Russia under the Old regime

272

muzhik was a born anarchist, and only a spark was needed to set the countryside on fire. That spark was to be carried by the intelligentsia in the form of revolutionary 'agitation'. Lavrov adopted a more gradual approach. Before he would turn into a revolutionary, the Russian peasant needed exposure to 'propaganda' which would enlighten him about the injustices of the Emancipation Edict, about the causes of his economic predicament, and about the collusion between the propertied classes, the state and the church. Inspired by these ideas, in the spring of 1874 several thousand youths quit school and went 'to the people'. Here disappointment awaited them. The muzhik, known to them largely from literary descriptions and polemical tracts, would have nothing to do with idealistic students come to save him. Suspecting ulterior motives -the only kind experience had acquainted him with - he either ignored them or turned them over to the rural constabulary. But even more disappointing than the peasant's hostility, which could be explained away by his ignorance, were his ethics. Some radical youths scorned property because they came from propertied backgrounds: they associated concern for wealth with their parents, whom they rejected. Hence they idealized the rural commune and the artel. The muzhik, living from hand to mouth, looked at the matter quite differently. He desperately wanted to acquire property, and was not very choosy how to go about getting it. His idea of a new social order was an arrangement under which he took the part of the exploiting landlord. The intellectuals could indulge in talk of selfless brotherhood because, being supported by their families or the government (by means of stipends) they were not required to compete with one another. The muzhik, however, was always competing for scarce resources, and he treated conflict, including the use of force or duplicity, as right and proper.*

In response to these disappointments, the radical movement broke up into warring factions. One group, called narodniki from their unbounded faith in the narodox people, decided that it was improper for intellectuals to foist their ideas upon the masses. The toiling man was always right. Intellectuals should settle in the village and learn from the peasant instead of trying to teach him. Another group, convinced that this method would end in renunciation of revolution, began to veer towards terrorism (below, p. 297). A third developed an interest in western Social Democracy and, having concluded that no social revolution in Russia was possible until capitalism had done its work, braced themselves for a long and patient wait. * It may not be out of place here to remark that the Revolution of October 1917, by sweeping away the old, westernized elite, brought to power a new elite rooted in the village and permeated with this kind of psychology. Why the radical intelligentsia, having learned much of the peasant's psychology, nevertheless still expected him to emerge as a selfless socialist, is one of the unexplained mysteries of Russian history.

The number of radical activists in Russia was always very small. Statistics on political repression carried out by a police disinclined to give suspects the benefit of the doubt, indicate that they constituted an infinitesimal part of the country's population (below, p. 307). What made them dangerous was the behaviour of the public at large in the mounting conflict between the radical left and the authorities. The imperial government invariably over-reacted to radical challenges, carrying out mass arrests where restraint would have been in order, and exiling where arrest and brief detention would have been sufficient punishment. By various bureaucratic-police devices, which will be detailed in the following chapter, the government increasingly restricted the civil liberties of all the Russians, alienating law-abiding citizens who otherwise would have had no truck with the opposition. The radicals, having quickly learned how beneficial to their interests government over-reaction was, developed elaborate techniques of 'provocation', that is of baiting the police into brutality as a means of gaining public sympathy for themselves and their cause. The net effect was for public opinion to shift steadily towards the left. The average liberal found himself in a great quandary as to how he should react to the mounting civil conflict. While he disapproved of violence, he saw that the authorities also did not stay within the bounds of law; his choice was not between 'law and order' and violence, but between two kinds of violence, one perpetrated by the (seemingly) all-powerful state, the other by misguided but (seemingly) idealistic and self-sacrificing youths, struggling for what they conceived to be the public good. Faced with such a choice, he tended to opt for radicalism. This kind of dilemma is clearly reflected in the writings of Turgenev, in this respect a typical Westerner and liberal. But even an arch-conservative like Dostoevsky could not entirely escape it. He for whom radicalism was explainable best by recourse to demonology admitted once to a friend that he would have been incapable of turning over to the police hypothetical terrorists overheard talking about a bomb planted by them in the Winter Palace.1'

The unwilling, half-hearted, often tormented recruits from the centre constituted a critical asset for the radicals. The technique of purposefully driving the government to the extreme right and to violent excesses, first developed by Russian radicals in the late nineteenth century, has ever since served as the most effective weapon in the radical arsenal. It paralyses the liberal centre and prods it into joining ranks with the left against the increasingly extreme right, thereby assuring, over the long haul, liberalism's self-destruction. The conservative movement in Russia under Alexanders 11 and m arose in response to radicalism, and in struggling against it acquired many of its