Rubel Claims Marx Expected Czarist Russia Would Be Upset by Bourgeois, Not Communists

Although Marx and Engels foresaw imminent revolution in czarist Russia, they believed it would be not communist, but bourgeois, Maximilien Rubel declared yesterday in his final lecture on Marxism.

In 1877 Marx observed Russia on the verge of an "unfortunate submission to capitalism," Rubel said. He believed that Russia's economic backwardness would doom any program aiming at an immediate socialist revolution.

It was only in 1868, at the age of 50, that Marx became sympathetic to the revolutionary movement which he perceived developing from the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861. Czarist influence in 1843 had led to the suppression of Marx's political journal by the Prussian government, Rubel noted, and thus had provoked Marx's long-standing "anti-Russian obsession."

On account of his denunciation of Russia, Rubel said, Marx was always surprised at the popularity of his writing in Russia, while "embittered by his lack of reputation in the West." With the news that Russians would publish the first translations of Capital, Marx became at first sympathetic, finally "deeply concerned with the social future of Russia."