Le falle della censura russa nei confronti di Marx e del 'Capitale'

“The attitude of the Censorship towards Marxism in particular shewed some signs of hardening. Marx himself had indeed early been recognized as dangerous, but this had not prevented the Censorship authorities from passing the first volume of ‘Capital’ on the grounds that it was an obscure and abstract treatise, without relevance to Russian conditions. Their attitude in the mid-eighties was precisely the same as it had been a dozen years earlier. When in 1884 the Minister of the Interior was authorized to ban books from issue in public libraries, Marx’s name was among those black-listed (3). Nevertheless, in December 1885, the St. Petersburg Censorship Committee passed ‘Capital’, Vol. ii, with the comment that it was a ‘serious piece  of economic research… comprehensible only to specialists’ (4)” [(3) See J.F. Baddeley, ‘Russia in the Eighties’ (London, 1921), p. 206, the full list included Bagehot, Huxley, Lassalle, Lecky, Louis Blanc, Marx, Mill, Elisé Réclus, Zola, Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’ and ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments’, and the whole of Herbert Spencer. Not Engels? Not Darwin? Apparently not, though without access to the original decree it is impossible to be certain; (4) See ‘Karl Marks i tsarskaya tsenzura’, in ‘Krasny Arkhiv’, n. 56, p. 10. Volume ii of ‘Capital’ was added  to the ‘index’ only in 1894. (Loc. cit.)] [Richard Kindersley, ‘The First Russian Revisionists. A Study of ‘Legal Marxism’ in Russia’, Oxford, 1962]