ABSTRACT
The place of Russia in Marx's overall revolutionary strategy needs to be looked at from at least two points of view, which focus on its state and its society respectively. Marx's readiness to make concessions regarding the possibility of Russia's avoiding some of the stages usually considered necessary prerequisites for socialism stemmed at least in part from his desire to see the Tsarist system done away with as soon as possible. His hostility to the Russian autocracy did not automatically extend to its subjects, however. While throughout the 1840s, '50s and much of the '60s his concern with Russia was focused largely on the counter-revolutionary nature of its government, he tended to see that government's interests as increasingly divergent from those of the people it ruled. Marx's analysis of the origin and growth of the Russian state was a strange one to have been written by a man who considered himself to be a historical materialist.
