Leon Trotsky: 1905

Leon Trotsky: 1905: CHAPTER 4 -- The Driving Forces of the Russian Revolution
stock exchange, which holds the hegemony in European countries and which, without effort, turned the
Tsarist government into its financial vassal, neither wished nor was able to become part of the bourgeois
opposition within Russia, if only because no other form of national government would have guaranteed it
the usurers' rates of interest it exacted under Tsarism. As well as financial capital, foreign industrial
capital, while exploiting Russia's natural resources and labor power, had its political basis outside
Russia's frontiers -- namely, the French, English, and Belgian parliaments.
Neither could our indigenous capital take up a position at the head of the national struggle with Tsarism,
since, from the first, it was antagonistic to the popular masses -- the proletariat, which it exploits directly,
and the peasantry, which it robs indirectly through the state. This is particularly true of heavy industry
which, at the present time, is everywhere dependent on state activities and, principally, on militarism.
True, it is interested in a 'firm civil rule of law," but it has still greater need of concentrated state power,
that great dispenser of bounties. The owners of metallurgical enterprises are confronted, in their own
plants, with the most advanced and most active section of the working class for whom every sign that
Tsarism is weakening is a signal for a further attack on capitalism.
The textile industry is less dependent on the state, and, furthermore, it is directly interested in raising the
purchasing power of the masses, which cannot be done without far-reaching agrarian reform. That is why
in 1905 Moscow, the textile city par excellence, showed a much fiercer, though not perhaps a more
energetic, opposition to the autocratic bureaucracy than the Petersburg of the metalworkers. The Moscow
municipal duma looked upon the rising tide with unquestionable goodwill. But when the revolution
revealed the whole of its social content and, by so doing, impelled the textile workers to take the path
that the metalworkers had taken before them, the Moscow duma shifted most resolutely, "as a matter of
principle," in the direction of firm state power. Counter-revolutionary capital, having joined forces with
the counter-revolutionary landowners, found its leader in the Moscow merchant Guchkov, the leader of
the majority in the third Duma.
The Bourgeois Intelligentsia
European capital, in preventing the development of Russian artisanal trade, thereby snatched the ground
from under the feet of Russia's bourgeois democracy. Can the Petersburg or Moscow of today be
compared with the Berlin or Vienna of 1848, or with the Paris of i789, which had not yet begun to dream
of railways or the telegraph and regarded a workshop employing 300 men as the largest imaginable? We
have never had even a trace of that sturdy middle class which first lived through centuries of schooling in
self-government and political struggle and then, hand in hand with a young, as yet unformed proletariat,
stormed the Bastilles of feudalism. What has Russia got in place of such a middle class? The "new
middle class," the professional intelligentsia: lawyers, journalists, doctors, engineers, university
professors, schoolteachers. Deprived of any independent significance in social production, small in
numbers, economically dependent, this social stratum, rightly conscious of its own powerlessness, keeps
looking for a massive social class upon which it can lean. The curious fact is that such support was
offered, in the first instance, not by the capitalists but by the land owners.
The Constitutional-Democratic (Kadet) party, which dominated the first two Dumas, was formed in 1905
as a result of the League of Landed Constitutionalists joining the League of Liberation. The liberal
fronde of the Landed Constitutionalists, or zemtsy, was the expression, on the one hand, of the
landowners' envy and discontent with the monstrous industrial protectionism of the state, and, on the
other hand, of the opposition of the more progressive landowners, who recognized the barbarism of
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