Weber Comprehension

Stud East Eur Thought (2017) 69:305–328
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-017-9294-9
Max Weber and Peter Struve on the Russian

Revolution
Timofey Dmitriev1
Published online: 20 November 2017

Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2017
Abstract The author conducts a comparative analysis of the Russian Revolution

developed by two prominent social-political thinkers of Germany and Russia in the
early twentieth century—Max Weber and Peter Struve. The article focuses on their
respective interpretations of the causes, course, and consequences of the Revolution
as determined by their political ideals, i.e. a specific combination of nationalism and
liberalism. The author pays special attention to Weber’s and Struve’s perception of
the Russian Revolution, which, albeit for different reasons, was rejected by both
thinkers.
Keywords Max Weber Peter Struve Russian Revolution Revolution

as a religious and cultural problem Political freedoms Liberalism Nationalism
In November 2017, Russia will celebrate the centennial anniversary of the

Revolution that shook the established world order to its very foundations and set the
key vectors for the political agenda for the rest of the twentieth century. However,
there are still heated debates on the essence of this event and its political, social, and
cultural consequences for both Russia and the world. Certainly, following the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the discussions became calmer and more
academic in their tone though without losing interest in the Revolution, as shown by
the impressive number of essays and scientific works on the Revolution and its
leading actors (Fitzpatrick 2017: 13–15). In such a situation, the opinions and
assessments of ‘committed observers’1 are of special importance. This term denotes
1
This useful term was introduced by the prominent French sociologist and political thinker Aron (1981).
& Timofey Dmitriev

tdmitriev@hse.ru
1
Faculty of Humanities, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Building 1,
21/4 Staraya Basmannaya Ulitsa, Moscow, Russian Federation 105064
123
306 T. Dmitriev
outstanding political and social thinkers who either were direct witnesses to the
Revolution or were able to observe it from exile and who tried to identify the logic
and meaning of the events and their significance for the fate of the world. The article
considers the interpretations and assessments of the Russian Revolution by two
prominent social and political thinkers of Germany and Russia at the beginning of
the twentieth century—Max Weber and Peter Struve.
Though these two great minds of their time did not know each other personally,
they had much in common.2 Both were social theorists and researchers of the first
magnitude in their countries; both tried to make a political career and failed; both
dreamed of political reforms aimed at democratization of suffrage and at
establishing liberal-democratic forms of government in, respectively, Germany
and Russia. Moreover, they had strikingly similar political views that surprisingly
combined ideals of political and civic freedoms with a consistent nationalism
prioritizing the political importance of the nation and nation-state interests. For both
thinkers, nationalism and liberalism were ideological and spiritual constants that
determined the development of their political views. Both considered political
freedoms a guarantee of national self-preservation and prosperity. Such a symbiosis
of ideas seems rather strange to an observer today but was quite typical for the
European political life of the early twentieth century. Political journalism and
political thought of the day defined it as ‘national liberalism’. Thus, the article
considers how two prominent national liberals from Germany and Russia
respectively, of the early twentieth century, viewed the Russian Revolution of
1917 and its social and cultural consequences. Due to limitations of space, I will not
reconstruct in detail these two thinkers’ logic of reasoning, but will focus on their
most important ideas and assessments of the Revolution of 1917 and Bolshevism.
Max Weber on the Russian Revolution of 1917
The articles and speeches of 1917–1919 are not the first examples of Weber’s
interest in the prospects of the Russian Revolution (See Weber 1988a). Already in
1906, after having carefully studied the Russian press and even learning Russian for
the purpose, Weber published two fundamental articles on the first Russian
Revolution—‘‘Bourgeois democracy in Russia’’ (‘‘Zur Lage der bürgerlichen
Demokratie in Russland’’) and ‘‘Russia’s transition to pseudo-constitutionalism’’
(‘‘Russlands Übergang zum Scheinkonstitutionalismus’’).3 In these articles, he
conducted a thorough analysis of the possible transformation of the tsarist autocracy
into a constitutional government and of the liberals’ chances to become a part of the
government system. Weber’s conclusions were disappointing: he believed that
2
It should be noted that Weber was well aware of the political views of Peter Struve as one of the leading
ideologists of the liberal Russian intelligentsia that in 1905 united around the Constitutional Democratic
Party with the official title ‘‘Party of Popular Freedom’’ (commonly known as Kadets). Weber repeatedly
mentioned Struve in his works on the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917; in particular, he examined
the project of the agrarian reform prepared by P. Struve during the first Russian Revolution (Weber
1995a: 46, 65, 75, 76, 92, 100, 200, 243).
3
These articles were published in the tenth volume of Max Weber’s Gesamtausgabe (1989, Bd. 10).
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Max Weber and Peter Struve on the Russian Revolution 307
Russia had no serious social forces whose material interests would spur them to
fight for political freedoms and a liberal-parliamentary form of government. Weber
was not optimistic about the future of Russia as a democratic country. However,
despite the fact that he estimated Russia’s chances of establishing a liberal-
democratic form of government as rather low, he sympathized with the Russian
liberals’ fight for a better future of the country. After the failure of the first
Revolution, Weber rarely addressed Russian issues, except in 1909 and 1912 in light
of the aggravation of relations between Austria-Hungary and Russia due to their
rivalry in the Balkans (Mommsen 1997: 9–10). During the First World War, Weber
considered the situation in Russia only in passing; however in 1917 the victory of
the February Revolution incited him to return to the careful analysis of events in
Russia.
Unlike the publications of 1906 focusing on internal-political and social
processes in Russia, Weber’s articles of 1917 and 1918 considered primarily the
foreign policy agenda. According to Wolfgang Mommsen,
he tried to convince the German public (notably the German Left) that the
deposition of the tsar and the establishment of the Provisional Government
would not bring about a major shift in Russian foreign policy, at least for the
time being. In his view, the hope that the new government might be willing to
enter into negotiations for a separate peace with the Central Powers was ill
founded. Weber wanted to make clear that the German government had
already done its best to arrive at a separate peace with the new Russian
authorities, but their diplomatic initiatives had been to no avail (Mommsen
1997: 11).
Perhaps that was the reason why Weber’s articles of 1917–1918 differed
significantly in their tone from his previous works on Russia, which was mainly
determined by the fact that Russia was at war with Germany and its allies in order to
support the Entente powers.4 However, he conducted a thorough analysis of the
events in Russia, paradoxically combining sharp and deep insights with estimates
and forecasts that did not stand the test of time.
Weber’s articles on Russia in 1917 provide a thoughtful researcher not only with
an overview of the foreign policy agenda in the final years of the ‘great war’, but
also with impressive data on the new phase of the revolutionary process and on the
essence of Russian Bolshevism. At the very beginning, Weber self-critically
admitted that the revolutionary events in Russia in February–March 1917 were a
bolt from the blue (and not only for him). For the overwhelming majority of
interested observers in both Russia and abroad, including V.I. Lenin, at that time in
exile in Switzerland, the February Revolution of 1917 was a bolt from the blue.
‘‘Even those who are far better informed on the situation than I am had serious
4
The publishers of the English translation of Weber’s works on Russia, G. Wells and P. Baer, explained
such a dramatic change in the tone of his articles in 1917 compared to his publications on the first Russian
Revolution by the fact that ‘‘in 1917 it is the interests and security of the German nation-state that are
foremost in his mind’’ (Wells and Baehr 1995: 2). Richard Pipes came to similar conclusions in his article
‘‘Max Weber and Russia’’ (Pipes 1955: 387–388) as did Wolfgang Mommsen in his analytical
investigation ‘‘Max Weber und die deutsche Politik’’ (Mommsen 1959: 261, 274).
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308 T. Dmitriev
doubts as to whether the tsar would be overthrown during the war, or even after the
war’’ (Weber 1995e [1917]: 241). Neither the objective trends of the development
of Russian society following the first Revolution nor the alignment of social and
class forces in Russia during the First World War, provided grounds for such
forecasts and assumptions. After the failure of the first Revolution, Russian society
underwent major social changes that significantly transformed it. In the article
‘‘Russia’s transition to pseudo-democracy’’ (1917), Weber mentioned only the most
important of these changes.
According to Weber, the key social transformation was the agrarian reform
carried out by the government of Peter Stolypin (1906–1911); it allowed the
authorities to split the united peasant front struggling for the radical redistribution of
land.
Stolypin’s agrarian reform had made the clever tactical move of splitting one
of the core units of the socialist revolutionaries, the peasants of the region of
Old Russia, into two differently sized but inevitably profoundly hostile parts:
on the one hand, the new private owners who had emerged from village
communism, that is, the economically strongest elements of the peasantry,
whose new possessions tied them closely to the regime in power; on the other
hand, the proletarianized masses of the peasantry, who had remained within
village communism, and who regarded the granting of the private ownership
as a blatant injustice, favoring the other group (Weber 1995d [1917]:
241–242).
Considering the other leading social groups of Russian society on the eve of
1917, Weber mentioned that the working class was growing due to the
‘‘proletarization of broad lower strata of the peasants, and as a result of the new
system of private ownership, the landless industrial proletariat, which was not tied
to the village by the claims to land, had greatly increased’’; however, the working
class ‘‘was limited in numbers’’ (Weber 1995d [1917]: 242) and too small to play an
independent social role in the predominantly peasant country. In Russia there was
an unstable equilibrium that would not allow any significant social forces (the
bourgeois circles or the proletarian masses) to overthrow the tsarist regime without
an alliance between these two leading social forces, which Weber considered
extremely unlikely under the given circumstances.
In the articles on the first Russian Revolution, Weber also considered the most
important condition for the successful transition of Russia to the liberal-democratic
form of government—the political unity of the opponents of the tsarist autocracy,
which crucially depended on the relations between two major social forces of urban
Russia, i.e. the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. However, the main opposition forces
differed significantly in both social composition and ideology. The bourgeoisie
opposed the tsarist autocracy from liberal positions, while the working class was
increasingly influenced by the socialist propaganda from the second half of the
1890s. Moreover, the archaic ideas of ‘agrarian communism’, or ‘village
communism’, were widespread among the workers maintaining close ties to the
village. As Weber noted in the article ‘‘Russia’s transition to pseudo-democracy’’ in
1917, referring to the first Russian Revolution,
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revolutions today, if they are to have more than a short-term success, can be
carried out neither by the middle classes and bourgeois intelligentsia alone,
nor by the proletarian masses and the proletarian intelligentsia alone either.
Every general strike and putsch failed from the moment when the bourgeoisie
and specifically that part of the bourgeoisie which is most important in Russia,
namely the landowning zemstvo circles, had refused any further participation.
(Weber 1995d [1917]: 242).
Weber considered the lack of prerequisites for an alliance of the bourgeoisie and
bourgeois intelligentsia, on the one hand, and the urban proletariat led by the
proletarian intelligentsia, on the other hand, the most important reason that
practically brought to naught the chances to overthrow the tsarist autocracy.
Without a strong alliance with bourgeois circles, any attempts by the proletariat to
overthrow tsarism were doomed to failure, for only the bourgeoisie had financial
resources ‘‘necessary for the organization of the permanent administration’’ (Weber
1995d [1917]: 243). Weber stressed that
… even when the rebellious masses have leaders who are as able and at least
to some extent unselfish, as they undoubtedly are in Russia, there is one
weapon they lack which will always be vital: credit-worthiness. This weapon
is, however, possessed by the bourgeoisie. And on the basis of this credit-
worthiness the bourgeoisie can obtain the funds which today are necessary for
the organization of permanent administration, whether or not it calls itself
‘revolutionary’. (Weber 1995d [1917]: 242–243). Therefore, there was a
question ‘‘how the bourgeois circles would react to another revolution’’ (Ibid
243).
A decade after the first Russian Revolution, the attitudes of the bourgeois
business circles and intelligentsia changed significantly. Weber believed that on the
eve of 1917 bourgeois circles did not strive for revolution or overthrow of the tsarist
autocracy. According to Weber, not only were the ‘large industrialists’ opponents of
a revolutionary coup5; following the Revolution of 1905–1907 ‘‘the majority of the
bourgeois intelligentsia and the zemstvo circles’’ (Ibid., 243) were disappointed in
revolutionary ideals and considered the possibility of external expansion. They were
satisfied with the rights and freedoms granted by the tsar’s manifesto (October 17,
1905), and counted on foreign expansion into the Balkans, the Middle East, the
Bosporus and Dardanelles.
Their self-esteem, broken by the disappointment of their hopes of acquiring
domestic powers, took refuge all the more fervently in the romantic dream of
exercising power abroad. …Constantinople and the so-called liberation of
Slavs (meaning in reality their domination by the nationalist Greater Russian
bureaucracy) now replaced the enthusiasm for the ‘human rights’ and the
‘constituent assembly’. This imperialist legend, especially the Greater Russian
claim to dominance within Russia itself, remained alive even in the bourgeois
5
‘‘It was, of course, clear, that the few giant enterprises in heavy industry in Russia would adopt an
absolutely reactionary stance’’ (Weber 1995d [1917]: 243).
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310 T. Dmitriev
intelligentsia, and even during the heyday of the whole Liberation Movement.
(Ibid., 243).
Thus, in terms of the objective alignment of social and class forces in Russia at
the beginning of 1917 ‘‘the revolution appeared extremely improbable’’ (Ibid., 244).
Then why did the revolution break out and lead to the overthrow of the monarchy?
Weber blames the political incapacity of the last Russian monarch Nicholas II and
his closest circle.
‘‘His [Nicholas II] overriding and fundamental error lay in his fatal insistence on
wanting to rule on his own’’ (Ibid.). Russian public opinion blamed the tsar for the
defeat suffered by the army at the front during the ‘great’ war, especially after he
appointed himself supreme commander in 1915, and for the refusal to share
responsibility with bourgeois circles. On the eve of the revolution, ‘‘the path was
open to agreement with the thoroughly nationalistic, bourgeois, monarchical
majority of the Duma elected by a blatantly class-based franchise. However, the tsar
was evidently prevented from taking this path and thus embracing parliamentarism
by his fatal vanity’’ (Ibid.). If Nicholas II had confidently set out to establish a
constitutional monarchy and a ‘government of public trust’, he would have had a
chance to strengthen the relations with the bourgeois circles. However, both the tsar
and his closest circle lacked such willingness.
A political compromise with the bourgeois circles would have given Nicholas II
a chance to keep the loyalty of army commanders and to prevent an alliance of
bourgeois and radical socialist intelligentsia against the autocracy. The tsar rejected
the idea of cooperation with opposition business and zemstvo circles, i.e. he made a
major political miscalculation that ultimately cost him the throne. ‘‘Without the
opposition of the bourgeois intelligentsia to the old regime, any mass revolt, no
matter how successful, would have quickly run into the sand… But not only all
trained workers’ leaders but also the leading strata of the bourgeois intelligentsia
joined in, as a result of the behavior of the tsar’’ (Weber 1995d [1917]: 247). In the
second year of the war, under the liberal-bourgeois opposition circles consolidation
and the society’s disappointment in the military efforts of the tsarist regime, there
was an objective need to exclude the politically incompetent tsar from the game in
the interests of the state. ‘‘The longer the war continued, the more the need to
remove the monarch was born in among the Russian imperialists themselves’’
(Weber 1995d [1917]: 245).
In February 1917, ‘‘there was no ‘revolution’ but merely ‘the removal’ of an
incompetent monarch. As least half of the real power was in hands of purely
monarchist circles, who were only going along with the present ‘republican’ sham
because, to their regret, the monarch did not stay within the necessary restraint to his
power’’ (Weber 1995d [1917]: 252). The February Revolution led to the dual power
of the bourgeois Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet of workers’ and
soldiers’ deputies, in which, during the spring and summer of 1917 moderate
socialists—Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks—dominated. Weber defined
(though not quite correctly) the events of February–March 1917 as a ‘palace coup’
that removed an ‘incompetent monarch’ from the political scene ‘in the interests of
the state’. He argued that despite the dual power of the first Provisional Government
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and the Petrograd Soviet the coup did not change and could not have fundamentally
changed the nature of power in Russia, especially the attitude of the new ruling
circles to war.
The bourgeois circles, officers, and a considerable part of bourgeois intelligentsia
advocated the continuation of the war on the side of the Entente powers, and the
establishment of order in the country, i.e. they sought a ‘strong personality’ or a
military dictatorship capable of ensuring the social order. The strong power could
guarantee not only the continuation of the war but also the inviolability of their
property at a time of acute crisis. Therefore, the privileged circles (in terms of
property and education) were not supporters of democracy.
It was very unlikely that an open or disguised military dictatorship could be
permanently kept at bay, if the war continued’’ (Weber 1995d [1917]: 248) for
‘‘the majority of professional officers, and certainly the bourgeois strata the
class-based Duma and the Provisional Government, feared genuine democ-
racy. Above all the money-providers, both domestic and in the allied countries,
feared it. This is partly because they wished the war to continue, but partly
also because they feared for the security of the money they have advanced.
Their influence was the most significant. (Ibid., 248).
The proletarian strata of the city and of the ‘intelligentsia’ were split into two
unequal groups—the moderates led by the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolution-
aries, and the so-called ‘maximalists’ headed by the Bolsheviks (the second group
was in the minority). Weber did not believe in the success of the moderate socialist
majority led by the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries (he called them
‘democrats’) that managed to control the majority of the proletariat and the city
Soviets from February to the end of the summer of 1917.
By obstructing the administration the socialist workers’ leaders may be able to
extract political concessions from a bourgeois government—but they cannot
do this from a ‘constituent assembly’ of peasants. Neither can they organize
any steady administration of the country as long as the war continues. Here the
decisive point is the lack of credit-worthiness, which remains a crucial factor
as long as the war continues. (Ibid., 251–252).
That is why Weber defined the events in Russia in February–March 1917 as a
‘transition to pseudo-democracy’ referring primarily to the propertied classes’
unwillingness to solve the fundamental social questions in the interests of the
overwhelming majority of the Russian people, represented at that time by peasant
masses demanding land and peace. Though the February Revolution used slogans of
peace and democracy, it did not bring and could not have brought either peace or
democracy, for the liberal-bourgeois circles that came to power in February 1917
with the support of moderate socialists (Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries)
were not interested in the immediate end of the war by a separate peace with
Germany and its allies or by establishing a democratic form of government in the
foreseeable future. Weber believed that in foreign policy the liberal-bourgeois
circles adhered to the slogan of continuing the war to victory, while in domestic
policy, due to both material interests and sympathies, they sought a military
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312 T. Dmitriev
dictatorship capable of keeping soldiers in the trenches, the workers at their

machine-tools, and, most importantly, rebuffing peasants who were smashing
landowners’ estates and seizing the private land.
Thus, in the articles of 1917, Weber came to the conclusion that, in the spring–
summer of 1917, neither of the two power groups (the Provisional Government and
the Petrograd Soviet) wanted to establish a democratic government, solve the
agrarian question, and end the war.
The socially reactionary elements of the Duma and of the Provisional
Government, amongst which the large landowners figure prominently, must
first secure their own position within the country. To do this they need, first, to
hold down the peasants who are demanding free distribution of private large
landholdings, and secondly, they need money. The democratic peasants can be
held down by keeping them in the trenches under the discipline of the general.
Money can be obtained if Russia’s own banks and big industrialists, or the
Entente powers, provide it. Neither their own, nor foreign financial powers
will provide money except on condition that radical and revolutionary
peasants are suppressed, and the war continues. (Weber 1995d [1917]:
264–265).
Under the dual political power, the position of the ‘silent’ peasant majority
became decisive for the fate of the Revolution. The moods of the peasantry were
determined, on the one hand, by their reluctance to remain at the front and, on the
other hand, by their demand for the radical redistribution of land, in which the
peasant masses in soldiers’ greatcoats could take part only after the cessation of
hostilities and mass demobilization.
Objectively, it is the peasants in particular who have a real interest in peace,
and they represent the overwhelming majority of the Russian people. In terms
of their own ideals, their real interests cannot be satisfied without (1) the
expropriation in entirety of non-peasant land, and (2) cancellation of Russia’s
foreign debts. (Weber 1995d [1917]: 248–249).
The ‘natural peasant program’ in the spring–summer of 1917 consisted of ‘‘(1)
expropriation of land, (2) cancellation of the state debts, and (3) peace’’ (Weber
1995d [1917]: 251).
The fundamental interests of the peasant masses represented in the ‘natural
peasant program’ did not have the slightest chance for the support of the propertied
classes with quite opposite interests. The latter sought to preserve large and middle-
sized land property; to defend the institution of private property under the threat of
the radical redistribution of private land without any redemption; to support
domestic and foreign creditors by excluding the possibility of the moratorium on
paying debts or of repudiation of debts; and to continue the war to keep the peasants
in the trenches under the control of the army military-technical apparatus. In other
words, the propertied classes of the Russian society and its leaders considered the
war a means to solve domestic political problems (Weber 1995d [1917]: 249–250).
As long as the war continued, the peasants stayed at the front, in the trenches, and
the propertied classes and bankers were not worried about their money and property;
123
and the moderate socialists (Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries) controlled

(until August 1917) the majority in the city Soviets, thus, providing society with a
respectable democratic facade of ‘Soviets’ democracy’. In fact, this was the
situation until October 1917, when, following the successful coup in Petrograd, the
most radical faction of the Russian socialists (the Bolshevik Party headed by V.
Lenin and L. Trotsky) came to power.
Military dictatorship not of generals, but of corporals
Max Weber’s assessment of Bolshevism
Weber did not take the Bolshevik coup in October 1917 seriously, for he believed
that the Bolsheviks would hold power only for a few months. ‘‘Their government is
a government of an insignificant minority. It relies on the army being tired of the
war. Under the given circumstances (and regardless of their beliefs’ sincerity) they
are doomed to a military dictatorship, not of generals, but of corporals’’ (Weber
1988b [1918]: 292). Weber considered it ridiculous to believe that the Bolsheviks
were supported by the ‘‘‘class conscious’ mass of the proletarian type for there was
only the proletariat of soldiers’’ (Weber 1988b [1918]: 292). However, though
Weber’s estimates of Bolsheviks prospects to hold on to power after the October
1917 coup were clearly mistaken, his analysis of the social nature of Bolshevism is
still of undoubted interest. Based on the example of the October coup, Weber
showed what social prerequisites could cause a seemingly political event, and what
social consequences the latter would inevitably have.
According to Weber, the nature of Bolshevism was determined not so much by
the socialist ideas and ideals declared by the Bolshevik leaders, but by the material
interests of their followers. He believed that the logic of the Bolsheviks’ domination
would make the material interests of their followers prevail over and disgrace the
ideal interests of their leaders. It is no exaggeration to say that Weber’s approach
suffers from an underestimation of the ideals that helped the Bolsheviks’ come to
power and of the ideocratic nature of the Soviet state they created. ‘‘Whatever may
have been the goals the Saint-Petersburg intellectuals (die Petersburgen Literaten)
pursued, their apparatus of power—the soldiers—was waiting and demanding only
one thing: salaries and military booty, which explains everything’’ (Weber 1988b
[1918]: 293). The reliance on the declassed and demoralized soldiers and the armed
detachments of the Red Guard made the Bolsheviks highly dependent on their
support. ‘‘A well-paid Red Guard will lack any interest in peace, for it will deprive
the Guard of work and income’’ (Weber 1988b [1918]: 293). The Bolsheviks could
strive for peace (in their slogans and ideals) as much as they wanted, but the masses
of soldiers would not let them sign a peace treaty. The material interests of the
Bolsheviks followers played a decisive role in the unfolding events. The Bolsheviks
talked a lot about peace ‘without annexations and indemnities’, but the soldiers
supporting them did not need such peace for they ‘‘invaded Ukraine, Finland, and
other areas (including Russian), and collected indemnities under the pretext of
‘liberation’’’ (Weber 1988b [1918]: 293).
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314 T. Dmitriev
Weber conducted an analysis of the social base of Bolshevism and wrote a

considerable amount about those who ‘‘lived not for the revolution, but at the
expense of the revolution’, i.e. social parasites who derived personal benefits from
revolutionary activities and, thus, were interested rather in the revolution lasting as
long as possible than in achieving its declarative goals. That was the ‘‘essence of
Bolshevism’’ (Weber 1988c [1918]: 452). As Weber stressed in his ‘‘Politics as a
vocation and profession’’, in the modern world the fate of every politician, who
wants to create the realm of absolute justice by violence, depends entirely on his
ability to offer his retinue and followers such material and symbolic rewards that
would satisfy them. Even being a purposeful genius, he would not be able to
implement a political program without a government apparatus that would follow
his orders if he promised and ensured the necessary (internal and external) rewards.
‘‘Internal premiums’’ allow ‘‘satisfying hatred and the craving for revenge’’,
‘‘resentment and the need for pseudo-ethical self-righteousness: the opponents must
be slandered and accused of heresy’’; while ‘‘the external rewards are adventure,
victory, booty, power, and spoils’’ (Weber 1946 [1919]: 125). ‘‘The leader and his
success are completely dependent upon the functioning of his machine and hence
not on his own motives. Therefore, he also depends upon whether or not the
premiums can be permanently granted to the followers, that is, to the Red Guard, the
informers, the agitators, whom he needs. What he actually attains under the
conditions of his work lies therefore not in his hands, but is prescribed to him by the
followers’ motives, which, if viewed ethically, are predominantly base. The
followers can be harnessed only as long as an honest belief in his person and his
cause inspires at least part of the followers…’’ (Weber 1946 [1919]: 125).6
In Weber’s articles and speeches of 1917–1919, one can find another noteworthy
explanation of the Bolsheviks’ coming to power in October 1917. According to
Weber, a unique constellation of three types of communist aspirations provided the
Bolsheviks with mass social support in the fall of 1917: the agrarian communism of
the peasantry that sought to preserve the land commune and to distribute private
land by consumers; the consumer communism of the declassed masses of soldiers
and the Red Guard detachments that demanded from the Bolshevik leaders the
booty and premiums (internal and external) as a reward for their loyalty and support;
and the utopian communism of the revolutionary intelligentsia that considered the
Russian revolution a detonator of the world socialist revolution, primarily in the
developed countries of Western and Central Europe.7 Without the constellation of
these three factors under the acute social-political crisis in the autumn of 1917, the
Bolsheviks would have hardly had a chance to seize power, not to mention a chance
to hold it in the foreseeable future.
Among three forms of communism identified by Weber in his study of
Bolshevism, utopian communism is of a particular interest, for this is an ideological
doctrine of the radical intelligentsia that made the struggle against the tsarist
autocracy its profession. This allowed Weber to define the Russian revolutionary
6
The translation is slightly amended.
7
Stefan Breuer rightly points to this in his valuable analysis of Soviet communism from the perspective
of the systematic and historical sociology of Max Weber (Breuer 1992: 269).
123
intelligentsia as a ‘quasi-religious’ movement of intellectuals united by a ‘common

faith’. Though many theoreticians of Russian social democracy at the turn of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries tried to resist populism, their followers often
remained adherents of the idea of the special mission of Russia as supposedly
capable of skipping the bourgeois stage of social development and of immediate
transition to socialism, and sympathized with agrarian communism rooted in the
social practices of the Russian rural commune.
When considering Weber’s analysis of Bolshevism, one should remember that he
distinguished two forms of socialism. The first one is modern socialism connected
with rational industrial capitalism, factory labor discipline, and the mass labor
movement putting the rational organization of production on a collectivist basis to
the fore. The second form of socialism emphasizes the fundamental importance of
the equal distribution of social wealth. Weber defines this second form of socialism
in the modern world as ‘communism’. In Economy and Society, he identifies
conceptual differences between socialism and communism: ‘‘The conflict between
two rival forms of socialism has not died down since the publication of Marx’s
Misère de la Philosophie. On the one hand, there is the type, which includes
especially the Marxists, which is evolutionary and oriented to the problem of
production; on the other hand, the type which takes the problem of distribution as its
starting point and advocates a rational planned economy. The latter is again today
coming to be called ‘communism’’’ (Weber 1978 [1921]: 112).
In his articles on the Revolution of 1905, Weber declared the doctrinal
discrepancies between the two forms of modern socialism to be the cause of the split
of Russian social democracy into the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, though he noted
that the struggle for power and for the souls of potential adepts between various
groups of social democrats and their leaders played an equally important role. ‘‘The
conflict within the Russian socialist movement, especially as exemplified in the
passionate dispute between Plekhanov and Lenin, was, after all, also concerned with
this issue. While the internal divisions of present-day socialism are very largely
concerned with competition for leadership and for ‘benefits’, along with these issues
goes the same set of problems’’ (Weber 1978 [1921]: 112). Even though ‘‘the causes
of the split are evidently not ones of principle, but are in part personal, in part
tactical in nature’’, ‘‘some of the reasons [for the split] lie in the intellectual
peculiarity of Russian socialism’’ (Weber 1995b [1906]: 67).
Considering the strategy and tactics of the Bolsheviks who already in the first
Russian Revolution relied on armed uprising and the confiscation of all non-peasant
lands in favor of the peasants, Weber argued that the revolutionary-‘putschist’
sentiments of the Russian social democracy were determined not only by the
struggle of its leaders for power or euphoria at the initial stage of the first
Revolution, but also by features of the Russian revolutionary tradition.
Revolutionism and opposition to the ‘laws of development’ has been in blood
of the specifically Russian kind of socialism from the time of its fathers,
Herzen and Lavrov, who were influenced by some of Hegel’s ideas. Herzen
rejected as ‘nonsense’ the idea that socialism could only arise via capitalism,
and Lavrov, like the older representatives of the ‘narodnichestvo’, stressed the
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316 T. Dmitriev
‘creative’ nature of the human mind—the spirit ‘come to itself’. This

pragmatic rationalism has never been completely supplanted by the natural-
istic rationalism of any ‘developmental theory’. Of course, its most telling
arguments are to be found in the actual existence of communism in the
Russian village commune. (Weber 1995b [1906]: 67–68).
Weber was a discerning observer of the revolutionary process in Russia and
understood that revolutionism and social messianism were not distinctive features of
the supporters of Bolshevism; they were typical for the entire radical intelligentsia
regardless of ideological differences and political views among them. It is no
coincidence that in Economy and Society Weber defined Russian socialism as a
great intellectual movement that ‘‘shared enough basic elements to approximate a
religion’’ (Weber 1978 [1921]: 515–516). Though the Russian liberation movement
was never ‘unified’ by ideological orientations and political aspirations, it had a
‘common faith’. This common faith of the radical intelligentsia was expressed in
that
… patrician, academic, and aristocratic intellectuals stood alongside plebeian
ones. Plebeian intellectualism was represented by the proletaroid minor
officialdom, which was highly sophisticated in its sociological thinking and
broad cultural interests; it was composed especially of the zemstvo officials
(the so-called ‘third element’). Moreover, this kind of intellectualism was
advanced by journalists, elementary school teachers, revolutionary apostles
and peasant intelligentsia that arose in the Russian social conditions. (Weber
1978 [1921]: 516).8
In Economy and Society, Weber described the quasi-religious character of the
Russian revolutionary intelligentsia ideology: ‘‘in the 1870s, this movement
culminated in an appeal to the theory of natural rights, oriented primarily toward
agricultural communism, the so-called ‘narodnichestvo’ (populism). In the 1890s,
this movement clashed sharply with Marxist dogmatics, but in part also aligned with
it. Moreover, attempts were made to relate it, usually in an obscure manner, first to
Slavophile romantic, then mystical religiosity or, at least, religious emotionalism’’
(Weber 1978 [1921]: 516).9 Certainly, Weber’s position is similar to the
assessments of the Russian intelligentsia in the articles of outstanding Russian
thinkers of the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 published in the collections ‘‘Vekhi’’
[Landmarks] (1909) and ‘‘Iz Glubiny’’ [From the Depths] (1918) with the active
participation of Struve (1991a [1909]: 150–166, b [1918]: 459–478).
However, Weber’s main objections to the socialist experiment in Russia were
determined primarily by his systematic theory of bureaucracy.10 According to
Weber, one of the principal features of the modern world is the concentration of all
managerial functions in the hands of a professional bureaucracy. Though the
historical development of rational bureaucracy was connected with rational
8
9
10
Most researchers of Weber’s works on this issue have emphasized this circumstance: Beetham 1985:
202–203; Mommsen 1959: 274–277; Parkin 2003: 118; Pipes 1955: 396–398.
123
Western-style industrial capitalism (in a narrow sense) and the multifaceted

modernization of the old European societies, the prevalence of rational bureaucratic
management is a distinctive feature of modern societies as such, for, due to
technological reasons, they separate workers from the means of production.
Weber emphasized that ‘‘today increasing ‘socialization’ inevitably means
increasing bureaucratization’’ (Weber 1994a [1918]: 147). All societies like that of
Soviet Russia, in which the main branches of the economy are nationalized, and the
state is directed by ‘‘Literaten’’ (as Weber contemptuously called the revolutionary-
minded representatives of intelligentsia), strives to control all aspects of life, are
doomed to dictatorship, but not to the dictatorship of proletariat the Bolshevik
leaders dreamed of, but to ‘‘the dictatorship of the bureaucrat’’. The nationalization
of enterprises and firms eliminates private sector bureaucracy and replaces it with
the united state bureaucracy that is much harder to oppose by the workers defending
their professional interests. ‘‘It is in publicly owned concerns and those of single-
purpose associations, however, that the official, not the worker rules completely and
exclusively; here it is more difficult for the worker to achieve anything by strike
action than it is against private entrepreneurs. It is the dictatorship of the official, not
that of the worker, which, for the present at any rate, is on the advance’’ (Weber
1994b [1918]: 292). Thus, Weber considered Lenin’s idea of the ‘commune-state’
an unviable illusion.
The Russian Revolution as a spiritual and historical-sociological problem
Peter Struve’s conception
Unlike Weber, who analyzed the causes and consequences of the Russian
Revolution from the foreign-policy and sociological perspectives, Struve’s percep-
tion was determined primarily by religious and moral considerations, which is
evident in his article ‘‘Twelve by Alexander Blok’’: ‘‘the attitude to the Russian
Revolution is a particular case of the general attitude to sin and abomination’’
(Struve 1921: 232–233). Such a religious-moral approach explains why in the
articles and speeches of 1917 Struve rarely conducted a social-political or social-
economic analysis of the dynamics of the revolutionary process in Russia. As
Richard Pipes rightly noted in his classical monograph on Struve’s works of that
time, ‘‘this was not so much a concrete political program as a political sermon, very
much in the spirit of Dostoevsky. In fact, throughout the rest of the year, Struve paid
scant attention to such issues as political institutions, agrarian policies, or the
nationality question, which preoccupied his contemporaries. These, in his mind,
were secondary matters compared to the fundamental issues of spirit and will’’
(Pipes 1980: 234).
The years 1918–1921, with the fierce civil war being waged, were not the right
time for a calm and comprehensive analysis of the results of the Russian Revolution.
In these years, Struve was primarily an active politician and ideologist of the anti-
Bolshevik ‘white’ movement. The right time to sum up the results of the Revolution
came later, in emigration, when Struve combined political efforts to organize an
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318 T. Dmitriev
anti-Bolshevik united front with the analysis of spiritual and social-cultural outcome
of the Russian Revolution. It should be noted that during the 1920s-1940s Struve
repeatedly reconsidered the driving forces, the essence and consequences of the
Revolution, the nature of the Bolshevik regime, and the prospects of its overthrow,
clarified and explained his interpretations and assessments, changed them to accord
with the new historical and social-economic context, though his general attitude to
the Revolution remained unchanged (Struve 1999a: 289–318; 319–330; 331–349).
During both the armed struggle against Bolshevism (1918–1920) and the forced
emigration (1921–1944), Struve defined the victory of the Bolshevik revolution as a
colossal civilizational and cultural regression on the way to liberal democracy and
economic prosperity; he believed it would take several decades to overcome the
consequences of this regression after the fall of the Soviet regime.
Struve considered the Russian Revolution ‘‘a deep cultural, social and political
reaction’’, a ‘‘national disaster, an internal-political and foreign-policy collapse’’
(Struve 1952: 19, VII). ‘‘The Bolshevik coup and Bolshevik rule are the social and
political reaction of the egalitarian lower classes against the centuries-old social and
economic Europeanization of Russia’’ (Struve 1952: 9). He believed that the
consequences of the Revolution made it an extraordinary event breaking the normal
course of the historical process by the terrible economic decline and cultural
impoverishment. ‘‘The characteristic feature of the Russian Revolution—as it has
actually been carried out in Bolshevism—is not only and not so much the
weakening of the state and of its power in its traditional form; far more important
than the fall of the state is the weakening both of the physical strength of the
population, and of its spiritual culture under the Bolshevik regime’’ (Struve 1922:
29). Struve offered the definition of the Revolution as a colossal social-civilizational
and cultural regression as the basis ‘‘for the sociological interpretation of reality, for
the political will to master it, and, most importantly, for the spiritual perception of
it’’ (Struve 1999d [1922]: 321).
The last statement proves that Struve considered the Russian Revolution at
several levels, and in his works there are at least two interpretations. On the one
hand, he insisted that the Revolution was a moral-religious problem requiring a
practical and volitional attitude in the form of spiritual denial and defeat. Struve
stressed that ‘‘Russia could recover only by a radical spiritual overcoming of the
revolution. All forms of its idealization must be evaluated from this point of view.
The more spiritual and abstract the idealization is, the more dangerous it is. The
Russian spirit must devote all its forces to the final spiritual overcoming of the lie
inherent in the revolution and evidently manifested in its material and spiritual
destructions’’ (Struve 1999d [1922]: 321).
However, this is not the only line of reasoning in Struve’s political philosophy.
He also considered the Revolution as a historical-sociological problem rooted in
Russia’s past. ‘‘The historical problem of the political and social revolution which
has taken place in Russia involves the elucidation of the following questions: (1)
How did it come about that the revolution against property took place in Russia? (2)
Why and how could this revolution succeed and to what has its work led?’’ (Struve
1922: 32).
123
Struve’s historical-sociological interpretation of the Russian Revolution has

several features. While historians and publicists of the Russian emigration
supporting the ‘left’ and ‘progressivist’ positions as well as Bolshevik theorists
tended to draw far-reaching parallels between the Russian and French revolutions,
Struve, on the contrary, considered such parallels false, for most of the goals of the
revolution in France had been successfully achieved by the ‘old order’ in Russia
before the first Revolution of 1905–1907. Thus, the economic and administrative-
legal unification, realized by the French Revolution, had been successfully carried
out in Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the tsarist autocracy
(Struve 1922: 34): communication lines were improved to link the most remote
parts of the country; the full-fledged domestic market was created; the currency, the
taxation system, the system of measures and weights, the system of universal formal
education, especially primary and secondary, and legal guarantees for private
property were unified and standardized. And vice versa: the problems that remained
unresolved within the Russian Empire on the eve of the twentieth century (primarily
the agrarian, labor and national questions), acquired solutions in the course of the
Russian Revolution contrary to the very spirit of the French Revolution. By its aims,
the latter was a bourgeois revolution aiming to eliminate the last obstacles to the
development of civil (bourgeois) society on a sustainable institutional and legal
basis. Therefore, the Code of Napoleon became the most important symbol of the
victorious revolution.11
The revolution in Russia, on the contrary, led to the destruction of the incipient
civil society and to the radical land redistribution in the spirit of agrarian
communism (Weber stressed this point). This led to the destruction of the highly
developed private entrepreneurial economy in agriculture with its large share of
commodity products. The Bolsheviks’ strategic choice of ‘complete collectiviza-
tion’ in agriculture in the late 1920s had been to a large extent predetermined by
these developments. Workers were deprived of free professional and political
representation. Entire social-professional categories—the aristocracy, service
nobility, bureaucracy, officer corps, the large industrial and commercial-financial
bourgeoisie, merchants, orthodox clergy, the intelligentsia of ‘free professions’, the
prosperous peasantry, Cossacks, urban commercial entrepreneurs, etc.—suffered
destruction. The Revolution brought about the destruction of all more or less
significant prerequisites and conditions for the development of bourgeois civil
society and constitutional forms. That is why the Soviet period became a ‘modernity
without a civil society’.
Though Struve denied the relevance of far-reaching parallels between the
Russian and French revolutions, he laid a certain share of the historical blame for
the revolution on the ‘old order’, i.e. the tsarist autocracy, its bureaucracy and the
11
Max Weber also noted the false parallels between the Russian and French Revolutions in his articles
on first Russian revolution. ‘‘The Russian revolution has been compared to the French Revolution. Apart
from numerous other differences it suffices to indicate the decisive object which, in contrast to that time,
is no longer ‘sacred’ even to the ‘bourgeois’ representatives of the freedom movement [in Russia] and is
missing from the catalogue of benefits which it is hoped liberation will bring, namely ‘property’. Today
the tsar proclaims its ‘sanctity’—rather belatedly from the point of view of his own interests’’ (Weber
1995c [1906]: 232).
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320 T. Dmitriev
social forces supporting it. Considering the historical causes and prerequisites of the
Russian Revolution, he repeatedly stressed that the unwillingness and refusal of the
tsarist autocracy and bureaucracy to share political power and responsibility with
civil society was one of the main reasons for the collapse of tsarism. Struve harshly
criticized the tsarist autocracy for the political catastrophe of 1917 in the articles and
speeches of 1917–1918. Thus, in November 1917, hot on the heels of the October
Revolution he wrote: ‘‘If one wants to call the All-Russian pogrom of 1917 a
Russian Revolution, I will be honest: the main crime of the old regime is precisely
that it prepared this revolution and made it unavoidable. However, for the sake of
justice I should add that the entire progressive Russian intelligentsia was a
participant in this crime due to its indiscriminate and reckless struggle with the old
order, in particular after the revolution of 1905’’ (Struve 1999b [1917]: 257).
In his article in the collection From the Depths, Struve also did not fail to
emphasize the unwillingness of the tsarist autocracy and absolutist bureaucracy to
share political power and responsibility with the aristocratic and bourgeois circles as
one of the main causes of the Revolution. Struve considered the Russian monarchy
on the eve of its overthrow
….to be persistent in its reactionary distrust of the educated classes and
jealous protection of its prerogatives; it was systematically pushing these
classes into opposition increasingly imbued with a renegade anti-state spirit.
Thus, the revolution had two sources and was prepared by both the historical
monarchy that deprived the cultural and educated elements of political
participation in state building, and the intelligentsia with its shortsighted
struggle against the state. (Struve 1991b [1918]: 466–467).
Such an interpretation of the causes of the Revolution followed from Struve’s
idea of history. He considered the history of Russia following the reforms of Peter
the Great in terms of a conflict between state and society. Having taken the path of
modernization and westernization at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, the Russian state sought to create broadly literate and educated classes
and relied on the Europeanized elite, or new ‘educated classes’, first the nobility and
then the commons (raznochintsy). However, the aim of the state to create and to rely
on the classes educated in the European style was not accompanied by the
willingness to share political responsibility for governing the country. The educated
classes played an increasingly important role though remained politically powerless.
The historical misfortune of Russia that determined the tragic catastrophe of
1917 is due…to the terrible delay of political reform in Russia. To ensure
Russia’s proper cultural and national development, the reform should have
been carried out already at the beginning of the 19th century. Then the delayed
(personal) emancipation of the peasants would have quickly followed, and the
development of political and social relations would have proceeded more
normally. (Struve 1991b [1918]: 466).
As Struve noted with regret, political rights were granted to the educated nobility
and educated classes generally too late, in exchange for preserving serfdom that was
123
abolished only in 1861 and at the expense of the ‘apostasy’ (otschepenstvo) of the
educated classes from the state.
The old aristocratic regime has leaned for centuries on the social authority and
political subservience of that class which has created Russian culture and
without whose creative work there would have been no [Russian] nation: the
class of the landed gentry. By systematically refusing first that class, and then
its offshoot, the intelligentsia, the right to participate authoritatively in the task
of constructing and administering the state, the autocracy inculcated in the
souls, in the intentions and habits of Russia’s educated, the psychology and
traditions of political apostasy. This apostasy is precisely that destructive force
which, after spilling over onto ordinary people and linking up with their
material lusts and longings, brought down the great multifarious state. (Struve
1991b [1918]: 462).
According to Struve, the split between the state and the educated society
determined the logic of Russian history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
and thus Russia’s historical destiny. The participation of the educated classes in the
political life of the country, in key decisions, together with the expansion of the
masses’ civil and political rights, constituted the most important social-political
problem at the beginning of the twentieth century. ‘‘Russia’s misfortune and the
main cause of the catastrophic nature of the Russian Revolution lies in the fact that
the people, the population, society (call it what you will) were not drawn into and
involved with the requisite gradualness in active and responsible participation in
political life and political authority’’ (Struve 1999c [1919]: 281).
Struve and other liberal Russian ideologists of the early XX century believed that
the social-political and economic transformation of the obsolete social order could
be successful only under the cooperation of the government and ‘healthy’ (i.e.
liberal-minded) forces of society. However, the tsarist autocracy and bureaucracy
proved incapable of solving the tasks of modernization, which they took on in the
era of ‘great reforms’. If the ruling elite had taken seriously the policy of expanding
political and civil rights, first of the educated classes and then of the broad masses,
the elite would have been in a much more favorable position at the beginning of the
twentieth century, and in the years of the first Russian Revolution would not have
been literally ‘thrust to the wall’ by society, urgently forcing the tsarist regime to
make one concession after another and to implement the long overdue program of
social-political and economic transformations. In politics, the time factor plays a
crucial role; the steps that can save the situation today will not ensure the desired
result tomorrow and will just fuel public expectations pushing society to a tougher
confrontation with the authorities.
One of the key consequences of the civilizational split between the state and
society in prerevolutionary Russia (Struve preferred to call it the ‘apostasy’ of the
educated society from the state) was the emergence of a special group within the
educated classes: the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia combined the messianic
interpretation of the idea of serving the people with socialist ideas and ideals
borrowed from the West. ‘‘The Russian revolutionary intelligentsia as a special
cultural category is the product of the interaction of Western socialism with the
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322 T. Dmitriev
specific conditions of our cultural, economic and political development. Before the
reception of socialism in Russia, there was no intelligentsia, only an ‘educated class’
and its variations’’ (Struve 1991a [1909]: 165).
The main social-political factor determining the historical fate of the Russian
revolutionary intelligentsia was its sharply negative attitude, not only to the tsarist
autocracy, but also to the state. ‘‘In the Russian political development, the
intelligentsia is a very special factor: the historical significance of the intelligentsia
in Russia is determined by its attitude to the state in both its idea and its
embodiment. From this point of view, the intelligentsia as a political category
appeared in Russian political life only in the era of reforms and finally showed up in
the revolution of 1905–1907’’ (Struve 1991a [1909]: 153). Unlike the ‘educated
classes’ that ‘‘played and continue to play a prominent role in every state’’, ‘‘the
Russian intelligentsia chose another ideological form—apostasy, alienation from
the state and hostility to it’’ (Struve 1991a [1909]: 153).
Struve’s historical reflections on the causes of the Revolution are intertwined
with the elements of sociological analysis. Considering the social classes that
became the driving forces of the Revolution of 1917, Struve named not only the
revolutionary intelligentsia but also another social group—the peasantry, whose
significance for the Russian history cannot be overestimated. These two forces
played a crucial role in the irreversible collapse of the old social order and in the
Revolution’s radical character. Included among the key challenges for the Russian
transition to liberal democracy were the belated constitutional reform politically
limiting the tsarist autocracy and the delay in the abolition of serfdom, that came
about very late by the European standards—in 1861. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century, the tsarist autocracy was not ready to limit its powers
constitutionally and compensated for the refusal to grant political rights to the
nobility by preserving serfdom. ‘‘The Russian monarchy paid with serfdom for the
refusal to carry out a political reform. And the belated personal peasant
emancipation postponed the irreversible establishment of small landed property
and land management’’ (Struve 1991b [1918]: 465).
Such a policy had a regrettable outcome—double alienation of the educated
classes from the state, and the peasant masses from the civilized bases of private
property and legal consciousness. In 1918, Struve wrote:
Today it might be obvious to us that the Russian monarchy collapsed in 1917
having depended too long on the absence of political rights of the nobility and
civil disenfranchisement of the peasantry. The absence of political rights of
the nobility and other cultured classes gave birth to the political apostasy of
the intelligentsia. And this apostasy produced the spiritual poisons which,
having penetrated the peasantry, that until 1861 had lived outside the law and
without rights and developed neither an awareness of nor an instinct for
property, impelled the peasant masses clad in gray uniforms to overthrow the
state and economic culture. (Struve 1991b [1918]: 465–466).
What does Struve mean by ‘spiritual poisons’? He emphasized that
123
the attack [on the ‘old order’ in both forms—tsarist and bourgeois—in 1917]
was led in the name of the idea of socialism and communism against existing
property, and the idea of property altogether. Here the decisive factor was that
in virtue of the late development of Russian ideologies under the influence of
the West, in the Russian educated class, which socially was a peculiar variant
of the bourgeoisie, the prevailing point of view was socialist, while among the
masses of the people neither the habits nor the idea of property prevailed.
(Struve 1922: 32).
The Russian Revolution (as both Weber and Struve stressed already in
1905–1906) took place under the hegemony of two kinds of socialist and
communist ideas: the radical intelligentsia adhered to the Western ideas of
socialism, while the peasantry—to the levelling syndrome of agrarian communism.
It was this infernal explosive mixture of socialist ideas borrowed from the West and
egalitarian-communal ideas of the peasantry that proved to be deadly and eventually
destructive.
The combination of socialism among the educated classes and the absence of
any sense of property among the masses of the peasantry created that spiritual
atmosphere within which the Russian Revolution ran its course. The
institution of property was defenseless on two sides: the intelligentsia had
intellectually renounced it, and the masses of the people had not yet arrived at
it. This is the historical explanation of that lack of any conscious resistance to
the Russian Revolution’s onslaught upon property. As far as there did exist
elements of settled peasant property in pre-Revolution Russia—the creation of
which had been the aim of men like Stolypin and Krivoshin—these elements
were also swept away by the Revolution. The Revolution equally did away
with the property of the gentry and peasantry. (Struve 1922: 33).
At the same time Struve stressed that Russian history was determined not only by
the lack of developed feudal institutions and private peasant property. The
Revolution had deeper cultural and civilizational roots, including the lack of the
modernizing influence of the Reformation that deprived Russian society of the
rational organization of everyday life and the rational, reasonable, practical, and
projective perception of labor based on the idea of a methodical lifestyle. Thus, the
ideals and norms of modern practical rationality could not penetrate the depths of
everyday life patterns, which, among other things, led to the lack of a healthy sense
of private property, to the lack of the developed juridical consciousness among the
Russian peasantry, and to the peasant masses’ fascination with the ideas and moods
of agrarian communism.
The significance of the Reformation and of the Catholic reaction which is so
closely connected with it consists in this—that, with the help of religion and
the Church, the principles of a certain social morality and discipline deeply
penetrated the soul of the people. The Reformation marks the secularization of
Christian morality, its conversion into a discipline and practice of everyday
life—or, if you prefer, its ‘embourgeoisement’’’. However, ‘‘in Russia there
was no Reformation and there was no secularization of Christian morality, nor
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324 T. Dmitriev
was it ever converted into a method and discipline of everyday life, into a
bourgeois morality. In Russia there was religion and a religious sense, but
religion did not penetrate into everyday life as a principle of discipline.
(Struve 1922: 35, 36).12
Needless to say, Struve’s and Weber’s ideas coincide: Weber, too, regarded the
motivational prerequisites and foundations of methodical life to be among the
determining factors of rational industrial, capitalist development. Such practical and
ethical rationalism rooted in the religious ideas of protestant sects constituted the
basis for the formal-rational (instrumental) perception of the world as well as the
special concept of worldly (mundane) labor as a vocation for the believer. Thereby,
Weber’s liberal interpretation of the motivational prerequisites of capitalism and
liberal democracy was strikingly similar to the Struve’s liberal idea that the absence
in Russia of the kind of personality formed by the methodical behavior and
embodying bourgeois ideals of practical rationality, ascetic morality, and discipline
that became a main reason for the failure of pre-revolutionary modernization and for
the victory of the Bolshevik revolution. Such motivational prerequisites and the
methodical life based on them were not widespread in Russia (with the exception of
some religious sects like the Old Believers).
Both in the spiritual as well as the social and political evolution of the Russian
people there is a missing link, which for the evolution of the peoples of the
West is no less material, indeed, perhaps even more material, than the system
of feudalism and bondage and municipal institutions. Bourgeois morality and
bourgeois discipline did not have the roots in Russia out of which they grew in
West-European civilization, and from which also sprang socialism as a
movement of civilization. (Struve 1922: 36).13
That is what the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia could not and did not want
to understand, which made the role of the intelligentsia in the Revolution central for
Struve’s studies. He believed that anti-state activities of the revolutionary
intelligentsia and its political apostasy from the state were the main causes of the
collapse of statehood and the death of historical Russia. The revolutionary
intelligentsia was inspired by the socialist illusion and sought to spread it into the
depths of the people’s life, paying little attention to the real needs of the people it
had to serve in post-reform Russia. The outlook of the revolutionary intellectual was
a combination of moral irresponsibility and political shortsightedness. ‘‘The
irreligious apostasy from the state typical for the political outlook of the Russian
intelligentsia explains both its moral flippancy and political inefficiency’’ (Struve
1991a [1909]: 163). In addition to these qualities, unsuitable for practical politics,
the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia, unlike the educated classes of Western and
Central Europe, completely lacked a serious national self-consciousness. It is this
weakness of the national consciousness of the people and educated classed that
Struve considered to be the key cause of the radical intellectual circles’ adherence to
12
13
123
the socialist temptation and the main reason for the devastating events of 1917 that
destroyed the centuries-old tradition of Russian statehood and culture. ‘‘Russia was
ruined by the non-nationality of intelligentsia, the single and unique case in world
history when the national idea was consigned to oblivion by the brains of the
nation’’ (Struve 1999c [1919]: 272). Struve considered a healthy national self-
consciousness an essential prerequisite to overcoming the social crisis caused by the
Revolution.
However, the direct catalyst of the revolutionary explosion in 1917 was Russia’s
participation in the First World War requiring tremendous efforts on the part of state
and society alike, including calling up millions of peasants for military service. The
fate of statehood critically depended on the ‘support’ of the ‘armed people’ (or the
lack thereof). As Struve stressed,
the peculiarity of the Russian Revolution consisted in this: that its agent was
not simply the ‘people’, but the armed people. The war created the active force
of the Revolution. It was only through the war that such enormous masses of
people could actively engage in the Revolution. This circumstance defined the
force and scope of the Revolution. To comprehend this side of the question,
we must keep in mind that what we understand as the force and scope of such
movements as revolutions depends, in the last resort, not only on the force of
the attack, but on the relation of the attack to the resistance. (Struve 1922:
31–32).
In 1917, the forces of order (first the tsarist autocracy and after February 1917 the
bourgeoisie) turned out to be a relatively weak actor in the blind defense, while the
revolutionary forces managed to go on the offensive supported by the armed
soldiers and ideological hegemony of socialist ideas propagated by the revolution-
ary intelligentsia. The World War made the masses both at the front and in the
village exceedingly receptive to socialist and anti-state propaganda. ‘‘The
phenomenon of the Russian Revolution can be explained by the coincidence of
the distorted ideological upbringing of the Russian intelligentsia through most of the
19th century and the impact of the great war on the masses: the war pushed the
people into a situation that made them particularly susceptible to the demoralizing
message of intellectual ideas’’ (Struve 1991b [1918]: 461).
The struggle between the state and revolutionary intelligentsia in 1917 ended in
the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy and the collapse of the state. However, the
triumph of pre-revolutionary intelligentsia was short-lived. In the new Soviet
society, it was first declared a supporting actor due to its ‘social unreliability’ and
then destroyed as a social-professional group under the Stalin’s ‘cultural revolution’
(1928–1932). The pre-revolutionary intelligentsia was replaced by a new Soviet
intelligentsia consisting mainly of workers and peasants, performing primarily
administrative-managerial and engineering-technical functions, and completely
loyal to the Communist Party and Soviet government. The new Soviet intelligentsia
resembled the former pre-revolutionary intelligentsia in name only (Schlögel 2002:
160). That was the inglorious historical end of the revolutionary intelligentsia
struggle against the tsarist autocracy: in February 1917, the revolutionary
intelligentsia scored a ‘Pyrrhic victory’ over the autocracy, which eventually
123
326 T. Dmitriev
destroyed both historical Russia and the intelligentsia itself. No wonder that Leonid
Luks aptly named the history of the revolutionary intelligentsia in post-reform
Russia (1861–1917) ‘a chronicle of triumphant defeat’ (Luks 1993: 58).
Conclusion
Despite the differences in evaluations and interpretations of the Russian Revolution

of 1917 as well as Bolshevism, neither Weber nor Struve believed that the
Bolsheviks could hold on to state power. They considered the fall of the Bolshevik
regime just a matter of time. In 1922, following the end of the civil war, Struve
wrote: ‘‘Both the initial success of the Bolsheviks and the continued existence of
their power in conditions of unheard-of economic devastation, are a complete
departure from the usual scheme of the economic interpretation of history. The
communist power existing in Russia is completely devoid of any positive economic
foundation. It is an essentially political fact, which, if it rests economically on
anything, rests on a purely negative basis, on the impoverishment and penury of the
people, created by the government itself’’ (Struve 1922: 30–31).
Weber also considered the fall of Bolshevism to be predetermined. In November
1918, a year after the bolshevist coup d’état, he stressed: ‘‘Bolshevism is a military
dictatorship like any other, and it will collapse like any other’’ (Weber 1988d: 365).
Such a pessimistic (today we would say—unrealistic) assessment of the Bolsheviks’
ability to hold on to power puts in question the relevance of Weber’s and Struve’s
sociological-historical approach to the analysis of the Bolshevik revolution.
Considering Weber’s works, we should probably point to the fundamental
limitations of his theory of legitimate domination, which lacks an ideal type of
power typical for the political history of the twentieth century, i.e. modern tyranny
or revolutionary authority based on mass political mobilization, one-party control
over the apparatus of violence, and massive state propaganda.14 For his part, Struve
underestimated the potential of social engineering by modern tyrannical regimes
and their ability to create both a necessary social-institutional basis and a man of a
new (Soviet) type. Thus, in sociological terms, two outstanding thinkers underes-
timated the variability of the paths to the present and the possibility of ‘modernity
without a civil society’, i.e. deprived of or substantially limited in (basically
bourgeois) political and civil rights and freedoms.
The works of Weber and Struve are of a great importance not only for their ideas
and interpretations of the Russian Revolution of 1917, but also, and perhaps to a
greater degree, for bringing to light the issues they overlooked, did not focus on, or
14
In the 1960s, Weber’s former student and later famous jurist Loewenstein (1966: 62, 88) pointed this
out. Based on the comprehensive analysis of the political and social experience of the first half of the
twentieth century, Loewenstein came to the conclusion: ‘‘It seems, therefore, that Max Weber’s typology
of the patterns of rule needs to be expanded and complemented if it is to fit the contemporary experience.
However, since Weber dealt only with legitimate authority, his framework must be extended to include a
new category of illegitimate violence, since this is no less a type of rule than the legitimate patterns’’
(Loewenstein 1966: 90). Later a well-known researcher of German national-socialism and Italian fascism,
Stefan Breuer (Breuer 1992: 272), came to similar conclusions in his analysis of the political experience
of the twentieth century.
123
did not evaluate correctly. There is an obvious need to find an explanation for why
two outstanding social scientists and political thinkers of the twentieth century did
not provide convincing answers to the key questions arising out of the history of the
Russian Revolution; it would be an explanation that would shed new light on the
dramatic political experience of the long-suffering twentieth century.
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Stud East Eur Thought (2017) 69:305–328

Max Weber and Peter Struve on the Russian

Published online: 20 November 2017

Abstract The author conducts a comparative analysis of the Russian Revolution

Keywords Max Weber Peter Struve Russian Revolution Revolution

In November 2017, Russia will celebrate the centennial anniversary of the

& Timofey Dmitriev

Max Weber on the Russian Revolution of 1917

dictatorship capable of keeping soldiers in the trenches, the workers at their

and the moderate socialists (Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries) controlled

Military dictatorship not of generals, but of corporals

Max Weber’s assessment of Bolshevism

Weber conducted an analysis of the social base of Bolshevism and wrote a

intelligentsia as a ‘quasi-religious’ movement of intellectuals united by a ‘common

‘creative’ nature of the human mind—the spirit ‘come to itself’. This

Western-style industrial capitalism (in a narrow sense) and the multifaceted

The Russian Revolution as a spiritual and historical-sociological problem

Peter Struve’s conception

Struve’s historical-sociological interpretation of the Russian Revolution has

Despite the differences in evaluations and interpretations of the Russian Revolution

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