Russia under the Old regime

263

The 'circle' {kruzhok) was throughout the nineteenth century a very popular vehicle for intellectual activity. It began in the age of salons, when separate circles were formed to study Schelling, Hegel and the French socialists, and continued into the era of university dominance when the salon ceased to play a significant role in the country's intellectual life. The circle was an informal gathering of persons sharing common intellectual interests who met periodically for study and discussion. At periods of severe repression, they acquired of necessity a clandestine and subversive character.

The fourth major institution of the Russian intelligentsia and on a par with the university in importance was the periodical, or as it was popularly known, the 'fat journal' (tolstyi zhurnal). This kind of publication came into vogue with the easing of censorship after 1855. Typically, it consisted of two parts, one belletristic, the other devoted to public concerns in the broadest sense of that word (politics, to the extent allowed by censorship, economics, sociology, science, technology and so on). Each journal espoused a philosophical-political line and appealed to a particular clientele. The polemics between them, waged in coded or 'aesopian' language to get by the censors, became for Russians a surrogate for open political debate. In the 1850s and early 1860s, the leading radical organ was The Contemporary (Sovremennik), and, after its closing in 1866, Annals of the Fatherland (Otechestvennye Zapiski) which, in turn, was followed by Russian Wealth (Russkoe bogatstvo). The Messenger of Europe (Vestnik Evropy) was the steady beacon of pro-western, liberal opinion, a role which after 1907 it shared with Russian Thought (Russkaia Mysl'). The conservative-nationalist point of view had its mouthpiece in the Russian Messenger (Russkii Vestnik), a periodical which owed much of its popularity to the fact that the great novelists of the age, among them Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Turgenev, published many of their works there. Backing up these leading organs of opinion were scores of lesser known periodical publications.* The 'fat journal' performed a unique service in the development in Russia of public opinion. It broadcast throughout the vast empire information and ideas which otherwise would have remained confined to the two capital cities, and by so doing created multiple networks linking widely scattered individuals inhabiting provincial cities and rural estates. It is on this basis that political parties emerged in Russia so quickly at the beginning of the twentieth century. Within a year after he came to power Lenin shut down all the non-Bolshevik 'fat journals', no doubt because his

* In the reign of Nicholas 1 the number of political, social and literary journals hovered between 10 and 20. After 1855, their number grew rapidly: 1855,0.15; 1860,0.50; 1875,0.70; 1880, c.110; and 1885, c.140 Entsiklopedicheskii slovar'... Ob'a Brokgam i Ejron (St Petersburg 1899), xvi la, pp. 416-417 keen political sense told him what danger they presented to absolute authority.*

Finally, there were the zemstva. These organs of local self-government came into being in 1864, partly to replace the authority of one-time serf-owners, partly to carry out functions which the provincial bureaucracy was incapable of executing, such as elementary education, sanitation, maintenance of roads and bridges, agrarian improvement. Zemstva had limited powers of levying taxes and were authorized to use the money they raised to hire technical and professional personnel. Known as the 'third element', this personnel consisted of teachers, physicians, engineers, agronomists and statisticians. It numbered in 1900 some 47,000 persons. The political orientation of this group may be described as liberal-radical or liberal-democratic, that is, socialist but anti-revolutionary and anti-61itist. This 'third element' subsequently furnished the backbone of the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party, formed in 1905, and had much to do with its general leftward leanings. The landlords elected to zemstvo posts tended to be considerably more to the right, and in the main conservative-liberal; they disliked the bureaucracy and opposed all manifestations of arbitrariness, but they were cautious about introducing into Russia a constitutional regime, and especially a parliament based on a democratic franchise. In the 1880s and 1890s it was the fashion for liberals and non-revolutionary radicals to seek employment with zemstva. Committed revolutionaries, on the other hand, viewed all such work with suspicion.

These five institutions had this in common that they furnished society with means to resist the ubiquitous bureaucracy, for which reason they became the prime target of repression. In the final years of the nineteenth century, when the monarchy launched a determined political counter-offensive against society, the universities, journals and zemstva were singled out for harsh treatment. The first controversy within the Russian intelligentsia broke out in the late 1830s and concerned the historic mission of Russia. Schellingian and Hegelian philosophy had raised in an acute form the question what was every major country's contribution to the advance of civilization. The German thinkers tended to dismiss the Slavic contribution and to relegate the Slavs to the category of'unhistoric' races. The Slavs reacted by extolling themselves as the wave of the future. The first to develop a 'Slavophile' theory were the Poles and the Czechs, both under direct German pressure. In Russia the question was raised in an acute form

* In the Khrushchev era, the Soviet monthly Novyi Mir (New World) sought, with fair measure of success, to revive the 'fat journal's' political role as a critic of the status quo. With the dismissal of its editor, Alexander Tvardovskii, in 1970, this attempt came to an end.