The search for methodological foundations of the theory of progress took place through analysis and critical rethinking of leading philosophical trends: Hegelism, Marxism, positivism, positivist sociological theories."

Conclusion

The Soviet historiographical tradition was characterized by consideration of Lavrov’s theoretical concept through the prism of materialist methodology. However, in addition, Lavrov was characterized by a synthesis of other directions, such as positivism, humanism and the agnosticism of I. Kant. The tradition established by the thinker was supported in Russian social philosophy and was developed in the ideas of Mikhailovsky, Kovalevsky, Kareev.

Analyzing the role and place of Marxism as a philosophical movement, Mikhailovsky noted its specific historical conditionality. The philosopher supported Lavrov's pluralistic view. The authors' criticism of Hegelian philosophy and Marxism created the opportunity to see the differences between these areas of philosophy at the methodological level.

In looking at the problem of using the subjective method in socio-historical knowledge, Lavrov defended the idea of ​​the need for its practical application, since the researcher of social processes is a subject of knowledge. According to the ideas of thinkers, in the theory of knowledge it is impossible to jump over subjective elements. Path scientific knowledge lies through the recognition of subjectivity as a necessary stage in the development of the humanities.

However, we should not talk about the absolute dominance of the thinker’s subjectivity. Lavrov is not ignored as defining objective methods of socio-philosophical research. Philosophers clearly approached the disclosure of the features of social science and, in this regard, outlined the scope of application of the subjective method. For thinkers, this is taking into account and understanding the interests of people themselves in historiosophical and sociological research, as well as a moral assessment of reality. In theoretical terms, this provided an opportunity for the practical implementation of the social ideal, therefore the subjective method itself is revealed by philosophers through a theoretical justification for the dialectic of possibility, the need for the realization of the ideal. The subjective method was not just a method of cognition, it went beyond epistemology and was the required and stable core of the historiosophical concept of the socialist.

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1) In the late 40s - early 50s of the XIX century. A revolutionary-democratic direction of Russian social thought is emerging.

Its founders and propagandists were people whom some called revolutionary democrats, others - people's socialists, and still others - utopian socialists. They did not accept the very essence of the country's state structure, believed that it needed to be completely changed, and were supporters of a radical, revolutionary reorganization of society. They mercilessly crushed the Slavophiles and harshly criticized the Westerners. They thought it was perfect government system in Russia should be established on the principles widespread in the Russian village, in the world of the peasant community. There was no division based on property, all land belonged to everyone, and relations between community members were regulated not so much by state laws as by traditions and customs.

Representatives of the revolutionary democratic movement are V.G. Belinsky, A.I. Herzen and N.P. Ogarev. The 40-50s also saw the beginning of the development of revolutionary democratic theory, which was based on the latest philosophical and political (mainly socialist) teachings spreading in Western Europe.

2) In general, the entire second quarter of the 19th century. in Russia was a time of passion for philosophy, especially classical German, which was studied by representatives of various directions of Russian social thought from the extreme “right” to the extreme “left”. The works of the famous German philosophers Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and Feuerbach were as well known in Russia as in their homeland in Germany. Each of the Russian thinkers sought in their works a theoretical justification for their socio-political positions.

3) V. G. Belinsky. Vissarion Grigorievich Belinsky (1811 -1848) was born into the family of a naval doctor. He graduated from primary school in the city of Chambara (Penza province), and then studied at the Penza gymnasium, but did not complete the course. In 1829-1832 he studied at the verbal (philological) department of Moscow University, from where he was expelled for poor academic performance. Then he made a living by teaching at home and collaborated in Moscow and St. Petersburg magazines. He also wrote literary works (dramas, novels and short stories), which were not successful.

Belinsky gained fame as an observer of the country's literary and artistic life. His merciless pen branded and exposed, praised some and blasphemed others. His critical articles were distinguished by their extraordinary emotionality.

Belinsky became the founder of that direction in Russian social thought, which is usually called revolutionary-democratic.

Revolutionary democrats believed that life in Russia is full of cruelty and injustice, that it must be radically changed, that the people themselves must decide their own destiny and establish a fair social system.

Belinsky considered all works of literature and art from the point of view of their ideological orientation. The artistic merits of the work were not of the greatest importance to him. The main thing is a social idea, a social orientation. The more sharply the existing reality was criticized in the work, the higher Belinsky rated it. Even the work of A. S. Pushkin, which he had previously placed above the work of all other writers in Russia, the critic began to consider “yesterday.” In Pushkin’s poetry he did not find “modern consciousness, modern thought about the meaning and purpose of life, about the paths of humanity, about the eternal truths of existence.”

4) Alexander Ivanovich Herzen (1812-1870) was the son of a wealthy Russian landowner. Herzen and his friend N.P. Ogarev constantly thought about their future and the future of Russia.

In 1828, on Sparrow Hills in Moscow, friends swore eternal friendship and the inviolability of their decision to devote their lives to “serving freedom.” Friends were sure that the entire the world. Herzen kept his oath and indeed He devoted most of his life to the fight against political power in Russia.

In 1829-1833, A. I. Herzen studied at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Moscow University. At the same time, he became interested in the socialist teachings of A. Saint-Simon, C. Fourier and R. Owen. Gradually, a circle of like-minded people formed, where political issues and plans for the reconstruction of society were passionately discussed. In 1834, authorities uncovered this illegal cell. Herzen was sent to Perm, then to Vyatka, where he served as an official in the provincial chancellery. The exile ended in 1840, and Herzen was accepted into service in the office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in St. Petersburg. But public service did not interest him. He remained true to his ideas and actively disseminated them, for which he again found himself in exile. After some time, Herzen returned to the capital, but did not enter public service again. He took up literary creativity, wrote several works, including the novel “Who is to Blame?”, where he spoke out not only against serfdom, but also against social order in Russia in general.

In 1847, A.I. Herzen went abroad and never visited Russia again. Lived in different countries. In 1853, in London, he created the Free Russian Printing House, where leaflets and brochures directed against the autocracy were printed. Two magazines were published here - “Polar Star” and “Bell”. The publications in them were distinguished by their sharp rejection of the social and political structure of Russia. Not accepting the bourgeois order of Europe, A. I. Herzen believed that Russia should take a different path. The people should be overthrown royal power and the yoke of serfdom and establish a social system, the prototype of which should be the peasant community.

5) OGAREV Nikolai Platonovich. His early childhood was spent in his father's Penza village, where he interacted with serfs. In the autobiographical “Notes of a Russian Landowner” (70s), Nikolai Platonovich wrote that he was brought up on the feeling of “the hatred of a serf for the nobility.”

In 1820, Ogarev was brought to Moscow, where he soon met and then became friends with his distant relative A. I. Herzen . Together with Herzen, He studied at Moscow University. Initially he attended lectures as a volunteer.

In 1856 Ogarev emigrated to Great Britain; lived in London, where, together with Herzen, he headed the Free Russian Printing House. He was one of the initiators and co-editor of the weekly newspaper Kolokol. He developed a socio-economic program for the abolition of serfdom through a peasant revolution. Developed the theory of “Russian socialism” put forward by Herzen. In the socialist views of Ogarev important role populist tendencies played out. In 1877 he died in Greenwich (near London).

Ogarev is the author of several poems and many poems (mostly romantic). The best known is the poem “Humor” (the first and second parts - 1840-1841, the third part - 1867-1868 published in the almanac “Polar Star”). He performed journalistic works (promoted the ideas of realism).

6) Hegel's system, his philosophy of history and the dialectical method of knowledge especially attracted the attention of Slavophiles. For Belinsky and Herzen, the revolutionary understanding of Hegel's dialectics was of particular importance. Herzen called it the “algebra of revolution.” It served him as a justification for the regularity and inevitability of the revolutionary breakdown of the feudal-absolutist system.

7) During this same period, the original theory of “Russian socialism” was formed. Its founder was A.I. Herzen, who outlined its main ideas in works written by him in 1849-1853: “The Russian People and Socialism”, “The Old World and Russia”, “On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia”, etc. He proceeded from the idea of ​​“original “the path of development of Russia, which, bypassing capitalism, will come to socialism through the peasant community. Herzen’s “Russian socialism” became the starting point of the ideology of populism, and the theme of Herzen’s socialism has been attracting the attention of historians and publicists for the second century. Since the idea of ​​building a world without violence, a society of equal rights and social guarantees is still alive and popular in the world, the relevance of addressing this problem is obvious.

8) In the second quarter of the 19th century, a social movement began to emerge in Russia, called Russian utopian socialism. The essence of the idea was not new. From the late Middle Ages to the French bourgeois revolution In Europe, various philosophical utopian works arose, entire movements were formed, sometimes turning into civil wars. What was the essence of utopian philosophy? There were always social aggravations in society and, trying to somehow solve the emerging problems, philosophers and thinkers appeared from among the nobility and intelligentsia, who in their literary works in theory created an ideal model of society. Thomas More can rightfully be considered the first utopian, who in 1506 wrote the book “The Island of Utopia” in England. Describing in it an ideal society on a certain island, T. More criticized the then structure of England. This work was more artistic than philosophical work. All utopian movements, both early and late, boiled down to one truth: changes in the social system through non-violent means. In Russia, in this direction, Russian society was divided into three movements; adherents of utopian views were called Westerners, Slavophiles and conservatives

10) For the first time, the ideas of Westerners were formulated by P.Ya. Chaadaev; in 1830, his “Philosophical Letter” was published in the Telescope magazine. This caused an explosion of emotions in Russian enlightened society. The essence of this direction was as follows. Chaadaev P. I was a religious philosopher and believed that Orthodoxy was the cause of all troubles in Russia. The Byzantine Orthodox Church, which professed obedience and humility, according to his conviction, placed Russia outside the general historical development. He believed that Russians have nothing in common with either the culture of the West or the culture of the East. Because of this, he believed that the historical development of Russia did not follow the Western path, which in his opinion was more correct. Focusing on Western values, Chaadaev’s supporters also condemned autocracy and the serfdom system. Ideas for a constitution were discussed in secret, which at that time was a rather dangerous activity.

11) Following the theory of the Westerners, at the end of the 30s a new movement arose opposing the Westerners - the Slavophiles. They disagreed with the Westerners on many issues. In particular, the Slavophiles believed that the absence of Western culture in the history of Russian society was a blessing. They saw the main vision of the development of Russia precisely in the originality of Russian and Slavic life. The dissimilarity of Russian culture from others, the communal principle, and the spiritual unity of the people were salvation and a special path for the development of the country. Slavophiles supported autocracy, believing that the power of government should belong to the king, and the power of opinion should belong to the people. These two movements also had common views; the Slavophiles, like the Westerners, were against the serfdom, believing that if the peasants were freed from the oppression of the landowners and given land, they would create their own communities and coexist peacefully with autocratic power. It is believed that with the advent of the Slavophiles, freedom of thought arose in Russia. Constant research and debate subsequently led to the emergence of Russian socialism. One of the prominent figures in this direction was Herzen A.I. The main ideas of Russian socialism were taken from the early philosophy of the Slavophiles. Herzen saw the development of socialism in the peasant community; he believed that it was the community that saved the Slavs from complete destruction by the Tatar-Mongols, from the harmful, in his opinion, influence of the West. All that he recognized as valuable in Western civilization was science. I sincerely believed that the use of science could greatly facilitate peasant life. Another of the supporters of Russian socialism was Chernyshevsky N.G., who tried to fit the ideas of socialism formulated earlier into the legislative and economic framework. He viewed the rural community as an integral part of the country's economy.

12) At all times and eras, the bulk of society intuitively opposed everything new that could change the usual course of things. This fear of change and attachment to the old order is called conservatism. In Russia throughout the 19th century, conservatives made up a significant majority of the utopian socialists. They belonged to different strata of society. First of all, these were adherents of the existing government. The tsarist government in the first half of the 19th century tried to develop its own ideology, contrasting it with socialism. One of the autocratic conservatives was the former freethinker Uvarov. In every possible way defending the ruling regime, he argued that new social ideas are detrimental to the development of the state. Many prominent scientists, writers and statesmen saw the development of Russia in the preservation of the old order.

13) Early Russian utopian socialism had a strong influence not only on the social development of Russia, the ideas of socialism were partially embodied in the development of the law on the abolition of serfdom. Subsequently, progressive members of Russian society brought many of the bright thoughts of utopianism to life. After the abolition of serfdom, representatives of the nobility and intelligentsia opened zemstvo hospitals and free schools for peasants, where they themselves treated and taught. The impossibility of translating the basic ideas of utopianism into life led the progressive public to the ideas of Marxism, the philosophy of which called for action more decisively to bring the ideas of socialism to life. Thus, in the second half of the 19th century, the first revolutionary movements arose.

Just text that has nowhere to paste) Utopian socialism differed from other utopias in that the idea of ​​general, true equality was born and developed in it. It was supposed to build this ideal society on the basis or taking into account the achievements of material and spiritual culture that bourgeois civilization brought with it. A new interpretation of the social ideal: coincidence, combination of personal and public interests. Socialist thought took special forms in Russia, developed by Russian thinkers who wanted to “adapt” the general principles of socialism to the conditions of their fatherland. The inconsistency was manifested primarily in the fact that the main form of utopian socialism in Russia naturally turned out to be peasant socialism (“Russian”, communal, populist), which acted as an ideological expression of the interests of revolutionary and democratic, but still bourgeois development. The founder of Russian socialism was Alexander Ivanovich Herzen (1812-1870). Herzen associated his spiritual awakening with the Decembrist uprising . The “new world” that opened up to the fourteen-year-old boy was not yet clearly conscious. But this uprising awakened in Herzen’s soul the first, albeit still vague, revolutionary aspirations, the first thoughts about the struggle against injustice, violence, and tyranny. “The awareness of the unreasonableness and cruelty of the autocratic political regime developed in Herzen an insurmountable hatred of all slavery and tyranny.” Herzen was of great interest in the philosophy of history. In the early 40s he comes to the conclusion that where there is no philosophy as a science, there cannot be a solid, consistent philosophy of history. This opinion was associated with the idea of ​​philosophy that he formed as a result of his acquaintance with the philosophy of Hegel. He was not interested in the theoretical basis of philosophy; it interested him insofar as it could be applied in practice. Herzen found in Hegel's philosophy the theoretical basis for his enmity with the existing; he revealed the same thesis about the rationality of reality in a completely different way: if the existing social order is justified by reason, then the struggle against it is justified - this is a continuous struggle between the old and the new. As a result of studying Hegel's philosophy, Herzen came to the conclusion that: the existing Russian reality is unreasonable, therefore the struggle against it is justified by reason. Understanding modernity as a struggle of reason, embodied in science, against irrational reality, Herzen accordingly builds an entire concept of world history, reflected both in the work “Amateurism in Science” and in “Letters on the Study of Nature.” He saw in Hegelian philosophy the highest achievement of the reason of history, understood as the spirit of humanity. Herzen contrasted this reason embodied in science with unreasonable, immoral reality. In Hegel's philosophy he found justification for the legitimacy and necessity of the struggle against the old and the final victory of the new. In Herzen's work, the idea of ​​the rationality of history was combined with socialist ideals, bringing German philosophy closer to French utopian socialism. The point of connection between socialism and philosophy in Herzen’s work is the idea of ​​the harmonious integrity of man. The idea of ​​unity and being was also considered by Herzen in socio-historical terms, as the idea of ​​​​unifying science and the people, which will mark socialism. Herzen wrote that when the people understand science, they will go out to the creative creation of socialism. The problem of the unity of being and thinking appears on another level - as a revolutionary practice, as a conscious act, as the introduction and embodiment of science in life. He saw the mastery of science by the masses as a necessary condition for the establishment of socialism. Since science contains the germ of a new world, one has only to introduce it to the masses and the cause of socialism will be secured. Herzen's socialism was utopian. Arguing in this way, he even raised in general terms the question of the possibility for Russia to be the first to embark on the path of radical social transformation: “...maybe we, who have lived little in the past, will be representatives of the real unity of science and life, word and deed. Essentially, this hope was not based on any factual data; his references to the special qualities of the Russian national character were not serious. Herzen's use of abstract philosophical ideas to justify revolution and socialism means that philosophy here ceases to be philosophy itself. It becomes a social doctrine, a theory of the revolutionary struggle for socialism. The forward movement of thought consisted in the recognition of the pattern of struggle in society and the need for rational education of the masses with science. Having mastered Hegel's dialectics, he realized that it was the “algebra of revolution,” but he went further to historical materialism. At the end of the 40s, Herzen connected all his thoughts about future socialist development with Western Europe. Revolution of 1848-49 was the most important event in Herzen's life. He perceived the revolution as the beginning of a socialist revolution. But what happened before Herzen’s eyes in Paris in 1848 did not at all coincide with his idea of ​​a socialist revolution. The mass of the people was not ready for the immediate organization of a truly new republic. The result was defeat. Herzen was overcome by doubts about the possibility of the rapid implementation of socialism, but he still hoped that the people would soon rise to fight again and put an end to the old civilization forever. But Herzen's hopes were not justified. Having perceived the uprising of the Parisian proletariat in June 1848 as the beginning of the “dying” of Europe and postponing the establishment of socialism in Western European countries to the indefinitely distant future, Herzen did not stop searching for opportunities to achieve the great ideal. Herzen found the state most capable of social transformation in his homeland. “Faith in Russia saved me on the brink of moral death...” said Herzen. The Russians are significantly behind Europe; historical events swept over these people. But this is his happiness. “The Russian people have preserved their mighty soul, their great national character.” He fixed his gaze on the Russian community. “The community saved the Russian people from Mongol barbarism and from imperial civilization, from European-style landowners and from the German bureaucracy. The community organization, although greatly shaken, resisted government intervention; she lived happily until the development of socialism in Europe.” In the patriarchal community, Herzen saw a means of radical social transformation, a real element of socialism. Herzen developed the theory of “communal”, “peasant”, “Russian” socialism as an integral, complete doctrine. He believed that the combination of Western European socialist ideas with the Russian communal world would ensure the victory of socialism and renew Western European civilization. The ideas of “Russian socialism” were first presented by Herzen in the article “Russia” (Aug. 1848), written in the form of a letter to G. Herwegh. The term “Russian socialism” itself arose much later: Herzen introduced it only in 1866 in the article “Order triumphs!” “We call Russian socialism that socialism that comes from the land and peasant life, from the actual allotment and the existing redistribution of fields, from communal ownership and general management - and goes together with the workers’ artel towards the economic justice that socialism in general strives for and which science confirms. Herzen did not leave a story about exactly how the turn to a new view took place in his thought, how the main principles of the theory of “Russian socialism” took shape and developed. The general answer to this question is known: “Russian socialism” arose as a result of the spiritual drama experienced by Herzen during the revolution of 1848, as a result of disappointment in the possibility of the imminent victory of socialism in Western Europe and the desire to find other possible ways to realize the socialist ideal. In the development of ideas, two main stages can be distinguished: the 50s and 60s. The milestone between them is 1861. This division does not fully reflect the development of “Russian socialism”. Within each period there were certain milestones that made it possible to trace this development in more detail. The pre-reform period (1849-1960) in the development of the ideas of “Russian socialism” begins in 1849 because the first more or less systematized presentation of them in the article “Russia” dates back to this year. The fifth letter from the series “Letters from France and Italy” (December 1847) is interesting. Herzen expresses regret over the absence in Europe of a “village commune” similar to the Russian one, and exclaims: “Long live, gentlemen, the Russian village - its future is great.” In the work “Russia”, Russia represents in modern Europe a young people, full of strength, a people who have no past, but everything is ahead. There is no reason to believe that in its further development Russia must go through all the phases through which the peoples of Western Europe went. These peoples have “developed” to certain social ideals. Russia, in its everyday life, is closer to these ideals than Western Europe: “...what for the West is only a hope towards which efforts are directed is for us already a real fact from which we begin.” Such a “real fact” corresponding to the ideal of Western Europe is the Russian rural community. This community, however, needs a certain development and change, since in its modern form it does not represent a satisfactory solution to the problem of the individual and society: the individual in it is suppressed, absorbed by society. Having preserved the land community throughout its history, the Russian people “are closer to the socialist revolution than to the political revolution.” What socialist did Herzen find in the community? Firstly, democracy, or “communism” (i.e. collectivism) in managing the life of a rural artel. At their meetings, “in peace,” the peasants decide the general affairs of the village, elect local judges, a headman who cannot act contrary to the will of the “peace.” This general management of everyday life is due to the fact - and this is the second point characterizing the community as the embryo of socialism - that people use the land together. They cultivate it together, share meadows, pastures, and forests. This communal land use seemed to Herzen the embryo of conscious collective ownership. Herzen also saw an element of socialism in peasant rights to land, i.e. in the right of every peasant to a plot of land, which the community must provide him with for use. He cannot and has no need to pass it on by inheritance. His son, as soon as he reaches adulthood, acquires the right, even during his father’s lifetime, to demand a land plot from the community. A peasant who leaves his community for a while does not lose his rights to the land; it can be taken away from him only in the event of expulsion - this is decided by a secular gathering. If a peasant leaves the community of his own free will, he loses the right to an allotment. He is allowed to take his movable property with him. This right to land seemed to Herzen a sufficient condition for the life of the community. It excluded, in his opinion, the emergence of a landless proletariat. Community collectivism and the right to land constituted, according to Herzen, those real embryos from which, subject to the abolition of serfdom and the elimination of autocratic despotism, a socialist society could develop. Herzen believed, however, that the community itself does not represent any socialism. Due to its patriarchal nature, it is devoid of development in its present form; For centuries, the communal system has lulled the people's personality; in the community it is humiliated, its horizons are limited to the life of the family and the village. In order to develop the community as the embryo of socialism, it is necessary to apply Western European science to it, with the help of which only the negative, patriarchal aspects of the community can be eliminated. “The task of the new era into which we are entering,” Herzen wrote, “is to develop an element on the basis of the science of our communal self-government to complete freedom of the individual, bypassing those intermediate forms through which the development of the West necessarily went, wandering along unknown paths. Our new life must weave these two inheritances into one fabric in such a way that a free person will have the earth under his feet and so that the community member will be a completely free person.” Thus, Herzen did not consider Russia’s path to socialism through the community as an exception to the experience of global development. He considered the possible rapid implementation of socialism in Russia, first of all, as an aid to the world revolution; after all, it is impossible without the destruction of Russian tsarism, without the emancipation of Russia. Europe is never destined to be free." But Herzen notes that in Russian life there is something higher than the community, and stronger than power. He sees this “something” in the “internal” force, not fully aware of itself, which “independent of all external events and in spite of them, preserved the Russian people and supported their indestructible faith in themselves.” Now the idea of ​​the absence of a firmly established “past” in Russia becomes one of the most important principles of “Russian socialism.” Developing the theory of “Russian socialism,” Herzen thought that he had finally managed to actually substantiate socialism. Having seen in the community the material embryo of a society of social equality, Herzen believed that he had overcome the utopianism of the former socialists, that from now on not only the justice and reasonableness of socialism was proven, but also the possibility and reality of its actual implementation. Herzen writes: “...I see no reason why Russia must necessarily undergo all phases of European development; I also do not see why the civilization of the future must invariably submit to the same conditions of existence as the civilization of the past.” The article “Russia” is the first sketch of the ideas of “Russian socialism”, just a sketch, a quick sketch, designed mainly to draw attention to the problems posed in it, to awaken interest in Russia and point out the need for its study. With him, Herzen’s activities began, aimed at “introducing Europe to Russia.” One of the major milestones of this work is marked by the book “On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia. Herzen begins the first chapter “Russia and Europe” with a mention of the article “Russia” and says: “...our views have not changed since that time.” The main thing in this work by Herzen from the point of view of the development of the ideas of “Russian socialism” is that here for the first time, and in essence the only time, the author tries to substantiate his idea in such a systematic and consistent manner with the course of historical development of Russia. In an attempt to provide a historical substantiation of the ideas of “Russian socialism,” Herzen argues that Russia has “two reasons for living: the socialist element and youth.” In the book he tried to prove this thesis about the organicity, strength, and non-crushing nature of the “socialist element” of Russian life - the rural community. Herzen believed that the history of Russia to date is only “the history of the embryonic development of the Slavic state,” “the path to an unknown future that is beginning to dawn.” This thesis occupied an important place in the theory of “Russian socialism”. But in the internal history of the country, in the development of social forms and political institutions, the strengths and capabilities of the Russian people were not revealed with sufficient completeness. This shows the entire course of Russian history. Autocracy and serfdom are two main factors of Russian life, which removed the people from active participation in the social and political life of the country and fettered their forces. The idea of ​​the “youth” of the Russian people, which Herzen tried to prove here, was essentially a form in which the consciousness of the contradiction between the fact of the economic and political backwardness of the country and the potential possibilities of broad, progressive development was expressed.

12) Early Russian utopian socialism had a strong influence not only on the social development of Russia, the ideas of socialism were partially embodied in the development of the law on the abolition of serfdom. Subsequently, progressive members of Russian society brought many of the bright thoughts of utopianism to life. After the abolition of serfdom, representatives of the nobility and intelligentsia opened zemstvo hospitals and free schools for peasants, where they themselves treated and taught. The impossibility of translating the basic ideas of utopianism into life led the progressive public to the ideas of Marxism, the philosophy of which called for action more decisively to bring the ideas of socialism to life. Thus, in the second half of the 19th century, the first revolutionary movements arose.