Leon Trotsky: 1905

Leon Trotsky: 1905: CHAPTER 1-- Russia's Social Development and Tsarism
share of the surplus product, which is to say that it lived at the expense of the privileged classes then
being formed and thus restrained their development which, in any case, was a slow one. But that was not
all. The state seized the essential product of the agricultural worker, snatched from him the very sources
of his livelihood, and, by so doing, drove him from the soil on which he had hardly had time to become
securely settled; this in turn inhibited population growth and restricted the development of productive
forces. Therefore, as the state absorbed a disproportionately large part of the surplus product, so it
inhibited the process -- at any rate, a slow one -- of class or estate differentiation; and, as it seized a
significant part of the basic product, it destroyed even those primitive productive bases which were its
only support.
But in order to exist and rule, the state itself had need of a hierarchical organization of estates. And that is
why, while undermining the economic foundations of the growth of such organization, it strove at the
same time to force its development by state-imposed measures -- while endeavoring, like all other states,
to turn this process to its own advantage.
In the play of social forces, the pendulum swung much further in the direction of state power than was
the case in the history of Western Europe. That exchange of services -- at the expense of the working
people -- between the state and the higher social groups, which is expressed in the distribution of rights
and obligations, services and privileges, occurred less in favor of the nobility and the clergy in Russia
than had been the case in the medieval estate organizations of Western Europe. Nevertheless it is a
terrible exaggeration and a distortion of all perspective to say, as Milyukov says in his history of Russian
culture, that while in the West the estates created the states, in Russia state power created the estates in
its own interest.
Estates cannot be created by legislative or administrative means. Before a particular social group,
assisted by state power, can become a fully-fledged privileged estate, it must form itself economically
with all its social privileges. You cannot create estates in accordance with a previously devised "table of
ranks" or with the charter of the Légion d'honneur.
One thing is certain: in its relationship to the Russian privileged estates, Tsarism enjoyed an
incomparably greater degree of independence than European absolutism which had grown out of estate
monarchy.
Absolutism reached the apex of its power when the bourgeoisie, having hoisted itself on the shoulders of
the third estate, became sufficiently strong to serve as an adequate counterweight to the forces of feudal
society. The situation in which the privileged and owning classes, by fighting one another, balanced one
another, ensured maximum independence for the state organization. Louis XIV was able to say, "L'état,
c'est moi." The absolute monarchy of Prussia appeared to Hegel as an end in itself, as the materialization
of the idea of the state as such.
In its endeavor to create a centralized state apparatus, Tsarism was obliged not so much to oppose the
claims of the privileged estates as to fight the barbarity, poverty, and general disjointedness of a country
whose separate parts led wholly independent economic lives. It was not the equilibrium of the
economically dominant classes, as in the West, but their weak ness which made Russian bureaucratic
autocracy a self-contained organization. In this respect Tsarism represents an intermediate form between
European absolutism and Asian despotism, being, possibly, closer to the latter of these two.
But at a time when semi-Asiatic social conditions were transforming Tsarism into an autocratic
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1905/ch01.htm (3 of 5) [06/06/2002 13:41:29]