ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on socialism as vast state and tells that Russia was a society of estates, social categories that went with specific legal rights, duties and privileges. In Russia, ‘workers’ socialism’ instead would be based on village and urban communes. Russian socialists believed that the conditions in their own country represented a better launching pad for the communist transition than those prevailing in the West. Socialist Jacobinism emerged from the radical student movement. Engels argued that the conversion of the commune into a ‘higher’ form of society depended on material support provided by a victorious proletarian revolution in the West. It was Lavrov who formulated a mature concept of socialism in one country appropriate for the Russian condition. When Marx began to involve himself in the question of Russian socialism, he appeared to agree with the Russian socialists about the communist potential of the commune.
