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Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870-1905 (Russian Research Center Studies) (v. 1)

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This is a brilliant study by Richard Pipes of the first phase of the life of Peter Struve. Peter Struve was the most outstanding intellectual of the Russian revolutionary movement. Struve had a most profound grasp of Russian history and of the advanced state of decomposition to which tsarist Russia had sunk at the end of the 19th century. Struve was the intellectual founder of Russian Social Democracy and a source of inspiration for the young Lenin before Bolshevism . He made the first thorough analysis of the nature of the changing Russian economy. He was the leader of Liberational Movement which sparked the Revolution of 1905-6, which was nearlt toppled the Romanov dynasty and the absolute autocracy. The Revolution of 1905 was actually more elemental than the February Revolution of 1917, and it forced parliamentary concessions from Nicholas II. Struve was a professional economist who passed through the Neo-Kantianism of Reihl and then abandoned positivism altogether. He accepted metaphysics and then eventually became a Christian. He broke with Lenin at the turn of the century. Struve was a person of great moral integrity and was the first to grasp the truly malevolent nature of Lenin. He stated later in life that the principal motivation of Lenin was hatred; single-minded hatred of all Russian institutions, public or private, which he wanted to destroy and eventually did. At the turn of the century, Lenin developed a deep and implacable hatred for Struve. This hatred on deepened when Lenin viewed his arch-rival Struve, as a liberal, playing such a central role in the Revolution of 1905, while he, Lenin, and the rest of the radicals, watched from the sidelines. Of course, the constitutional experiment of 1905-1917 failed in Russia. What many hoped would be a new Russia turned out to be only a breathing spell, the final act of autocracy. The collapse of the Romanov dynasty came in February of 1917, brought on by the privations of the war with Germany which Nicholas had thrown the incompetent Russi! an military against with such foolhardy recklessnes. They dynasty was replaced by a weak-willed provisional government of liberals. These men were helpless and indecisive and events quickly spun out of control. In the general anarchy, it seemed as if no one really wanted to rule Russia. Lenin did!!! He saw his chance and in the vacuum of power, he and the charismatic Leon Trotsky conducted the first modern coup d'etat. It was brilliantly conceived and masterfully executed. There is no question tha tStruve thought the survival of this new Bolshevik regime against nearly impossible odds was the greatest tragedy ever to befall Russia. The Bolsheviks survived the incrediby brutal three-year civil war agains the Whites and the even more tragic war against the Russian peasantry as a whole. In 1921, when the Tambov peasant rebellion was put down with mustard gas, and the Kronstadt naval rebellion wasdefeated ruthlessly by Trotsky and the Red Army, Lenin knew that he had survived, though barely. Struve detested above all things the fact that so many in the West saw Lenin as a benign figure in history. He especially detested the fact that so many also tended to separate the reign of Lenin from the genocidal madness of Stalin, as if they were two totally unrelated historical phenomena. Stalin's rise to the heights of power in the Bolshevik Party was due solely and exclusively to Lenin and to no one else. Lenin himself unleashed mass terror and murder on the Russian people from the earliest days of his Bolshevik regime. The gulag and the secret police were founded by Lenin. Stalin was Lenin's most assiduous student. He learned from the master and applied the principles of Lenin on a massive scale in his 30-year reign of terror, reaching a height of unprecedented tyranny and leaving a bloodbath in his wake. Nor was Stalin Lenin's only pupil. Both Mussolini and Hitler learned their one-party statecraft from Lenin. The Russo-German war of 1941-1945 were simply mirror images clashing on a titanic scale, grinding the co! mmon mand to powder by the tens of millions. It all started with Lenin. Struve saw this clearly as he approached his death in Belgrade in 1944. No student of Russian history can hope to grasp the essential nature of the epic events of the Russian Revolution without reference to the life of Pyotr Bogdanovich Struve. No scholar has entered as deeply into the life, work and thought of this extraordinary figure as has Richard Pipes in this richly fascinating book and its companion volumen on the second half of Struve's career. Pipes' scholarship is first class, his analysist is deep and clear, and his prose is lucid and remarkably well-ordered.