TOWARDS AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY OF N.I. SIEBERFrançois ALLISSON* Federico D’ONOFRIO** Danila RASKOV***

*Senior Lecturer, Centre Walras-Pareto, University of Lausanne, Switzerland, e-mail: francois.allisson@unil.ch

**Senior SNF Researcher, Centre Walras-Pareto, University of Lausanne, Switzerland, e-mail: federico.donofrio@unil.ch

*** State University of Sankt Petersburg

Nikolay Ivanovich Sieber (1844-1888) is known as the Russian economist who introduced the economic theories of Karl Marx in Russia, and who first translated David Ricardo into the Russian language. But there are some gaps in the traditional historiography about his biography. First, he is said to have resigned from his position of professor of economics at the University of Kiev for protesting against the dismissal of his friend, the famous Ukrainian nationalist Dragomanov. But not much is known about Sieber’s actual support of the nationalist cause. Second, Sieber’s father is a Swiss citizen and Sieber spent a decade in Switzerland. But while most of his published works (all in Russian) were written in Switzerland, nothing is known about his life in that country. Third, Sieber lived almost all his life as an “independent researcher”, and had a reputation of an armchair economist. But nothing is known about how he materially survived all these years, and how he published his works in Russia from Switzerland.

This paper, written in the context of the preparation of an English translation of Sieber’s main opus “Ricardo’s theory of value and capital” (1871), is an attempt to fill these gaps, using primary materials gathered in several archives in Switzerland (mostly Bern and Zürich), in the Ukraine, in Russia and in the Netherlands (mainly official acts and correspondence). Among the difficulties encountered during the research and evoked in the paper, one is discussed: how to write the intellectual biography of an economist that left few traces?

Keywords: Nikolai Sieber; intellectual biography; network; Switzerland; Russia; Ukrainian nationalism

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Niclaus Sieber (1844–1888), or Nikolaj Ivanovich Sieber, or N. I. Ziber, is known in the Soviet historiography for being one of the very first readers of Marx, and his name is associated with the early development of Russian Marxism, and as the translator of Ricardo in Russia. An edition of his collected works was even published in two volumes during the Soviet period (Sieber, 1959). His name is not well-known outside Russia, although he lived in both Imperial Russia and in Switzerland, mainly because he apparently published only in the Russian language. (We will return on this “apparently later.)

In Russia, Sieber’s influence was considered very widespread. As far as Ricardo is concerned, Sieber offered the first comprehensive interpretation of its theory of value and capital in his 1871 dissertation (Sieber 1871). His translations of Ricardo’s Principles (1873) and Works (1882) with his commentaries were often the only way for many Russians to get access to Ricardo’s work. Almost all Russian economists quoted Sieber’s translation explicitly, and Lenin is no exception to the rule. The material impact is far greater where Marx is concerned. In his 1871 dissertation, Sieber analyses Marx’s economic theory of value, money and the analysis of commodities for the first time in Russian literature. This reading of Marx’s first volume of Capital appeared one year before the Russian translation of the original (Marx [1867] 1872). And when the original was temporarily banned through censorship, Sieber’s digest of Capital was still available and played the role of a substitute (Zweynert 2002, 4.8.5). In addition to being physically more accessible, Sieber’s exposition style was easier to read and understand than the original. Moreover, and this is an important endorsement, Marx himself praised Sieber’s 1871 dissertation in the « Afterword to the Second German Edition » of Capital’s first volume (1873):

An excellent Russian translation of « Das Kapital » appeared in the spring of 1872. The edition of 3,000 copies is already nearly exhausted. As early as 1871, N. Sieber, Professor of Political Economy in the University of Kiev, in his work « David Ricardo’s Theory of Value and of Capital », referred to my theory of value, of money and of capital, as in its fundamentals a necessary sequel to the teaching of Smith and Ricardo. That which astonishes the Western European in the reading of this excellent work, is the author’s consistent and firm grasp of the purely theoretical position. (Marx [1873] 1906, 21)

Sieber’s role in popularising Marx’s work was important, especially for the first generation of Russian Marxists, and even further, since his work represented, and

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still represents a « valuable coda » to Capital (Smith 2001, 48) which surpassed Kautsky’s popular volume on Marx (Guelfat 1970, 144). On this point, the Soviet historiography is consistent with contemporary views on Sieber as the first scientific interpreter of Marx and the first Marx propagandist in Russia.

For instance, in the most comprehensive bibliographical resource on Sieber to date, Rezul gives the following rather hagiographic statement on Sieber’s achievements: « 1. Sieber was the first to popularise and comment the doctrines of Marx in Russia and in the Ukraine. 2. Sieber was the author of the first Marxist work on the history of primitive economic culture […]. 3. Sieber was the first to translate Ricardo into Russian and therefore to give access to this great pre-Marxist economist. » (Rezul 1931, 142–143). The list goes on and credits Sieber for the first Marxist evaluations of Rodbertus and of Henry George’s works, for the first sceptical Marx-based approach towards the obshchina, etc.

His doctoral dissertation on Ricardo’s theory of value and capital (Sieber 1871) together with some papers on Marx’s economic theory appeared together in his most famous work, David Ricardo and Karl Marx in their Socio-Economic Researches (1885). This was to become a bedside book for generations of Russian Marxists. The best illustration of this fact is perhaps contained in Lenin’s following footnote, added to the 1908 edition of his 1897 Characterisation of Economic Romanticism:

The word « realist » was used here instead of the word Marxist exclusively for censorship reasons. For the same reason, instead of referring to Capital, we referred to Sieber’s book, which summarised Marx’s Capital. (Lenin [1908] 1972, 188)

Readers who were able to read between the lines (more on this later) saw Sieber as a proxy for Marx. But besides this role of popularising and disseminating the theories of Ricardo and Marx, Sieber was also conveying his own interpretation of classical political economy. He was becoming a Marxist.

Thanks to the work of several pioneering scholars (Guelfat 1970; Scazzieri 1987; Kappeler 1989; White 1996, 2001, 2009, 2011; Smith 2001), the name of Sieber is starting to become known outside Russia and Ukraine. But except for two papers translated by White (Sieber 2001, 2011), his work still remains inaccessible for a non-Russian audience. The present paper is part of a joint project between a Swiss-team (the two co-authors of the present paper) and a Russian team (Danila Raskov, Leonid Shirokorad and Aleksandr Dubyansky) that aims at overcoming this sorry state of

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affair in two main steps.

First, the project aims at providing a wider access to Sieber’s main economic work. Out of the two editions of his PhD dissertation, Ricardo’s theory of value and capital (Sieber 1871) and David Ricardo and Karl Marx in their socio-economical researches (1885), we favoured the early 1871 view on Marx’s Capital as Sieber’s most needed text. We will offer a critical English edition of this text, with a historical and an analytical introduction, to make this end-of-nineteenth century Russian text easier to grasp for an English language twenty-first century reader, as well as editors and translators notes, to provide the necessary elements of context and on concepts of this 300 pages masterpiece.

Second, the project aims at providing Sieber’s first intellectual biography. The man is discreet, leave scarce information behind him, and there are some interesting controversies about his real role. Besides a biographical essay, which implies archival work in both Switzerland and Russia for the many elements that are still missing on Sieber’s life, and an updated bibliography based on the already comprehensive but surprisingly selective version by Rezul (1931), it will contain an evaluation of his economic work in light of his even lesser known but numerous writings in sociology, anthropology, economic history and law about various subjects mainly aimed at analysing the economic development of societies. This will contain an interpretation of his reconstruction of classical political economy (thus providing Sieber’s renewed historiographical account of classical political economy), a characterisation of his economic vision on development, and an assessment of his legacy.

This paper is part of the latter objective, and is a first step towards Sieber’s intellectual biography. It is not yet a coherent whole, but it already provides some pieces of the puzzle we are trying to assemble. And more than definitive results, this paper addresses some chosen topics with even more questions to come. Before entering into these aspects of Sieber’s intellectual biography, it is necessary to remind some known facts about his life course. Born in 1844 as a Swiss citizen in Russia, he studied in Simferopol and Kiev (at the time in the Russian empire, nowadays in the Ukraine), where he studied political economy. He published his dissertation in 1871, and then was sent to study further abroad. He traveled and studied in 1871-1872 in Europe (notably in Germany and Switzerland), and became dozent then professor at the University of Kiev. He resigned from the university in 1875, and left for Switzerland, where he lived with his wife Nadezhda Olimpievna Schumowa, and from where he published articles and books in Russian until 1884. Then he moved

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back “home” in Yalta, where he died in 1888 at the age of 44 years old.

We invite the reader, with this chronology in mind, on a journey through the following five topics: a methodological discussion on writing in a repressive context (1), on being a student in economics in Kiev in the late 1860s (2), on Sieber’s political views (3), on Sieber’s views on the world markets (4), and eventually on Sieber’s views on the relation between the core and the periphery in economic development (5). Writing the intellectual biography of N. I. Sieber is not an easy task. There are different reasons for this: his life was relatively short, since he died at the age of 44 and there are very concrete reasons why he left little traces in Switzerland’s archives. But the foremost reason is that Sieber himself seems to have been trying to hide all his life. He was afraid of persecution for his political ideas, we learn from the memoirs of the linguist Ovsjanko-Kulikovskij (1923). What were then his political ideas? This will be the subject of the second section. Let’s first sketch a few methodological problems.

1. Writing between the lines: on methodology

The most obvious place to look at in order to reconstruct Sieber's political opinions as well as his economic thought would be Sieber’s work. During his life, he published a huge number of articles often disguised as book reviews. Most of such articles appeared in Russian journals over the 1870s and early 1880s. Here lays a first problem: Russian journals were subject to a strict censorship. In the archives of the Central Administration for the Affairs of the Press (Glavnoe Upravlenie po Delam Pechati), we found, for instance, at least one reprimand against the journal Slovo for an article published by Sieber (Slovo, before 1878, was called Znanie but the government closed Znanie, RPP 1959, pp. 591—592 ). Sieber’s incriminated paper was titled “Dialektika v ee primenenija k nauke” (Dialectism in its applications to science) (RGIA, F. 776, op. 6, del. 245, l. 75, 11 December 1875). We also know, from a letter by Sergej Podolinskij to Valerjan Smirnov, that the Kievskij Telegraf was published only thanks to a corrupted (podkuplennij) censor in Kiev. The first level of difficulty therefore is preventive self-censorship.

Leo Strauss (1941) proposed to “read between the lines” when dealing with authors who wrote under severe repression. We should certainly not expect Sieber to express in print a praise of revolution, of class struggle, or of Ukraine's independence in the Russia of the 1870s and 1880s. But how to read between the lines when the

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author is dealing with statistics which should be transparent and self-evident, like Sieber did? In the above mentioned letter by Podolinksij to Smirnov, Podolinskij explains, for instance, how he read between the lines of the Kievskij Telegraf:

Take for instance - Podolinskij writes to his hesitating friend - the following articles. (...); the series on housing (...) where it is immediately said that nothing, whatever might be undertaken now, can lead to any meaningful (improvement) without a radical economic revolution (perevorota); (...). In the article "Joint Stock Companies", for the first time as far as I could read in the censored press, it is explicitly set the question of the ironclad laws of wages and for the first time it is said that unions can only be an educational means in order to educate workers to the full realization of their ideal form, namely the full expropriation of capital … (Letter from S.A. Podolinskij to Smirnov 17.05.1875)

But the articles that Podolinskij listed proved difficult to identify so far, and he might have been exaggerating the revolutionary content of the articles in order to reassure Smirnov about the social-democratic credentials of the ukrainophiles. Reading between the lines is difficult: one has a tendency to read what one wished for.

We also have a few articles by Sieber that were published abroad, for instance in Vol'noe Slovo. One could assume that he expressed his opinions more freely outside of the control of Russian censorship. The study of these articles has still to be completed, but, for the moment, Sieber appears a very shy revolutioner. Is it because he was afraid of persecution abroad as Ovsianko-Kulikovskij claimed? At this time, the Russian secret police was still very active abroad. Michel Elpidin, one of the Russians who lived in Geneva, in a letter sent to the Directorate of Police and Justice of the Swiss Confederation in Bern, claimed that the Russian secret service was planning to assassinate some of the revolutionary chiefs, and Dragomanov was followed by Russian (and Austrian) police agents (Mysyrowicz 1973). This might have impressed Sieber, who always tried to preserve his possibility to travel to Russia freely. And nevertheless, in Voln'oe Slovo, Sieber expressed his idea much more freely. The end of Russian autocracy was approaching - he wrote in his review of Voroncov's Kapitalizm v Rossii, but it would not be a peaceful concession by the Russian despot:

The time has passed, when such changes could be considered a graceful present that can be taken back any minute. (Sieber, 1882 (2012), p. 204 )

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But there are other layers of forgetfulness that deposited on Sieber after his death. We know for instance that he was in contact with the group Osvobozhdenie Truda, composed by Aksel'rod, Plekhanov, Zasulich and others in Geneva. The archive of the International Institute for Social History of Amsterdam preserves one letter by Sieber to Aksel'rod in Zurich where Sieber asks Aksel'rod whether he has got Sieber's copy of Marx’s Zur Kritik (Bern, 5.8.1881). Plekhanov himself recognized his debt toward Sieber as an interpreter of Marx, whom he defined “one of the most talented pupils and vulgarisators of Marx’s thought.”

But, as James White (2009) convincingly showed, Plekhanov and Sieber's interpretations of Marx diverged significantly and Sieber's role had to be erased in order for Plekhanov to establish himself as the “first Russian Marxist”. This became the official narrative of Marxism-Leninism during the Soviet period, when Sieber was usually considered “the source of legal Marxism”, a “Kathedersozialist”.

But in addressing Sieber’s political opinions, there is a third potential source of historiographical troubles, namely Sieber connection to the Ukrainophiles. For those Soviet authors who wrote in the 1920s it was essential to clear Sieber from any association with the ukrainophiles. Naumov (1930), one of Sieber’s early biographers in Kiev, is particularly awkward. He first lists all the evidence accumulated by other Ukrainian biographers that shows how Sieber was involved in the action of the ukrainophiles. He even mentions a document of the secret police that defines Sieber one of the most dangerous minds behind the ukrainian independence movement. But he eventually dismisses this apparently compelling evidence single-handedly and with no convincing explanation. With the memory of the Russian civil war and the bloody conquest of Ukraine by the Bolsheviks so fresh, if Naumov wanted to establish a place for Sieber in the pantheon of Russian Marxism he had to preserve him - whatever Sieber’s true convictions - from any accusation of being an Ukrainophile. Ovskianko-Kulikovskij’s memoirs have a similar problem and the latter’s insistence on Sieber’s self-identification as “Russian” is also fraught with doubts.

While investigating “what Sieber really thought”, we are therefore forced to face all these different potential sources of confusion and error: did he believe in the socialist revolution? Was he really an Ukrainophile? A potential way through seems to proceed by observing his association with the revolutioners, with the Ukrainians. We are now indeed trying to map Sieber’s friends and acquaintances in order to show that Sieber was not an isolated scholar. He lived amidst a community of radical

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Russian thinkers. But this demarche is also risky.

The archival documents of the Central Administration for the Affairs of the Press at the State Historical Archives in St. Petersburg provide us with a particularly impressive evidence of such risks. When Maksim Kovalevksij was forced to resign as editor of the Juridicheskij Vestnik, the University of Moscow, that published the journal, proposed he be replaced by another native of Kharkov, Viktor Gol’zov. The censors asked the secret police whether Gol’zov was politically safe and the police answered he had certainly been acquainted with people who predicated a materialist ideology in Kharkov but the city was small and most of the youth went out in the same places: if the replacement had been meeting revolutioners, it was not for political reasons, but only to hang out with friends (RGIA, Ju. V. 776 3 507 1-109).

2. Studying economics in Kiev in the late 1860s

Sieber’s singular Marxism can be best understood, it seems reasonable, by reconstructing the sources of his ideas. In order to do so, we ask here the following question: how was it to be a student on the eve of the 1870s in Kiev? Sieber’s alma mater was Saint Vladimir Imperial University of Kiev (who was renamed after Dragomanov - the Mikhailo Drahomanov University - from 1920 until 1932). Sieber finished his first degree in 1866, then started again to study with a grant from 1868 to 1871 and got the magister diploma in 1871. Sieber’s professors of political economy at the time were Nikolay Khristianovich Bunge (1823-1895) and Grigory M. Cekhanoveckij (1833-1898).

Bunge was professor of political economy, but also rector of Kiev university (in 1959-1862, 1871-1875 and 1878-1880). He is nowadays more famous as the Russian Minister of Finances (1881-1886) and Chairman of the Committee of Ministers (1887-1895), being Aleksandr III most important councillor. Bunge was a reformer, an admirer of British classical political economy and French liberal economists, but at the same time, he was influenced by the German historical school, and thought, for instance, that the nascent Russian industry, which he promoted, should have protection from the State. He can be characterised as a liberal from the kathedersozialist kind, i.e. a social reformer.

Cekhanoveckij was equally professor of political economy, and became rector of the university of Kharkov (1881-1884), but he was not a public figure. Described by

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his colleagues as a scholar who published very few but knew so much, this erudite indeed published two booklets (from his two dissertations): one on the significance of Adam Smith in the history of economic thought, the second on the - typical at the time - relation between the State and Railway.

We know that it is thanks to Bunge that Sieber got his grant to pursue graduate studies. And we may assume that both figures inspired Sieber. In fact, we find in Sieber the bookworm pure-scholar figure (Cekhanoveckij) and the publicist (although not stateman) interested in the real economic life and in its transformation (Bunge).

Fortunately, Cekhanoveckij published his lecture notes (probably taken by a student, which may be Sieber himself) in 1866 in the Kievskie Universitetskie Izvestija (Heralds of the University of Kiev). Equally, Bunge published his lectures notes of 1869-1870 in the same journal. We are thus able to have an idea of what was the content of the economic education in Kiev at the time.

Cekhanoveckij’s lectures (1866) starts with a very detailed exposition of the task of political economy, in a highly pedagogical polemically-written style mixing Utopian thinkers and science. And the writing shows a taste for the history of economic doctrines. The task of political is understood by Cekhanoveckij as the resolution of the “problème social” (quoted in French), which consists of combining the wealth of nations with the poverty of the mass of people. This problem entails the study of political economy. The economy is described in a set of successive abstractions, starting with the natural economy, the monetary economy, and the credit economy. Then, the production, as the main subject of inquiry, is decomposed from consumption, personal interest, utility, the definitions of goods and wealth, and production itself through the force of human labour, the nature as a productive force, the capital, the division and cooperation of labour, and the use of instruments and machines in production. The references quoted include many German economists (like Hermann, Mangoldt, Dietzel, Roesler, Hildebrand, Thünen), but also French-writting economists (Courcelle-Seneuil, Say, Bastiat, Chevalier, Wolkoff, Rossi, Cournot), and also some socialists (Lassalle, Proudhon), English (Malthus, McLeod, Carey) and methodological texte (Comte, Whewell, Mill), and others. But the lectures follow more often three names: Adam Smith (in English), John Stuart Mill (in Russian translation) and Wilhelm Roscher (in German). Cekhanoveckij does not follow the followers of Smith, who according to him confine themselves in the abstract direction, while the German historical method is the only “positive” science that tries

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to resolve the most urgent social questions (together with Mill on cooperatives). And so, only Mill is rescued from the English. And the debate between Proudhon and Bastiat is used to favour the first: Cekhanoveckij speaks of “antagonism of class”, and write such sentences like: “the economists, representatives of the interests of the rich people, would like to limit the tasks of government to a very limited circle”. While not quoted, Ricardo is certainly targeted by Cekhanoveckij for being too abstract. Marx is absent (these lectures were published one year before the publication of Capital), and so it is not known whether Cekhanoveckij was the one who introduced Sieber to Marx, but it could have well been the case. Although Sieber showed an inclination towards abstract reasoning, it was never exclusive, as shown in the previous three sections, and so Cekhanoveckij’s path might have exerted a significant influence on him.

Bunge’s lectures (1869-1870) are a bit more traditional, more English, but with a mix of liberalism and protectionism. The English economists Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, MacCulloch, Senior, J.S.Mill, Fawcett, Macleod, Tooke and the American Carey are well represented. On the French part, Turgot, Say, Storch, Sismondi, Rossi, Chevalier, Courcelle-Seneuil and Bastiat; on the German side: Rau, List, Schültz, Roscher, Wirth, Wagner, and Schäeffle (and a few others). The inclusion of List is important in these lectures, so are the absence of all socialist thinkers. Evidently, this reading list is more compatible with that of a minister. Ricardo, Storch and Say play a significant role in the text (vs. Smith and Mill for Cekhanoveckij), but on the method, Roscher is still the was to follow (and Bunge uses Babst’s Russian translation of Roscher - Babst was the "Russian Roscher"). It is interesting from a material point of view that most English authors are quoted in the French “Collection des économistes”, which was supposedly available at Kiev University. It is important since Sieber himself quote English authors through their French translation. The structure of Bunge's lectures follows Say: consumption, production (with productive services), exchange, distribution (wage, profit, rent, relation between the three types of income). From these lectures, the chapter on exchange includes a thorough discussion on value and prices, and on the central issues related to this. It appears that Bunge most certainly gave the inspiration to Sieber to work on such abstract issues as Ricardo's theory of value.

This picture of Sieber’s point of departure is to be complemented further by his public activity in Kiev and the neighbouring gubernija, working in a cooperative, as a publicist (see above), and as a civil servant. But it allows already to see that Kiev had a specific position in the diffusion of political economy – which was more

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English than in Moscow or St. Petersburg – equally German, and with a mix of socialism, liberalism and protectionism that forms the basis of Siber's reception of Marx. We still don’t know how he came in touch with Marx’s Capital (was it thanks to Cekhanoveckij, to Bunge, or to some of his friend like Podolinskij?), but we know more in which context he was about to start reading it, and applying it. The next sections will see how this is done.

3. Sieber’s political views

It is very difficult to investigate Sieber’s political ideas. Was he convinced of the necessity of a revolution? Did he believe that Ukraine (or Little Russia, as it was commonly known) would be better off as an independent country? Was Sieber really a “legal Marxist” or even a “Kathedersozialist” as Soviet historiography has largely believed? What was his position concerning the Russian terrorism of the 1870-80s? What did he think of the prospects of peasant insurrections and of the possibility of a general revolution - a Russian 1848?

Was Sieber an Ukrainophile?

Sieber was born in Crimea in 1844, his father was Swiss, his mother had French blood but her religion and her nationality remain unclear. Most likely, Sieber grew up as an orthodox subject of the Russian multinational empire (note the oxymoron: Russian-multinational). After high-school, he moved to Kiev and studied law and economics there. In Kiev he got involved in the activities of a group of intellectuals, the so called “Gromada” (we use here the Russian spelling because our sources are in Russian and all published and unpublished works by Sieber and most of the writings of his friends are in Russian). In 1869, while still a student, Sieber became one of the founders of the consumers’ co-operative of Kiev, alongside one of his life-long friends, Mikhail Dragomanov and other faculties of the University of Kiev (Saint-Vladimir). In 1871, he published his thesis on Ricardo and Marx and soon left for a stay-abroad period that was decisive for his life. During this trip to Germany, Austria-Hungary, Switzerland and other countries, Sieber met his future wife, but also the Moscow economist Aleksandr Ivanovich Chuprov. In Leipzig and Zurich, Sieber entered a world of scheming Russians, plotting the Revolution (Podolinskij to Smirnov).

For someone who had not travelled very extensively, this visit marked the

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beginning of a new trend of thought. Switzerland - it is clear when reading Sieber’s account of his visit - presented a fascinating stratification of modern industry and rural communities whose dissolution was already under way under pressure of the community's demography and of market economy. Sieber paid attention to the forms of Swiss democracy (he attended the Landsgemeinde in Glarus in May 1873 that rejected a proposal of constitutional amendment) and to the Swiss consumers’ and producers’ co-operatives (Sieber 1873). Sieber applied this lesson to Ukraine after returning to Kiev and becoming professor at the University. Together with Dragomanov, the natural scientist Sergej Podolinskij and others, Sieber joined the redaction of an old newspaper, the Kievskij Telegraph. The group radically transformed the rancorous loyalist newspaper, turning it into a very dynamic outlet for economic and political discussions that originated in the academic and political interests of the group.

What the exact political position of this group was is unclear. Were they in favour of a liberal constitution modelled on western-european constitutions? Most commentators believed this. Soviet historians were particularly eager to describe this group as liberal-nationalist and depicted Dragomanov as one of the precursors of the Cadet Party (the Constitutional Democratic Party of the early 20th century), just like the “legal Marxist” Peter Struve and Marx’s Russian friend Maksim Kovalevskij. In fact, the letters exchanged between Podolinskij and Valerian Smirnov (one of the closest collaborators of the populist Petr Lavrov) seem to indicate that the group self-identified differently in the 1870s. By referring to the Belgian socialist Caesar de Paepe, Podolinskij claimed that nations were useful as basic units of economic organisation. He insisted that insofar the economic organisation of the Ukrainian nation was concerned, the Ukrainophiles - with the exception of some old groups in L'vov - were all socialists, members of the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Party and they believed in a future where the land would be owned collectively and workers would own the means of industrial production. The path ahead, for Podolinskij was socialist by necessity, which, to him, meant collective ownership of land and of the means of production, and a political path “similar to the anarchists western Europe, not to the extremists, such as the Spaniards, but to those of Jura and the anarchic group of Belgium.” (Hall bei Steyer, 17.5.1875)

When his friend Smirnov expressed his doubts about the real socialist engagement of the Kievskij Telegraph, Podolinskij referred him to the articles on the census claiming it was the clearest invocation of a socialist revolution ever to have appeared in print on a Russian legal newspaper. But Podolinskij was a really

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convinced Ukrainophile and social-democrat (and anti-semite). He tried to keep communication channels open between the Ukranians in Austria-Hungary and in Russia, he favoured peasant insurrections in order to rise the revolutionary awareness of peasants. Was he correctly representing the ideas of the whole group of the Gromada? Wasn’t he exaggerating?

Even if Podolinskij might have been exaggerating, Sieber must have felt threatened after Dragomanov was dismissed from the university and forced to flee into exile. Sieber rapidly resigned from the university and, together with his wife, arrived in Bern on 15 May 1875, without the legally required authorization to leave Russia. Whatever the reasons for Sieber’s hastened departure from Kiev, it seems clear that the group of people in Kiev Sieber was part of was busy sketching the future of Ukraine/Little Russia, the country’s role in the global capitalist economy and the nature of the post-capitalist economy (a future post will explore this issue). And it is also clear that Sieber rejected the positions of the narodniki (populists) who believed that the future of Russia (and the Ukraine) was not in industry but in some form of communal non-capitalist agriculture.

Did Sieber believe in the socialist struggle?

It was a commonplace among Soviet interpreters of Sieber to stress that he did not understand the revolutionary potential of Marx’s theory. To Sieber, Marx seemed to offer the appropriate global theoretical framework to address the historical transformation of society (in a way that was not metaphysical, not Hegelian). Zur Kritik and Das Kapital provided the Russian researcher with a consistent theory of how economic realities drove historical change towards a fully capitalist society and beyonds through different stages of disaggregation of the original natural community. Sieber – according to the Soviet interpreters – understood only Marx’s historical materialism.

But this is not fair. Marx was not just sketching capitalism, he was thinking forward to new forms of social economy, or so Sieber believed. For this reason he translated a booklet (a “brochure”) allegedly published in England in 1869 Objections to the economic doctrine of John Stuart Mill. The unknown marxist author of this booklet argued, criticising Mill’s lack of consequence, that

such situation of society, as Mill describes it in his imagination, implies the idea that all means of production would stop functioning as capital and the regulation of production and of the product of labour would be attributed to

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the government of society.

This is not possible until the government is in the hand of the capitalists,

until the members of the government are nominated by one class only, they will have to serve the interests of such a class and protect it with all the force of the law ... no individual charitable feeling (blagonamerennost’) will allow the government to redirect production toward the satisfaction of the necessities of society rather than toward the creation of profit for a few owner of capital.

Why did Sieber translate this pamphlet and published it? We do not know for sure, but he must have agreed with its content to a great extent.

We can fairly conclude that Sieber believed in class struggle, in its inevitability given the nature of surplus value, in the impossibility to reconcile capitalists and workers around a Millian program. It would be absurd to call him a Kathedersocialist, since Kathedersozialisten did cooperate with the German Imperial government (an anti-democratic government dominated by the big industrialists, the landed interests and the military aristocracy). But also the characterization of legal Marxist is highly problematic, given how the debate on “legal Marxism” evolved in the 1890s. And yet there is no evidence that Sieber believed in active revolutionary activities like Podolinskij did.

There is also no evidence that Sieber believed in a democratic way towards socialism and expected that the vanguard countries of capitalism, England, Germany, Belgium, and the US would move to a next stage and become socialists due to the intrinsic (but not peaceful) logic of capitalism and thanks to the action of trade unions. In the late 1880s, though, when Sieber was already ill, his friend Dragomanov published a pamphlet “On the eve of new troubles” (Dragomanov 1886) where he attacked the repressive policies of the Russian government, claiming that, by opposing the course of history, Czar Aleksander III was creating the conditions for more and more political violence. Dragomanov abhorred the methods of the terrorist who had killed Aleksander II in 1881. In contrast, Dragomanov had great expectations about Great Britain. Having extended the voting right to most of its male population after harsh social struggles, Britannia was inevitably on its way to the collectivization of the means of production and the British Empire would soon transform into a democratic federation including on an equal foot all the former colonies, including India.

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4. Sieber and the global markets

The Vienna stock exchange crash that took place in 1873 conventionally marks the beginning of the Long Depression that marked the last quarter of the nineteenth century.. In 1876, Sieber summarized for the Russian readers a book on the Berlin stock exchange crash (Glagau 1876) which was written rapidly following after the events.1 The book listed countless examples of sheer fraud that led to the crash. But while Glagau really believed that fraudulent speculations had caused the crisis, Sieber warned his reader:

We cannot agree with the opinion of M. Glagau that it was speculation and the behaviour of the Gründers [the German speculators] that produced the whole series of painful economic phenomena that he believes. The fact is that speculation is only possible when the conditions exist for the creation of new enterprises. (Sieber 1876)

As usual, Sieber reaffirmed the primacy of the average case over the extraordinary, the importance of the inner logic of the economy over the temporary swindles and scams of the speculators (the primacy of scientific laws over random exception was a central principle of Sieber's scientific work; see Naumov 1930, Scazzieri, 1987). If the responsibility of the crisis did not rest on the shoulders of greedy individual schemers, how could the crisis be accounted for?

What actually happened, how long the depression lasted and whether the Long Depression really was a world-wide economic downturn is still a matter of dispute among historians. But it seems interesting to remark that while the epicentre of the financial crisis in 1873 were peripheral countries of the world economy such as Austria-Hungary and the United States, the crisis corresponded to the emergence of a growing number of competitors for the British industry and a relative decline of its industry. The economist Mikhail Tugan-Baranovskij commented:

The last thirty years of the past century (i.e. since 1870) featured a relative slow-down of English industry and a relative weakening of English industrial supremacy. (Tugan-Baranovsky 1913, 326)

1 The author of the book, Otto Glagau, is notoriously known for his anti-semitism. The question whether Sieber was anti-semitic himself will require a section on its own.

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The most traditional sectors of European agriculture were also heavily affected, for instance in England and in Italy. It seems that the main cause of the Long Depression were the destabilizing consequences of the sudden appearance on the world markets of new producers: Germany and the United States for the manufacturing sector; Argentina, Canada, Russia for agriculture, thanks to the revolution in the cost of transportation that made the agricultural products of these country (flax, wheat, wool, meat, etc) suddenly competitive on the European markets.

But Sieber probably looked at the crisis differently and believed that the role of Great Britain was strengthened rather than weakened by international competition. Whatever the real causes of the financial crashes in Europe and the US, the economic depression of the years 1873-79 is probably to be regarded among the growth pains of the global market.

Sieber and the first globalization

In contrast with the impact of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the impact of the events of the 1870s on economic theory might not have been taken seriously enough. For Sieber, it must have been considerable. Sieber was a native of those southern provinces of Russia that became crucial exporters of wheat and linseed oil through the harbours of Odessa and the Crimea (in order to have an idea of the wealth that derived from such trade, read Edmund de Waal’s best-seller that tells the story of the Ephrussi family from Odessa; de Waal 2010).

Already in the 1870s, when Sieber joined the “Gromada” in Kiev, the position of the Ukraine in the Russian empire and in the global economy was a crucial concern for him. The Gromada group was particularly eager to show that modernization was under way in the South-Western gubernijas of the Russian Empire. In an unsigned article (Anonymous 1875), one of the redactors of the Kievskij Telegraf defended Ukrainians from the accusation of being slow, lazy and conservative, by underlining the fact that economic disparities between north and south Russia were rooted in natural endowments and patterns of productive specialization rather than ethnic borders. The article of the Kievskij Telegraf warned against a simplistic distinction between northern and southern Russia. The far-north of Russia was primitive, while the south-western gubernijas were part of the global markets with a specific specialization in agricultural products.

In a lengthy review of a book by Chuprov on Russian railways, Sieber (1875) insisted particularly on the role of new transportation means in dragging all

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countries, from India to Russia, into a global market . The general result was that the expansion of transportation means powerfully enabled “the change from natural to commercial economy”,

from production intended for satisfaction of own needs to production for the satisfaction of unknown and changing foreign needs.

The result was increasing international division of labour according to the law of comparative advantage of the different nations (Ricardo seems to offer yet another point of entry into Marxism): for example the sparsely populated countries such as Austria-Hungary, USA and Russia were exporting more and more wheat, while the densely populated ones, such as Great Britain, were importing more and more. The same process went on for livestock (herded in Hungary, Russia, America, Australia), and within countries with increasing specialization of the different branches of production.

In an article published in Russkaja Misl' in 1882, Sieber went back to this idea, and, by quoting the Übersichten der Weltwirthschaft by F. X. von Neumann-Spallart, underlined that

Since the second half of the current century, the functions of that complicated whole that we name “world economy”, in opposition to the individual national economies, have emerged with increasing strength.

And he then explained how European states abolished market restrictions between provinces and during the 1860s custom duties went down at least until 1877-78. Even if a period of protectionist policies followed,

The force of facts demands unhindered reciprocal trade relationships to continue without restraint.

The “force of facts” led to the creation of large trade blocs among state, of the postal and telegraphic union, etc. toward a sort of “cosmopolitical union” of the World. Goods moved over continents, the consumption of goods such as tea, coffee, sugar, etc. increased manifolds. Capitals could be moved rapidly from one country to another, and, whereas David Ricardo had deemed foolish to invest abroad, Great Britain was living of the interests paid on its foreign investments abroad. It was the triumph of the first globalization.

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Ripples across the water: core and periphery

The expansion of the world economy lasted until 1873 in most of the world. But in some countries worrisome signals had anticipated the 1873 catastrophe. Actually, the financial crashes were an epiphenomenon underpinned by overinvestment and the mismatch between demand and supply that, for Sieber, characterised capitalism. The depth of the crisis, according to him, corresponded to the strength of the expansionary phase. In the “turbulent years” 1874-1879, instead,

the depression progressed with such a discouraging evidence, that people were unable to explain to themselves how such a situation could continue in the whole of central Europe and north America without the least sign of improvement. (Sieber 1882, 79)

And yet, recovery began in the second semester of 1879 in America and then extended to Europe over the course of 1880: production of key goods and financial services began growing again in England, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Germany, the core countries of the new industrial economy. The impulse of growth extended further but got weaker, like “ripples across the water”:

the further expansion of this impulse from the West to the East happened slowly on the European continent. And yet there are signs that this impulse, like rings of ripples on the surface of the water, continues to move further and is less and less visible the further away it moves from the point of impact.

To the South and East of the core nations, in Austria-Hungary and Italy, the recovery was still slow and uncertain.

Von Neumann-Spallart did not mention Russia in this passage probably because he lacked Russian statistics. But it seems quite natural to imagine that Sieber ideally prolonged these rings of ripples to the east: the Russian empire (and Ukraine within it) was clearly in the periphery. Everything that Sieber wrote about Russia should be read as concerning the periphery of the world. While Sieber probably opposed the idea of a homogeneously industrial West vs. and homogeneously rural East (a perspective that the Slavophiles and some narodniki, instead, embraced), he conceived indeed the world as a set of real or metaphoric concentric rings at different stages of industrial development and integration. And he thought that the core of the world economy demonstrated to the countries on the periphery what their future would look like.

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5. The fate of the periphery lies at the core

Whether capitalism was to be everywhere a logically determined step in the development of every human society, has been one of the most fertile problems of Marxism since the time Marx was still alive. Actually, when Marx published the first volume of Capital, he was already aware that continental Europeans might find that his description of the antagonistic nature of the modern economy could well apply to England but was not a proper description of the continental economy. It is for this reason that he famously warned the German reader: “de te fabula narratur!”

Very quickly Marx himself got involved in the well-known dispute among Russians on the rural obshchina. Could Russia bypass capitalism thanks to the persistence of its old communal institutions? The multiple drafts of Marx’s response to Vera Zasulich bear witness to the importance of this issue for him in the last years of his life. In the 1880s, Georgij Plekhanov established a new influential synthesis for Russian Marxists: the obshchina had no place in the future of Russia and the country had to develop along capitalist lines before a socialist revolution could take place. It is needless to say that Plekhanov’s orthodoxy was shaken by the facts of October 1917: Lenin’s revolution was hardly compatible with Marx’s view on the stepwise evolution of the modes of production…

After 1945, these questions acquired a new meaning, in relationship with an historical assessment of both colonial economic dependency and the “peasant revolutions” in eastern Asia (China, Vietnam, etc.) The debate between Marx and the Russians was rediscovered alongside Marx’s conceptualisation of pre-capitalist forms of production, Marx’s ideas on India, etc. Celebrated anthologies of Marx’s texts on non-capitalist societies and the expansion of global markets appeared in French and English, etc. In the same period, the reflection on the economic significance of colonialism led to a new stress on the concept of dependence, asymmetric trade, dependent development. The world market - according to dependency theorists - was able to include non-capitalists forms of production and assigned them a subordinate position in the world economy, thus creating complicated hierarchies of cores and peripheries.

For Sieber the world was much simpler. There was a positive feedback between division of labour, growth of market size and technological improvement. More and more products were put on the market by more and more countries

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through improved means of transportation and communications. The world was more and more one and interconnected. Sieber did not deny differences, but he believed that those differences were a matter of degree of deviation from a shared path that led from the communities of blood of the primitive hunter-gatherers to victorian Britain.

Sieber first polemical target were the Russian narodniki. The sequence of articles Sieber dedicated to rural communes in Switzerland and elsewhere bears witness to his polemics against the populists. The review of Maksim Kovalevskij’s Obshchinnoe zemlevladenie, prichiny, khod i posledstvija ego razlozhenija that Sieber published in the Moscow-based Juridichekij Vestnik (directed by Kovalevskij, RPP 1959), polemically insists on the “natural” dissolution of rural communes. In contrast with the opinion held by Kovalevskij, Sieber stressed that it was not the British rule of India that was “artificially” dissolving India’s rural communities. Population growth was a much more effective driver of the emergence of private property (through a mechanism that was very evidently inspired by Ricardo’s analysis of land rent). In line with Marx’s fundamental teaching, Sieber argued that institutions and legal forms of property ownership were a consequence, not a cause, of changes in the division of labour:

The relative significance of the forms of property [...] represents nothing else but the juridical expression of the relative significance of the corresponding forms of composition of labour [slozhenie truda] (Sieber 1879).

The rural commune was doomed just like the traditional economy of Indian villages in Marx famous description of the "benefits" of British imperialism (Marx 1853; that Sieber seems to quote almost litterally at times, although he was unlikely to have read it).

The crucial issue of the rural commune - inescapable given the Russian political debates of the 1870s and early 1880s - emerged again in Sieber’s review of Voroncov’s Capitalism in Russia (on this review, see Dubjanskij 2016). This lengthy article was published in 1881 in the newspaper that Dragomanov edited in Geneva, the Vol'noe Slovo (Although Voln’oe Slovo eventually turned out to be part of plot of the Russian secret police, at the time it was believed a genuine outlet for Russian exiles, as Vera Zasulich testified; see Zasulich 1913)

In this review, Sieber insisted on the relative progress of Russian capitalism, criticising Voroncov’s use of data. Russia was following the path of all other

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countries in the West: industry was growing and employment in production for the market was replacing production for auto-consumption. Capitalism did not necessarily mean the factory system. It’s essence was the transformation of production into production for exchange as a result of increased division of labour. The opposition between the industrialised West and the East, which Voroncov, probably following the habit of the Slavophiles, so much insisted upon, was less than evident for Sieber. The East and West were all parts of the global market.

Meanwhile, the crisis of 1873 had stimulated, also in Western Europe, a reflection on the viability of small industry and family farming. It seemed to many that the crisis had demonstrated that small business could better survive the crisis than large capitalist companies. The debate evolved over time in the Revisionismusdebat of the 1890s, a substantial part of which dealt with the role of small business and family farming. Just like Karl Kautsky in the 1890s, Sieber had no doubt: to him, large was beautiful. In 1879, he translated therefore extracts from the already mentioned Objections to the economic doctrines of John Stuart Mill that presented a surprisingly concise illustration of Marxist doctrines on class struggle and capitalist development. The author of the pamphlet demonstrated that cottage industry could not withstand the competition of industrial factories and attacked Mill’s ideal of the family farm (that Mill derived from Sismondi). For the author of the pamphlet, as for Sieber:

If in large scale agriculture, 100 workers are able to produce - thanks to their combined actions and to the force of machines and the steam engine - as much as 300 peasants can produce at the cost of inhumane individual efforts, then the economy [ekonomija] prescribes the destruction of peasant farming [...]

And the same was to be said about cottagers.

It was the demographic evolution of societies that made the rural commune as well as any other form of traditional society unsustainable. The growth of population condemned any society to evolve and transform into something else. Sieber and the pamphlet he translated for Slovo agreed on this point, as Sieber studies on the evolution of Swiss rural communities and primitive societies demonstrate. Any attempt by traditional societies to defend the old way of life was misguided and lead to more and more human suffering. This was the case of China:

The surprising efforts of the Chinese to earn from the land the means of subsistence that are necessary for a surplus population and the superiority of

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their culture cannot appear to our eyes otherwise than as the desperate effort of a weakening race that desires to ensure its own survival without establishing the necessary pre-conditions for it, since it no more possesses the strength and bravery needed to break the ossified the relationships that made it vegetate for thousands of years and that force hundreds of thousands of its people to starve (Sieber 2012, 77)

But, implicitly, a similar faith would await Russia if it persisted in the attempt to preserve the remnants of the old institutions: the autocracy, the rural commune. Resistance was futile, or, as Marx put it, it would be a case of “Le mort qui saisit le vivant.”

The future of the periphery - for Sieber - lays in the core, in Great Britain. The expansion of the global market was a unifying force that was rapidly taking hold of the whole world. Was Sieber happy of this natural evolution of things? He certainly believed very strongly that capitalism was better than any form of production that preceded it. Through capitalism, society attained unprecedented levels in the development of its productive forces. But it also prepared for a future post-capitalist development.

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