BEBEL – SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AND TERROR

Abstract

The subject of interest of the article was August Babel’s book “Assassinations and Social Democracy“ found in Ilia Chavchavadze’s library. This author is interesting to us in two ways. First, before the polemic against Noe Jordania, Ilia was working on a large amount of literature including the works of the leaders and scholars of the socialist movement (Lassalle, Kautsky, Bernstein, Vandervelde. The text of Babel’s public speech that captured Ilia’s attention was published in 1905, two years before Ilia’s assassination and the title sounds like the title of the article that could be written about the attack on

Ilia. It was interesting to us to discuss the historical context of the period when Ilia read the views of the leaders of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Bebel argues that terror is unacceptable and harmful to the Social Democrats. The social-democratic movement was developing in a completely different direction in the Russian Empire and, in particular, in Georgia. In 1905-1907, terror was considered as one of the acceptable forms of struggle for both wings of the Georgian Social Democrats. However, from late 1906, in the wake of the failure of the 1905 revolution, the Mensheviks sought to change strategy, abandoning the fundamental principles of the teaching of Marxism and their politics came closer to the German Social Democrats’ approaches.

It is noteworthy and interesting that Ilia, after looking through the works of the founders of the German Social Democracy, saw a perspective of a different path from the Russian Socialist movement much earlier than the Georgian Social democrats.

It was interesting to us to discuss the ideological foundation of the political environment that prepared the “ground“ for Ilia’s assassination and then changed the strategy of the Georgian Social Democrats.

Until recently, the relationship between Ilia and the Georgian Social Democrats was discussed only in the context of confrontation. Stephen F. Jones showed that we should search for one of the bases of the Georgian Social Democrats’ worldview in the national ideas of Ilia and the “Tergdaleulebi“.

In this article, we tried to show that despite the heated confrontation, there were some points of contact between Ilia and Georgian Social Democrats – reformist, liberal ideas of the European Social Democrats. This includes the views of August Bebel.

These grounds determined the fact that no matter how paradoxical it may sound, Noe Jordania and therefore, the Georgian Social Democrats after 1906, despite the preceding sharp polemics, came close to Ilia’s ideas on a number of issues and one might say, became his successors.