From Marxism through liberalism to conservative anti-Bolshevism: the thinker who traced the arc of a Russian intelligentsia
Vasily Shulgin recalled asking him: “So you too should have been crushed?” Struve, trembling his white beard, rose and shouted: “Yes! Me first! The moment a revolutionary raises his head — whack! — a rifle butt to the skull!”
A thinker who moved from legal Marxism through liberal activism, co-founding the Union of Liberation and contributing to Vekhi (1909), to becoming a White ideologue. He wrote the first RSDLP Manifesto (1898) and sustained anti-Bolshevik scholarship in emigration.
Career Timeline
- 1894Critical Notes on Russia's Economic Development, leading legal Marxist
- 1898Drafted the Manifesto of the 1st RSDLP Congress
- 1902–05Edited Osvobozhdenie; co-founded the Union of Liberation
- 1905–15Kadet CC member; contributor to Vekhi (1909)
- 1907Deputy to the Second State Duma (Petersburg)
- 1917Full Academician; Director of Economic Dept, MFA
- 1918–20White ideologue; foreign relations for Denikin and Wrangel
- 1921–44Émigré editor and scholar, Vozrozhdenie and other journals
Related historical events
From Legal Marxism to Idealism
Struve was the most prominent representative of so-called 'Legal Marxism' in 1890s Russia. This current propagated Marxism through academic journals that could pass tsarist censorship, defending the progressiveness of capitalism and attacking the populists' faith in the village commune. His first book, Critical Notes on the Economic Development of Russia (1894), ended with the declaration "Let us acknowledge our lack of culture and go to school with capitalism," becoming something of a creed for Russian Marxists. The following year he wrote an anonymous open letter to Nicholas II demanding a constitution, and in 1898 he drafted the Manifesto of the First RSDLP Congress, the founding document of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.
Yet even then, Struve was already distancing himself from Marxism's philosophical foundations. In his 1899 article 'Marx's Theory of Social Development,' published in Germany, he subjected Marx's thesis of the inevitability of social revolution to critical scrutiny. He later recalled: 'Socialism, to tell the truth, never aroused the slightest emotion in me, still less attraction... I became a socialist by a purely rational path.' In 1902 he spearheaded the collection Problems of Idealism, which mounted a neo-Kantian challenge to Marxism's materialist premises and became the philosophical starting point for the Russian liberal conservatism that would culminate in Vekhi (1909). To Lenin and orthodox Marxists, Struve's defection was betrayal; Struve himself saw it as a theoretical turn in search of a foundation for political freedom that social democracy could not provide.