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LEON TROTSKY
medieval and modern history. The personality of the burgher, bursting
the shell of feudalism, turned against the everyday automatism of the
Catholic Church; and this personality strove to establish a more intimate
relation between itself and God. This was of colossal importance for the
revolution of the spirit and for the fOlmation of a new type of individual
- and all that took place at the beginning of the sixteenth century!
What can our history show that can in any way be compared with the
Reformation? Surely not poor Nikon.
How striking is the difference between cultural types when per–
ceived on the basis of urban history! The medieval European town was
the stone cradle of the third estate. It was there that every new epoch
was prepared. In the crafts, guilds, municipalities, the universities with
their assemblies, elections, processions and disputes - in all those forms
the precious habits of self-government were crystallized. Among them
the bourgeois personality expanded; to be sure, it was a bourgeois per–
sonality, but its face was that of a human being, not a snout that every
policeman was at liberty to punch. When the third estate felt cramped
in the old corporations, it had simply to transform the already existing
commercial and personal relationships into the state and nation at
large. And how about our Russian cities? Let us leave aside the question
of "medieval" times and consider the cities in the era preceding Peter
the Great. These were not centers of commerce and artisanship but no
more than military and aristocratic excrescences on the body of the
Russian countryside. Their role was parasitic. They contained land–
lords, menials, soldiers and bureaucrats. . . . The bureaucratic mas–
querade that often took place in various parts of our land neither
covered nor concealed our social poverty. During Peter's reign workshops
were imposed by police measures, but in the long run handicraft culture
failed to flourish under the sponsorship of the police. The poverty of
our bourgeois-democratic traditions was thus rooted in the character
of our precapitalist cities. Such poverty was simply an extension of our
primitive class traditions.
Our Slavophiles, idealising meekness and humility as the best attri–
butes of the Slav soul, set out to preserve this lack of social personality,
this slavery of the spirit impotent to rise above the herd instinct. As for
the populists, they wanted to make our primitive economic system the
basis for social miracles. And finally our newly-constituted subjectivists,
crawling on their bellies before the same social and political poverty, are
perverting history into an apotheosis of the intelligentsia.
Since the eighteenth century, and even earlier, our entire history
has unfolded under the growing pressure of the West. The two groupings
