Karl Marx fiercly opposed Russian autocracy as the main threat to democratic progress in Europe. But large parts of the Left have ignored his insights and are trapped in the Russian imperial narrative up to this day. The following text is the English version of my column which first appeared in German here.
The fact that the international extreme right feels closely linked to the Russian autocracy should not surprise anyone. After all, it shares with her the hatred of the achievements of democratic modernity and hopes to be able to turn back the wheel of history with the Kremlin´s powerful support.
At first glance, however, it seems less plausible that large parts of the left also show more or less open sympathy or at least extensive understanding for the Putin regime – although it no longer even pretends to have anything to do with socialist ideals.
The persistent love of many leftists to Russia is all the more remarkable because Karl Marx, who most of them recognize as the founding father of socialist theory, was a die-hard opponent of Russian despotism. He regarded him as the main bastion of the reaction and a decisive obstacle to democratic and social progress in Europe.
In a series of articles published 1856/57 under the title “Reveals to the History of Diplomacy in the 18th Century”, Marx defined the Russian system of rule as an “Asian despotia” and wrote about the nature of the tsarist empire: “The bloody swamp of Mongolian slavery (…) was the cradle of Moscow, and modern Russia is only a metamorphosis of this Mongolian Moscow.”
Marx also linked his front position against Russian imperialism and colonialism with the decisive advocacy for the independence of Poland, which at the end of the 18th century had been devided between Prussia, the Habsburg empire, and Russia. He sharply criticized the lenient policies of the Western governments towards Russian “enslavement policy”. In particular, he accused Great Britain of betraying the freedom struggle of the Poles and of letting Russia go on with its reactionary expansion policy.
The author of the “Capital” and the “Communist Manifesto” saw, as the Marx expert Timm Graßmann (more here) notes, in the history of Russian politics from the beginning two constants: autocracy internally and outward systematic attacks on foreign territories. In doing so, Marx realized that Moscow’s expansionism was always out to wipe out historically progressive state structures such as the royalty of Poland-Lithuania, which was characterized by strong republican features – an ethnically-culturally and religiously heterogeneous multi-ethnic state.
As Marx diagnosed, Moscow deliberately eliminated democracies or republics in order to prevent the spirit of freedom they embodied from spreading to Russia. If you replace the word “Poland” with “Ukraine”, Marx’s statements are of an astonishing current relevance – especially since he also explicitly recognized the independence of the Ukrainian nation. However, as the political scientist Jörg Himmelreich recently showed, already then leading socialists opposed the Marxian position, denied Poland the right to exist and accused the Polish independence movement of carrying discord to Europe.
In the tradition of Marx, on the other hand, Karl Kautsky, the leading theorist of Marxism in his time, regarded Russian despotism as the main source of political and social reactionary setback in Europe. That is why he condemned the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in October 1917 as a coup that was in line with the “idea of dictatorship arising from the Russian peculiarity”. In his 1918 writing “Democracy or Dictatorship”, Kautsky made it clear that socialism was inextricably linked to democracy and could only prevail in societies that already had more or less developed democratic traditions. Germany, however, and namely Prussia, had “so far lived under a regime of military autocracy and police arbitrariness, which was so related to the Russian one that a mental constitution could be formed in some strata”, which was receptive to the Russian dictatorship principle.
This was the case of a considerable part of the left, which from now on had been devoted to the Soviet regime. Thus, Russian despotism, through the detour of “Marxism-Leninism” and the Soviet power founded on this ideology, also seized the original emancipatory idea of the socialist movement and placed it at the service of its imperialist and colonialist goals.
The attraction of Russian authoritarianism was further strengthened by the Second World War. Stalinist totalitarianism was now perceived even by some democratic socialists as an “anti-fascist” force – although it had initially allied itself with Nazi Germany through the Hitler-Stalin Pact and thus paved the way for war. It also fell out of sight that the Soviet Union did not only consist of Russia, but that the main victims of the German war of extermination against the Soviet Union were Belarus and Ukraine. Russian nationalism, however, claims victory over Nazi barbarism exclusively for itself – and numerous leftists in the West stubbornly follow this myth.
The adoption of the Russian imperial narrative by large parts of the Western left has thus survived the collapse of the Soviet empire. Regardless of the continuity of the current Russian policy of aggression to that of the Tsarist Empire, Russia is still regarded by many leftists as a counterweight to Western capitalism, which they see as the cause of all the disasters in the world. In doing so, they ignore central insights of their idol Karl Marx, whom they perceive only as a radical critic of capitalism, but not as a determined opponent of anti-Western despots such as the Russian ones in particular. Freeing left-wing thinking from the contamination by authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies can only be accomplished through the derussification of its historical and political premises.
