The Press: The Irony of History

In large part, Soviet Russia is a monument to Karl Marx. It was Marx’s Communist Manifesto, written with Frederick Engels in 1848, that became the blueprint for the Russian Revolution of 1917, and Marxist doctrine still guides Russia today. From Lenin to Khrushchev, Russia’s Communist leaders have placed the full-bearded German Jew high on the honor roll of their country’s heroes. But no man is less deserving of that dubious distinction—an irony of history recalled this week with publication of a slender book, Marx vs. Russia (Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.; 198 pp.; $3.50).

The book is an anthology of columns that Marx wrote for the New York daily Tribune (later to become the Herald Tribune) more than a century ago. The time was the ill-fated Crimean War of 1853-56, in which a British-French expeditionary force, after many a blunder, frustrated Czarist Russia’s plans to swallow the Turkish Empire. Correspondent Marx, then an impoverished freelance journalist scribbling in a London slum, looked beyond the surface meaning of the war, beyond the imperious figure of the Czar, and saw a “barbarous” power embarked on a campaign of world conquest.

“Thine Is the World!” “There is a facetious story,” he wrote in one dispatch to Tribune readers, “of two naturalists who were examining a bear; the one who had never seen such an animal before inquired whether that animal dropped its cubs alive or laid eggs; to which the other, who was better informed, replied: ‘That animal is capable of anything.’ ”

No one understood that bear better than Marx, who filled his Tribune articles with historical evidence of the insatiable Russian appetite for power. “More than eight centuries ago,” wrote Correspondent Marx, “Sviataslaff, the yet Pagan Grand Duke of Russia, declared in an assembly of his Boyards [noblemen] that ‘not only Bulgaria, but the Greek Empire in Europe, together with Bohemia and Hungary, ought to undergo the rule of Russia.’ ” Marx also quoted Derzhavin, poet laureate to Russian Empress Catherine II (1729-96): “Of what use are allies to thee, O Russian? Stride forth, and thine is the whole world!”

“Bones to Dog.” As the Crimean conflict approached, the Tribune’s London correspondent filed warning after warning to the timorous West. Marx pleaded that Russia’s “ambitious, coolheaded, unprincipled, egotistical and insinuating” diplomats, piously professing peace even as Russian armies marched into Turkey, were not to be believed: “Russia only throws out so many notes to the Western diplomats, like bones to dogs, in order to set them at an innocent amusement, while she reaps the advantage of further gaining time.” Russian propaganda, Marx argued, should be recognized for what it was: “Confidential hints are being communicated to every newspaper that the Russian troops are marching to the frontier . . . These, and a lot of similar reports, are nothing but so many ridiculous attempts on the part of the Russian agents to strike a wholesome terror into the Western world.”

But the terror worked, and Marx railed against the fears of the West. “Counting on the cowardice and apprehensions of the Western Powers,” he wrote in an article about Czar Nicholas I, “he bullies Europe, and pushes his demands as far as possible . . . If, at the outset, [England and France] had proved that bluster and swagger could not impose on them, the Autocrat would have for them a very different feeling from that contempt which must now animate his bosom.”

No One Listening. As Europe drifted toward a confrontation with Russia, Karl Marx, the obscure revolutionary, the author of a tract condemning his society to death in a revolt of the working class, never lost hope that free men could yet win the day. “With free institutions, unfettered industry, and emancipated thought, the people of the West will rise again to power and unity of purpose, while the Russian Colossus itself will be shattered by the progress of the masses and the explosive force of ideas.”

Unfortunately, no one seemed to be listening. The world rolled toward that inexorable collision between East and West that Karl Marx not only foresaw but tried to prevent. He died in London in 1883. And the revolution that he had hoped to ignite in Germany with his Manifesto flamed instead in the very country whose dreams of world conquest he feared the most.