4 - The parting of the ways

Summary

If Struve ‘ceases entirely to be a Genosse’–so much the worse for him. It will, of course, be an enormous loss to all the Genosse for he is a very talented and well-informed person, but of course friendship is one thing and duty is another, and this does not get rid of the need for war.

(Lenin II, vol. 46, p. 32)

Struve was never an orthodox Marxist in the sense that Plekhanov was. As long, however, as the behaviour of the Russian proletariat seemed to confirm the predictions of Plekhanov, he continued to belong to the mainstream of Russian Marxism. Till the beginning of 1899 Struve's position in the Marxist camp was similar to that of Lenin, Potresov and other leading Marxists inside Russia, except for the fact that he was mainly engaged in theoretical activity while they, from the very beginning, combined theoretical with practical illegal work in workers' circles. But even this difference was, according to Struve himself, due more to chance than to conscious design. While describing the activities of the first Marxist circles in Russia, he wrote in his memoirs inter alia:

That I did not then take a more active part in that propaganda and was not arrested as early as 1891 and have thus, as it were, remained outside ‘practical’ social democratic work, was due to chance, namely to the discovery and arrest of Golubev… Then towards the end of 1891, I fell seriously ill…and after a time in hospital went abroad.