Russia's interest in the economic thought of John Stuart Mill was sparked by the debate on capitalism and land reform that unfolded in Russia with the beginning of the Great Reform in the late 1850s. Seeking to bridge the growing gap between Russia and Western Europe, Alexander II (1855–81) initiated a series of modernization reforms that set Russia on the path to capitalist economy and political liberalization. After three decades of conservative reaction under Nicholas I, the relaxation of censorship stimulated publishing and journalism to a degree unseen in Russia before.Footnote ¹ More books by foreign authors were published within the first five years of reform than in the entire thirty-year reign of Nicholas I.Footnote ² “It was a remarkable time,” wrote one contemporary, “the time when everyone suddenly wanted to read, learn, and think.”Footnote ³ Once again, many journalists were looking to Europe, especially to England, for inspiration and ideas.Footnote ⁴ There was much interest in the British system of local government, courts, the economy and, most notably, the workers’ movement.Footnote ⁵ As Russia was transitioning from serfdom to free labor, the main question was how to apply the British experience of modernization in a country whose socioeconomic conditions were much different from those of Western Europe. It was also a time when native Russian economists began to replace German and French professors who had dominated Russian universities in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Political economy itself ceased to be the “suspicious” science that it had become in the last years of Nicholaevan rule.Footnote ⁶ It was to meet the demand for more up-to-date literature on political economy that Russian publishers turned to Mill's Principles, which by that time had already acquired a classic status in British universities.Footnote ⁷ Between 1860 and 1917 (the end of the imperial period), the Principles was published in seven editions and three translations,Footnote ⁸ becoming one of the longest-lasting manuals in Russian academic economics.Footnote ⁹ Each edition was accompanied by an editorial preface or longer introduction and followed by extensive reviews in popular journals, some of which evaluated Mill's political economy in the context of his biography and sociopolitical views. Judging from this publication history and the amount of debate the Principles generated, Mill far exceeded in popularity his immediate predecessors Ricardo and Malthus, whose works were also translated and published in Russia during the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁰ Apart from the clarity and intellectual accessibility of Mill's ideas, which made the Principles understandable to a wide audience, the main reason for its popularity in Russia was the emphasis which Mill placed on the social problem and his quest to find a middle ground between capitalist and socialist economic models. Mill appeared to offer an answer to the question that stood at the center of the Russian debate on capitalism: how to overcome Russia's backwardness while minimizing the harmful social effects of rapid modernization.Footnote ¹¹ It is notable that in Russia most of the reviews of the Principles were written not by professional economists, but by the intelligentsia that dominated the debate on capitalism until Russian academic economics came of age towards the late 1880s. What interested the intelligentsia most in Mill was his discussion of land reform, workers’ cooperatives, and measures for improving the cultural level of the laboring classes, whereas the abstract parts of Mill's economics were often left aside. Even trained economists who reviewed Mill tended to overlook Mill's theoretical subjects in favor of more practical themes and his concept of social justice, as expressed in the Principles.Footnote ¹² In fact, much of Mill's theoretical economics (including his theories of value, rent, and trade) was severely abridged in the 1895 edition. As the translator noted, he chose to publish “only those parts of Mill's treatise that appear the most important.”Footnote ¹³ This was not an indication of the immaturity of the Russian audience, only a reflection of Russia's intense preoccupation with reformist ideas in the age of modernization.Footnote ¹⁴

The popularity and longevity of the Principles in Russia did not, however, mean that Mill's economics was appreciated on its own terms. Whereas Mill was already controversial in his home country, in Russia his quest to find a middle ground between unbridled capitalism and utopian socialism provoked even greater controversy because the issue of capitalism itself was a subject of heated debate which engaged the intellectuals on a wide political spectrum. As a result, the labels attached to Mill were wider-ranging and the tendency to read him selectively was more pronounced. As this essay will show, Mill's reputation in Russia ranged from that of “socialist” to “an apologist of the bourgeoisie”; his Principles was sometimes enlisted in support of radical ideas (which Mill himself might not have endorsed), while at other times it was held as an example of what political economy should not be; what some reviewers praised as Mill's ability to avoid dogmatic adherence to the classics, others saw as inconsistency and indecisiveness. In the end, Mill failed to convince Russian readers that the solutions he offered were sufficient (or realistic enough) to solve the social question, but his attempt to tackle the issue that other classical economists tended to ignore ensured Mill a wide and sustained audience in Russia.

To understand Russian response to Mill it is important to begin with a brief overview of Mill's economic ideas and their reception in Britain. The unusual trajectory of Mill's intellectual journey as an economist was described by Mill himself in his Autobiography. Raised and educated by his father, a well-known utilitarian and classical economist, the young Mill began as a faithful follower of Smith and Ricardo whose theories of free-market capitalism were grounded on the assumption that self-interest is the most effective motivator of human action. He shared his father's Benthamite creed that “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” would come from legal and political reforms (including majoritarian democracy and moderate changes in taxation of private property) that would allow self-interested individuals to maximize their gain in ways conducive to the general progress. However, his mental crisis over the validity of utilitarian ethics at the age of twenty, and subsequent recovery due to the influences of the British poets, opened up Mill's mind to the idea that higher moral and aesthetical motives play a greater role in human character. With this broader concept of human nature, Mill became more receptive towards socialist ideas and more critical of the existing rules of private property and wealth distribution. The Principles, then, was an attempt to apply his new social ideas to the “core” Ricardian economics, thereby connecting political economy to social ethics and rescuing the former from the criticism levelled by the socialists and “humanitarians” that political economy had become a “heartless” science serving the needs of capital.Footnote ¹⁵ Already in the first edition that was published in 1848, Mill made some important corrections to Ricardian laws. For instance, he argued that there is a distinction between the laws of production and the laws of distribution: production is governed by objective and unchangeable laws whereas distribution depends on multiple subjective factors, including government regulations and private-property laws which could be changed in the interests of more equitable distribution of wealth. This idea led Mill to soften the concept of the free market by expanding the range of cases where government interference was suitable. The subsequent editions of Mill's Principles showed his growing awareness of social inequalities and the workers’ question.Footnote ¹⁶ Under the influence of his wife, Harriet Taylor, and the French cooperative movement, he came to advocate workers’ cooperatives and associations between workers and capitalists as a solution to class antagonism. While Mill defended the right of workers to unionize and demand higher wages, he was convinced that profit sharing was a more equitable and economically efficient principle than mere wage bargaining. In workers’ cooperatives, unlike in private enterprises with hired labor, each participant has an immediate incentive to work and see their profit grow.Footnote ¹⁷ To improve the position of agricultural laborers, Mill championed the expansion of peasant proprietorship based on the same principle that a peasant working on his own farm was more industrious and frugal than the landless laborer. He urged the government to help create peasant farms or larger cooperative units by purchasing land coming on the market.Footnote ¹⁸ Mill's other remedies for poverty involved population control, education of the working classes, taxation reform, and, most radically, changes in the existing laws of inheritance that would limit the amount of inheritable wealth. Anything above “the amount sufficient to constitute a moderate independence” should be confiscated by the state. In this case the individual would have a strong incentive to bequeath his fortune to several recipients, which, in Mill's view, would lead to more equitable distribution of wealth in society.Footnote ¹⁹

However, Mill was not a socialist of the same type as Marx or the French utopians, even though he was influenced by Fourier and Saint-Simon.Footnote ²⁰ He never abandoned the principles of competition and private ownership, which he considered important (though not exclusive) motivators of economic action. More importantly, he was not convinced that the socialist principle of common ownership would be conducive to the ideal of individual liberty that lay at the heart of his social philosophy. Mill expected that one day capitalist order would evolve towards some form of cooperative socialism with more egalitarian institutions and higher social ethics, but he rejected the idea of revolution and the abolition of private property, at least in the foreseeable future. Until then he placed more faith in reforming rather than abolishing capitalist structures, hoping that time and experience would show which economic order—capitalist or socialist—was superior.Footnote ²¹

Considering Mill's shift of position, it is no wonder that his readers, both in England and in Russia, disagreed about Mill's place within the European tradition of economic thought.Footnote ²² In both countries, reviewers often tended to focus on one or the other of Mill's arguments, depending on their own economic views and assumptions. In England, however, prevailing opinion emphasized and praised the conservative implications of his economic thought—his defense of private property rights and laissez-faire (with some qualifications)—rather than his socialist sympathies.Footnote ²³ To Mill's disappointment, the Principles produced no outcry about its doctrine on property, in part because, in the words of one reviewer, it was “the dream of the future too distant to affect the living.”Footnote ²⁴ His public standing suffered a serious decline only when he turned from words to action, defending the reform of land tenure first as an MP in 1867 and later as a public figure. He acquired a reputation as a “rabble-rouser” and “hothead” whose radicalism offended the sensitivities of the British liberals.Footnote ²⁵

In Russia, by contrast, the attention had always focused on Mill's reformist ideas, while his conservative principles were more often criticized than approved. The main reason for that was the nature of the Russian debate on capitalism and political economy. Russia's humiliating defeat in the Crimean war of 1853–5 brought home the fact that serfdom-based Russia had fallen far behind the industrial countries which now threatened her position as the Great Power. However, the suitability of capitalism to Russia was still an open question for many intellectuals. Already in the 1840s, Alexander Herzen, the “father of Russian socialism,” voiced his disappointment over the “bourgeois society” that he observed in Britain and France. He fled the oppressive Nicholaevan Russia in 1847 only to find in the West a different kind of oppression, as he saw it. He was horrified by the social cost of industrialization and repelled by the “vulgarity” of the bourgeoisie.Footnote ²⁶ His lamentations about Western individualism and “the despotism of capital” were closely echoed in the 1840s by the Slavophiles—a group of intellectuals who saw communitarian-oriented Russia as morally and spiritually superior to the West.Footnote ²⁷ In the 1860s, with increased travel abroad and greater exposure to the French socialist ideas, more Russian intellectuals came to doubt the progressiveness of capitalism, especially its “pure” English type. Within the next two decades, Russia produced a wide range of alternative theories and models that were supposed to replace or modify English-style capitalism. For the Populists who focused on the interests of the peasantry, the solution lay in agrarian socialism, which they expected to build on the basis of the Russian commune that survived the serfdom reform of 1861. Since Russia had not yet developed a capitalist economy, it was possible, in their view, to bypass capitalism altogether. By contrast, the Russian Marxists of the 1870s dismissed the Populist solution as a backward utopia, focusing instead on the needs of the rising working class. However, some of them came to the same conclusion regarding the possibility of skipping capitalism in Russia. On their interpretation of Marx, Russia should take advantage of its relative backwardness and proceed directly towards socialist revolution and industrial socialism instead of waiting until the maturation and economic disintegration of the capitalist stage. By the 1890s those who held this position became known as Social Democrats or revolutionary Marxists, in contrast to the Legal Marxists who recognized that capitalism had already made its inroads in Russia, which appeared to prove Marx's postulate about the inevitability of the capitalist stage. The Legal Marxists, however, hoped to soften the edges of capitalism (mostly through labor legislation), eventually arguing along lines similar to those of Eduard Bernstein and revisionist Marxism in Germany.Footnote ²⁸ The conservative Slavophiles, for their part, tried to promote the concept of Slavophile capitalism, which urged business owners to treat their employees with benevolence and “Christian paternalism.”Footnote ²⁹ Their inspiration came, in part, from the economists of the German historical school, who argued that in each country the economy always reflects the nation's unique culture and history rather than, as Smith had postulated, universal economic laws. Amidst this kaleidoscope of movements which expressed various degrees of hostility towards capitalism, even liberals displayed some ambivalence and misgivings about capitalist economy, despite their embrace of Western political culture.Footnote ³⁰ Not all of Mill's reviewers identified themselves with either of these currents and some were eclectic enough to combine the ideas of several schools, but it is clear that all of them read Mill in light of a controversy over capitalism that did not subside in Russia until the early twentieth century.

There was one more factor that influenced the reception of Mill in Russia—the quality of Russian translations. In contrast to the French and German languages, which became almost a second tongue to the Russian elite and many intelligentsia, knowledge of English was very limited in Russia. Despite the growing fascination with everything British, neither universities nor the elite schools for the nobility included English in their curriculum until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. For this reason, the task of translating Mill was often entrusted to journalists and writers who learned English through travel, self-study, or home schooling rather than professional training.Footnote ³¹ As nonprofessional translators, they could be less faithful to the original text, making cuts and additions that were not always justified by the need for purely stylistic adjustment.Footnote ³² The problem was also compounded by limited translatability between the two languages: many English words and idioms, especially those related to British economic and social realia, had no close equivalents or carried different connotations in the Russian language. In the English–Russian dictionary issued in 1850 the word “identity,” for instance, contained only one equivalent, tozhdestvennost’ (“sameness”); the word “capital” was translated as lezhashchie den’gi (“savings”); and the words “self-interest,” “trades union,” and “competitive” were missing altogether.Footnote ³³ Although the process of linguistic borrowing accelerated, bringing the number of foreign words to some thirty thousand by the 1860s,Footnote ³⁴ terms such as “skilled labor” or “workers’ association” still defied precise translation and had to be rendered into Russian either in a descriptive manner or through the nearest equivalent, sometimes with imperfect results.Footnote ³⁵ It is clear that, in some cases, different socioeconomic conditions in Russia prevented readers from fully grasping the meaning of the original word. However, intentional distortion and politicization of Mill's vocabulary was not uncommon, especially among radical-minded readers.Footnote ³⁶ For instance, in the early editions of the Principles, the term “trades union” was left untranslated for lack of the Russian equivalent, but one reviewer translated it as soiuz soprotivleniia (literally “union for resistance”), which sounded much stronger and more threatening than the original term.Footnote ³⁷

Censorship, too, played a role in shaping Mill's image in Russia. Mill's attitude towards socialism was a subject which he clarified in his Autobiography, which came out posthumously in 1873. In Russia it was translated and published a year later, but a few crucial passages that explained his drift towards socialist ideas were modified or omitted altogether. In the original version, for instance, Mill wrote, “our ideal of ultimate improvement went far beyond Democracy and would class us decidedly under the general designation of Socialists.”Footnote ³⁸ In the Russian translation, the word “socialists” was removed, leaving readers to guess what exactly Mill meant by saying that his (and his wife’s) “ideal went far beyond democracy and led us much further.”Footnote ³⁹ When Mill wrote that some parts of his political economy were “affirmed by socialists, [but] . . . fiercely denied by political economists,” the words “affirmed by socialists” were deleted from the Russian translation.Footnote ⁴⁰ In several places, the word “socialist” was translated as “social” or “sociological,” so Mill's statement that after the French revolution of 1848 he spent “much time” studying “the best of Socialistic writers” was altered to sound as if Mill simply read “Continental sociologists” (pisatelei kontinenta po sotsiologii). In the original version, Mill also noted that the first edition of the Principles (published before the revolution) contained stronger criticism of socialism than later editions. However, in the Russian translation the word “socialism” appeared as “social tasks,” which made the whole sentence rather incongruent and obscure.Footnote ⁴¹ In another place censors altered a passage in which Mill praised “all socialistic experiments by select individuals”; instead, the Russian version read, “all efforts of thinking individuals.”Footnote ⁴² Taken together, those alterations obscured Mill's point about the revolution of 1848 as an important milestone in his evolution towards socialist ideas. It is no wonder that only one reviewer in Russia noted the changes between the successive editions of Mill's Principles.Footnote ⁴³ For those who only read the Autobiography in Russian, censorship cuts must have made Mill less of a socialist than he actually was. His Chapters on Socialism which came out in Britain in 1879 were never published in Russia.

The first Russian rendition of the Principles appeared in 1860–61 on the pages of the left-wing Sovremennik (The Contemporary), one of the most popular and progressive journals of the reform era.Footnote ⁴⁴ The translator was a radical-minded publicist, Nikolai Chernyshevskii, who supplemented Mill's text with explanatory notes and extensive critical comments written from the socialist point of view. Like other radical thinkers, Chernyshevskii used the translation as a convenient means of disseminating his own ideas.Footnote ⁴⁵ In fact, his commentary took up so much space in the journal that after completing Book One, Chernyshevskii reneged on his promise to publish Mill's work “without any abridgements.” Book Two appeared in 1861 in the form of a summary and excerpts but with a new pledge that the full text would be published as a book within the next year.Footnote ⁴⁶ Chernyshevskii's arrest for revolutionary activity in 1862 postponed the publication for another three years, when it was finally arranged by his relative and cowriter from Sovremennik, Alexander Pypin.Footnote ⁴⁷ The fact that the Principles first appeared in a so-called “thick journal” was a sign of nascent success for Mill. In autocratic Russia, where opportunities for public debate were limited, literary journals became a major forum for discussing and disseminating liberal and radical ideas.Footnote ⁴⁸ One contemporary called Sovremennik “a textbook of life which guided [the public] towards the most urgent issues of the time”—freedom and “better life for everyone.” Chernyshevskii's translation of the Principles, in his view, was an important milestone in Russia's intellectual awakening.Footnote ⁴⁹

Chernyshevskii's radical commentary to the Principles did as much to popularize the book as it did to enhance controversy around it. In his preface, Chernyshevskii praised Mill “as a thinker who seeks only the truth” and whose work “is considered by all economists as the best, the most faithful and thoughtful exposition of the tradition founded by Adam Smith.” For those interested in political economy, Chernyshevskii strongly suggested Mill over “French economists” (apparently referring to J. B. Say and his school), whom he labeled elsewhere as rutinery (from the French word routiner) for their rigid interpretation, as he saw it, of classical economics. However, he warned his readers that Mill's “system is far from being our system.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In fact, that was an understatement, probably calculated to lull the censors. For those readers who took the time to study both the main text and Chernyshevskii's lengthy commentary, it must have been clear that he stood much further to the left than Mill.Footnote ⁵¹ Beyond such technical subjects as credit, the theory of the wage fund (which Mill later recanted), profit, and the distinction between laws of production and distribution, there was little that Chernyshevskii approved of in the Principles, including Mill's definition of political economy. If Mill defined it in the traditional Smithian manner, as a science about “wealth,” Chernyshevskii argued that political economy should be about “man's well-being” rather than the accumulation of riches.Footnote ⁵²

Chernyshevskii agreed with Mill (and Smith) that “material well-being” is important for each individual and that “personal benefit is the main [economic] motive,” but he rejected the idea that society should be structured around the principles of competition, profit-making and the market exchange of goods. Competitive economy, he argued, enriches few and exploits many.Footnote ⁵³ Although Chernyshevskii gave Mill credit for his critique of the British system of land tenure, he dismissed Mill's proposition of land reform as a “weak” solution, which, in his view, also contradicted Mill's own position as a laissez-faire economist. Even if implemented, it would not fundamentally change the nature of capitalist society; nor would it increase agricultural input, because small farms, according to Chernyshevskii, are less productive than big ones. He was similarly skeptical about Mill's idea of how to improve the lot of the working class.Footnote ⁵⁴ While he praised Mill for expressing a more “sympathetic attitude” towards socialist theories, and for refusing to accept the poverty of the working class as a norm, Chernyshevskii did not share Mill's optimism that education and population control would raise the workers from poverty. In Chernyshevskii's view, the expected changes are more likely to appear in reverse order: if the material conditions of the working class improve, so will their educational level and the ability to practice birth control. He also rejected Mill's argument that progressive taxation and reformed laws of inheritance would reduce social inequality. Chernyshevskii objected that it would be difficult to assess individual fortunes and incomes with sufficient accuracy. Likewise, he disagreed with Mill's argument regarding the benefits of limited government interference, although he admitted that Mill, unlike French followers of Smith, was more open to the idea of government regulations.Footnote ⁵⁵

In place of Mill's “palliative measures” and “hesitant” solutions, Chernyshevskii advocated restructuring the whole of society based on the principle that “labor should not be a commodity and that each person is the most productive when he works for himself and not for somebody else.”Footnote ⁵⁶ In practical terms, this implied cooperative socialism with the elements of technocratic planning that would exclude competition and reduce the need for market exchange, which Chernyshevskii viewed as a waste of human energy. “In the business of trade,” he argued, “all efforts are concentrated on reshuffling of finished product rather than on its production.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Chernyshevskii was convinced that in capitalist society too much labor is diverted away from agriculture towards the production of luxury goods, which ultimately leads to high prices on food and basic commodities. In typical utopian manner, he claimed that it would be possible for the government to “produce precise estimates of society's needs and resources” in order to coordinate the production of basic goods, comforts, and luxury commodities.Footnote ⁵⁸ Like all Populists, Chernyshevskii viewed the capitalist factory as a monstrous institution that degraded and crippled workers, but he did not go so far as to advocate a return to the economy of craft production, as some Russian Populists did.Footnote ⁵⁹ He thought there was a simple and economically effective solution to the drudgery of factory work. It involved the division of labor but not in the sense that Mill and all followers of Smith understood it. According to Chernyshevskii, workers should be allowed to switch activities several times a day so that their minds and bodies would not get tired of doing the same task over and over again, as was presently the case in factory production.Footnote ⁶⁰

Chernyshevskii was disappointed with Mill for treating the subject of productivity without considering how the division of labor impacts the worker himself.Footnote ⁶¹ Likewise he reproached Mill for devoting “only two and a half lines . . . to the fact that in the wealthiest societies there are [social] classes that live in the same unenviable condition as ‘savages.’”Footnote ⁶² He was particularly offended by Mill's remark that English workers must be kept under strict supervision until their education and moral habits have improved.Footnote ⁶³ On Chernyshevskii's part, this was not a fair criticism; it downplayed the fact that the Principles was imbued with social criticism, even if Mill shunned the kind of sentimentality and language of social exposé used by some British philanthropists and social reformers. Such comments, many of which took Mill's remarks out of context, created a one-sided and simplistic image of Mill's economic thought.

Chernyshevskii's commentary set the tone for radical critique of Mill's economics in Russia, being ranked by Lenin as one of the most important writings that nurtured the future generation of Russian revolutionaries.Footnote ⁶⁴ One contemporary recalled that Chernyshevskii's commentary was eagerly discussed by the members of the “economic circle” that emerged in St Petersburg University in the 1880s and included students from diverse academic backgrounds. One of them was Lenin's older brother Alexander Ul’ianov, who studied in the Biology Department but was also passionately interested in political economy.Footnote ⁶⁵ Ul’ianov's unsuccessful attempt on the life of Alexander III in 1887 put an end to student circles in the capital, but reading Chernyshevskii's commentary to Mill acquired, in the words of one student, the status of “‘revolutionary’ activity.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Another contemporary, a student from the Philology Department, remembered in his memoirs that he could not stop reading Mill in Chernyshevskii's translation even though it took him away from his primary studies.Footnote ⁶⁷ For some readers who were engaged in self-education, Chernyshevskii's edition was of interest not only for its content but also as an exercise in critical thinking. Vera Zasulich, a woman revolutionary, wrote in her memoirs, “I read [Mill] as if I was doing school homework: I would read a chapter and then retell its content to myself. By the end of Mill's book, I was sometimes able to guess what exactly Chernyshevskii would object to this or that argument and when I happened to be right, I was very pleased.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Outside Russia, Chernyshevskii's translation caught the attention of none other than Karl Marx himself, who praised the commentary as a “masterful” analysis and was willing to study Russian in order to read Chernyshevskii in the original.Footnote ⁶⁹ Compared to Marx,Footnote ⁷⁰ Chernyshevskii was more courteous towards Mill, but he did the Principles little justice by measuring it against his own, essentially utopian, socialist ideas.

Another radical-minded reviewer, N. Sokolov, took Chernyshevskii's critique a step further. He presented Mill as an apologist for the “bourgeoisie,” which, in his treatment, was a derogatory term. Mill was labeled “a bourgeois to the marrow of his bones for whom everything that is human and not bourgeois is alien.”Footnote ⁷¹ He was accused of defending bourgeois “idleness” and “passion for accumulation.” His whole teaching, according to Sokolov, was “immoral” and amounted to nothing more than the defense of the bourgeoisie's “dirty interests.”Footnote ⁷² Whatever concern for public interest he found in Mill, the reviewer discounted as contradictory and hypocritical. It is notable that in talking about “accumulation,” the reviewer used the old Russian word likhoimstvo, which derived from the root likho (meaning “evil” or “misfortune”) and carried a strong negative connotation, which implied greed. Although a more neutral economic term, nakoplenie, came in use in the nineteenth century, using older vocabulary became a common tactic among the opponents of capitalism in Russia.

In the same year, Sokolov published in the journal Russkoe Slovo (Russian Word) two more lengthy articles which censured political economy as a “science about greed [likhoimstvo],” and derided Mill as a mediocre, self-contradictory, and hypocritical “sophist” who expressed sympathy to the working classes on one page but defended the interests of capital on the other.Footnote ⁷³

Sokolov's article appalled Alexander Herzen, who then lived in London and admired Mill for his political philosophy. He wrote, “to call Stuart Mill a rascal, forgetting all the service he has done, is not that the same as the Russian master's way of punching old Gavrilo in the snout for a crumpled cravat?” In his typical pessimistic manner, Herzen lamented that Russia's newly granted freedom of the press produced such ugly outbursts of “insolent arrogance.” “Our black earth,” he concluded, “needs good drainage!”Footnote ⁷⁴

Herzen was not the only one who felt offended for Mill. Sokolov's accusations were promptly answered on the pages of Sovremennik by the economist Iurii Zhukovskii, who preferred to remain anonymous.Footnote ⁷⁵ Outraged by Sokolov's “campaign” against Mill, Zhukovskii thought it was “time to stop this bullying.” He (correctly) accused the reviewer of taking Mill's quotes out of context and intentionally distorting them in such a way as to present Mill's passages about the bourgeoisie as normative rather than descriptive or critical. “Mill,” he argued, “insistently tells us such facts that expose negative sides of [bourgeois] society, which . . . other economists . . . are trying to conceal.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Zhukovskii defiantly entitled his article “Mill distorted [perevrannii] by the Russian Word,” but his own assessment of Mill was not unbiased, if in the opposite direction. He presented Mill as a philosopher and political activist who is “inimical to bourgeois order.” There is little in his thought, he insisted, “that would in any way flatter . . . the bourgeoisie.”Footnote ⁷⁷ In support of his claim, Zhukovskii referred readers not only to the Principles but also to Mill's political writings, citing his demand for universal suffrage and democracy, his support for workers’ unions and, most importantly, his critique of the current structures of private ownership. The reviewer quoted at length Mill's argument that communism is a more equitable system than the existing capitalist order; however, he left aside Mill's more conservative arguments, such as his adherence to the principles of competition and laissez-faire that left-leaning critics found objectionable. So the picture of Mill that emerged from the review was one of a radical thinker “who completely [napoval] condemns English bourgeois order.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Zhukovskii's article, however, did not convince Russian radicals. In 1879 an author who identified himself only by the initials N.I. blasted “vulgar political economy” as “a servant of big pockets” and criticized Mill for his alleged inconsistency and hypocrisy with regard to the laboring classes. The reviewer's tone, much like Sokolov’s, was harsh, sarcastic, and full of contempt towards Mill and his classical predecessors, Malthus and Ricardo. He wrote, “even the reddest communist could not have depicted current society in a gloomier light. Despite that, what Mill proposes . . . will not have even the slightest effect on the relations between capital and labor.” Like Chernyshevskii, he believed that nothing short of a radical transformation of the rules of production and distribution would improve the lot of working people.Footnote ⁷⁹

A much more positive, if selective, interpretation of the Principles was provided by the Legal Marxists who appeared in Russia in the early 1890s. As Andrzej Walicki noted, in many ways the Legal Marxists anticipated the ideas of Bernstein revisionism that would emerge in Europe a few years later.Footnote ⁸⁰ The difference was that Russian Marxists, challenged by Slavophile and Populist critiques of capitalism, devoted more attention to the issue of the peasant commune and land reform than did Marxists in the West. Not surprisingly, in reading Mill, the Legal Marxists focused primarily on his critique of landownership in Britain, often leaving aside more contentious issues. For instance, Mikhail Tugan-Baranovskii, a prominent Russian economist, enlisted Mill's Principles in support of his own argument that all land should be nationalized—an argument that Mill himself was not ready to accept. Citing Mill's idea that “land is the common heritage of the whole of mankind,” Tugan-Baranovskii presented Mill as one of the pioneers of the movement towards the nationalization of land, whose ideas were later developed by more radical thinkers. He wrote, “this most influential and authoritative of all bourgeois economists revealed most unambiguously his sympathy towards fundamental [korennoi] reform of private property in land . . . Mill's views could not but influence the educated classes of English society.”Footnote ⁸¹ Other Legal Marxists lauded Mill for his support of workers’ associations and for going beyond the Smithian school with regard to state interference in public affairs.Footnote ⁸²

Towards the end of the century, some of the Legal Marxists, including Tugan-Baranovskii, shifted further away from Marxism in the direction of the liberal school, but only a few Russian liberals were prepared to accept competitive laissez-faire economy as a model for their country. Even as newly converted liberals, they believed that socialism was compatible with liberalism.Footnote ⁸³ In one of his later works, Tugan-Baranovskii made an interesting observation about the paradox exhibited by Western capitalism in its present form: politically, he argued, it raised workers’ awareness of their human rights and dignity as individuals, yet economically it reduced them to mere tools of production.Footnote ⁸⁴ His remark was characteristic of the dilemma facing Russian liberals. Until the very end of imperial Russia, they struggled with the question of how to preserve the political and material benefits of capitalism without at the same time subjecting the working classes to economic exploitation and social dislocation that accompanied capitalist modernization in the West.Footnote ⁸⁵

It is among the liberals of different shades that Mill's Principles commanded the most attention. The attitude of left-wing liberals was expressed by the economist Nikolai Rozhdestvenskii, who wrote a monograph on Mill's economic ideas. He began his analysis by defending Mill against the charges of “Jacobinism” and utopian socialism. He argued that some of Mill's recommendations regarding the laws of inheritance had already been implemented in England and none of them posed a threat to social order.Footnote ⁸⁶ The main strength of Mill's book, according to Rozhdestvenskii, was that it expanded the subject of political economy by giving more attention to social questions and to “the philosophical foundations” underlying political economy.Footnote ⁸⁷ “Mill”, he wrote “had realized that the central idea of the modern era is the need to raise the living conditions of the working class and to promote cooperation among [social] classes.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Rozhdestvenskii noted with admiration that Mill defended the idea of workers’ associations at a time “when everybody looked at them as a utopia” whereas the experience of the associative movement in recent years had proved Mill's wisdom.Footnote ⁸⁹ He also praised Mill's distinction between the objective laws of production and the subjective laws of distribution, which allowed Mill to “explore conditions” required for the improvement of “people's well-being”—the aspiration that set him far apart from other classical economists.Footnote ⁹⁰ In another place, the reviewer admitted that Mill's utilitarian principle of the greatest happiness is “the best” among those so far proposed by economists, the others being either too idealistic or too unethical. However, it is not a “satisfactory” principle because it allows for the ethics of competition and self-interest. It is indicative that Rozhdestvenskii conveyed Mill's idea of self-interest by choosing the Russian word svoekorystie (which implied selfishness and greed) instead of employing the more neutral expression chastnyi interes (“private interest”) that was usually preferred by Russian proponents of capitalism.

As a liberal with socialist sympathies, Rozhdestvenskii was searching in the Principles for something like the Marxian grand theory of historical stages, but without the idea of violent revolution. A few ameliorative solutions offered by Mill did not, in his view, present an alternative to the communist model. In the end, he wrote, the reader is still left with the question, “is it really that social science should oscillate between the principle of communism and that of self-interest?”Footnote ⁹¹ Moreover, Rozhdestvenskii saw a contradiction between the philosophical foundations of Mill's Principles, which ultimately derived from laissez-faire thinking, and his practical solutions to class antagonism, which essentially implied restrictions on competition and self-interest.Footnote ⁹²

For more moderate liberals, the notion of self-interest in itself was not objectionable, but some of them also found Mill's Principles inconsistent and weak in theoretical grounding. In 1895 Nikolai Bunge, a prominent Russian economist and minister of finance from 1881 to 1886, published a monograph analysis of Mill's economic thought. It reflected the thinking of those liberals who rejected socialist theories but were still searching for ways to mitigate the social impact of the capitalist order. Bunge was under the impression that the alternative commonly discussed by European economists was capitalism versus communism, society based exclusively on “private interest” (chastnyi interest) versus society with unlimited power over the individual. For Bunge, however, this was a false dilemma. The true task, in his view, should be the extension of government involvement in society in such a way that “both principles—that of individuality and collectivity—would receive their fullest development.”Footnote ⁹³ Bunge admitted that it is a “very difficult” task and that Mill advocated more government regulations than was commonly accepted in capitalist countries, but, like Rozhdestvenskii, he was disappointed that Mill's recommendations did not amount to a new socioeconomic theory. This was because Mill drew on the theoretical postulates of the Ricardian school of economics but tried to apply them to the economic forms proposed by utopian socialists. The result, in his view, was an attempt “to combine the incompatible.”Footnote ⁹⁴

Looking further to the right on the liberal spectrum, one could find more favorable and balanced assessments of Mill's conciliatory stance. In a long review published by Severniy Vestnik (Northern Herald), an anonymous writer, while noting “some hesitations” and “contradictions” in the Principles, was more inclined to excuse them as “unavoidable” and praise rather than criticize Mill for his eclectic position.Footnote ⁹⁵ None of the existing economic schools, in the reviewer's opinion, answered the needs of modern society: Ricardian economics had sanctioned the ethics of extreme individualism and “acquisitiveness” (stiazhanie), while the German school of economics headed by Roscher and Hildebrand had gone too far in criticizing Smith's principles of laissez-faire. In Mill he found an attempt, if an imperfect one, to correct both extremes. To the reviewer, the recent repeal of the Corn Laws in England was proof that it was indeed possible “to reconcile the differences among the economists,” as Mill had hoped. He concluded that while Mill's political economy “is not the path to the blessed land [zemlia obetovannaia], it is nevertheless a beacon of hope for people wandering in the jungles of science.”Footnote ⁹⁶

Another laudatory review was published in 1874 by Vestnik Evropy (Herald of Europe), a popular and long-lasting “thick journal” which professed liberal principles and the idea of industrial modernization.Footnote ⁹⁷ The author, Iurii Rossel’, was a Russian publicist of English origin who spent several years in England and contributed to Vestnik and other journals a variety of liberal-minded articles on political and economic issues.Footnote ⁹⁸ Rossel’ lavishly praised Mill for “courage,” “patience,” and “conciliatory tone”—the qualities that, in his opinion, compelled even Mill's opponents to study his ideas and accept many of them. “In England,” he wrote,

In degree of historical importance, Rossel’ ranked Mill higher than the illustrious John Locke: Mill, according to Rossel’, played the same role of major human rights advocate in the nineteenth century that Locke had done two hundred years earlier, but with a greater sense of urgency and courage. Rossel’ conceded to Mill's critics that Mill neither was an original thinker, nor elaborated a comprehensive “social theory” akin to that which Auguste Comte attempted (but, in his view, also failed) to create.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ None of that, however, diminished Mill's importance as a reformer and philosopher. Rossel’ was exceptional among Russian reviewers for appreciating not only Mill's critique of the existing rules of distribution but also his moderation in prescribing remedies for their improvement. He fully agreed with Mill that capitalism (if based on reformed principles of private property) might be as effective as socialism in providing for society's economic needs, “but whether socialism is capable of providing for [individual] freedom—another vital human need—is still an open question.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ With minor exceptions, Rossel’ endorsed every remedy offered by Mill, but he made an important disclaimer: “his plan is good only for such countries as England,” where the working class was willing to exercise the kind of self-discipline expected by Mill and was already showing signs of progress.Footnote ¹⁰² By implication, Russian workers still had a long way to go.

The attitude to Mill of more conservative liberals was expressed by Boris Chicherin, a professor of law in Moscow University (until his forced resignation in 1867) and one of the most original thinkers in the Russian intellectual tradition. In 1882–3 he published the two-volume work Property and State, which sought to expand on his previous polemic against Marx by offering a comprehensive refutation of socialist and communist theories. He was alarmed by the popularity of socialist ideas in Russia, hoping to demonstrate to Russian youth the faulty logic and political dangers inherent in socialist thinking. Looking at the range of socialist ideas, Chicherin located Mill at the middle of the spectrum, among those thinkers who would not go as far as abolishing all private property but would prefer “landed property . . . to belong to society as a whole” since “the forces of nature,” in their view, “essentially belong to all of humanity.” “By the end of his life,” Chicherin wrote, “Mill became increasingly sympathetic to socialist ideas, embracing the idea of land nationalization.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Chicherin accepted neither the premise nor the conclusion of such theories. They are based, he argued, on the faulty idea that “society is obligated to provide each individual with some property.” Although not as extreme as other socialist theories, this thinking puts ethical principles ahead of economic considerations, treating entitlement to property as a form of human right. He was convinced that this idea was a source of fundamental contradiction within the socialist theory: instead of freedom it would eventually produce enslavement of the individual to the state, instead of egalitarian society it would lead to the formation of the bureaucratic elite and new forms of inequality, instead of economic well-being for everyone socialism would result in economic stagnation and loss of innovation because individual initiative would be replaced with government regulation. Citing Mill's words that the future will show whether communism is to prevail, Chicherin expressed his surprise that “such a remarkable writer” as Mill failed to see these contradictions. For Chicherin, whose every prediction came true a few decades later, communism was nothing but an extreme perversion of human nature and of the idea of freedom. Unfortunately for Russia, Chicherin represented a tiny and isolated minority among the Russian liberals whose sympathy with socialist ideas led them to adopt the fatal slogan “no enemies to the left.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The publication of a new translation of Mill's Principles in 1895 testified to the continued popularity of Mill's economic thought in Russia, despite its fading relevance in England, where it was challenged by mathematical economics and soon replaced as a major textbook by Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The new Russian translation was made from the latest, seventh, edition issued in 1892. It contained translator's subtextual notes and the introduction which analyzed the Principles within the larger context of Mill's sociopolitical ideas and his life as a reformer. The translator, Alexander Miklashevskii, was a well-known economist of liberal orientation who published several works on finances and served as a professor of political economy in Iur’evskii University.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Although he noted that some of Mill's ideas, including his theory of the wage fund, had been recently corrected, and others, such as his discussion of workers’ associations, stood in need of updating, he found Mill's work “the best manual for everyone studying political economy.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Like other economists with sympathy for the workers’ question, Miklashevskii saw Mill's biggest accomplishment as seeking “the middle ground” and trying to “discuss many phenomena not from the narrow economic viewpoint but from a wider social perspective.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ He also commended Mill's idea of peasant proprietorship and his argument about the distinction between production and distribution.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Compared to Chernyshevskii's rendition, the new translation was more elegant, economic in style, and easy to read. It reflected new lexical borrowings and semantic shifts that had occurred in the Russian language since mid-century. For instance, the term “trades union” was now given a Russian equivalent—rabochii soyuz (literally “workers’ union”), while the term “strike” was translated as zabastovka, the same word that is still in use today and which conveyed the idea of protest rather than simply “stoppage of work.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ However, Miklashevskii's edition contained significant textual cuts (most of which were marked in the text with ellipses) and alterations which shortened the original by almost a half. According to Miklashevskii, the omissions were made with the purpose of “saving space” and because some of Mill's points “are subject to such frequent discussions” that there was no need to reproduce them.Footnote ¹¹¹ Among the omitted passages most concerned Mill's theoretical economics, but others, such as the chapter on strikes and on inheritance, and a large part of the chapter on workers’ associations, were central to Mill's reformist ideas. It seems likely that at least some of these omissions were made by censors rather than by Miklashevskii himself, who was otherwise known for his liberal views and interest in social questions. In the introduction he praised Mill for paying attention to the social issues of the day, yet it was primarily those passages where Mill discussed the rights of the working classes or the rights of the individual vis-à-vis the state that were abridged. For instance, Mill's discussion of government functions (Book Five, I), where he asserted that “individuals are proper guardians of their own interests,” was condensed into a few sentences which did not do justice to Mill's ideas.Footnote ¹¹² In another place, Mill's characterization of the “non-laboring class” as “the great social evil” (Book Four, VII, 1) was modified to make it sound descriptive rather than critical. The words “the great social evil” were absent from the Russian edition.Footnote ¹¹³

A year later another new edition was published in Kiev, the capital of Malorossiia Province at that time. The translation was less polished than Miklashevskii’s, mostly because E. I. Ostrogradskaia followed a more literalist philosophy of translation. But, unlike the 1895 Moscow edition, this version contained no textual cuts or alterations. Apparently Kiev censors did not consider Mill's work dangerous in any way. Such instances of censorship inconsistency were not unusual in Russia, where censorship laws were fluid and each censor, in the words of one contemporary, was like “his own tsar.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

The editor, O. I. Ostrogradskii (who was apparently related to the translator), shared with Miklashevskii the opinion that despite the appearance of other specialized and general studies on political economy, Mill's book remained valuable due to its attention to “the social ideas of our time” and Mill's attempt to combine economic theory with practical application.Footnote ¹¹⁵ This statement reflected Russian economists’ preoccupation in the 1890s with the issues of methodology and the relation between theory and practice in political economy. Unlike their Western colleagues at the turn of the century, Russian scholars still considered political economy essentially as a philosophical science inseparable from ethical and social questions.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Besides its academic use, the Principles remained relevant to the Russian debate on the fate of the peasantry, the education of the working classes, and internal colonization, which continued until the end of the imperial period.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Tugan-Baranovskii, for instance, was influenced by Mill (among other sources) when he argued for land reform in Russia. Zhukovskii's proposition that the government should regularly purchase available land and create “economic units” for peasants also bore close resemblance to Mill's ideas on peasant proprietorship.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Another well-known advocate of Russian peasants, economist A. Vasil’chikov, enlisted Mill in support of his claim that “landownership is no longer considered such an inalienable right that it could not be subjected to some limitations in the interests of other classes.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

Like Mill, those economists were supporters of private property, but even some advocates of communal ownership in Russia paid homage to Mill. In 1862 Nikolai Ogarev, Herzen's closest associate in exile, sent Mill his book Essai sur la situation russe, asking Mill for his opinion on the issue of the Russian commune. Mill's reply was typical of his conciliatory stance. After expressing his gratitude for the book and the letter, Mill wrote,

Mill's response to Ogarev was not published in Russia until 1912, but in 1906 Alexander Manuilov, an economist with Populist sympathies from Moscow University, published a series of articles in which he cited Mill in support of his proposition that land should be owned by the state and distributed to “self-governing units”—a modernized version of the Populist concept of the commune, which had only a remote resemblance to Mill's cooperative enterprises.Footnote ¹²¹ Some Marxist economists also quoted Mill's description of workers’ conditions in support of their own radical ideas, even though a few pages later they criticized Mill as a Ricardian economist.Footnote ¹²² It was not uncommon among academic economists to combine in their lectures the ideas of Mill with those of Marx, as did, for instance, Chuprov, who referenced Mill's chapter on workers’ cooperatives but rejected his theory of the wage fund in favor of the more radical ideas of Marx.Footnote ¹²³

There was, however, one argument in Mill's Principles which even his supporters hesitated to endorse. It was his Malthusian law of population and its corollary claim that maximization of agricultural production has its natural limits.Footnote ¹²⁴ In Russia, criticism of the Malthusian component in Mill's thought extended across ideological lines, expressed as it was by both liberals and radicals. Chernyshevskii, for instance, strongly disagreed with Mill that population, if unrestricted, would double every twenty years. He rebuked Mill for accepting and expanding Malthusian arguments without checking them against more recent statistics. Using elaborate calculations, he argued that the production bottleneck predicted by Malthus would not occur for another three generations and possibly much longer, considering that the power of man over nature is constantly increasing.Footnote ¹²⁵ According to Rossel’, who cited a German study on agricultural productivity, humanity has nothing to fear for at least another four hundred years because agricultural technology is steadily improving.Footnote ¹²⁶ Similar arguments were made by Bunge and Rozhdestvenskii. Bunge saw Mill's theory of population as a typical example of deductive thinking in economics, which he found fundamentally flawed. He accused Mill (and other classical economists) of “building science through a priori thinking” and then presenting his conclusions “in a dogmatic manner” as if they were proven facts.Footnote ¹²⁷ Other critics focused on the ethics rather than economics of population control. One of them asserted that it would be “unreasonable to go against the laws of nature.”Footnote ¹²⁸ According to another reviewer, it is too naive to demand restrictions on “the most uncontrollable of all human instincts.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Professor of economics I. Ivaniukov found it surprising that “even such remarkable thinker” as Mill had succumbed to the “naivety” of Malthusian theory.Footnote ¹³⁰ Among his radical critics, Mill's call for a population check was interpreted as “treacherous liberalism”—a veiled attempt to relieve the upper classes of their philanthropic duties towards the poor.Footnote ¹³¹ In the same spirit, the anonymous reviewer from Slovo accused Mill of using the rhetoric of population control for the purpose of checking the demographic changes that might threaten the dominant position of the ruling class. He wrote, “they [Malthus and Mill] wish to preserve the social status quo by preventing social changes which will inevitably accompany population growth.”Footnote ¹³² Contradicting his earlier claim that excess of labor is desirable for “capitalists” because it drives wages down, the reviewer also argued that population control is used as a “pretext,” masking the sinister desire to regulate the amount of labor force required at a given stage of technological progress. No matter how much the working classes restricted their numbers, he argued, the supply of labor would always exceed demand because modern machinery constantly makes large numbers of manual workers redundant.Footnote ¹³³

For all the criticism that came from different quarters, Mill's book remained influential in Russia until the very end of the imperial period. Published at a time when Russian political economy was only emerging as an academic science, the Principles, in the words of one reviewer, “promoted the dissemination of sound economic ideas and in general had an important educational significance.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Ironically, Mill's attempt to reconcile classical and socialist economics was as much a reason for the longevity of the Principles in Russia as it was the cause of criticism. There was some disappointment that Mill did not succeed in creating anything epochmachendes (“epoch-making”) and “systematic,” contenting himself with a synthesis of already known ideas.Footnote ¹³⁵ Mill's conciliatory position (as well as his reluctance to provide the ultimate answer to the question of what the future should look like) was also the reason why the Principles came to be seen in Russia as a work lacking in originality. Mill's Autobiography strengthened the impression among the Russian readers that Mill was a “popularizer” rather than an original thinker. His lavish praise of Harriet Taylor's intellectual influence and specific contribution to the chapter on the laboring classes—one of the most quoted in Russia—came as a surprise to many readers. At the same time, many were deeply moved by Mill's description of his childhood, mental crisis, and recovery. His father, by contrast, was commonly depicted as a “dry,” “pessimistic,” and “emotionless” utilitarian, “a thinking machine” who took his duties seriously and raised good children but was “unable to enjoy them.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Mill's unusual upbringing and relationship with his father were now seen as a psychological cause of Mill's “intellectual dependency” and “susceptibility to other people's influences,” some of which contradicted each other.Footnote ¹³⁷ According to Mikhailovskii, a well-known Populist writer, Mill became torn between the “intellectual ideas” of his father and “the ethical” influences of his wife.Footnote ¹³⁸ Other reviewers stressed that Harriet “pushed” her reluctant husband towards more radical ideas, hence the tension between “the socialist ideals” and “the theory of laissez-faire” in his work.Footnote ¹³⁹ Yet most of Mill's well-wishers simply refused to believe that her influence was “that significant.” Citing Mill's family members and friends, some critics noted that Harriet was a “domineering,” “hot-tempered,” and even “dangerous” person, whose intellectual abilities and virtues were much exaggerated by “melancholy-stricken” and “lonely” Mill.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ By contrast, other reviewers conceded that she had a beneficial moral impact on Mill, but they discounted his intellectual tribute to Harriet as “a voice of the emotions rather than reason.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ According to Miklashevskii, the social component in the Principles was due not so much to Harriet as to the French socialists, whose influence on Mill pre-dated his companionship with Harriet Taylor.Footnote ¹⁴²

However, those who noted Mill's “duality” and lack of originality did not always mean it in a critical sense. Mikhailovskii, for instance, argued that “this peculiarity” of Mill's thinking “was rather beneficial to our society”: not only did it keep the discussion going, preventing the Principles from becoming “a dead authority” in Russia, but it also provided an example of intellectual tolerance that “accustomed the mind to calm critical analysis.”Footnote ¹⁴³ He wrote this in 1874, on the occasion of a second edition of the Principles; twenty years later another influential reviewer, Nikolai Bunge, observed that Mill acquired “such universal popularity” that “only a few economists” were able to claim. It was its conciliatory stance and quest “to meet the needs of modern society” that allowed the Principles to become a point of reference to “the followers of opposite schools, from liberal economists to socialists.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ In writing this, Bunge forgot to mention that some of those references were rather self-serving and selective, but he was right that the Principles had wide appeal in Russia, even though Mill's unconditional converts were few. As a middle-ground theory, the Principles conveniently lent itself to eclectic use, often in combination with the ideas of Marx and the German historical school.

Compared to the influence of Marx in Russia, Mill's role was more limited; the Principles produced no separate school of economic thought similar to Russian Legal Marxism. At the same time, Mill's book remained in demand until the end of the imperial period, whereas the influence of Legal Marxism began to decline after 1900, when several prominent Marxists shifted to the liberal camp.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ For some readers who were interested in the workers’ question but had no knowledge of political economy, Mill's book (with Chernyshevskii's comments) was preferable to Marx's Capital because it was easier to read and understand. One contemporary recalled that in 1870 a group of women feminists from St Petersburg formed a discussion circle with the purpose of studying literature on political economy and economic development. Marx's book was suggested to them by a male friend who was a university student sympathetic to women's quest for self-education. The women, however, replied that “very few people were capable of understanding Marx, and we did not want to take on faith, from somebody else's words, a philosophy we could not study ourselves.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Apprehensive that more educated men, if invited, would dominate their circle intellectually, the group focused exclusively on the literature they could understand on their own. On top of their list was Mill's Principles, which they studied “very seriously,” enjoying the challenge of comparing Mill's text to Chernyshevskii's comments.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The lucidity of Mill's style and his ability to discuss opposing ideas “in a dignified tone” was praised not only by the neophytes to political economy, but also by more sophisticated readers, including university professors.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ As the Russian controversy over capitalism intensified in the late 1880s, Mill's Principles gained in popularity, whereas in England its importance began to diminish. For the Legal Marxists and liberals who embraced capitalism but sought to mitigate its social cost, Mill's book remained of great interest, especially his view of cooperative labor and landownership reform—the topics on which Marx had nothing to offer to his Russian followers.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Most of the references to Mill's “socialist” ideas in Russian economic literature date from the 1890s to early 1900s, when the debate on the commune and labor regulation reached its peak. In contrast to England, where Mill was often praised for conservative aspects of his economics—his loyalty to the principles of competition, and (moderate) laissez-faire—in Russia, where sympathy with socialist ideas reached far into liberal quarters, Mill's fame was mostly due to his concern with social questions and economic ethics. Not surprisingly, none of the Russian reviews or special studies of Mill commended his adherence to laissez-faire philosophy, only his points of departure from it. In Russia the theory of the “invisible hand” had few supporters, even among liberal economists.Footnote ¹⁵⁰