Russia under the Old regime

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to raise himself to the status of a citizen. The late fifties and early sixties were a period of rare unanimity, as left, centre and right joined forces to help the government carry out its grand reform programme.

The first breach in the united front occurred in 1861 with the publication of the terms of the Emancipation settlement. The left, led by Chernyshevskii and his Contemporary, disappointed that the peasant received only half the land he had been cultivating and had to pay even for that, declared the whole Emancipation a cruel hoax. Student unrest of the early 1860s coupled with the Polish revolt of 1863 an(l a simultaneous outbreak of mysterious arson in St Petersburg persuaded many conservatives and liberals that a conspiracy was afoot. The Russian Messenger, until then an organ of moderate opinion, now swung sharply to the right and began to attack the left from a patriotic position. There was a further split within radical ranks themselves. The Contemporary launched vicious personal attacks on the intelligentsia of the older generation, accusing it of lack of serious commitment and inertia. Herzen replied in the pages of his London-based Bell, charging the younger generation with chronic biliousness. Chicherin then attacked Herzen for his revolutionary predilections, while Chernyshevskii called Herzen 'the skeleton of a mammoth'. By 1865, Russian opinion was thoroughly splintered. Still, the basic debate as it unfolded was a dialogue between radicals and conservatives who could agree on nothing except their common loathing of the sensible, pragmatic men of the middle. The 1860s and 1870s were the Golden Age of Russian thought, when all the major themes which have occupied the intelligentsia ever since were stated and examined. The new radicalism developed on the basis of a 'scientific' or 'positivistic' philosophy which began to penetrate Russia from the west in the closing years of Nicholas' reign but fully conquered the radical left only under his successor. The spectacular achievements of chemistry and biology in the 1840s, notably the discovery of the laws of conservation of energy and the cellular structure of living organisms, led to the emergence in western Europe of an anti-Idealist movement committed to a crass form of philosophic materialism. The writings of Buchner and Moleschott, which young Russians read with a sense of revelation, told of a cosmos composed exclusively of matter in which all activity could be reduced to basic chemical or physical processes, a cosmos in which there was no room for God, soul, ideals or any other metaphysical substance. Feuerbach explained how the idea of God itself was a projection of human wishes; and his followers applied this psychological explanation to money, state and other institutions. Buckle, in the introduction to his Histoij of Civilization in England, a best seller in Russia, promised that the science of statistics would make it possible to determine in advance with mathematical precision all manifestations of social behaviour. These ideas, seemingly backed by the prestige of natural science, suggested that the key to the understanding of man and society had at long last been found. Nowhere was their impact stronger than in Russia where the absence of a tradition of humanism and lay theology made intellectuals exceedingly vulnerable to deterministic explanations.

Left-wing youths now contemptuously rejected Idealist philosophy which had sent their elders into such raptures - at any rate, they rejected it consciously, because unconsciously they retained a great deal of personal idealism and a belief in historic progress which, strictly speaking, could not be justified on empirical grounds. InFathers and Sons, Turgenev depicted this clash of generations in a manner which the protagonists at once recognized as accurate. The young 'nihilists' viewed the world in which they found themselves as a living relic of another, earher phase of human development, now drawing to a close. Mankind stood on the eve of the stage of 'positivism', when all natural and human phenomena would be properly understood and therefore made to subject to scientific management. The immediate task was to smash what was left of the old order, of which Idealism, as a metaphysical doctrine, was part. Dmitry Pisarev, one of the idols of radical youth of the early 1860s, urged his followers recklessly to hit about them right and left, assailing institutions and conventions, on the premiss that whatever fell in the process was not worth saving. Such 'nihilism' was motivated not by a total absence of values, as conservative critics were to charge, but by the belief that the present already belonged to the past, and destruction, therefore, was creative.

Psychologically, the outstanding quality of the new generation of radicals was a tendency to oversimplify by reducing all experience to some single principle. They had no patience at all with complexities, refinements, qualifications. To deny the simple truth or to try to complicate it by introducing caveats was taken by them as an excuse for inaction: it was a symptom of 'Oblomovitis', as extreme sloth came to be known after the hero of Goncharov's novel. Each radical of this era had a formula, the adoption of which was certain radically to alter the entire human condition. Chernyshevskii's vision of a terrestrial paradise was a kind of oleograph of the prophetic writings he must have read in his seminary days; all was simple provided people would only see the truth, and the truth was that only matter existed and nought else.* Perfectly

* The Russian right was not far behind the left in its reductionism. 'Actually, it is all so simple' Dostoevsky wrote at the conclusion of the 'Dream of a Ridiculous Man', 'in one day, in one hour, everything could be arranged! The main thing is to love others as oneself- this is the main thing, and this is all, and nothing more is needed. As soon as you know this, everything will be arranged.'