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1881 Letters of Vera Zasulich and Karl Marx

This set of documents concerning Marx’s exchange of letters with Vera Zasulich in February/March 1881, and first published in Russia in 1924 in Arkhiv K. Marksa i. F. Engel’sa, Volume 1, represents a discovery, the profound intellectual significance of which has not yet been fully acknowledged. Their lasting importance lies as much in the uncovering of the ‘kitchen’ of thought of a theorist whose impact has been paramount as in the essence of the topic tackled – the problems of social transition in the societies which our generation has misnamed ‘developing.’ The text of Zasulich holds some particular relevance of its own. Her initial letter bears testimony to Marx’s influence upon the radical intelligentsia as far as the Russian verge of Europe. It also shows how much the question she posed and Marx answered was not only that of the Russian peasants but also, much more broadly, of socialists facing non-proletarians and pre-capitalist social structures in a world in which capitalism had already made its powerful appearance. Both the Marx/Zasulich letters and Marx’s own drafts were translated from the French original in Marx-Engels Archiv, Frankfurt, 1925, Volume 1, pp. 316-42, by Patrick Camiller who was assisted at the stage of verification by Perry Anderson, Derek Sayer and Teodor Shanin. The division into text and page footnotes follows the one adopted in the first 1925 publication. The chapter notes are by myself. The order of presentation in which the ‘Second Draft’ appears before the ‘First Draft’ is explained in Note 1 below.