Liu Xun: A Study on the History of the Dissemination of Marx's "Capital" in Tsarist Russia, Soviet Russia, the Soviet Union, and Russia
Karl Marx’s Capital has been disseminated in Tsarist Russia, Soviet Russia, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation for over 150 years. Reviewing this history is of great significance for understanding the dissemination landscape of Marxism in the Russian-speaking world and indeed globally. As Lyudmila Vasina, the current head of the Moscow editorial group for MEGA2 [1], stated: "Without the history of the profound influence of Marx's ideas in Russia, and without the academic research organizations established during the Soviet period to publish the literary heritage of Marx and Engels, Marx and Engels would not be so world-renowned and highly esteemed."
I. The Dissemination of Capital in Russia Before 1917 and its Influence on the Choice of Russia’s Path of Social Development
Prior to 1872, the German edition of Volume I of Marx’s Capital had already attracted the attention of Russian intellectuals. In 1872, the Russian translation of Volume I of Capital was officially published in Russia. The dissemination of this Marxist classic in Russia elicited a strong response from the Russian people and exerted an important influence on the choice of Russia's path of social development.
(i) The ideological foundation for the dissemination of Capital in Russia before 1917
Compared with other European countries, the study of political economy in Russia started relatively late. In 1804, Moscow University welcomed its first professor of political economy—the German Christian Schlözer. During his tenure (1804–1825), Schlözer compiled the first political economy textbook for the Russian academic community. During the same period, Heinrich Storch, the author of another important Russian political economy textbook, was also German. Both scholars received higher education in British classical political economy in Germany. Their teaching work, and that of their successors, laid the ideological foundation for the smooth entry of Marx's theory into Russia. As early as the second half of the 19th century, Alexander Manuilov, a professor of economics at Moscow University, pointed out that the most authoritative and popular thinkers in Russia were Marx and Ricardo; Russian political economy courses were mostly built on the foundations of the thoughts of these two economists, and the Ricardo-Marx system was a characteristic of Russian economic thought at the time.
Against this background, some political economists consciously introduced Marx's Capital to Russia. For example, Nikolai Sieber, a professor of political economy at Kiev University, regarded Marx's theories of value, money, and capital as the inevitable result of the development of Smith's and Ricardo's doctrines in his master's thesis, Ricardo’s Theory of Value and Capital (1871). This conclusion was mentioned and approved by Marx in the postscript to the second edition of Volume I of Capital in 1873. Sieber popularized Capital in Russia even earlier than Plekhanov, the first Russian Marxist. Russian economists represented by him made important contributions to the dissemination of Marxism in Russia. As the 2014 edition of the Russian Philosophical Encyclopedia states: "In the Russia of the 1870s and 1880s, Sieber popularized Marx's socio-economic doctrines most completely and objectively, playing an important role in its legal dissemination in academic and journalistic publications."
(ii) Publication and distribution of Capital in Russia before 1917
Contemporary scholar Vincent Barnett pointed out: "In the 1870s, two landmark events occurred in the Russian economic thought community that had a profound impact on the next 30 years: the Marginal Revolution in the West and the publication of the Russian translation of Capital in 1872." By comparison, the latter was even more of a sensation. As soon as the Russian translation of Volume I of Capital was released in St. Petersburg on April 8, 1872, the Russian people immediately showed great enthusiasm: the total circulation of this edition was 3,000 copies, and more than 900 copies were sold in less than one and a half months; it was announced as sold out within four months. According to incomplete statistics, "about 170 publications in Russia responded to the Russian translation of Volume I of Capital in the 1870s." In a letter to Sorge in 1880, Marx mentioned that Capital in Russia "was read more and appreciated more highly than anywhere else."
Compared with the "dismal sales" of the German edition of Volume I of Capital when it was released in Germany, the dissemination of the Russian translation of Volume I in Russia was clearly very smooth. Even though it encountered Russian official control and bans in the 1880s and 1890s, the dissemination process of Capital in Russia was not greatly affected. According to Lenin's research, before the October Revolution of 1917, five Russian editions of Volume I of Capital were publicly distributed in Russia: the 1872 and 1898 editions translated by Nikolai Danielson; the 1899 and 1905 editions translated by Evgenia Gurvich and Lev Zak and revised by Peter Struve; and the 1909 edition translated by Vladimir Bazarov and Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov. Before the October Revolution, in addition to the Russian translation of Volume I, Russia also released two Russian editions of Volumes II and III: the translation by Danielson (Volume II in 1885, Volume III in 1896) and the translation jointly completed by Bazarov and Skvortsov-Stepanov (1907–1909). Furthermore, before the October Revolution, some publications related to Capital were also published in Russia. For example, there were three versions of the Russian translation of Karl Kautsky's edition of Theories of Surplus Value: the 1906 St. Petersburg edition revised by Plekhanov, the 1906 Kiev edition revised by Vladimir Zheleznov, and the 1907 Kiev edition revised by Pavel Tuchapsky.
(iii) The dissemination of Capital in Russia and the choice of Russia’s path of social development
From the perspective of revolutionary practice, the dissemination of Capital in Russia was also successful, which to some extent should be attributed to the surging revolutionary liberation movement after the abolition of serfdom in 1861. In the mid-19th century, an extremely active revolutionary force emerged in Russia—the Narodniks [2]. The early dissemination of Capital in Russia had deep historical roots in the Narodnik movement because the translation and publication of the first Russian edition were mainly organized and completed by Narodnik intellectuals. However, the Narodniks organized the translation and introduction of Capital in Russia not because they agreed with the Marxist proposal for a proletarian revolution, but because the critique of feudal autocracy in Capital aligned with their opposition to Tsarist autocracy. The Narodniks believed that the "historical necessity" of social development explained in Capital applied to advanced Western European countries rather than backward Russia; Russia could fully utilize its own "obshchina" [3] advantages to mobilize the peasantry and take a path toward "communal socialism" that bypassed capitalism. For this reason, the release of the 1872 Russian translation of Volume I sparked theoretical debates between the Narodniks and the liberals (who advocated for Russia to take the capitalist path) between 1877 and 1879. This theoretical debate sparked strong interest among Russian socialists. Lenin summarized the focus of Russian socialists on Capital as "the fate of capitalism in Russia," a powerful and enduring theme that lasted from the introduction of Capital into Russia until the October Revolution.
After the 1880s, the Narodniks abandoned their early radical revolutionary claims but still believed that Russian capitalism had developed accidentally and therefore had no future and was already in decline. They denied the fact that Russian capitalism had already developed and opposed its continued development in Russia. During the same period, Plekhanov and the "Emancipation of Labour" group [4]—the first Russian Marxist organization he established—disagreed with the Narodnik view. They persisted in promoting the fundamental viewpoints of Capital within the workers' movement to eliminate the erroneous influence of the Narodniks in the dissemination of the work. In his book The Development of the Monist View of History (1885), Plekhanov, from the perspective of Marxist philosophy, categorized the aforementioned views held by Narodniks (represented by Nikolai Mikhailovsky) as subjectivist theoretical errors and asserted: "There is no ground for hope that Russia will soon leave the path of capitalist development on which it entered after 1861."
However, Plekhanov did not completely refute the Narodnik views, because in essence, his philosophical arguments were too general and abstract. For Russian Marxists at that time, there was a greater need for a "Russian Capital" that possessed objective data and could provide theoretical support for revolutionary practice. From 1897 to 1899, while in exile, Lenin used the first-hand domestic socio-economic data he had collected during his previous imprisonment in St. Petersburg to complete his political economy work The Development of Capitalism in Russia. From the perspective of Marxist political economy, he systematically analyzed Russia's economic and social system and class structure. In this work, Lenin specifically targeted the foundation of all Narodnik illusions—the "obshchina." Combining the theory of social development elucidated in Capital with the reality of Russian agricultural development, he pointed out that "the structure of economic relations in the 'obshchina' countryside does not constitute a special structure ('people's production,' etc.), but an ordinary petty-bourgeois structure." He argued that the capitalist mode of production had been fully established in both urban and rural Russia, and that the strength of the Russian proletariat was growing steadily. Based on this judgment, Lenin provided a "preliminary answer" to the path of Russian social development in The Development of Capitalism in Russia.
At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, the major capitalist countries entered the stage of imperialism. While closely following imperialism as a "new stage" in the process of capitalist development, Lenin conducted an in-depth and systematic study of the philosophical basis of Capital—dialectics. This research work by Lenin had a profound purpose. As the Soviet philosopher Mark Rozental stated, this was "not accidental." Through his brilliant interpretation of the "soul" of Capital—dialectics—in his Philosophical Notebooks from 1895 to 1916, Lenin completed his scientific explanation of imperialism in 1916: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Starting from the initial category of "monopoly" in imperialism (just as Marx's Capital starts from the initial category of "value"), this book continued the study of the laws of capitalist development found in Capital, pointing out that imperialism is the highest and final stage of capitalism and the eve of the proletarian revolution. On this basis, Lenin provided the "final answer" to the focal question of the early dissemination of Capital in Russia—the choice of the path of social development: Russia, as the weakest link in the chain of imperialism, possessed the conditions to break out in a proletarian revolution and move toward socialism ahead of developed countries. This also laid a solid theoretical foundation for the Russian October Revolution of 1917.
II. The Dissemination of Capital in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union from 1917 to the mid-1950s
After the October Revolution in 1917, Soviet power was established throughout Russia. From this point on, the dissemination of Capital—the "Bible of the working class"—in Soviet Russia and subsequently the Soviet Union received the support of the new regime. From 1917 to the mid-1950s, the dissemination of Capital achieved many valuable results, including the successive editing and distribution of various publications related to Capital, and the collection, editing, and publication of precious manuscripts of Capital. However, with the formation of the Soviet Marxist "textbook system," abnormal phenomena appeared in the research and interpretation of Capital in the Soviet Union.
(i) Achievements in the dissemination of Capital in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union from 1917 to the mid-1950s
After the October Revolution, the dissemination of Marxism in Russia entered a brand-new period. Under the care of Lenin, David Riazanov took the lead in establishing the world's first Marxist museum. Building upon this, he created a research institution for the collection, organization, editing, and publication of the literary heritage of Marx and Engels, which later became known as the Marx-Engels Institute [5]. At its founding, the Institute possessed only eight original letters written by Marx to Ruge. After several years of effort, the Institute collected a large number of original documents and full photocopies from the literary heritage of Marx and Engels. These precious documentary materials constituted the textual basis for the major project of editing and publishing the works of Marx and Engels in the Soviet Union. Specifically, the Institute gathered original and photocopied textual materials related to Capital, including not only the texts officially published during the lifetimes or after the deaths of Marx and Engels, but also their related drafts, manuscripts, notes, correspondence, and the vast amount of reference material cited by Marx during the writing of Capital. Through the collection, organization, and identification of these original textual documents, the dissemination of Capital in Soviet Russia, and the Soviet Union thereafter, was elevated to a brand-new level overall.
During this period, various publications related to Capital were released in the Soviet Union, most notably the multiple manuscripts and documents related to Capital unearthed by MEGA1 [6]. According to the publication plan announced by Riazanov in 1927, Part II of MEGA1, "Capital and its Preparatory Materials," was to consist of "no less than 13 volumes"; however, this plan was never completed. In November 1931, the Marx-Engels Institute merged with the Lenin Institute to form the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute. Under the directorship of Vladimir Adoratsky, MEGA1 released several volumes of Marx's early writings related to Capital that had already been prepared during Riazanov’s tenure. In 1932, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 was published in MEGA1, Part I, Volume 3, and The German Ideology was published in MEGA1, Part I, Volume 5. It is worth mentioning that these two works sparked a wave of academic research in Western academia during the 1950s and 1960s regarding the "Young Marx" and the "discovery of another Marx." However, due to the shift in the Institute's focus after 1931, the editing and publication of textual materials related to Capital in MEGA1 were marginalized. After 1935, the publication of MEGA1 almost reached a standstill, and Part II, "Capital and its Preparatory Materials," did not complete its publication plan. Nevertheless, the experts involved in MEGA1 did not cease their work in identifying, organizing, and editing "Capital and its Preparatory Materials." The final publication resulting from this work was the Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Draft)—that is, the Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858 (Book 1, 1939; Book 2, 1941)—edited by Pavel Veller and released as informal volumes. This work opened a door for people to reveal the secrets of the formation of Capital and to further interpret Capital on this basis.
In addition to implementing the work of editing and publishing critical texts primarily for the academic community, the Soviet regime also attached great importance to the popularization of the core viewpoints of Capital among the proletariat. Anatoly Lunacharsky, then People's Commissar for Education, criticized the erroneous view existing among some comrades within the Party in 1921 that "proletarians do not need to study Capital." He wrote: "Only a fool would say, 'Marx need not have written Capital. It is a difficult book; it is rare for a proletarian to be able to read it through; it would have been better to focus exclusively on popularization work.' The differences in cultural cultivation among the Russian proletariat are quite large; besides engaging in the simplest labor, they can and need to engage in work of a higher degree of skill." Therefore, it was also extremely necessary to provide Russian translations that served political propaganda and met the reading needs of the masses. After the founding of Soviet Russia, the authorities continuously revised, improved, and distributed the Skvortsov-Stepanov version of the Russian translation of Capital, making it the most popular Russian translation of Capital in Soviet Russia and the subsequent Soviet Union. At the same time, the core viewpoints of Capital became the primary teaching content for political economy majors in Soviet institutions of higher education, achieving wide popularization among several generations of intellectuals. Furthermore, the encyclopedia series compiled during the Soviet period—such as the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the Small Soviet Encyclopedia, and the Soviet Encyclopedic Dictionary—all contained a large number of entries related to Capital, providing important reference tools for the academic study and mass reading of the work. Additionally, Soviet academia introduced popular readings of Capital for general readers, such as Lev Leontiev’s Guide to Capital, promoting the mass reading and wide dissemination of the work.
(2) Abnormal phenomena in the research and interpretation of Capital in the Soviet Union from the 1930s to the mid-1950s
Lenin’s research on Capital represented the highest level of Russian Marxism at the beginning of the 20th century. He gained profound insight into the dialectical relationship between Hegelian philosophy and Marx’s Capital, noting: "It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic." "In Capital, the logic, dialectics, and theory of knowledge [not three words: they are one and the same] of materialism are applied to one science, this materialism having taken everything valuable in Hegel and developed it." Regrettably, these important views of Lenin were not well inherited. During the Stalin period, the Soviet authorities' understanding of Marxism and Capital biased toward the unidirectional dimension of its utility for revolution and national construction, while weakening its richer theoretical connotations (especially dialectics). This practice had a negative impact on the dissemination of Capital in the Soviet Union. This was reinforced particularly by the formation of the Soviet Marxist "textbook system" in the 1930s. From the 1930s to the mid-1950s, influenced by the "textbook system," the research and interpretation of Capital tended toward ossification, and several abnormal phenomena emerged.
First, during this period, innovative research on Capital by Soviet scholars suffered setbacks. In 1932, after the publication in the Soviet Union of the two early documents related to Capital—the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology—Soviet scholars all attempted to interpret them according to Lenin’s understanding within the broad framework of the transition from idealism to materialism and from revolutionary democracy to communism. However, these efforts not only failed to receive support but were instead met with criticism. For example, in the 1930s, Isaak Rubin’s theoretical research on the form of value was defined as "idealism" due to its "Hegelianization"; Nikolai Kondratiev, who proposed the theory of long waves in capitalist economic crises, was also criticized for his academic views advocating the development of Russian capitalism. In 1946, certain views in Yevgeni Varga’s Changes in the Economy of Capitalism Resulting from the Second World War were severely criticized because they contradicted Stalin’s theory of the general crisis of capitalism.
Second, during this period, there were elements of fabrication in the research and interpretation of Capital in the Soviet Union. Starting from 1933, in response to the many "defects" existing in the popular edition of Capital edited by Kautsky and released by the Social Democratic Party of Germany in the 1920s, the Soviet Union began to release the Moscow popular edition of Capital. The Soviet side accused the Kautsky edition of intentionally creating an opposition between Marx and Engels or Lenin, calling it a "forgery by German Social Democrats" and a "phantom trick of the bourgeoisie." The prefaces and textual annotations of the Moscow popular edition of Capital, compiled under Adoratsky, cited relevant documents by Lenin and Stalin to reflect the consistency between Marxism, Leninism, and Stalinism. Furthermore, Volume 3 of Capital included two documents not found in the Kautsky edition—Engels’s "The Law of Value and Rate of Profit" and "The Stock Exchange."
Third, during this period, there was a tendency toward the vulgarization and dogmatization of the research and interpretation of Capital in the Soviet Union. According to Lenin’s division, Marxism consists of Marxist philosophy, political economy, and scientific socialism. These three parts run through Capital, making it an inseparable whole. However, because the core viewpoints of Capital were compiled into the Soviet Textbook of Political Economy (1954), the philosophical and scientific socialist components of Capital were discarded, leaving only the political economy portion. This objectively caused a one-sided interpretation of Capital. Additionally, the Soviet Textbook of Political Economy expanded the object of study of political economy to "political economy in the broad sense," which included socialist political economy. Structurally, it was divided into three sections: pre-capitalist modes of production, the capitalist mode of production, and the socialist mode of production. However, its logic did not, like Marx’s Capital, proceed from the "cell" of the social economy and ascend to the revelation of the historical laws governing the development of the entire social economy; thus, it lost the holistic characteristics of Marx’s Capital.
Broadly speaking, after the 1930s, the objective state of research and interpretation of Capital in the Soviet Union was characterized internally by the constraints of the Soviet Marxist "textbook system" and externally by the shift of the center of gravity for innovative interpretations of Capital due to the rise of Western Marxism. Despite the emergence of some abnormal phenomena, the research work on Capital in the Soviet Union during this period remained significant, and research on Capital in all countries benefited from it.
- The dissemination of Capital in the Soviet Union from the mid-1950s to 1991
From the mid-1950s to 1991, the Soviet Union edited and published the second Russian edition of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels and, in cooperation with the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, launched the editing and publication project for the new historical-critical edition of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels, namely MEGA2. Based on this, a series of philological achievements regarding Capital and its manuscripts were attained. During the same period, Soviet scholars achieved many innovative results in the two fields of the history of the formation of Capital and its methodology.
(1) Philological achievements based on the second Russian edition of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels and MEGA2
Beginning in 1955, the Soviet Union launched the editing and publication of the second Russian edition of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels. This version is the most complete in content and most widely distributed edition of the collected works of Marx and Engels globally to date. Volumes 46–50 of the second part and the supplementary volumes of this edition of the collected works include the first three volumes of Capital, the Theories of Surplus Value, and the main parts of the "three major manuscripts" written by Marx for Capital. Based on the second Russian edition of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels, various versions—including the German, English, Bulgarian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Czech, Hungarian, and the first Chinese edition of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels—were successively edited and published.
Furthermore, with the launch of the second Russian edition of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels, some Soviet specialists proposed issuing a Historical-Critical Edition (MEGA2) to accompany it, following the publishing tradition of the first Russian edition. In the 1960s, the Soviet Union reached an agreement with the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) to cooperate on the editing and publication of MEGA2. Within this framework, Capital and its manuscripts were primarily included in Section II, titled "Capital and Preparatory Materials." Through the joint efforts of Soviet and East German scholars, a total of eight volumes of Section II were released by 1990. In 1990, the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), together with the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Germany, and the Karl Marx House Museum and Research Center in Trier, established the International Marx-Engels Foundation (IMES). This ensured the ultimate continuation of the MEGA2 editing and publishing project, allowing the work on Capital and its manuscripts to keep advancing.
Alongside text editing and publication, Soviet scholars achieved significant results in the philological study of Capital and its manuscripts. In fact, ever since Ryazanov discovered important manuscripts and documents related to Capital, Soviet scholars had been continuously engaged in identification, collation, editing, and publication. Building on this foundation from the mid-1950s onward, Soviet scholars such as Vitaly Vygodsky, Georgi Bagaturiya, Nikolai Lapin, and Teodor Oizerman conducted deep and meticulous textual research [9] into the arrangement of editions, logical structure, and chronology of these documents. They produced many classic philological findings. For instance, Bagaturiya’s research on the logical relationship between the three notebooks of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; Lapin’s "two-stage theory" regarding the composition stages of the 1844 Manuscripts and his study of the writing sequence of the "three sources of income" in Notebook I; and the research by Vygodsky and Inna Osobova on the chronology of the Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858 have all gained universal recognition in the international Marxist academic community.
Beyond internal dissemination, the Soviet Union performed a vast amount of work for the global dissemination of Capital. Especially after the mid-1950s, the Soviet Foreign Languages Publishing House provided various language editions of Capital to many countries and regions: Chinese (1929, unfinished), German (1932–1934), English (1954–1986), Finnish (1957–1980), French (1965–1986), Hindi (1965–1988), Italian (1980), Vietnamese (1984–1988), Arabic (1985–1990), Bengali (1988–1989), and Spanish (Volume 1, 1990). Including these foreign language translations, from 1917 to 1991, the Soviet Union published approximately 10 million copies of Capital in 25 national and international languages.
(2) Research Findings on the Formative History and Methodology of Capital
After the mid-1950s, driven by the dual force of a relatively open domestic academic environment and the wave of "Young Marx" studies initiated by Western Marxists, Soviet academia began to emphasize research on the "Young Marx" problem and early documents related to Capital. Nikolai Lapin’s book The Young Marx (1968) was a highly influential Soviet scholarly achievement in this field. As early as the mid-1950s, Soviet scholars like David Rosenberg, Lev Leontiev, and Viktor Adoratsky had begun studying the formative history of Capital. However, because Soviet academia at the time prioritized the "mature Marx" while neglecting the "young Marx," they failed to realize the importance of determining the developmental process of Marx’s political economy prior to 1848. Confronting the "Young Marx" directly prompted scholars like Alexander Malysh, Vygodsky, and Bagaturiya to lift the historical shroud from this issue, leading to a series of systematic studies on the formation of Capital in the late 1950s. Among these, the work of Vygodsky, a member of the MEGA2 editorial committee, was particularly representative. He was the first to explicitly propose scientific criteria for demarcating the theoretical maturity of Marx’s political economy, advocating that Marx’s attitude toward classical bourgeois political economy serve as the standard. Based on this, he periodized the formative history of key theories in Capital—such as value, money, and methodology—categorizing the pre-1848 period as the "pre-history" of Capital. He divided the creative process of Capital into three periods corresponding to three sets of manuscripts: the 1857–1858 Manuscripts, the 1861–1863 Manuscripts, and the 1863–1865 Manuscripts, systematically revealing the formation of Capital from the 1840s to the 1860s.
Simultaneously, Soviet intellectual circles underwent an "epistemological turn." During this movement, a group of Soviet scholars represented by Evald Ilyenkov attempted to "correct" the rigid interpretation of Capital found in the "textbook system" [10] by returning to the long-buried Leninist tradition—interpreting Capital through the unity of dialectics, epistemology, and logic. After the death of Stalin, the interest of Soviet scholars in the methodological problems of Capital grew markedly. A collection of works emerged studying the methods of the abstract and the concrete, the logical and the historical, analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, and the particular and the general. However, the focus remained fixed on the core method of Capital: the method of ascending from the abstract to the concrete. Mark Rozental’s Problems of Dialectics in Marx's "Capital" (1955) argued that the "entire structure and every part of Capital is built on the method of ascending from the simple to the complex and from the abstract to the concrete." While the classical school of political economy also employed this method, they failed to grasp the true relationship between the abstract and the concrete and neglected "mediating links." In Marx’s Capital, categories such as "value," "surplus value," "profit," "average profit," "price of production," and "ground rent" serve precisely as these mutually conditioning "mediating links." Ilyenkov’s The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx's "Capital" (1960) placed special emphasis on the "starting point" of this ascent. He pointed out that the abstraction serving as the starting point is a "concrete abstraction" within dialectics, rather than a "formal abstraction" found in positivism. Like the starting points in natural sciences—such as "life in general" or "chemical elements"—the starting point of "value in general" in Capital is concrete; only thus could it be selected as the "starting point" for investigating modern capitalist society.
From the mid-1950s onward, with state support, Soviet academia continued to advance editing and publishing work related to Capital, ensuring that research in the post-Stalin era generally presented a more robust posture than during the Stalinist period.
IV. The Dissemination of Capital in Russia after 1991
In the initial years following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Capital was temporarily marginalized, misunderstood, and disparaged in Russia due to the new leadership’s strategy of "leaning completely toward the West." As time passed, starting in the mid-1990s, Russian intellectual circles began to view Capital again in an objective and rational manner. Entering the new century, neoliberal economics proved unable to explain the profound qualitative changes occurring in modern capitalist society or to warn of its destructive consequences. Since the outbreak of the 2008 global financial crisis, interest in Capital across various sectors in Russia has increased significantly. Left-wing publishers such as Eksmo, AST, and Bombora have released multiple new editions. Notably, the 2011 edition of Capital published by Eksmo marked the sales peak of its "Anthology of Economic Thought" series, which had been released continuously since 2007. In April 2012, the first International Congress of Political Economy, initiated by the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Moscow University of Finance and Law, was held, solemnly announcing the "return of political economy." It can be said that the dissemination of Capital in Russia is overall showing a trend of revival.
(1) Russia's Contribution to the Editing of Capital and its Manuscripts in MEGA2
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a Moscow editorial group—led by Bagaturiya and including Lyudmila Vasina, Elena Arzanova, Galina Golovina, and Valerij Fomichev—took over the relevant work from the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CPSU Central Committee. They became the official Russian editorial team for MEGA2, continuing to participate in this unfinished undertaking. Although Russian Marxism in the MEGA2 era no longer possessed the glory it had during the MEGA1 era, and the number of members in the Moscow group was limited, Russia nonetheless made its own contributions to the editing of Capital and its manuscripts within MEGA2.
By 2012, the publication of Section II of MEGA2, "Capital and Preparatory Materials," was fully completed. In early 2013, at a specialized MEGA2 roundtable held in Berlin, Vasina summarized the Moscow group's contributions. She noted that beyond providing the economic manuscripts of Marx and Engels preserved in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, the Moscow group made several specific contributions to Section II.
First, the Moscow group provided materials for the identification and deciphering of all parts of Capital and its manuscripts. During the MEGA1 period (primarily under the leadership of Ryazanov and Adoratsky), the Institute had already completed the identification and deciphering of most of the economic manuscripts and notes. The starting point for the Section II editing in MEGA2 was to use these materials as vital references, and the verification/collation of these materials was also completed by the Moscow group.
Second, the Moscow group participated directly or indirectly in the editing of Volumes 11, 12, and 13 of Section II. Volume 11 was co-edited by Vasina and Teinosuke Otani’s Japanese team, presenting for the first time in the original language the second version of the manuscript for Volume II of Capital (written by Marx between 1868 and 1870), along with nine other Volume II manuscripts of varying lengths. These show the formative process of the theory of the circulation of capital—one of the most important parts of Marx’s economic theory. Volume 12 consists of Engels's editorial manuscripts for Volume II of Capital, which formed the basis of the published text. This editorial manuscript was not in the original MEGA2 plan and was the only manuscript in Marx’s economic legacy that had not been identified at the time. The Moscow group argued for its significance, suggesting it be published as a separate volume, and took on the deciphering work. Additionally, at the request of the IMES board, the Moscow group provided the Japanese team in Sendai with microfilm materials related to the manuscripts, establishing a successful mechanism for transnational cooperation.
(2) Research on Capital by Russian Scholars
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the publication of Academician Teodor Oizerman’s Marxism and Utopianism (2003) and A Justification of Revisionism (2005) signaled the beginning of a de-ideologized and de-Stalinized era in the study of Marxism and texts such as Das Kapital in Russia. Although the intellectual trend initiated by Oizerman was of great significance for the resurgence of Marxism and Das Kapital in Russia during the new century, Oizerman’s methods of argumentation and his conclusions contributed little to the development and innovation of Das Kapital studies in contemporary Russia. Innovative research on Das Kapital has primarily been carried out by the School of Critical Marxism, represented by Alexander Buzgalin and Andrey Kolganov, professors in the Department of Economics at Moscow State University. The School of Critical Marxism advocates for a Neo-Marxist political economy that returns to classical political economy while distinguishing itself from Soviet Marxism, attempting to utilize Das Kapital to find solutions for both "eternal" and emerging problems in Russia's economy and society. Their research focuses on three main aspects.
First, the study of globalization. The book Global Capital, co-authored by Buzgalin and Kolganov, represents the school’s response to globalization and has been called Russia's "Das Kapital for the 21st Century." In addition to absorbing the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, and Ilyenkov [11], they were influenced by Western Marxists such as Lukács’s ontology of social being, Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, and Sartre’s theory of alienation. They argue that in the era of globalization, capitalism has entered a stage of hegemony characterized by global corporate capital, forming a global capitalist system based on capital’s total domination over and total alienation of human beings. In Global Capital, they examine new changes in commodity, money, and capital relations during this stage of global corporate capital hegemony, investigating new forms such as information commodities, virtual currencies, and virtual corporate financial capital. They point out that this hegemony is both an inevitable trend in the development of the logic of capital under globalization and a dead end for capitalist development—the final stage of "late capitalism." Based on this, they explore schemes for transcending global capital hegemony and transitioning toward a "realm of freedom," thereby forming a critical theory of global capital hegemony.
Second, the study of the "re-actualization" of methodology. Regarding methodological research, the School of Critical Marxism advocates that contemporary Marxist scholars must continuously "re-actualize" the methodology of Das Kapital and apply it to the study of modern capitalist society. In Marx's Das Kapital and the System of Modern Capitalist Relations of Production (2016), Buzgalin points out that from a dialectical perspective, the research of contemporary domestic and foreign scholars merely lists various phenomena of late capitalism and attempts to establish links between them. However, the method of "ascending from the abstract to the concrete" required by Das Kapital does not deal with categories placed side-by-side, but with a system of categories that are interconnected and reflect the mode of production. In the first volume of Global Capital, Buzgalin and Kolganov advocate for continuing the work of the Soviet philosopher Ilyenkov, using the method of ascending from the abstract to the concrete—starting from core categories such as commodity, money, and capital, and ascending to a categorical system that holistically reveals the development of the logic of global capital. They believe that while adhering to the dialectical method of the labor theory of value, one should appropriately combine positivist methods to conduct specific theoretical dissections of modern capitalist society. Furthermore, they have absorbed the dialogic [12] ideas of the Soviet philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, arguing that in the future "realm of freedom," where creative activity replaces alienated labor, a "dialogical" dialectic will replace Marx’s "classical" dialectic.
Third, the study of contemporary Russian social problems. The revival of Das Kapital in Russia is largely rooted in the needs of national rejuvenation and social transformation. The School of Critical Marxism defines Soviet socialism as "mutated socialism" [13] and characterizes contemporary Russian capitalism as "semi-peripheral, oligarchic-bureaucratic capitalism" accompanied by the "resurgence of semi-feudal order," arguing that Russia is still in a period of transition toward socialism. Regarding the vision for future socialism, a "New Socialist Trend of Thought" has emerged within Russian Marxism. Yuri Petrov’s Why Socialism? (1997) argues that socialism is an organization of life that serves the interests of the majority and provides opportunities for full self-actualization. Boris Kurashvili’s New Socialism (1997) posits that new socialism possesses two basic characteristics: the market and self-governance. Lyudmila Vartazarova, in her book Takeoff in the 21st Century (1997), elucidates New Socialist ideals imbued with Russian characteristics, such as a strong state, social justice, and solidarity. Although the theory of New Socialism is still in its growth phase, the "New Socialism Movement" has already become a political movement jointly promoted by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and left-wing scholars.