A Revolution Comes to Boil

Abstract

Russia began a new century with the revolution of 1905–07. For the rest of the world a new century began with the Russian revolution. To Russia the revolutionary failure of 1905–07 was a dramatic initiation to a period in which the very nature of Russian society was challenged and transformed to a depth never known before. The general significance of that transformation for the world at large — the impact of the eventual establishment of the USSR we know today, is manifest and massive, but there is more to it. The events of Russia were part of a radical wave which in those years swept the world at large: massive strikes, peasant riots, struggles for parliamentary suffrage, armed mutinies, government changes, etc.¹ A long-term view makes this picture more particular in character, delimiting a new type of phenomena. At the non-colonial peripheries of capitalism the Russian revolution of 1905–07 was the first in a series of distinctive revolutionary struggles which offered a fundamental challenge to the Eurocentrism of the nineteenth century’s structures of power and patterns of cognition.

It is impossible to live so!

I at any rate cannot and will not live so.

That is why …

Lev Tolstoy

It will be best in so far as the Russian revolution [of 1905–07] and our tasks in it are concerned to look at it neither as if it was a bourgeois revolution in its usual sense, nor a socialist revolution, but a distinctive process.

Karl Kautsky