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A Paradigm Lost? Response to Anna Krylova

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Reginald E. Zelnik
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Abstract

Anna Krylova questions whether the spontaneity-consciousness paradigm, the standard interpretive approach toward Bolshevik thought in the field of Soviet studies, offers an exhaustive account of Bolshevik discourse. To do that she examines the centrality of V I. Lenin's What Is to BeDone? (1902) in Bolshevik thought and points to the 1905 revolution as the formative event in the Bolshevik conception of the worker. Krylova introduces an overlooked Bolshevik notion of “class instinct” (klassovyiinstinkt, klassovoe chut'ie) and argues that the notion of “class instinct” centrally informed the Bolshevik vision of the worker, structuring her article as a dialogue between scholars of Soviet history and their historical subjects. In the conclusion, she suggests the consequences that such a broadened notion of the Bolshevik conception of proletarian identity—beyond the spontaneity-consciousness paradigm—has for interpretations of Bolshevik and Stalinist culture. In “A Paradigm Lost?” his response to Krylova's essay, Reginald E. Zelnik welcomes Krylova's “class instinct” thesis as a fresh enrichment of and supplement to the spontaneity-consciousness paradigm, but, he argues, if we place this language in its early historical context, we cannot avoid the conclusion that with or without the introduction of “instinct,” Lenin and the Bolsheviks still had to face the same kind of contradictions in their conceptualization of the role of workers in the revolutionary movement. The revolutionary value of particular consciousness or particular instinct still had to be judged in accordance with an external point of reference, the nature of which remained and remains elusive. Igal Halfin, in his response, “Between Instinct and Mind: The Bolshevik View of the Proletarian Self,” argues that the Bolshevik notion of the self indeed deserves careful scrutiny. Focusing on how the official Soviet language characterized the interaction between workers’ bodies and workers’ souls, Halfin argues that the synthesis of the affective and the cerebral was key to this construction of the New Man in the 1920s and 1930s.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 62 , Issue 1 , Spring 2003 , pp. 24 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2003

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References

1 Halfin, Igal, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in RevolutionaryRussia (Pittsburgh, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 All the above citations from the Manifesto are from the Signet edition: The Communist Manifesto, with an Introduction by Martin Malia (New York, 1998), which I have checked against the German (Das Kommunistische Manifest, 2d ed. [Vienna, 1921]) and slightly modified. The pages cited are (English) 50 (note), 58-59, 62-64, and (German) 20, 22.

3 The author of an important memoir, Vospominaniia Ivana Vasil'evicha Babushkina,1893-1900 (Moscow, 1955; written 1902, first published 1925), Babushkin was arrested and executed in 1906.

4 See my “Worry about Workers: Concerns of the Russian Intelligentsia from the 1870s to What Is to Be Done?” in Siefert, Marsha, ed., Extending the Borders of Russian History:Essays in Honor of Alfred f. Rieber (Budapest, 2002)Google Scholar.

5 See especially Halfin, From Darkness, 425n83, where my own efforts to cut to the “reality” of workers’ identity are thoughtfully challenged.

6 See the 1895 Marxist pamphlet Stachki, ikh znachenie dlia rabochikh, which Lenin's sister Anna helped produce; reprinted in Ivanov, L. M., ed., Rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii v XIXveke: Sbornik dokumentov i materialov, vol. 4, pt. 1: 1895-1897 (Moscow, 1961), 72–89 Google Scholar.

7 “Worker-phile” is the term aptly used by Allan K. Wildman in The Making of a Workers'Revolution: Russian Social Democracy, 1891-1903 (Chicago, 1967), still the fundamental study of these and related developments. See also Dietrich Geyer, , Lenin in der russischenSozialdemokratie: Die Arbeiterbewegung im Zarenreich als Organisationsproblem der revolutionarenIntelligenz, 1890-1903 (Cologne, 1962)Google Scholar; Keep, John L. H., The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia (Oxford, 1963)Google Scholar. Space does not permit me to elaborate, but I would argue that the burgeoning resistance by Russian workers to intelligentsia tutelage that began in the late 1890s was a much more important contributor to Lenin's concerns about the trajectory of working-class consciousness than were the ideas of Eduard Bernstein and their echoes in some Russian circles, emphasized here by Krylova.

8 Which may explain why, at an interesting panel on What Is to Be Done? ably organized by Lars Lih at the annual convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (November 2001), each speaker could make a pretty convincing case for his own particular interpretation of Lenin's position.

9 Zelnik, R. E., ed. and trans., A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography ofSemen Ivanovich Kanatchikov (Stanford, 1986)Google Scholar; Zelnik, , “Russian Bebels: An Introduction to the Memoirs of Semen Kanatchikov and Matvei Fisher,” Russian Revieio 35, nos. 3 and 4 (1976)Google Scholar.

10 I have yet to encounter Lenin referencing a specific working-class woman in the prewar period, but I invite correction from readers.

11 On the gaponovshchina, see especially Walter Sablinsky, The Road to Bloody Sunday:Father Capon and the St. Petersburg Massacre of 1905 (Princeton, 1976); Surh, Gerald D., “Petersburg's First Mass Labor Organization: The Assembly of Russian Workers and Father Gapon,” Russian Review 40, nos. 3 and 4 (1981)Google Scholar.

12 On worker militancy in 1912-1914, see especially Haimson, Leopold H., “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917,” Slavic Review 23, no. 4 (December 1964): 619–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar and 24, no. 1 (March 1965): 1-22. See also McKean, Robert B., St. Petersburgbetween the Revolutions: Workers and Revolutionaries, June 190 7-February 1917 (New Haven, 1990)Google Scholar. Although Haimson and McKean differ on several key issues, including the degree of Bolshevik influence in 1912-1914 on Petersburg workers and the revolutionary character of the July 1914 general strike, they are in accord about the workers’ growing militancy and on the point that, whatever the Bolsheviks’ special role, none of the left political parties significantly controlled and coordinated the strikers.

13 For discussion of the post-1905 flowering of educational opportunities for workers, especially workers’ clubs and other cultural societies in the capitals, see McKean, St. Petersburg, chap. 3; Bonnell, Victoria E., Roots of Rebellion, Workers’ Politics and Organizationsin St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900-1914 (Berkeley, 1983), 328–34Google Scholar; and Steffens, Thomas, Die Arbeiter von Petersburg, 1907-1917: Soziale Lage, Organisation und spontaner Protestzwischen zwei Revolutionen (Freiburg, 1985), 275–98Google Scholar.

14 See, for example, “Ivan Vasil'evich Babushkin (Nekrolog),” Lenin's warm tribute to the deceased “advanced worker” (rabochii-peredovik) Ivan Babushkin, in Rabochaiagazela, no. 2 (18/31 December 1910); reprinted in Vospominaniia Ivana Vasil'evicha Babushkina, 9-12.