The German reception towards the Russian revolution of 1905

Author(s)

Luiz Enrique Vieira de Souza

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2012-11-27

Examining board members

Ricardo Musse; Gabriel Cohn; Sérgio Ricardo da Mata; Lincoln Ferreira Secco; Gabriel Eduardo Vitullo

• Advisor: Ricardo Musse

Abstract

The statements presented in the following pages will focus the reaction of some representative members of the German intelligentsia towards the Russian revolution of 1905. Due to its achievements in the cultural field, Russia already exercised a sort of magnectical attraction upon the German cultural stratum, even before it became the scenery of revolutionary events of central importance for the political destiny of the European continent. Neverthless, those conflicts that ensued the bloody Sunday also roused concerns about the possible reflexes of this revolutionary proccess in their own political context. This assertion will be corroborated by the critical analysis of the writings that some among the most prominent intellectual personalities in Wilhelminian Germany devoted to the disputes in the empire of the tsar. More specifically, I intend to consider Max Weber\'s articles which were based on a peculiar combination of German nacionalism and the liberal tradition in relation to the judgments of the different social democratic tendencies envolved in the debate over the course of the major party within the Second International. Thus, I will make an attempt to shed some light on how the controversies between Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg over the feasibility of the political mass strike methods in Germany were infused with particular interpretations concerning the distance between the class struggle conditions in the Kaiserreich and the peculiarities which characterized that social tissue where the proletariat emerged for the first time as protagonist and hegemonical force of revolutionary transformations. In short, it will be shown that these authors\' formulations about the Russian revolution were pervaded by underlying reflections that implicitly or explicitly referred to the social and political tensions that accompanied the modernization proccess in Germany. Metaphorically, I will support the proposition that Russia appeared to them as a convex mirror, where the image of Germany would have been reflected, even though in a distorted manner. (AU)