it altered the style and content of the great political and artistic controversies of the hundred years and more since his death.
In the polite, elegant, spirited, gay, socially accomplished society
of the intellectuals of Moscow and Petersburg he continued to speak,
indeed at times to shout, in his own dissonant idiom, and remained
independent, violent, maladjusted, and, indeed, what later came to be
called 'class-conscious', to the end of his days; and he was felt to be
a profoundly disturbing figure for precisely this reason, an unassimilable outsider, a dervish, a moral fanatic, a man whose unbridled behaviour threatened the accepted conventions upon which a civilised
literary and artistic world rested. He secured this independence at a
cost; he over-developed the harsher side of his nature, and sometimes
ftung off needlessly crude judgments, he was too intolerant of refinement and fastidiousness as such, too suspicious of the merely beautiful, and was sometimes artistically and morally blinded by the violence of
his own moral dogmatism. But his individuality was so strong, the
power of his words so great, his motives so pure and so intense, that
(as I said before) the very roughness and clumsiness of his style created
its own tradition of literary sincerity. This tradition of protest and
revolt is of a quality wholly different from that of the well-born and
well-bred radicals of the 1 84os who shook and in the end destroyed
the classical aristocratic fa�e of the 'Augustan age' of Russian
literature. The circle-or the two overlapping circles-in which he
moved, in his day still consisted principally of the sons of land-owning
,,
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
squires. But i n due course this aristocratic opposition gave way to
more violent figures drawn from the middle class and the proletariat.
Of these latter Belinsky is the greatest and most direct ancestor.
Those left-wing writers of a later day inevitably tended to imitate
the defects of his qualities, and in particular the brutal directness and
carelessness of his diction as a measure of their own contempt for the
careful and often exquisite taste of the polite belles lettres against which
they were in such hot rebellion. But whereas the literary crudities of
such radical critics of the 6os as Chernyshevsky or Pisarev were
deliberate-a conscious weapon in the war for ;naterialism and the
natural sciences, and against the ideals of pure art, refinement, and the
cultivation of aesthetic, non-utilitarian attitudes to personal and social
questions- Belinsky's case is more painful and more interesting. He
was not a crude materialist, and certainly not a utilitarian. He believed
in his critical calling as an end valuable in itself. He wrote as he spokein shapeless, over-long, awkward, hurrying, tangled sentences-only because he possessed no better means of expression; because that was
the natural medium in which he felt and thought.
Let me remind you once again that Russian writing for several
decades, before and after Push kin, practised, as it was, almost exclusively
by the 'awakened' members of the upper and upper middle class, drew
on foreign, principally French and later German, sources, and was
marked with an altogether exceptional sensibility to style and subtlety
of feeling. Belinsky's preoccupations, for all his insight into the process
of artistic creation, were predominantly social and moral. He was a
preacher, he preached with fervour, and could not always control the
tone and accent of his utterance. He wrote, as he spoke, with a grating,
occasionally shrill intonation, and Pushkin's friends-aesthetes and
mandarins- instinctively recoiled from this noisy, frantically excited,
half-educated vulgarian. Belinsky, whose admiration of their magnificent achievement was wholehearted and boundless, felt (as so often) wounded and socially humiliated. But he could not alter his
nature, nor could he alter or modify or pass over the truth as he saw_
it, painfully, but, from time to time, with overwhelming clearness.
His pride was great, and he was dedicated to a cause; the cause was
that of the unadorned truth, and in her service he would live and die.
The literary elite, the friends of Pushkin, the Arz.amas group as
they were called, despite radical ideas acquired abroad in the victorious
war against Napoleon, despite the Decembrist interlude, was on the
whole conservative, if not always politically, yet in social habits and
1 78
V I S S A R I O N B E L I N S K Y
temper; it was connected with the Court and the Army and deeply
patriotic. Belinsky, to whom this seemed a retrograde outlook, a sin
against the light of science and education, was convinced that Russia
had more to learn from the technologically progressive west than to
teach it, that the Slavophil movement was a romantic illusion, and,
in its extreme form, blind nationalistic megalomania, that western arts
and sciences and forms of civilised life offered the first and only hope
of lifting Russia from her backward state. Herzen, Bakunin, Granovsky believed this too, of course. But then they had had a semi-western education, and found it both easy and agreeable to travel and live
abroad and to enter into social and personal relations with civilised
Frenchmen or Germans. Even the Slavophils who spoke of the west
as worthless and decadent were delighted by their visits to Berlin or
Baden-Baden or Oxford or even Paris itself.
Belinsky, who intellectually was so ardent a Westerner, was
emotionally more deeply and unhappily Russian than any of his contemporaries, spoke no foreign languages, could not breathe freely in any environment save that of Russia, and felt miserable and persecutionridden abroad. He found western culture worthy of respect and emulation, but western habits of life were to him personally quite
insufferable. He began to sigh bitterly for home as soon as he had
left his native shore on a sea voyage to Germany; the Sistine Madonna
and the wonders of Paris did not comfort him; after a month abroad he
was almost insane with nostalgia. In a very real sense he embodied
the uncompromising elements of a Slav temperament and way of life
to a sharper degree than his friends and contemporaries-whether like
Turgenev they felt contented in Germany and Paris and unhappy in
Russia, or, like the Slavophils, wore traditional Russian dress and
secretly preferred a poem by Goethe or a tragedy by Schiller to any
number of ancit:nt Russian ballads or Slav chronicles. T:1is deep inner
conflict between intellectual beliefs and emotional, sometimes almost
physical, needs, is a characteristically Russian disease. As the nineteenth
century developed, and as the struggle between social classes became
sharper and more articulate, the contradiction, which tormented
Belinsky, emerged more clearly. The Marxists or agrarian socialists
or anarchists, when they are not noblemen or university professors,
that is to say, to some degree professionally members of an international society, make their bow with great conviction and sincerity to the west in the sense that they believe in its civilisation, above all
its sciences, its techniques, its political thought and practice, but when
,,
1 79
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
they are forced to emigrate, find life abroad more agonising than other
exiles. Herzen, Bakunin, Turgenev, Lavrov were by birth gentlemen,
and lived abroad, if not happily, at any rate without becoming embittered specifically by contact with it. Herz.en did not greatly love Switzerland and he disliked Twickenham and London a great deal,
but he preferred either to St Petersburg under Nicholas I, and he was
happy in the society of his French and Italian friends. Turgenev
seemed more than contented on Madame Viardot's estate at Bougival.
But Belinsky can no more be thought of as a voluntary emigre than
Dr Johnson or Cobbett. He stormed and ranted and denounced the
most sacrosanct Russian institutions, but he did not leave his country.
And although he must have known that imprisonment and slow and
painful death were inevitable if he persisted, he did not, and obviously
could not for a moment, contemplate emigrating beyond the frontiers
of the Russian Empire: the Slavophils and the reactionaries were the
enemy, but the battle could be fought only on native soil. He could
not be silent and he would not go abroad. His head was with the west,
but his heart and his ill-kept body were with the mass of inarticulate
peasants and small traders-the 'poor folk' of Dostoevsky, the inhabitants of the teeming world of Gogol's terrible comic imagination.
Speaking of the Westerners' attitude to the Slavophils, Herz.en said :
Yes, we were their opponents, but very peculiar ones. We had only
ont love, but it did not takt tht samt form.
From our earliest years, we were possessed by one powerful,
unaccountable, physiological, passionate feeling, which they took
for memory of the past, we for a vision of the future-a feeling of
love, limitless, embracing all our being, love for the Russian people,
the Russian way of life, the Russian type of mind. We, like Janus
or the double-headed eagle, looked in opposite directions, while ont
htart beat in us all.
Belinsky was not torn between incompatible ideals. He was an
integrated personality in the sense that he believed in his own feelings,
and was therefore free from the self-pity and the sentimentality which
spring from indulgence in feelings which one does not respect in
oneself. But there was a division within him which arose from a
simultaneous admiration for western values and ideals, and a profound
lack of sympathy with, indeed dislike and lack of respect for, the
characters and form of life of the western bourgeoisie and typical
western intellectuals. This ambivalence of feeling, created by history-
1 80
V I SSARION B E L I N SKY
by the social and psychological conditions, which formed the Russian
intellectuals in the nineteenth century- was inherited by and became
prominent in the next generation of radical intellectuals- in Chernyshevsky and Nekrasov, in the populist movement, in the assassins of Alexander II, and indeed in Lenin too, Lenin who could not be
accused of ignoring or despising the contributions of western culture,
but felt far more alien in London or Paris than the more 'normal'
type of international exile. To some degree this peculiar amalgam of
love and hate is still intrinsic to Russian feelings about Europe: on
the one hand, intellectual respect, envy, admiration, desire to emulate
and excel; on the other, emotional hostility, suspicion, and contempt, a
sense of being clumsy, dt trop, of being outsiders; leading, as a result,
to an alternation between excessive self-prostration before, and
aggressive flouting of, western values. No visitor to the Soviet Union
can have failed to remark something of this phenomenon: a combination of intellectual inadequacy and emotional superiority, a sense of the west as enviably self-restrained, clever, efficient, and successful :
but also as being cramped, cold, mean, calculating, and fenced in,
without capacity for large views or generous emotion, for feeling which
must, at times, rise too high and overflow its banks, for heedless selfabandonment in response to some unique historical challenge, and consequently condemned never to know a rich flowering of life.
This spontaneity of feeling and passionate idealism are in themselves sufficient to distinguish Belinsky from his more methodical disciples. Unlike later radicals, he was not himself a utilitarian, least
of all where art was concerned. Towards the end of his life he pleaded
for a wider application of science, and more direct expression in art.
But he never believed that it was the duty of the artist to prophesy
or to preach- to serve society directly by telling it what to do, by
providing slogans, by putting its art in the service of a specific programme. This was the view of Chernyshevsky and N ekrasov in the sixties; of Lunacharsky and Mayakovsky and Soviet critics today.
Belinsky, like Gorky, believed in the duty of the artist to tell the
truth as he alone, being uniquely qualified to see and to utter, sees it
and can say it; that this is the whole duty of a writer whether he be a
thinker or an artist. Moreover he believed that since man lives in
society, and is largely made by society, this truth must necessarily be
largely social, and that, for this reason, all forms of insulation and
escape from environment must, to that degree, be falsifications of
the truth, and treason to it. For him the man and the artist and the
,,
R U S SIAN T H I N K E R S
citizen are one; and whether you write a novel, o r a poem, or a work
of history or philosophy, or an article in a newspaper, or compose a
symphony or a picture, you are, or should be, expressing the whole
of your nature, not merely a professionally trained part of it, and you
are morally responsible as a man for what you do as an artist. You
must always bear witness to the truth, which is one and indivisible,
in every act and in every word. There are no purely aesthetic truths
or aesthetic canons. Truth, beauty, morality, are attributes of life and
cannot be abstracted from it, and what is intellectually false or morally
ugly cannot be artistically beautiful, or vice versa. He believed that
human existence was-or should be -a perpetual and desperate war
between truth and falsehood, justice and injustice, in which no man
had the right to be neutral or have relations with the enemy, least of
all the artist. He declared war on the official nationalists because they
suppressed and distorted or coloured the facts: and this was thought
unpatriotic. He denounced copybook sentiments, and with a certain
brutality of expression tried to formulate the crude truth behind them,
and that was thought cynical. He admired first the German romantics,
then only their radical wing, and then the French socialists, and was
thought subversive. He told the Slavophils that inner self-improvement
and spiritual regeneration cannot occur on an empty stomach, nor in
a society which lacks social justice and suppresses elementary rights,
and this was thought materialistic.
His life and personality became a myth. He lived as an idealised,
severe, and morally immaculate figure in the hearts of so many of
his contemporaries that, after mention of his name was once again
tolerated by the authorities, they vied with each other in composing
glowing epitaphs to his memory. He established the relation of literature to life in a manner which even writers not at all sympathetic to his point of view, such as Leskov and Goncharov and Turgenev, all
of whom in some sense pursued the ideal of pure art, were forced to
recognise ; they might reject his doctrine, but they were forced by
the power of his invisible presence into having to settle accounts with
him-if they did not, like Dostoevsky or Gogo!, follow him, they at
least felt it necessary to explain themselves on this matter. No one felt
this need more acutely than Turgenev. Pulled one way by Flaubert,
another by the awful apparition of his dead friend which perpetually
arose before him, Turgenev vainly tried to placate both, and so spent
much of his life in persuading himself and his Russian public that his
position was not morally indefensible, and involved no betrayals or
1 8:1
V I SSA R I ON B E L I N S K Y
evasions. This search for one's proper place in the moral and the
social universe continued as a central tradition in Russian literature
virtually until the revolt in the 1 89os of the neo-classicist aesthetes
and the symbolists under Ivanov and Balmont, Annensky and Blok.
But these movements, splendid as their fruit was, did not last long as
an effective force. And the Soviet revolution returned, albeit in a
crude and distorted utilitarian form, to the canons of Belinsky and the
social criteria of art.
Many things have been said against Belinsky, particularly by the
opponents of naturalism, and some of them it is difficult to deny. He
was wildly erratic, and all his enthusiasm and seriousness and integrity
do not make up for lapses of insight or intellectual power. He declared
that Dante was not a poet; that Fenimore Cooper was the equal of
Shakespeare; that Othello was the product of a barbarous age; that
Pushkin's poem Ruslan and Lyudmila was 'infantile', that his Tales
of Belkin and Fairy Tales were worthless, and Tatyana in Evgeny
One gin 'a moral embryo'. There are equally wild remarks about
Racine and Corneille and Balzac and Hugo. Some of these are due
to irritation caused by the pseudo-medievalism of the Slavophils,
some to an over-sharp reaction against his old master Nadezhdin and
his school, which laid down that it was inartistic to deal with what
is dark or ugly or monstrous, when life and nature contain so much
that is beautiful and harmonious; but it is mostly due to sheer critical
blindness. He did damn the magnificent poet Baratynsky _out of hand,
and erased a gifted minor contemporary of Pushkin-the lyrical poet
Benediktov-out of men's minds for half a century, for no better
reason than that he disliked mere delicacy without moral fervour. And
he began to think that he was mistaken in proclaiming the genius
of Dostoevsky, who was perhaps no more than an exasperating
religious neurotic with persecution mania. His criticism is very uneven.
His essays in artistic theory, despite good pages, seem arid and artificial
and conceived under the inAuence of Procrustean German systems,
alien to his concrete, impulsive, and direct sense of life and art. He
wrote and talked a very great deal, and said far too much about too
many unrelated things, and too often spoke incoherently and naively,
with the uncritical exaggeration and half-baked dogmatism of an
autodidact-'always in a dither of excitement, always frantic, always
hurrying', falling and rising and stumbling on, sometimes pathetically
ill-equipped, hurrying desperately wherever the battle between truth
and falsehood, life and death, seemed most critical. He was the more
,,
R U S S IAN T H IN K E R S
erratic because h e took pride i n what seemed to him freedom from
petty qualities, from neatness and tidiness and scholarly accuracy, from
careful judgement and knowing how far to go. He could not bear
the cautious, the morally timid, the intellectually genteel, the avoiders
of crises, the bien pensant seekers of compromise, and attacked them
in long and clumsy periods full of fury and contempt. Perhaps he was
too intolerant, and morally lop-sided, and overplayed his own feelings.
He need not, perhaps, have hated Goethe quite so much for his, to
him, maddening serenity, or the whole of Polish literature for being
Polish and in love with itself. And these are not accidental blemishes,
they are the defects inherent in everything that he is and stands for.
To dislike them overmuch is ultimately to condemn his positive
attitude too. The value and influence of his position reside precisely
in his lack of, and conscious opposition to, artistic detachment: for he
saw in literature the expression of everything that men have felt and
thought and have had to say about life and society, their central
attitude to man's situation and to the world, the justification of their
whole life and activity, and consequently looked on it with the deepest
possible concern. He abandoned no view, however eccentric, until he
had tried it out on himself as it were, until he had 'lived himself'
through it, and paid the price in nervous waste and a sense of inadequacy, and sometimes total failure. He put truth, however fitfully glimpsed, however dull or bleak it might turn out to be, so far above
other aims that he communicated a sense of its sanctity to others and
thereby transformed the standards of criticism in Russia.
Because his consuming passion was confined to literature and books,
he attached immense importance to the appearance of new ideas, new
literary methods, above all new concepts of the relation of literature
and life. Because he was naturally responsive to everything that was
living and genuine, he transformed the concept of the critic's calling
in his native country. The lasting effect of his work was in altering,
and altering crucially and irretrievably, the moral and social outlook
of the leading younger writers and thinkers of his time. He altered
the quality and the tone both of the experience and of the expression
of so much Russian thought and feeling that his role as a dominant
social influence overshadows his attainments as a literary critic. Every
age has its official preachers and prophets who castigate its vices and
call to a better life. Yet it is not by them that ia; deepest malaise is
revealed, but in the artists and thinkers dedicated to the more painful
and difficult task of creation, description and analysis-it is they, the
1 84
V I SSARION B E L IN S K Y
poets, the novelists, the critics, who live through the moral agony
of their society in their own personal experience; and it is they, their
victories and their defeats, that affect the fate of their generation and
leave the most authentic testimony of the battle itself for the benefit
of interested posterity. Nekrasov w.as a very gifted poet, but before
everything he was a preacher and a propagandist of genius; consequently it was not he but Belinsky who first saw the central issue and saw it more clearly and directly and simply than anyone would ever
see it again. Nor did the thought ever seem to arise in his mind that
it might be possible not to face it with all its implications, to practise
caution, to be more circumspect in one's choice of a moral and
political position, or perhaps even to retire to a neutral and disinterested
attitude above the din of the battle. 'He knew no fear, because he was
strong and sincere; his conscience was clear.' It is because he committed himself so violently and irrevocably to a very specific vision of the truth, and to a very specific set of moral principles to govern both
thought and action, at a price which grew greater continually to
himself and those who chose to follow him, that his life and his outlook
alternately appalled and inspired the generation which came after him.
No final verdict had been declared upon him in his own lifetime. Not
even official canonisation in his native country has finally laid the
ghost of his doubts and torments or stilled his indignant voice. The
issues on which he spent his life are today more alive-and, in consequence of revolutionary forces which he himself did so much to set in motion, more pressing and more threatening-than ever before .
..
IV
A L E X A N D E R H E R Z E N
A L E XA N D E R H E R Z E N is the most arresting Russian political writer
in the nineteenth century. No good biographies of him exist, perhaps
because his own autobiography is a great literary masterpiece. It is
not widely known in English-speaking countries, and that for no good
reason, for it has been translated into English, the first part magnificently by J. D. Duff, and the whole adequately by Constance Garnett; unlike some works of political and literary genius, it is, even
in translation, marvellously readable.
In some respects, it resembles Goethe"s Dichtung und Wahrheit
more than any other book. For it is not a collection of wholly personal
memoirs and political reRections. It is an amalgam of personal detail,
descriptions of political and social life in various countries, of opinions,
personalities, outlooks, accounts of the author's youth and early manhood in Russia, historical essays, notes of journeys in Europe, France, Switzerland, Italy, of Paris and Rome during the revolutions of I 848
and I 849 (these last are incomparable, and the best personal documents
about these events that we possess), discussions of political leaders, and
of the aims and purposes of various parties. All this is interspersed
with a variety of comment, pungent observation, sharp and spontaneous,
occasionally malicious, vignettes of individuals, of the character of
peoples, analyses of economic and social facts, discussions and epigrams
about the future and past of Europe and about the author's own
hopes and fears for Russia; and interwoven with this is a detailed and
poignant account of Herzen's personal tragedy, perhaps the most
extraordinary self-revelation on the part of a sensitive and fastidious
man ever written down for the benefit of the general public.
Alexander I vanovich Herzen was born in Moscow in I 8 I 2, not
long before the capture of the city by Napoleon, the illegitimate son
of I van Yakovlev, a rich and well-born Russian gentleman, descended
from a cadet branch of the Romanovs, a morose, difficult, possessive,
distinguished and civilised man, who bullied his son, loved him deeply,
J 86
A L E X AN D E R H E RZEN
embittered his life, and had an enormous influence upon him both by
attraction and repulsion. His mother, Luiz� Haag, was a mild
German lady from Stuttgart in Wurttemberg, the daughter of a minor
official. I van Y akovlev had met her while travelling abroad, but
never married her. He took her to Moscow, established her as mistress
of his household, and called his son Herzen in token, as it were, of
the fact that he was the child of his heart, but not legitimately born
and therefore not entitled to bear his name.
The fact that Herzen was not born in wedlock probably had a
considerable effect on his character, and may have made him more
rebellious than he might otherwise have been. He received the regular
education of a rich young nobleman, went to the University of
Moscow, and there early asserted his vivid, original, impulsive
character. He was born (in later years he constantly came back to this)
into the generation of what in Russia came to be called /ishnie lyudi,
'superfluous men', with whom Turgenev's early novels are so largely
concerned.
These young men have a place of their own in the history of
European culture in the nineteenth century. They belonged to the
class of those who are by birth aristocratic, but who themselves go
over to some freer and more radical mode of thought and of action.
There is something singularly attractive about men who retained,
throughout life, the manners, the texture of being, the habits and
style of a civilised and refined milieu. Such men exercise a peculiar
kind of personal freedom which combines spontaneity with distinction.
Their minds see large and generous horizons, and, above all, reveal a
unique intellectual gaiety of a kind that aristocratic ed:.�cation tends
to produce. At the same time, they are intellectually on the side of
everything that is new, progressive, rebellious, young, untried, of that
which is about to come into being, of the open sea whether or not
there is land that lies beyond. To this type belong those intermediate
figures, like Mirabeau, Charles James Fox, Franklin Roosevelt,
who live near the frontier that divides old from new, between the
douceur de Ia vie which is about to pass and the tantalising future,
the dangerous new age that they themselves do much to bring into
being.
Herzen belonged to this milieu. In his autobiography he has described
what it was like to be this kind of man in a suffocating society, where
there was no opportunity of putting to use one's natural gifts, what it
meant to be excited by novel ideas which came drifting in from all
, ,
1 8 7
RU SSIAN T H I N K E R S
kinds o f sources, from classical texts an d the old Utopias o f the west,
from French social preachers and German philosophers, from books,
journals, casual conversations, only to remember that the milieu in
which one lived made it absurd even to begin to dream of creating in
one's own country those harmless and moderate institutions which
had long become forms of life in the civilised west.
This normally led to one of two results: either the young enthusiast
simply subsided, and came to terms with reality, and became a wistful,
gently frustrated landowner, who lived on his estate, turned the pages
of serious periodicals imported from Petersburg or abroad, and
occasionally introduced new pieces of agricultural machinery or some
other ingenious device which had caught his fancy in England or in
France. Such enthusiasts would endlessly discuss the need for this or
that change, but always with the melancholy implication that little or
nothing could or would be done; or, alternatively, they would give in
entirely and fall into a species of gloom or stupor or violent despair,
becoming self-devouring neurotics, destructive personalities slowly
poisoning both themselves and the life round them.
Herzen was resolved to escape from both these familiar predicaments. He was determined that of him, at any rate, nobody would say that he had done nothing in the world, that he had offered no
resistance and collapsed. When he finally emigrated from Russia in
1 847 it was to devote himself to a life of activity. His education was
that of a dilettante. Like most young men brought up in an aristocratic
milieu, he had been taught to be too many things to too many men,
to reflect too many aspects of life, and situations, to be able to concentrate sufficiently upon any one particular activity, any one fixed design.
Herzen was well aware of this. He talks wistfully about the good
fortune of those who enter peacefully upon some steady, fixed profession, untroubled by the many countless alternatives open to gifted and often idealistic- young men who have been taught too much, are
too rich, and are offered altogether too wide an opportunity of doing
too many things, and who, consequently, begin, and are bored, and
go back and start down a new path, and in the end lose their way
and drift aimlessly and achieve nothing. This was a very characteristic
piece of self-analysis: filled with the idealism of his generation in
Russia that both sprang from and fed the growing sense of guilt
towards 'the people', Herzen was passionately anxious to do something
memorable for himself and his country. This anxiety remained with
J 88
ALEXAND E R H E RZEN
him all his life. Driven by it he became, as everyone knows who has
any acquaintance with the modern history of Russia, perhaps the
greatest of European publicists of his day, and founded the first freethat is i:o say, anti-tsarist- Russian press in Europe, thereby laying the foundation of revolutionary agitation in his country.
In his most celebrated periodical, which he called The Bell ( KDIDkol),
he dealt with anything that seemed to be of topical interest. He exposed,
he denounced, he derided, he preached, he became a kind of Russian
Voltaire of the mid-nineteenth century. He was a journalist of genius,
and his articles, written with brilliance, gaiety and passion, although,
of course, officially forbidden, circulated in Russia and were read by
radicals and conservatives alike. Indeed it was said that the Emperor
himself read them; certainly some among his officials did so; during
the heyday of his fame Herzen exercised a genuine influence within
Russia itself-an unheard of phenomenon for an tmtigre-by exposing
abuses, naming names, but, above all, by appealing to liberal sentiment
which had not completely died, even at the very heart of the tsarist
bureaucracy, at any rate during the I 8 50s and I 86os.
Unlike many who find themselves only on paper, or on a public
platform, Herzen was an entrancing talker. Probably the best descri�
tion of him is to be found in the essay from which I have taken my
title-'A Remarkable Decade', by his friend Annenkov. It was written
some twenty years after the events that it records.
I must own [ Annenkov wrote] that I was puzzled and overwhelmed,
when I first came to know Herzen-by this extraordinary mind
which daned from one topic to another with unbelievable swiftness,
with inexhaustible wit and brilliance; which could see in the tum
of somebody's talk, in some simple incident, in some abstract idea,
that vivid feature which gives expression and life. He had a most
astonishing capacity for instantaneous, unexpected juxtaposition of
quite dissimilar things, and this gift he had in a very high degree,
fed as it was by the powers of the most subtle observation and a
very solid fund of encyclopedic knowledge. He had it to such a
. degree that, in the end, his listeners were sometimes exhausted by
the inextinguishable fireworks of his speech, the inexhaustible
fantasy and invention, a kind of prodigal opulence of intellect
which astonished his audience.
After the always ardent but remorselessly severe Belinsky, the
glancing, gleaming, perpetually changing and often paradoxical
and irritating, always wonderfully clever, talk of Herzen demanded
of those who were with him not only intense concentration, but
..
I 89
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
also perpetual alertness, because you had always to be prepared to
respond instantly. On the other hand, nothing cheap or tawdry
could stand even half an hour of contact with him. All pretentiousness, all pompousness, all pedantic self-importance, simply Red from him or melted like wax before a fire. I knew people, many of them
what are called serious and practical men, who could not bear
Herzen's presence. On the other hand, there were others . . . who
gave him the most blind and passionate adoration . . .
He had a natural gift for cr:ticism-a capacity for exposing and
denouncing the dark sides of life. And he showed this trait very
early, during the Moscow period of his life of which I am speaking.
Even then Herzen's mind was in the highest degree rebellious and
unmanageable, with a kind of innate, organic detestation of anything which seemed to him to be an accepted opinion sanctified by general silence about some unverified fact. In such cases the
predatory powers of his intellect would rise up in force and come
into the open, sharp, cunning, resourceful.
He lived in Moscow . . . still unknown to the public, but in his
own familiar circle he was already known as a witty and a dangerous
observer of his friends. Of course, he could not altogether conceal
the fact that he kept secret dossiers, secret protocols of his own,
about his dearest friends and distant acquaintances within the
privacy of his own thoughts. People who stood by his side, all
innocence and trustfulness, were invariably amazed, and sometimes extremely annoyed, when they suddenly came on one or other side of this involuntary activity of his mind. Strangely enough,
Herzen combined with this the tenderest, most loving relations with
his chosen intimates, although even they could never escape his
pungent analyses. This is explained by another side of his character.
As if to restore the equilibrium of his moral organism, nature took
care to place in his soul one unshakeable belief, one unconquerable
inclination. Herzen believed in the noble instincts of the human
heart. His analysis grew silent and reverent before the instinctive
impulses of the moral organism as the sole, indubitable truth of
existence. He admired anything which he thought to be a noble or
passionate impulse, however mistaken; and he never amused himself at its expense.
This ambivalent, contradictory play of his nature-suspicion and
denial on the one hand and blind faith on the other-often led to
perplexity and misunderstandings between him and his friends, and
sometimes to quarrels and scenes. But it is precisely in this crucible
of argument, in its Rames, that up to the very day of his departure
for Europe, people's devotion to him used to be tested and
strengthened instead of disintegrating. And this is perfectly intelli-
I QO
ALEXAND E R H E RZEN
gible. In all that Herzen did and all that Herzen thought at this
time there never was the slightest trace of anything false, no
malignant feeling nourished in darkness, no calculation, no treachery.
On the contrary, the whole of him was always there, in every one
of his words and deeds. And there was another reason which made
one sometimes forgive him even insults, a reason which may seem
unplausible to people who did not know him.
With all this proud, strong, energetic intellect, Herzen had a
wholly gentle, amiable, almost feminine character. Beneath the stem
outward aspect of the sceptic, the :>atirist, under the cover of a most
unceremonious, and exceedingly unreticent humour, there dwelt
the heart of a child. He had a curious, angular kind of charm, an
angular kind of delicacy . . . [but it was given] particularly to those
who were beginning, who were seeking after something, people who
were trying out their powers. They found a source of strength and
confidence in his advice. He took them into the most intimate communion with himself and with his ideas-which, nevertheless, did not stop him, at times, from using his full destructive, analytic
powers, from performing exceedingly painful, psychological experiments on these very same people at the very same time.
This vivid and sympathetic vignette tallies with the descriptions
left to us by Turgenev, Belinsky and others of Herzen's friends.
It is borne out, above all, by the impression which the reader
gains if he reads his own prose, his essays or the autobiographical
memoirs collected under the title My Post and Thoughts. The impression that it leaves is not conveyed even by Annenkov's devoted words.
The chief influence on Herzen as a young man in Moscow
University, as upon all the young Russian intellectuals of his time,
was of course that of Hegel. But although he was a fairly orthodox
Hegelian in his early years, he turned his Hegeliaqism into something
peculiar, personal to himself, very dissimilar from the theoretical conclusions which the more serious-minded and pedantic of his contemporaries deduced from that celebrated doctrine.
The chief effect upon him of Hegelianism seems to have been the
belief that no specific theory or single doctrine, no one interpretation
of life, above all, no simple, coherent, well-constructed sc-hemaneither the great French mechanistic models of the eighteenth century, nor the romantic German edifices of the nineteenth, nor the visions
of the great Utopians Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, nor the socialist
programmes of Cabet or Leroux or Louis Blanc-could conceivably
..
R U S S IAN T H I N KE R S
be true solutions to real problems, at least not i n the form i n which
they were preached.
He was sceptical if only because he believed (whether or not he
derived this view from Hegel) that there could not in principle be
any simple or final answer to any genuine human problem; that if a
question was serious and indeed agonising, the answer could never be
dear-cut and neat. Above all, it could never consist in some symmetrical set of conclusions, drawn by deductive means from a collection of self-evident axioms.
This disbelief begins in Herzen's early, forgotten essays which he
wrote at the beginning of the I 84os, on what he called dilettantism
and Buddhism in science; where he distinguishes two kinds of intellectual personality, against both of which he inveighs. One is that of the casual amateur who never sees the trees for the wood; who is terrified,
Herzen tells us, of losing his own precious individuality in too much
pedantic preoccupation with actual, detailed facts, and therefore
always skims over the surface without developing a capacity for real
knowledge; who looks at the facts, as it were, through a kind of
telescope, with the result that nothing ever gets articulated save
enormous, sonorous generalisations floating at random like so many
balloons.
The other kind of student-the Buddhist-is the person who escapes
from the wood by frantic absorption in the trees; who becomes an
intense student of some tiny set of isolated facts, which he views
through more and more powerful microscopes. Although such a man
might be deeply learned in some particular branch of knowledge,
almost invariably-and particularly if he is a German (and almost all
Herzen's gibes and insults are directed against the hated Germans,
and that despite the fact that he was half German himself)-he becomes
intolerably tedious, pompous and blindly philistine; above all, always
repellent as a human being.
Between these poles it is necessary to find some compromise, and
Herzen believed that if one studied life in a sober, detached, and
objective manner, one might perhaps be able to create some kind of
tension, a sort of dialer.tical compromise, between these opposite ideals;
for if neither or' them can be realised fully and equally, neither of them
should be altogether deserted ; only thus could human beings be made
capable of understanding life in some profounder fashion than if they
committed themselves recklessly to one or the other of the two
extremes.
ALEXAND E R H E RZEN
This ideal of detachment, moderation, compromise, dispassionate
objectivity which Herren at this early period of his life was preaching,
was something deeply incompatible with his temperament. And indeed,
not long after, he bursts forth with a great paean to partiality. He
declares that he knows that this will not be well received. There
are certain concepts which simply are not received in good societyrather like people who have disgraced themselves in some appalling way. Partiality is not something which is well thought of in comparison,
for example, with abstract justice. Nevertheless, nobody has ever said
anything worth saying unless he was deeply and passionately partial.
There follows a long and typically Russian diatribe against the
chilliness, meanness, impossibility and undesirability of remaining
objective, of being detached, of not committing oneself, of not
plunging into the stream of life. The passionate voice of his friend
Belinsky is suddenly audible in Herzen's writings in this phase of his
development.
The fundamental thesis which emerges at this time, and is then
developed throughout his later life with marvellous poetry and
imagination, is the terrible power over human lives of ideological
abstractions (I say poetry advisedly; for as Dostoevsky in later years
very truly said, whatever else might be said about Herzen, he was
certainly a Russian poet; which saved him in the eyes of this jaundiced
but, at times, uncannily penetrating critic: Herzen's views or mode of
life naturally found little favour in his eyes).
Herzen declares that any attempt to explain human conduct in
terms of, or to dedicate human beings to the service of, any abstraction,
be it never so noble-justice, progress, nationality-even if preached by
impeccable altruists like Mazzini or Louis Blanc or Mill, always leads
in the end to victimisation and human sacrifice. Men are not simple
enough, human lives and relationships are too complex for standard
formulas and neat solutions, and attempts to adapt individuals and fit
them into a rational schema, conceived in terms of a theoretical ideal,
be the motives for doing it never so lofty, always lead in the end to a
terrible maiming of human beings, to political vivisection on an ever
increasing scale. The process culminates in the liberation of some
only at the price of enslavement of others, and the replacing of an old
tyranny with a new and sometimes far more hideous one-by the
imposition of the slavery of universal socialism, for example, as a
remedy for the slavery of the universal Roman Church.
There is a typical piece of dialogue between Herzen and Louis
193
R U S SIAN T H INKERS
Blanc, the French socialist (whom . he respected greatly), which
Herzen quotes, and which shows the kind of levity with which
Herzen sometimes expressed his deepest convictions. The conversation
is described as having taken place in London somewhere in the early
sos. One day Louis Blanc observed to Herzen that human life was
a great social duty, 'that man must always sacrifice himself to society.
'Why?' I asked suddenly.
'How do you mean "Why?" [said Louis Blanc] -but surely the
whole purpose and mission of man is the well-being of society?'
'But it will never be attained if everyone makes sacrifices and
nobody enjoys himself.'
'You are playing with words.'
'The muddle-headedness of a barbarian,' I replied, laughing.
In this gay and apparently casual passage, Herzen embodies his
central principle-that the goal of life is life itself, that to sacrifice the
present to some vague and unpredictable future is a form of delusion
which leads to the destruction of all that alone is valuable in men and
societies-to the gratuitous sacrifice of the flesh and blood of live
human beings upon the altar of idealised abstractions.
Herzen is revolted by the central substance of what was being
preached by some of the best and purest-hearted men of his time,
particularly by socialists and utilitarians, namely, that vast suffering
in the present must be undergone for the sake of an ineffable felicity
in the future, that thousands of innocent men may be forced to die
that millions might be happy-battle cries that were common even in
those days, and of which a great deal more has been heard since. The
notion that there is a splendid future in store for humanity, that it is
guaranteed by history, and that it justifies the most appalling cruelties
in the present-this familiar piece of political eschatology, based on
belief in inevitable progress, seemed to him a fatal doctrine directed
against human life.
The profoundest and most sustained -and the most brilliantly
written-of all Herzen's statements on this topic is to be found in
the volume of essays which he called From tht Othtr Short, and wrote
as a memorial to his disillusionment with the European revolutions of
1 848 and 1 849. This great polemical masterpiece is Herzen's profession of faith and his political testament. Its tone and content are well conveyed in the characteristic (and celebrated) passage in which
he declares that one generation must not be condemned to the role of
194
ALEXAN D E R H E RZEN
being a mere means to the welfare of its remote descendants, which
is in any case none too certain. A distant goal is a cheat and a deception.
Real goals must be closer than that- 'at the very least the labourer's
wage or pleasure in work performed'. The end of each generation is
itself-each life has its own unique experience; the fulfilment of its
wants creates new needs, claims, new forms of life. Nature, he
declares (perhaps under the influence of Schiller), is careless of human
beings and their needs, and crushes them heedlessly. Has history a
plan, a libretto? If it did 'it would lose all interest, become . . . boring,
ludicrous'. There are no timetables, no cosmic patterns; there is only
the ' Row of life', passion, will, improvisation; sometimes roads exist,
sometimes not; where there is no road 'genius will blast a path'.
But what if someone were to ask, 'Supposing all this is suddenly
brought to an end? Supposing a comet strikes us and brings to an end
life on earth? Will history not be meaningless? Will all this talk suddenly
end in nothing? Will it not be a cruel mockery of all our efforts, all
our blood and sweat and tears, if it all ends in some sudden, unexplained
brute fashion with some mysterious, totally unexplained event?' Herzen
replies that to think in these terms is a great vulgarity, the vulgarity
of mere numbers. The death of a single human being is no less absurd
and unintelligible than the death of the entire human race; it is a
mystery we accept; merely to multiply it enormously and ask 'Supposing millions of human beings die?' does not make it more mysterious or more frightening.
In nature, as in the souls of men, there slumber endless possibilities
and forces, and in suitable conditions . . . they develop, and will
develop furiously. They may fill a world, or they may fall by the
roadside. They may take a new direction. They may stop. They
may collapse . . . Nature is perfectly indifferent to what happens . . .
[But then, you may ask,] what is all this for? The life of people
becomes a pointless game . . . Men build something with pebbles
and sand only to see it all collapse again; and human creatures
crawl out from underneath the ruins and again start clearing spaces
and build huts of moss and planks and broken capitals and, after
centuries of endless labour, it all collapses again. Not in vain did
Shakespeare say that history was a tedious tale told by an idiot . . .
. . . [To this I reply that] you are like . . . those very sensitive people
who shed a tear whenever they recollect that 'man is born but to
die'. To look at the end and not at the action itself is a cardinal
error. Of what use to the Rower is its bright magnificent bloom?
Or this intoxicating scent, since it will only pass away? . . . None
..
1 95
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
at all. But nature i s not so miserly. She does not disdain what is
transient, what is only in the present. At every point she achieves all
she can achieve . . . Who will find fault with nature because flowers
bloom in the morning and die at night, because she has not
given the rose or the lily the hardness of flint? And this miserable
pedestrian principle wt wish to transfer to the world of history . . .
Life has no obligation to realise the fantasies and ideas [of civilisation] . . . Life loves novelty . . .
• . . History seldom repeats itself, it uses every accident, simultaneously knocks at a thousand doors . . . doors which may open . . . who knows?
And again :
Human beings have an instinctive passion to preserve anything they
like. Man is born and therefore wishes to live for ever. Man falls in
love and wishes to be loved, and loved for ever as in the very first
moment of his avowal . . . but life . . . gives no guarantees. Life
does not ensure existence, nor pleasure; she does not answer for
their continuance . . . Every historical moment is full and is
beautiful, is self-contained in its own fashion. Every year has its
own spring and its own summer, its own winter and autumn, its
own storms and fair weather. Every period is new, fresh, filled
with its own hopes and carries within itself its own joys and
sorrows. The present belongs to it. But human beings are not
content with this, they must needs own the future too . . .
What is the purpose of the song the singer sings? . . . If you look
beyond your pleasure in it for something else, for some other goal,
the moment will come when the singer stops and then you will
only have memories and vain regrets . . . because, instead of listening, you were waiting for something else . . . You are confused by categories that are not fitted to catch the flow of life. What is this
goal for which you [he means Mazzini and the liberals and the
socialists] are seeking-is it a programme? An order? Who conceived it? To whom was the order given? Is it something inevitable?
or not? If it is, are we simply puppets? . . . Are we morally free or
are we wheels within a machine?; I would rather think of life, and
therefore of history, as a goal attained, not as a means to something
else.
And:
We think that the purpose of the child is to grow up because it does
grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child.
If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of all life
is death.
ALEXAN D E R H E RZEN
This is Herzen's central political and social thesis, and it enters
henceforth into the stream of Russian radical thought as an antidote
to the exaggerated utilitarianism of which its adversaries have so often
accused it. The purpose of the singer is the song, and the purpose of
life is to be lived. Everything passes, but what passes may sometimes
reward the pilgrim for all his sufFering�. Goethe has told us that there
can be no guarantee, no security. Man could be content with the
present. But he is not. He rejects beauty, he rejects fulfilment today,
because he must own the future also. That is Herzen's answer to all
those who, like Mazzini, or the socialists of his time, called for
supreme sacrifices and sufferings for the sake of nationality, or human
civilisation, or socialism, or justice, or humanity-if not in the present,
then in the future.
Herzen rejects this violently. The purpose of the struggle for liberty
is not liberty tomorrow, it is liberty today, the liberty of living individuals with their own individual ends, the ends for which they move and fight and perhaps die, ends which are sacred to them. To crush
their freedom, their pursuits, to ruin their ends for the sake of some
vague felicity in the future which cannot be guaranteed, about which
we know nothing, which is simply the product of some enormous
metaphysical construction that itself rests upon sand, for which there
is no logical, or empirical, or any other rational guarantee-to do that
is in the first place blind, because the future is uncertain; and in the
second place vicious, because it offends against the only moral values
we know; because it tramples on human demands in the name of
abstractions-freedom, happiness, justice-fanatical generalisations,
mystical sounds, idolised sets of :ovords.
Why is liberty valuable? Because it is an end in itself, because it is
what it is. To bring it as a sacrifice to something else is simply to
perform an act of human sacrifice.
This is Herzen's ultimate sermon, and from this he develops the
corollary that one of the deepest of modern disasters is to be caught up
in abstractions instead of realities. And this he maintains not merely
against the western socialists and liberals among whom he lived (let
alone the enemy-priests or conservatives) but even more against his
own close friend Bakunin, who persisted in trying to stir up violent
rebellion, involving torture and martyrdom, for the sake of dim,
confused and distant goals. For Herzen, one of the greatest of sins
that any human being can perpetrate is to seek to transfer moral
,,
197
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
responsibility from his own shoulders to those of an unpredictable
future order, and, in the name of something which may never happen,
perpetrate crimes today which no one would deny to be monstrous
if they were performed for some egoistic purpose, and do not seem
so only because they are sanctified by faith in some remote and
intangible Utopia.
For all his hatred of despotism, and in particular of the Russian
regime, Herzen was all his life convinced that equally fatal dangers
threatened from his own socialist and revolutionary allies. He believed
this because there was a time when, with his friend, the critic Belinsky,
he too had believed that a simple solution was feasible; that some great
system-a world adumbrated by Saint-Simon or by Proudhon-did
provide it: that if one regulated social life rationally and put it. in
order, and created a clear. and tidy organisation, human problems
could be finally resolved. Dostoevsky once said of Belinsky that his
socialism was nothing but a simple belief in a marvellous life of
'unheard-of splendour, on new and . . . adamantine foundations'. Because
Herzen had himself once believed in these foundations (although
never with simple and absolute faith) and because this belief came
toppling down and was utterly destroyed in the fearful cataclysms of
1 848 and 1 849 in which almost every one of his idols proved to have
feet of clay, he denounces his own past with peculiarly intense indignation: we call upon the masses, he writes, to rise and crush the tyrants.
But the masses are indifferent to individual freedom and independence,
and suspicious of talent: 'they want a . . . government to rule for their
benefit, and not . . . against it. But to govern themselves doesn't enter
their heads.' 'It is not enough to despise the Crown; one must not be
filled with awe before the Phrygian Cap . . .' He speaks with bitter
scorn about monolithic, oppressive communist idylls, about the barbarous 'equality of penal servitude', about the 'forced labour' of socialists like Cabet, about barbarians marching to destroy.
Who will finish us off? The senile barbarism of the sceptre or
the wild barbarism of communism; the bloody sabre, or the red
Aag? . . .
. . . Communism will sweep across the world in a violent tempestdreadful, bloody, unjust, swift . . .
[Our] institutions . ; . will, as Proudhon politely puts it, be
liquidattd . . . I am sorry [for the death of civilisation]. But the masses
will not regret it; the masses to whom it gave nothing but tears,
want, ignorance and humiliation.
1 98
ALEXAN D E R H E RZEN
He is terrified of the oppressors, but he is terrified of the liberators too.
He is terrified of them because for him they are the secular heirs of
the religious bigots of the ages of faith; because anybody who has a
cut and dried scheme, a straitjacket which he wishes to impose on
humanity as the sole possible remedy for all human ills, is ultimately
bound to create a situation intolerable for free human beings, for men
like himself who want to express themselves, who want to have some
area in which to develop their own resources, and are prepared to
respect the originality, the spontaneity, the natural impulse towards
self-expression on the part of other- human beings too. He calls this
Petrograndism-the methods of Peter the Great. He admires Peter
the Great. He admires him because he did at least overthrow the
feudal rigidity, the dark night, as he thinks of it, of medieval Russia.
He admires the Jacobins because the Jacobins dared to do something
instead of nothing. Yet he is dearly aware, and became more and
more so the longer he lived (he says all this with arresting clarity in
his open letters To an Old Comrade- Bakunin-written in the late
1 86os), that Petrograndism, the behaviour of Attila, the behaviour
of the Committee of Public Safety in 1 792 -the use of methods which
presuppose the possibility of simple and radical solutions-always in
the end lead to oppression, bloodshed and collapse. He declares that
whatever the justification in earlier and more innocent ages of acts
inspired by fanatical faith, nobody has any right to act in this fashion
who has lived through the nineteenth century and has seen what
human beings are really made of-the complex, crooked texture of
men and institutions. Progress must adjust itself to the actual pace
of historical change, to the actual economic and social needs of society,
because to suppress the bourgeoisie by violent revolution-and there
was nothing he despised more than the bourgeoisie, and the mean,
grasping, philistine financial bourgeoisie of Paris most of all-before
its historical role has been played out, would merely mean that the
bourgeois spirit and bourgeois forms would persist into the new social
order. 'They want, without altering the walls [of the prison], to give
them a new function, as if a plan for a jail could be used for a free
existence.' Houses for free men cannot be built by specialists in prison
architecture. And who shall say that history has proved that Herzen
was mistaken?
His loathing of the bourgeoisie is frantic, yet he does not want a
violent cataclysm. He thinks that it may be inevitable, that it may come,
but he is frightened of it. The bourgeoisie seems to him li-ke a collection
;I
1 99
R U S SIAN T H I N K E R S
o f Figaros, but o f Figaros grown fat and prosperous. H e declares that,
in the eighteenth century, Figaro wore a livery, a mark of servitude
to be sure, but still something different from, detachable from, his
skin; the skin, at least, was that of a palpitating, rebellious human
being. But today Figaro has won. Figaro has become a millionaire.
He is judge, commander-in-chief, president of the republic. Figaro
now dominates the world, and, alas, the livery is no longer a mere
livery. It has become part of his skin. It cannot be taken off; it has
become part of his living flesh.
Everything that was repellent and degrading in the eighteenth
century, against which the noble revolutionaries had protested, has
grown into the intrinsic texture of the mean middle-class beings who
now dominate us. And yet we must wait. Simply to cut off the;r
heads, as Bakunin wanted, can only lead to a new tyranny and a new
slavery, to the rule of the revolted minorities over majorities, or worse
still, the rule of majorities-monolithic majorities-over minorities, the
rule of what John Stuart Mill, in Herzen's view with justice, called
conglomerated mediocrity.
Herzen's values are undisguised : he likes only the style of free
beings, only what is large, generous, uncalculating. He admires pride,
independence, resistance to tyrants; he admires Pushkin because he
was defiant; he admires Lermontov because he dared to suffer and to
hate; he even approves of the Slavophils, his reactionary opponents,
because at least they detested authority, at least they would not let
the Germans in. He admires Belinsky because he was incorruptible,
and told the truth in the face of the arrayed battalions of German
academic or political authority. The dogmas of socialism seem to him
no less stifling than those of capitalism or of the Middle Ages or of
the early Christians.
What he hated most of all was the despotism of formulas- the submission of human beings to arrangements arrived at by deduction from some kind of a priori principles which had no foundation in
actual experience. That is why he feared the new liberators so deeply.
'If only people wanted,' he says, ' . . . instead of liberating humanity, to
liberate themselves, they would do much for . . . the liberation
of man .' He knew that his own perpetual plea for more individual
freedom contained the seeds of social atomisation, that a compromise
had to be found between the two great social needs-for organisation
and for individual freedom-some unstable equilibrium that would
preserve a minimal area within which the individual could express
200
ALEXANDER H E RZEN
himself and not be utterly pulverised, and he utters a great appeal
for what he calls the value of egoism. He declares that one of the
great dangers to our society is that individuals will be tamed and
suppressed disinterestedly by idealists in the name of altruism, in the
name of measures designed to make the majority happy. The new
liberators may well resemble the inquisitors of the past, who drove
herds of innocent Spaniards, Dutchmen, Belgians, Frenchmen,
Italians to the autos-da-fl, and 'then went home peacefully with a
quiet conscience, with the feeling that they had done their duty, with
the smell of roasting human Besh still in their nostrils', and slept-the
sleep of the innocent after a day's work well done. Egoism is not to
be condemned without qualification. Egoism is not a vice. Egoism
gleams in the eye of an animal. Moralists bravely .thunder against it,
instead of building on it. What moralists try and deny is the great,
inner citadel of human dignity. 'They want . . /to make men tearful,
sentimental, insipid, kindly creatures, asking to be made slaves • . .
But to tear egoism from a man's heart is to rob him of his living
principles, of the yeast and salt of his personality.' Fortunately this is
impossible. Of course it is sometimes suicidal to try to assert oneself.
One cannot try and go up a staircase down which an army is trying
to march. That is done by tyrants, conservatives, fools and criminals.
'Destroy a man's altruism, and you get a savage orang-utan, but
if you destroy his egoism you generate a tame monkey.'
Human problems are too complex to demand simple solutions. Even
the peasant commune in Russia, in which Herun believed so deeply
as a 'lightning conductor', because he believed that peasants in Russia
at least had not been infected by the distorting, urban vices of the
European proletariat and the European bourgeoisie-even the peasant
commune did not, after all, as he points out, preserve Russia from
slavery. Liberty is not to the taste of the majority-only of the educated.
There are no guaranteed methods, no sure paths to social welfare.
We must try and do our best; and it is always possible that we shall fail.
The heart of his thought is the notion that the basic problems are
perhaps not soluble at all, that all one can do is to try to solve them,
but that there is no guarantee, either in socialist nostrums or in any
other human construction, no guarantee that happiness or a rational
life can be attained, in private or in public life. This curious combination of idealism and scepticism-not unlike, for all his vehemence, the oudook of Erasmus, Montaigne, Montesquieu-runs through all
his writings.
201
R U SSIAN TH I N K E R S
Her-zen wrote novels, but they are largely forgotten, because he was
not a born novelist. His stories are greatly inferior to those of his
friend, Turgenev, but they have something in common with them.
For in Turgenev's novels, too, you will find that human problems
are not treated as if they were soluble. Bazarov in Fathn-s and Childrm
sufFers and dies; Lavretsky in A House of Gmtlifoll is left in melancholy uncertainty at the end of the novel, not because something had not been done which could have been done, not because there is a
solution round the corner which someone simply had not thought of,
or had refused to apply, but because, as Kant once said, ' From the
crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made.' Everything is partly the fault of circumstance, partly the fault of the individual character, partly in the nature of life itself. This must be faced, it
must be stated, and it is a vulgarity and, at times, a crime to believe
that permanent solutions are always possible.
Her-zen wrote a novel called Who is to IJ/amt ? about a typical
tragic triangle in which one of the 'superfluous men' of whom I spoke
earlier falls in love with a lady in a provincial town who is married
to a virtuous, idealistic� but dull and naive husband. It is not a good
novel, and its plot is not worth recounting, but the main point, and
what is most characteristic of Herzen, is that the situation possesses,
in principle, no solution. The lover is left broken-hearted, the wife
falls ill and probably dies, the husband contemplates suicide. It sounds
like a typically gloomy, morbidly self-centred caricature of the Russian
novel. But it is not. It rests on an exceedingly delicate, precise, and
at times profound description of an emotional and psychological situation to which the theories of a Stendhal, the method of a Flaubert, the depth and moral insight of George Eliot are inapplicable because
they are seen to be too literary, derived from obsessive ideas, ethical
doctrines not fitted to the chaos of life.
At the heart of Herzen's outlook (and of Turgenev's too) is the
notion of the complexity and insolubility of the central problems, and,
therefore, of the absurdity of trying to solve them by means of political
or sociological instruments. But the difference between Herzen and
Turgenev is this. Turgenev is, in his innermost being, not indeed
heartless but a cool, detached, at times slightly mocking observer who
looks upon the tragedies of life from a comparatively remote point of
view; oscillating between one vantage point and another, between
the claims of society and of the individual, the claims of love and of
daily life; between heroic virtue and realistic scepticism, the morality
202
ALEXAN D E R H E RZEN
of Hamlet and the morality of Don Quixote, the necessity for efficient
political organisation and the necessity for individual self-expression;
remaining suspended in a state of agreeable indecision, sympathetic
melancholy, ironical, free from cynicism and sentimentality, perceptive, scrupulously truthful and uncommitted. Turgenev neither quite believed nor quite disbelieved in a deity, personal or impersonal;
religion is for him a normal ingredient of life, like love, or egoism,
or the sense of pleasure. He enjoyed remaining in an intermediate
position, he enjoyed almost too much his lack of will to believe, and
because he stood aside, because he contemplated in tranquillity, he
was able to produce great literary masterpieces of a finished kind,
rounded stories told in peaceful retrospect, with well-constructed
beginnings, middles and ends. He detached his art from himself; he
did not, as a human being, deeply care about solutions; he saw life
with a peculiar chilliness, which infuriated both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and he achieved the exquisite perspective of an artist who treats his material from a certain distance. There is a chasm between
him and his material, within which alone his particular kind of
poetical creation is possible.
Herzen, on the contrary, cared far too violently. He was looking
for solutions for himself, for his own personal life. His novels were
certainly failures. He obtrudes himself too vehemently into them,
himself and his agonised point of view. On the other hand, his autobiographical sketches, when he writes openly about himself and about his friends, when he speaks about his own life in Italy, in France, in
Switzerland, in England, have a kind of palpitating directness, a sense
of first-handness and reality, which no other writer in the nineteenth
century begins to convey. His reminiscences are a work of critical
and descriptive genius with the power of absolute self-revelation that
only an astonishingly imaginative, impressionable, perpetually reacting
personality, with an exceptional sense both of the noble and the
ludicrous, and a rare freedom from vanity and doctrine, could have
attained. As a writer of memoirs he is unequalled. His sketches of
England, or rather of himself in England, are better than Heine's or
Taine's. To demonstrate this one need only read his wonderful
account of English political trials, of how judges, for example, looked
to him when they sat in court trying foreign conspirators for having
fought a fatal duel in Windsor Park. He gives a vivid and entertaining
description of bombastic French demagogues and gloomy French
fanatics, and of the impassable gulf which divides this agitated and
..
203
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
slightly grotesque emigre society from the dull, frigid, an d dignified
institutions of mid-Victorian England, typified by the figure of the
presiding judge at the Old Bailey, who looks like the wolf in Red
Riding Hood, i n his white wig, his long skirts, with his sharp little
wolf-like face, thin lips, sharp teeth, and harsh little words that come
with an air of specious benevolence from the face encased in disarming
feminine curls-giving the impression of a sweet, grandmotherly, old
lady, belied by the small gleaming eyes and the dry, acrid, malicious
judicial humour.
He paints classical portraits of German exiles, whom he detested,
of Italian and Polish revolutionaries, whom he admired, and gives
little sketches of the differences between the nations, such as the
English and the French, each of which regards itself as the greatest
nation on earth, and will not yield an inch, and does not begin to
understand the other's ideals-the French with their gregariousness,
their lucidity, their didacticism, their neat formal gardens, as against
the English with their solitudes and dark suppressed romanticism, and
the tangled undergrowth of their ancient, illogical, but profoundly
civilised and humane institutions. And there are the Germans, who
regard themselves, he declares, as an inferior fruit of the tree of which
the English are the superior products, and come to England, and
after three days 'say "yes" instead of "ja", and "well" where it is not required'. It is invariably for the Germans that both he and
Bakunin reserved their sharpest taunts, not so much from personal
dislike as because the Germans to them seemed to stand for all that
was middle-class, cramping, philistine and boorish, the sordid despotism
of grey and small-minded drill sergeants, aesthetically more disgusting
than the generous, magnificent tyrannies of great conquerors of
history.
Where they are stopped by their conscience, we are stopped by a
policeman. Our weakness is arithmetical, and so we yield; their
weakness is an algebraic weakness, it is part of the formula itself.
This was echoed by Bakunin a decade later:
When an Englishman or an American says 'I am an Englishman',
'I am an American', they are saying 'I am a free man'; when a
German says 'I am a German' he is saying ' . . . my Emperor is
stronger than all the other Emperors, and the German soldier who
is strangling me will strangle you all . . . '
204
ALEXANDER H E RZEN
This kind of sweeping prejudice, these diatribes against entire nations
and classes, are characteristic of a good many Russian writers of this
period. They are often ill-founded, unjust and violently exaggerated,
but they are the authentic expression of an indignant reaction against
an oppressive milieu, and of a genuine and highly personal moral
vision which makes them lively reading even now.
.
His irreverence and the irony, the disbelief in final solutions, the
conviction that human beings are complex and fragile, and that there
is value in the very irregularity of their structure which is violated
by attempts to force it into patterns or straitjackets - this and the
irrepressible pleasure in exploding all cut and dried social and political
schemata which serious-minded and pedantic saviours of mankind,
both radical and conservative, were perpetually manufacturing,
inevitably made Herun unpopular among the earnest and the devout
of all camps. In this respect he resembled his sceptical friend Turgenev,
who could not, and had no wish to, resist the desire to tell the truth,
however 'unscientific' -to say something psychologically telling, even
though it might not fit in with some generally _accepted, enlightened
system of ideas. Neither accepted the view that because he was on
the side of progress or revolution he was under a sacred obligation
to suppress the truth, or to pretend to think that it was simpler than
it was, or that certain solutions would work although it seemed
patently improbable that they could, simply because to speak otherwise
might give aid and comfort to the enemy.
This detachment from party and doctrine, and the tendency to utter
independent and sometimes disconcerting judgements, brought violent
criticism on both Herzen and Turgenev, and made their position
difficult. When Turgenev wrote Fathtrl and Childrm, he was duly
attacked both from the right and from the left, because neither was
clear which side he was supporting. This indeterminate quality
particularly irritated the 'new' young men in Russia, who assailed
him bitterly for being too liberal, too civilised, too ironical, too
sceptical, for undermining noble idealism by the perpetual oscillation
of political feelings, by excessive self-examination, by not engaging
himself and declaring war upon the enemy, and perpetrating instead
what amounted to a succession of evasions and minor treacheries.
Their hostility was di rectcd at all the 'men of the 4os', and in particular
at Herun, who was rightly looked on as their most brilliant and most
formidable representative. His answer to the stern, brutal young
revolutionaries of the 1 86os is exceedingly characteristic. The new
•
zos
R U SSIAN T H I N K E RS
revolutionaries had attacked him for nostalgic love of an older style
of life, for being a gentleman, for being rich, for living in comfort,
for sitting in London and observing the Russian revolutionary struggle
from afar, for being a member of a generation which had merely
talked in the salons, and speculated and philosophised, when all round
them were squalor and misery, bitterness and injustice; for not seeking
salvation in some serious, manual labour-in cutting down a tree, or
making a pair of boots, or doing something 'concrete' and real in
order to identify himself with the suffering masses, instead of endless
brave talk in the drawing-rooms of wealthy ladies with other welleducated, nobly-born, equally feckless young men -self-indulgence and escapism, deliberate blindness to the horrors and agonies of their
world.
Herzen understood his opponents, and declined to compromise. He
admits that he cannot help preferring cleanliness to dirt; decency,
elegance, beauty, comfort, to violence and austerity, good literature
to bad, poetry to prose. Despite his alleged cynicism and 'aestheticism',
he declines to admit that only scoundrels can achieve things, that in
order to achieve a revolution that will liberate mankind and create a
new and nobler form of life on earth one must be unkempt, dirty,
brutal and violent, and trample with hob-nailed boots on civilisation
and the rights of men. He does not believe this, and sees no reason
why he should believe it.
As for the new generation of revolutionaries, they are not sprung
from nothing: they are the fault of his generation, which begat them
by its idle talk in the I 8.+os. These are men who come to avenge the
world against the men of the 4os-'the syphilis of our revolutionary
passions'. The new generation will say to the old : ' "you are hypocrites,
we will be cynics; you spoke like moralists, we shall speak like
scoundrels; you were civil to your superiors, rude to your inferiors;
we shall be rude to all ; you bow without feeling respect, we shall
push and jostle and make no apologies . . . " ' He says in effect:
Organised hooliganism can solve nothing. Unless civilisation-the
recognition of the difference of good and bad, noble and ignoble,
worthy and unworthy-is preserved, unless there are some people who
are both fastidious and fearless, and are free to say what they want to
say, and do not sacrifice their lives upon some large, nameless altar,
and sink themselves into a vast, impersonal, grey mass of barbarians
marching to destroy, what is the point of the revolution? It may come
whether we like it or not. But why should we welcome, still less work
206
ALEXANDER H ERZEN
for, the victory of the barbarians who will sweep away the wicked
old world only to leave ruins and misery on which nothing but a
new despotism can be built? The 'vast bill of indictment which
Russian literature has been drafting against Russian life' does not
demand a new philistinism in place of the old. 'Sorrow, scepticism,
irony . . . the three strings of the Russian lyre' are closer to reality
than the crude and vulgar optimism of the new materialists.
Herzen's most constant goal is the preservation of individual liberty.
That is the purpose of the guerrilla war which, as he once wrote to
Mazzini, he had fought from his earliest youth. What made him
unique in the nineteenth century is the complexity of his vision, the
degree to which he understood the causes and nature of confticting
ideals simpler and more fundamental than his own. He understood
what made-and what in a measure justified-radicals and revolutionaries: and at the same time he grasped the frightening consequences of their doctrines. He was in full sympathy with, and had a profound
psychological understanding of, what it was that gave the Jacobins
their severe and noble grandeur, and endowed them with a moral
magnificence which raised them above the horizon of that older
world which he found so attractive and which they had ruthlessly
crushed. He understood only too well the misery, the oppression, the
suffocation, the appalling inhumanity, the bitter cries for justice on
the part of the crushed elements of the population under the ancim
rlgime, and at the same time he knew that the new world which had
risen to avenge these wrongs must, if it was given its head, create its
own excesses and drive millions of human beings to useless mutual
extermination. Herzen's sense of reality, in particular of the need for,
and the price of, revolution, is unique in his own, and perhaps in any
age. His sense of the critical moral and political issues of his time is a
good deal more specific and concrete than that of the majority of the
professional philosophers of the nineteenth century, who tended to try
to derive general principles from observation of their society, and to
recommend solutions which are deduced by rational methods from
premises formulated in terms of the tidy categories in which they
sought to arrange opinions, principles and forms of conduct. Herzen
was a publicist and an essayist whom his early Hegelian training had
not ruined : he had acquired no taste for academic classifications: he
had a unique insight into the 'inner feel' of social and political predicaments: and with it a remarkable power of analysis and exposition.
Consequently he understood and stated the case, both emotional and
,,
'1.07
R U S S IA N TH INKERS
intellectual, for violent revolution, for saying that a pair of boots was
of more value than all the plays of Shakespeare (as the 'nihilistic'
critic Pisarev once said in a rhetorical moment), for denouncing
liberalism and parliamentarism, which offered the masses votes and
slogans when what they needed was food, shelter, clothing; and understood no less vividly and dearly the aesthetic and even moral value of civilisations which rest upon slavery, where a minority produces
divine masterpieces, and only a small number of persons have the
freedom and the self-confidence, the imagination and the gifts, to be
able to produce forms of life that endure, works which can be shored
up against the ruin of our time.
This curious ambivalence, the alternation of indignant championship of revolution and democracy against the smug denunciation of them by liberals and conservatives, with no less passionate attacks
upon revolutionaries in the name of free individuals; the defence of
the claims of life and art, human decency, equality and dignity, with
the advocacy of a society in which human beings shall not exploit or
trample on one another even in the name of justice or progress or
civilisation or democracy or other abstractions-this war on two, and
often more, fronts, wherever and whoever the enemies of freedom
might turn out to be-makes Herren the most realistic, sensitive,
penetrating and convincing witness to the social life and the social
issues of his own time. His greatest gift is that of untrammelled understanding: he understood the value of the so-called 'superfluous' Russian idealists of the +OS because they were exceptionally free, and morally
attractive, and formed the most imaginative, spontaneous, gifted,
civilised and interesting society which he had ever known. At the
same time he understood the protest against it of the exasperated,
deeply earnest, rrooltls young radicals, repelled by what seemed to
them gay and irresponsible chatter among a group of aristocratic
jl4nmrs, unaware of the mounting resentment of the sullen mass of
the oppressed peasants and lower officials that would one day sweep
them and their world away in a tidal wave of violent, blind, but justified hatred which it is the business of true revolutionaries to foment and direct. Herren understood this conflict, and his autobiography
conveys the tension between individuals and classes, personalities and
opinions both in Russia and in the west, with marvellous vividness
and precision.
My Past and Thoughts is dominated by no single clear purpose, it
is not committed to a thesis; its author was not enslaved by any formula
208
ALEXANDER H E RZEN
or any political doctrine, and for this reason, it remains a profound
and living masterpiece, and Herzen's greatest title to immortality. He
possesses other clai;ns: his political and social views were arrestingly
original, if only because he was among the very few thinkers of his
time who in principle rejected all general solutions, and grasped, as
very few thinkers have ever done, the crucial distinction between
words that are about words, and words that are about persons or
things in the real world. Nevertheless it is as a writer that he survives.
His autobiography is one of the great monuments to Russian literary
and psychological genius, worthy to stand beside the great novels of
Turgenev and Tolstoy. Like War and Peau, like Fathers and
Children, it is wonderfully readable, and, save in inferior translation,
not dated, not Victorian, still astonishingly contemporary in feeling.
One of the elements in political genius is a sensibility to characteristics and processes in society while they are still in embryo and invisible to the naked eye. Herzen possessed this capacity to a high
degree, but he viewed the approaching cataclysm neither with the
savage exultation of Marx or Bakunin nor with the pessimistic
detachment of Burckhardt or T ocqueville. Like Proudhon he believed
the destruction of individual freedom to be neither desirable nor
inevitable, but, unlike him, as being highly probable, unless it was
averted by deliberate human effort. The strong tradition of libertarian
humanism in Russian socialism, defeated only in October 1 9 1 7,
derives from his writings. His analysis of the forces at work in his
day, of the individuals in whom they were embodied, of the moral
presupposition of their creeds and words, and of his own principles,
remains to this day one of the most penetrating, moving, and morally
formidable indictments of the great evils which have grown to maturity
in our own time.
209
Russian Populism
R us s I A N populism is the name not of a single political party, nor of
a coherent body of doctrine, but of a widespread radical movement in
Russia in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was born during
the great social and intellectual ferment which followed the death of
Tsar Nicholas I and the defeat and humiliation of the Crimean war,
grew to fame and influence during the I 86os and I 87os, and reached
its culmination with the assassination of Tsar Alexander I I, after
which it swiftly declined. Its leaders were men of very dissimilar
origins, outlooks and capacities; it was not at any stage more than
loose congeries of small independent groups of conspirators or their
sympathisers, who sometimes united for common action, and at other
times operated in isolation. These groups tended to differ both about
ends and about means. Nevertheless they held certain fundamental
beliefs in common, and possessed sufficient moral and political solidarity
to entitle them to be called a single movement. Like their predecessors,
the Decembrist conspirators in the 20s, and the circles that gathered
round Alexander Herz.en and Belinsky in the 30s and 40s, they
looked on the government and the social structure of their country
as a moral and political monstrosity-obsolete, barbarous, stupid and
odious-and dedicated their lives to its total destruction. Their general
ideas were not original. They shared the democratic ideals of the
European radicals of their day, and in addition believed that the
struggle between social and economic classes was the determining
factor in politics; they held this theory not in its Marxist form (which
did not effectively reach Russia until the 1 87os) but in the form in
which it was taught by Proudhon and Herzen, and before them by
Saint-Simon, Fourier and other French socialists and radicals whose
writings had entered Russia, legally and illegally, in a thin but steady
stream for several decades.
The theory of social history as dominated by the class war-the
heart of which is the notion of the coercion of the 'have-nots' by the
'haves'-was born in the course of the Industrial Revolution in the
west; and its most characteristic concepts belong to the capitalist
2 I O
RU S S IAN P O P U L I S M
phase of economic development. Economic classes, capitalism, cutthroat competition, proletarians and their exploiters, the evil power of unproductive finance, the inevitability of increasing centralisation
and standardisation of all human activities, the transformation of men
into commodities and the consequent 'alienation' of individuals and
groups and degradation of human lives-these notions are fully
intelligible only in the context of expanding industrialism. Russia,
even as late as the I 8 50s, was one of the least industrialised states in
Europe. Nevertheless, exploitation and misery had long been amongst
the most familiar and universally recognised characteristics of its social
life, the principal victims of the system being the peasants, both serfs
and free, who formed over nine-tenths of its population. An industrial
proletariat had indeed come into being, but by mid-century did not
exceed two or three per cent of the population of the Empire. Hence
the cause of the oppressed was still at that date overwhelmingly that
of the agricultural workers, who formed the lowest stratum of the
population, the vast majority being serfs in state or private possession.
The populists looked upon them as martyrs whose grievances they
were determined to avenge and remedy, and as embodiments of
simple uncorrupted virtue, whose social organisation (which they
largely idealised) was the natural foundation on which the future of
Russian society must be rebuilt.
The central populist goals were social justice and social equality.
Most of them were convinced, following Herzen, whose revolutionary
propaganda in the I 8 50s influenced them more than any other single
set of ideas, that the essence of a just and equal society existed already
in the Russian peasant commune-the ohshchina organised in the form
of a collective unit called the mir. The mir was a free association of
peasants which periodically redistributed the agricultural land to be
tilled; its decisions bound all its members, and constituted the cornerstone on which, so the populists maintained, a federation of socialised, self-governing units, conceived along lines popularised by the French
socialist Proudhon, could be erected. The populist leaders believed
that this form of cooperation offered the possibility of a free and
democratic social system in Russia, originating as it did in the deepest
moral instincts and traditional values of Russian, and indeed all human,
society, and they believed that the workers (by which they meant all
productive human beings), whether in town or country, could bring
this system into being with a far smaller degree of violence or coercion
than had occurred in the industrial west. This system, since it alone
..
2.I I
R U S S IAN TH INKERS
sprang naturally from fundamental human needs and a sense of the
right and the good that existed in all men, would ensure justice,
equality, and the widest opportunity for the full development of
human faculties. As a corollary of this, the populists believed that the
development of large-scale centralised industry was not 'natural', and
therefore led inexorably to the degradation and dehumanisation of all
those who were caught in its tentacles: capitalism was an appalling
evil, destructi�e of body and soul; but it was not inescapable. They
denied that social or economic progress was necessarily bound up with
the Industrial Revolution. They maintained that the application of
scientific truths and methods to social and individual problems (in
which they passionately believed), although it might, and often did,
lead to the growth of capitalism, could be realised without this fatal
sacrifice. They believed that it was possible to improve life by scientific techniques without necessarily destroying the 'natural' life of the peasant village, or creating a vast, pauperised, faceless city proletariat.
Capitalism seemed irresistible only because it had not been sufficiently
resisted. However it might be in the west, in Russia 'the curse of
bigness' could still be successfully fought, and federations of small
self-governing units of producers, as Fourier and Proudhon had
advocated, could be fostered, and indeed created, by deliberate action.
Like their French masters, the Russian disciples held the institution
of the state in particular hatred, since to them it was at once the
symbol, the result and the main source of injustice and inequalitya weapon wielded by the governing class to defend its own privilegesand one that, in the face of increasing resistance from its victims, grew progressively more brutal and blindly destructive.
The defeat of liberal and radical movements in the west in I 848-9
confirmed them in their conviction that salvation did not lie in politics
or political parties: it seemed clear to them that liberal parties and their
leaders had neither understood nor made a serious effort to forward
the fundamental interests of the oppressed populations of their
countries. What the vast majority of peasants in Russia (or workers
in Europe) needed was to be fed and clothed, to be given physical
security, to be rescued from disease, ignorance, poverty, and humiliating inequalities. As for political rights, votes, parliaments, republican forms, these were meaningless and useless to ignorant, barbarous, halfnaked and starving men; such programmes merely mocked their misery. The populists shared with the nationalistic Russian Slavophils
(with whose political ideas they had otherwise little in common) a
2 1 2
R U S S IAN POP U L I S M
loathing of the rigidly class-conscious social pyramid of the west that
was complacently accepted, or fervently believed in, by the conformist
bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy to whom this bourgeoisie looked up.
The satirist Saltykov, in his famous dialogue between a German
and a Russian boy, immortalised this attitude when he declared his
faith in the Russian boy, hungry and in rags, stumbling in the mud
and squalor of the accursed, slave-owning tsarist regime, because he
had not, like the neat, docile, smug, well-fed, well-dressed German
bOy, bartered away his soul for the few pence that the Prussian official
had offered him, and was consequently capable, if only he was allowed
to do so (as the Gennan boy no longer was), of rising one day to his
full human height. Russia was in darkness and in chains, but her
spirit was not captive; her past was black, but her future promised
more than the death in life of the civilised middle classes in Germany
or France or England, who had long ago sold themselves for material
security and had become so apathetic in their shameful, self-imposed
servitude that they no longer knew how to want to be free.
The populists, unlike the Slavophils, did not believe in the unique
character or destiny of the Russian people. They were not mystical
nationalists. They believed only that Russia was a backward nation
which had not reached the stage of social and economic development
at which the western nations (whether or not they could have avoided
this) had entered upon the path of unrestrained industrialism. They
were not, for the most part, historical determinists; consequently they
believed that it was possible for a nation in such a predicament to
avoid this fate by the exercise of intelligence and will. They saw no
reason why Russia could not benefit by western science and western
technology without paying the appalling price paid by the west. They
argued that it was possible to avoid the despotism of a centralised
economy or a centralised government by adopting a loose, federal
structure composed of self-governing, socialised units both of producers
and of consumers. They held that it was desirable to organise, but not
to lose sight of other values in the pursuit of organisation as an end
in itself; to be governed primarily by ethical and humanitarian and
not solely by economic and technological-'ant-hill'-considerations.
They declared that to protect human individuals against exploitation
by turning them into an industrial army of collectivised robots was
self-stultifying and suicidal. The ideas of the populists wer:e often
unclear, and there were sharp differences among them, but there was
an area of agreement wide enough to constitute a genuine movement.
,,
2 1 3
R U SSIAN TH INKERS
Thus they accepted, in broad outline, the educational and moral
lessons, but not the state worship, of Rousseau. Some of them-indeed
perhaps the majority-shared Rousseau's belief in the goodness of
simple men, his conviction that the cause of corruption is the crippling
effect of bad institutions, his acute distrust of all forms of cleverness,
of intellectuals and specialists, of all self-isolating coteries and factions.
They accepted the anti-political ideas, but not the technocratic
centralism, of Saint-Simon. They shared the belief in conspiracy and
violent action preached by Babeuf and his disciple Buonarotti, but not
their Jacobin authoritarianism. They stood with Sismondi and
Proudhon and Lamennais and the other originators of the notion of
the welfare state, against, on the one hand, laissn-fairt, and, on the
other, central authority, whether nationalist or socialist, whether
temporary or permanent, whether preached by List, or Mazzini, or
Lassalle, or Marx. They came close at times to the positions of
western Christian socialists, without, however, any religious faith,
since, like the French Encyclopedists of the previous century, they
believed in 'natural' morality and scientific truth. These were some
of the beliefs that held them together. But they were divided by
differences no less profound.
The first and greatest of their problems was their attitude towards
the peasants in whose name all that they did was done. Who was to
show the peasants the true path to justice and equality? Individual
liberty is not, indeed, condemned by the populists, but it tends to be
regarded as a liberal catchword, liable to distract attention from
immediate social and economic tasks. Should one train experts to
teach the ignorant younger brothers-the tillers of the soil, and, if
need be, stimulate them to resist authority, to revolt and destroy the
old order before the rebels had themselves fully grasped the need or
meaning of such acts? That is the view of such dissimilar figures as
Bakunin and Speshnev in the 1 84os; it was preached by Chernyshevsky in the 50s, and was passionately advocated by Zaichnevsky and the Jacobins of 'Young Russia' in the 6os; it was preached by
Lavrov in the 70s and 8os, and equally by his rivals and opponentsthe believers in disciplined professional terrorism-Nechaev and Tkachev, and their followers who include-for this purpose alonenot only the Socialist-Revolutionaries but also some of the most fanatical Russian Marxists, in particular Lenin and Trotsky.
Some among them asked whether this training of revolutionary
groups might not create an arrogant elite of seekers of power and
214
R U S SIAN POP U L I S M
autocracy, men who would, at best, believe i t their duty to give the
peasants not what the peasants asked for but what they-their selfappointed mentors-thought good for them, namely, that which the masses ought to ask for, whether they in fact did so or not. They
· pushed the question farther, and asked whether this would not, in due
course, breed fanatical men who would pay too little heed to the
actual wants of the vast majority of the Russian population, intent on
forcing upon them only what they-the dedicated order of professional
revolutionaries, cut off from the life of the masses by their own special
training and conspiratorial lives-had chosen for them, ignoring the
hopes and protests of the people itself. Was there not a terrible danger
here of the substitution of a new yoke for the old, of a despotic
oligarchy of intellectuals in the place of the nobility and the bureaucracy and the tsar? What reason was there for thinking that the new masters would prove less oppressive than the old?
This was argued by some among the terrorists of the 6os- lshutin
and Karakozov, for example-and even more forcibly by the majority
of the idealistic young men, who 'went among the people' in the 70s
and later, with the aim not so much of teaching others as of themselves learning how to live, in a state of mind inspired by Rousseau (and perhaps by Nekrasov or Tolstoy) at least as much as by the more
tough-minded social theorists. These young men, the so-called
'repentant gentry', believed themselves to have been corrupted not
merely by an evil social system but by the very process of liberal
education which makes for deep inequalities and inevitably lifts
scientists, writers, professors, experts, civilised men in general, too
high above the heads of the masses, and so itself becomes the richest
breeding-ground of injustice and class oppression; everything that
obstructs understanding between individuals or groups or nations, that
creates and keeps in being obstacles to human solidarity and fraternity
is to ipso evil; specialisation and university education build walls
between men, prevent individuals and groups from 'connecting', kill
love and friendship, and are among the major causes responsible for
what, after Hegel and his followers, came to be called the 'alienation'
of entire orders or classes or cultures.
Some among the populists contrived to ignore or evade this r-roblem.
Bakunin, for example, who, if not a populist himself, influenced
populism profoundly, denounced faith in intellectuals and experts as
liable to lead to the most ignoble of tyrannies-the rule of scientists
and pedants-but would not face the problem of whether the revolu-
2.1 5
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
tionaries had come to teach o r to learn. I t was left uiWlswered by
the terrorists of the 'People's Will' and their sympathisers. More
sensitive and morally scrupulous thinkers- Chernyshevsky and
Kropotkin, for example-felt the oppressive weight of the question,
and did not attempt to conceal it from themselves; yet whenever they
asked themselves by what right they proposed to impose this or that
system of social organisation on the mass of peasants who had grown
up in a wholly different way of life, and one that might embody far
profounder values of its own, they gave no clear reply. The question
became even more acute when it was asked (as it increasingly came
to be in the 6os) what was to be done if the peasants actually resisted
the revolutionaries' plans for their liberation? Must the masses be
deceived, or, worse still, coerced? No one denied that in the end it
was the people and not the revolutionary elite that must govern, but
in the meanwhile how far was one allowed to go in ignoring the
majority's wishes, or in forcing them into courses which they plainly
loathed?
This was by no means a merely academic problem. The first
enthusiastic adherents of radical populism-the missionaries who went
'to the people' in the famous summer of I 874-were met by mounting
indifference, suspicion, resentment, and sometimes active hatred and
resistance, on the part of their would-be beneficiaries, who, as often
as not, handed them over to the police. The populists were thus
forced to define their attitude explicitly, since they believed passionately in the need to justify their activities by rational argument. Their answers, when they came, were far from unanimous. The activists,
men like Tkachev, Nechaev, and, in a less political sense, Pisarev,
whose admirers came to be known as 'nihilists', anticipated Lenin in
their contempt for democratic methods. Since the days of Plato it has
been argued that the spirit is superior to the flesh, and that those who
know must govern those who do not. The educated cannot listen to
the uneducated and ignorant masses. The masses must be rescued by
whatever means were available, if necessary against their own foolish
wishes, by guile or fraud, or violence if need be. But it was only a
minority in the movement who accepted this division and the authoritarianism that it entailed. The majority were horrified by the open advocacy of such Machiavellian tactics, and thought that no end,
however good, could fail to be destroyed by the adoption of monstrous
means.
A similar conflict broke out over the attitude to the state. All
2 1 6
R U S S IAN POPU L I S M
Russian populists were agreed that the state was the embodiment of
a system of coercion and inequality, and therefore intrinsically evil;
neither justice nor happiness was possible until it was eliminated.
But in the meanwhile what was to be the immediate aim of the
revolution? Tkachev is quite clear that until the capitalist enemy had
been finally destroyed, the weapon of coercion-the pistol torn from
his hand by the revolutionaries-must on no account be thrown away,
but must itself be turned against him. In other words the machinery
of the state must not be destroyed, but must be used against the
inevitable counter-revolution; it cannot be dispensed with until the
last enemy has been-in Proudhon's immortal phrase-successfully
liquidated, and mankind consequently has no further need of any
instrument of coercion. In this doctrine he was followed by Lenin
more faithfully than mere adherence to the ambivalent Marxist
formula about the dictatorship of the proletariat seemed to require.
Lavrov, who represents the central stream of populism, and reRects
all its vacillations and confusions, characteristically advocated not
indeed the immediate or total elimination of the state but its systematic
reduction to something vaguely described as the minimum. Chernyshevsky, who is the least anarchistic of the populists, conceives of the state as the organiser and protector of the free associations of peasants
or workers, and contrives to see it at once as centralised and decentralised, a guarantee of order and efficiency, and of equality and individual liberty too.
All these thinkers share one vast apocalyptic assumption: that once
the reign of evil-autocracy, exploitation, inequality-is consumed in the
fire of the revolution, there will arise naturally and spontaneously out
of its ashes a natural, harmonious, just order, needing only the gentle
guidance of the enlightened revolutionaries to attain its proper perfection. This great Utopian dream, based on simple faith in regenerated human nature, was a vision which the populists shared with Godwin
and Bakunin, Marx and Lenin. Its heart is the pattern of sin and
death and resurrection-of the road to the earthly paradise, the gates
of which will only open if men find the one true way and follow it.
Its roots lie deep in the religious imagination of mankind; and there is
therefore nothing surprising in the fact that this secular version of it
had strong affinities with the faith of the Russian Old Believers-the
dissenting sects-for whom, since the great religious schism of the
seventeenth century, the Russian state and its rulers, particularly
Peter the Great, represented the rule of Satan upon earth; this
2 1 7
RU SSIAN T H I N K E R S
persecuted religious underground provided a good many potential
allies whom the populists made efforts to mobilise.
There were deep divisions among the populists; they differed about
the future role of the intellectuals, as compared with that of the
peasants; they differed about the historical importance of the rising
class of capitalists, gradualism versus conspiracy, education and propaganda versus terrorism and preparation for immediate risings. All these questions were interrelated and they demanded immediate solutions.
But the deepest rift among the populists arose over the urgent question
of whether a truly democratic revolution could �ibly occur before
a sufficient number of the oppressed had become fully conscious-that
is, capable of understanding and analysing the causes of their intolerable condition. The moderates argued that no revolution could justly be called democratic unless it sprang from the rule of the revolutionary
majority. But in that event, there was perhaps no alternative to
waiting until education and propaganda had created this majority-a
course that was being advocated by almost all western socialists
Marxist and non-Marxist alike-in the second half of the nineteenth
century.
Against this the Russian Jacobins argued that to wait, and in the
meanwhile to condemn all forms of revolt organised by resolute
minorities as irresponsible terrorism or, worse still, as the replacement
of one despotism by another, would lead to catastrophic results: while
the revolutionaries procrastinated, capitalism would develop rapidly;
the breathing space would enable the ruling class to develop a social
and economic base incomparably stronger than that which it possessed
at present; the growth of a prosperous and energetic capitalism would
create opportunities of employment for the radical intellectuals themselves: doctors, engineers, educators, economists, technicians, and experts of all types would be assigned profitable tasks and positions;
their new bourgeois masters (unlike the existing regime) would be
intelligent enough not to force them into any kind of political conformity; the intelligentsia would obtain special privileges, status, and wide opportunities for self-expression-harmless radicalism would be
tolerated, a good deal of personal liberty permitted-and in this way
the revolutionary cause would lose its more valuable recruits. Once
those whom insecurity and discontent had driven into making common
cause with the oppressed had been partially satisfied, the incentive to
revolutionary activity would be weakened, and the prospects of a
radical transformation of society would become exceedingly dim. The
2 1 8
R U S S IAN P O P U L I S M
radical wing of the revolutionaries argued with great force that the
advance of capitalism, whatever Marx might say, was not inevitable;
it might be so in western Europe, but in Russia it could still be arrested
by a revolutionary coup, destroyed in the root before it had had time
to grow too strong. If recognition of the need to awaken the 'political
consciousness' of the majority of the workers and peasants (which by
this time, and partly as a result of the failure of the intellectuals in
I 848, had been pronounced absolutely indispensable to the revolution
both by Marxists and by the majority of the populist leaders) was
tantamount to the adoption of a gradualist programme, the moment
for action would surely be missed; and i n place of the populist or
socialist revolution would there not arise a vigorous, imaginative,
predatory, successful capitalist regime which would succeed Russian
semi-feudalism as surely as it had replaced the feudal order in western
Europe? And then who could tell how many decades or centuries
might elapse before the arrival, at long last, of the revolution? When
it did arrive, who could tell what kind of order it would, by that time,
install-resting upon what social basis?
All populists were agreed that the village commune was the ideal
embryo of those socialist groups on which the future society was to be
based. But would the development of capitalism not automatically
destroy the commune? And if it was maintained (although perhaps
this was not explicitly asserted before the I 88os) that capitalism was
already destroying the mir, that the class struggle, as analysed by Marx,
was dividing the villages as surely as the cities, then the plan of action
was clear: rather than sit with folded hands and watch this disintegration fatalistically, resolute men could and must arrest this process, and save the village commune. Socialism, so the Jacobins argued, could be
introduced by the capture of power to which all the energies of the
revolutionaries must be bent, even at the price of postponing the task
of educating the peasants in moral, social, and political realities; indeed,
such education could surely be promoted more rapidly and efficiently
after the revolution had broken the resistance of the old regime.
This line of thought, which bears an extraordinary resemblance, if
not to tl1e actual words, then to the policies pursued by Lenin in
191 7, was basically very different from the older Marxist determinism.
Its perpetual refrain was that there was no time to lose. Kulaks were
devouring the poorer peasants in the country, capitalists were breeding
fast in the towns. If the government possessed even a spark of intelligence, it would make concessions and promote reforms, and by this
,,
219
R U S S IAN T H IN K E R S
m eans divert educated men whose will and brain were needed for the
revolution into the peaceful paths of the service of the reactionary
state; propped up by such liberal measures, the unjust order would
continue and be strengthened. The activists argued that there was
nothing inevitable about revolutions: they were the fruit of human
will and human reason. If there were not enough of these, the
revolution might never take place at all. It was only the insecure
who craved social solidarity and communal life; individualism was
always a luxury, the ideal of the socially established. The new class
of technical specialists-the modern, enlightened, energetic men celebrated by liberals like Kavelin and Turgenev, and at times even by the radical individualist Pisarev-were for the Jacobin Tkachev 'worse
than cholera or typhus', for by applying scientific methods to social
life they were playing into the hands of the new, rising capitalist
oligarchs and thereby obstructing the path to freedom. Palliatives were
fatal when only an operation could save the patient : they merely prolonged his disease and weakened him so much that in the end not even an operation could save him. One must strike before these new, potentially conformist, intellectuals had grown too numerous and too comfortable and had obtained too much power, for otherwise it would
be too late: a Saint-Simonian elite of highly-paid managers would
preside over a new feudal order-an economically efficient but socially
immoral society, inasmuch as it was based on permanent inequality. ·
The greatest of all evils was inequality. Whenever any other ideal
came into conflict with equality, the Russian Jacobins always called
for its sacrifice or modification; the first principle upon which all
justice rested was that of equality; no society was equitable in which
there was not a maximum degree of equality between men. If the
revolution was to succeed, three major fallacies had to be fought and
rooted out. The first was that men of culture alone created progress.
This was not true, and had the bad consequence of inducing faith in
�lites. The second was the opposite illusion-that everything must be
learnt from the common people. This was equally false. Rousseau's
Arcadian peasants were so many idyllic figments. The masses were
ignorant, brutal, reactionary, and did not understand their own needs
or good. If the revolution depended upon their maturity, or capacity
for political judgment or organisation, it would certainly fail. The last
fallacy was that only a proletarian majority could successfully make a
revolution. No doubt a proletarian majority might do that, but if
Russia was to wait until it possessed one, the opportunity of destroying
220
R U S S IAN P O P U L I S M
a corrupt and detested government would pass, and capitalism would
be found to be too firmly in the saddle.
What, then, must be done? Men must be trained to make the
revolution and destroy the present system and all obstacles to social
equality and democratic self-government. When this was achieved, a
democratic assembly was to be convened, and if those who made the
revolution took care to explain the reasons for it, and the social and
economic situation that made it necessary, then the masses, benighted
though they might be today, would assuredly, in the view of the
Jacobins, grasp their condition sufficiently to allow themselves to beindeed to welcome the opportunity of being-organised into the new free federation of productive associations.
But supposing they were still, on the morrow of a successful coup
d'etat, not mature enough to see this? Herzen did indeed ask this
awkward question again and again in his writings in the late 1 86os.
The majority of the populists were deeply troubled by it. But the
activist wing had · no doubt of the answer: strike the chains from the
captive hero, and he will stretch himself to his full height and live in
freedom and happiness for ever after. The views of these men were
astonishingly simple. They believed in terrorism and more terrorism
to achieve complete, anarchist liberty. The purpose of the revolution,
for them, was to establish absolute equality, not only economic and
social, but 'physical and physiological': they saw no discrepancy
between this bed of Procrustes and absolute freedom. This order
would be imposed in the beginning by the power and authority of
the state, after which, the state, having fulfilled its purpose, would
swiftly 'liquidate' itself.
Against this, the spokesmen of the main body of the populists
argued that J acobin means tended to bring about J acobin consequences:
if the purpose of the revolution was to liberate, it must not use the
weapons of despotism that were bound to enslave those whom they
were designed to liberate: the remedy must not prove more destructive
than the disease. To use the state to break the power of the exploiters
and to impose a specific form of life upon a people, the majority of
whom had not been educated to understand the need for it, was to
exchange the tsarist yoke for a flew, not necessarily less crushing
one-that of the revolutionary minority. The majority of the populists
were deeply democratic; they believed that all power tended to corrupt,
that all concentration of authority tended to perpetuate itself, that all
centralisation was coercive and evil, and, therefore, the sole hope of a
..
221
R U S S I AN T H I N K E R S
just and free society lay in the peaceful conversion o f men by rational
argument to the truths of social and economic justice and democratic
freedom. In order to obtain the opportunity of converting men to this
vision, it might indeed be necessary to break the existing obstacles to
free and rational intercourse-the police state, the power of capitalists
or of landowners-and to use force in the process, whether mass
mutiny or individual terrorism. But this concept of temporary
measures presented itself to them as something wholly different from
leaving .absolute power in the hands of any party or group, however
virtuous, once the power of the enemy had been broken. Their case
is the classical case, during the last two centuries, of every libertarian
and federalist against Jacobins and centralisers; it is Voltaire's case
against both Helvetius and Rousseau; that of the left wing of the
Gironde against the Mountain; Herzen used these arguments against
doctrinaire communists of the immediately preceding period-Cabet
and the disciples of Babeuf; Bakunin denounced the Marxist demand
for the dictatorship of the proletariat as something that would merely
transfer power from one set of oppressors to another; the populists of
the 8os and 90s urged this against all those whom they suspected of
conspiring (whether they realised it or not) to destroy individual
spontaneity and freedom, whether they were laisuz-faire liberals who
allowed factory owners to enslave the masses, or radical collectivists
who were ready to do so themselves; whether they were capitalist
entrepreneurs (as Mikhailovsky wrote to Dostoevsky in his celebrated
criticism of his novel The Posse sud) or Marxist advocates of centralised
authority; he looked upon both as far more dangerous than the
pathological fanatics pilloried by Dostoevsky-as brutal, amoral social
Darwinists, profoundly hostile to variety and individual freedom and
character.
This, again, was the main political issue which, at the turn of the
century, divided the Russian Socialist-Revolutionaries from the Social
Democrats; and over which, a few years later, both Plekhanov and
Martov broke with Lenin: indeed the great quarrel between the
Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks (whatever its ostensible cause) turned
upon it. In due course Lenin himself, two or three years after the
October Revolution, while he never abandoned the central Marxist
doctrine, expressed his bitter disappointment with those very consequences of it which his opponents had predicted-bureaucracy and the arbitrary despotism of the party officials; and Trotsky accused Stalin
of this same crime. The dilemma of means and ends is the deepest
222
R U S SIAN P O P U L I S M
and most agonising problem that torments the revolutionary movements of our own day in all the continents of the world, not least in Asia and Africa. That this debate took so clear and articulate a form
within the populist movement makes its development exceptionaJly
relevant to our own predicament.
All these differences occurred within the framework of a common
revolutionary outlook, for, whatever their disagreements, all populists
were united by an unshakeable faith in the revolution. This faith
derived from many sources. It sprang from the needs and outlook of a
society still overwhelmingly pre-industrial, which gave the craving for
simplicity and fraternity, and the agrarian idealism which derives
ultimately from Rousseau, a reality which can still be seen in India
and Africa today, and which necessarily looks Utopian to the eyes of
social historians born in the industrialised west. It was a consequence
of the disillusionment with parliamentary democracy, liberal convictions, and the good faith of bourgeois intellectuals that resulted from the fiasco of the European revolutions of 1 848-9, and from the
particular conclusion drawn by Herzen that Russia, which had not
suffered this revolution, might find her salvation in the undestroyed
natural socialism of the peasant mir. It was deeply influenced by
Bakunin's violent diatribes against all forms of central authority, and
in particular the state; and by his vision of men as being by nature
peaceful and productive, and rendered violent only when they are
perverted from their proper ends, and forced to be either gaolers or
convicts. But it was also fed by the streams that flowed in a contrary
direction: by Tkachev's faith in a Jacobin �lite of professional revolutionaries as the only force capable of destroying the advance of capitalism, helped on its fatal path by innocent reformists and humanitarians and careerist intellectuals, and concealed behind the repulsive sham of parliamentary democracy; even more by the passionate
utilitarianism of Pisarev, and his brilliant polemics against all forms
of idealism and amateurishness, and, in particular, the sentimental
idealisation of the simplicity and beauty of peasants in general, and of
Russian peasants in particular, as beings touched by grace, remote from
the corrupting influences of the decaying west. It was supported by the
appeal which these 'critical realists' made to their compatriots to save
themselves by self-help and hard-headed energy-a kind of nee
Encyclopedist campaign in favour of natural science, skill, and
professionalism, directed against the humanities, classical learning,
history, and other forms of 'sybaritic' self-indulgence. Above all, it
•'
R U S SIAN TH I N KE RS
contrasted 'realism' with the literary culture which had lulled the best
men in Russia into a condition where corrupt bureaucrats, stupid and
brutal landowners, and an obscurantist Church could exploit them or
let them rot, while aesthetes and liberals looked the other way.
But the deepest strain of all, the very centre of the populist outlook,
was the individualism and rationalism of Lavrov and Mikhailovsky.
With Herzen they believed that history followed no predetermined
pattern, that it possessed 'no libretto', that neither the violent conflicts
between cultures, nations, classes (which for Hegelians constituted
the essence of human progress), nor the struggles for power by one
class over another (represented by Marxists as being the motive force
of history) were inevitable. Faith in human freedom was the cornerstone of populist humanism: the populists never tired of repeating that ends were chosen by men, not imposed upon them, and that men's
wills alone could construct a happy and honourable life-a life in
which the interests of intellectuals, peasants, manual workers and the
liberal professions could be reconciled; not indeed made wholly to
coincide, for that was an unattainable ideal; but adjusted in an unstable
equilibrium, which human reason and constant human care could
adjust to the largely unpredictable consequences of the interaction of
men with each other and with nature. It may be tltat the tradition
of the Orthodox Church with its conciliar and communal principles
and deep antagonism both to the authoritarian hierarchy of the Roman
Church, and the individualism of the Protestants, also exercised its
share of influence. These doctrines and these prophets and their
western masters- French radicals before and after the French revolution, as well as Fichte and Buonarotti, Fourier and Hegel, Mill and Proudhon, Owen and Marx-played their part. But the largest figure
in the populist movement, the man whose temperament, ideas and
activities dominated it from beginning to end, is undoubtedly Nikolay
Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky. The influence of his life and teachings,
despite a multitude of monographs, still awaits its interpreter.
Nikolay Chernyshevsky was not a man of original ideas. He did
not possess the depth, the imagination, or the brilliant intellect and
literary talent of Herzen; nor the eloquence, the boldness, the temperament or the reasoning power of Bakunin, nor the moral genius and unique social insight of Belinsky. But he was a man of unswerving
integrity, immense industry, and a capacity rare among Russians for
concentration upon concrete detail. His deep, steady, lifelong hatred
of slavery, injustice and irrationality did not express itself in large
224-
RU SS IAN PO P U L I S M
theoretical generalisations, or the creation of a sociological or metaphysical system, or violent action against authority. It took the form of slow, uninspired, patient accumulation of facts and ideas-a crude,
dull, but powerful intellectual structure on which one might found a
detailed policy of practical action appropriate to the specific Russian
environment which he desired to alter. Chernyshevsky was in greater
sympathy with the concrete, carefully elaborated socialist plans, however mistaken they might be, of the Petrashevsky group (to which Dostoevsky had belonged in his youth), crushed by the government in
I 849, than with the great imaginative constructions of Herzen,
Bakunin and their followers.
A new generation had grown up during the dead years after 1 849.
These young men had witnessed vacillation and outright betrayals on
the part of liberals, which had led to the victories of the reactionary
parties in 1 849. Twelve years later they saw the same phenomenon
in their own country when the manner in which the peasants had
been emancipated in Russia seemed to them to be a cynical travesty of
all their plans and hopes. Such men as these found the plodding genius
of Chernyshevsky-his attempts to work out sped fie solutions to specific
problems in terms of concrete statistical data; his constant appeals to
facts; his patient efforts to indicate attainable, practical, immediate
ends rather than desirable states of affairs to which there was no
visible road; his flat, dry, pedestrian style, his very dullness and lack
of inspiration-more serious and ultimately more inspiring than the
noble flights of the romantic idealists of the 1 84os. His relatively low
social origin (he was the son of a parish priest) gave him a natural
affinity with the humble folk whose condition he was seeking to
analyse, and an abiding distrust, later to turn into fanatical hatred, of
all liberal theorists, whether in Russia or the west. These qualities
made Chernyshevsky a natural leader of a disenchanted generation of
socially mingled origins, no longer dominated by good birth, embittered
by the failure of their own early ideals, by government repression, by
the humiliation of Russia in the Crimean war, by the weakness,
heartlessness, hypocrisy, and chaotic incompetence of the ruling class.
To these tough-minded, socially insecure, angry, suspicious young
radicals, contemptuous of the slightest trace of eloquence or 'literature',
Chernyshevsky was a father and a confessor as neither the aristocratic
and ironical Herzen nor the wayward and ultimately frivolous
Bakunin could ever become.
Like all populists, Chernyshevsky believed in the need to preserve
,,
225
R U SS IAN T H I N K E R S
the peasant commune and to spread its principles to industrial production. He believed that Russia could profit directly by learning from the scientific advances of the west, without going through the agonies of
an industrial revolution. 'Human development is a form of chronological unfairness,' Herzen had once characteristically observed, 'since lat�mers are able to profit by the labours of their predecessors
without paying the same price.' 'History is fond of her grandchildren,'
Chernyshevsky repeated after him, 'for it offers them the marrow of
the bones, which the previous generation had hurt its hands in
breaking.' For Chernyshevsky history moved along a spiral, in
Hegelian triads, since every generation tends to repeat the experience
not of its parents, but of its grandparents, and repeats it at a 'higher
level'.
But it is not this historicist element in his doctrine that bound its
spell upon the populists. They were most of all influenced by his
acute distrust of reforms from above, by his belief that the essence of
history was a struggle between the classes, above all by his conviction
(which derives nothing, so far as we know, from Marx, but draws upon
socialist sources common to both) that the state is always the instrument
of the dominant class, and cannot, whether it consciously desires this
or not, embark on those necessary reforms, the success of which would
end its own domination. No order can be persuaded to undertake its
own dissolution. Hence all attempts to convert the tsar, all attempts
to evade the horrors of revolution, must (he concluded in the early 6os)
remain necessarily vain. There was a moment in the 'late sos when,
like Herzen, he had hoped for reforms from above. The final form of
the Emancipation, and the concessions which the government had
made to the landowners, cured him of this illusion. He pointed out
with a good deal of historical justification that liberals, who hoped to
influence the government by Fabian tactics, had thus far merely
succeeded in betraying both the peasants and themselves: first they
compromised themselves with the peasants by their relations with their
masters; after that, the governing class found little difficulty whenever
this suited their convenience in representing them as false friends to
the peasants, and turning the latter against them. This had occurred
in both France and Germany in 1 849. Even if the moderates withdrew
in time, and advocated violent measures, their ignorance of conditions
and blindness to the peasants' and workers' actual needs usually led
them to advocate Utopian schemes which in the end cost their
followers a terrible price.
:u6
R U S S IAN P O P U L I S M
Chemyshevsky had evolved a simple form of historical materialism,
according to which social factors determined political ones, and not
vice versa. Consequently, he held with Fourier and Proudhon that
liberal and parliamentary ideals merely evaded the central issues: the
peasants and the workers needed food, shelter, boots; as for the right
to vote, or to be governed by liberal constitutions, or to obtain
guarantees of personal liberty, these meant little to hungry and halfnaked men. The social revolution must come first: appropriate political reforms would follow of themselves. For Chernyshevsky the principal
lesson of 1 848 was that the western liberals, the brave no less than the
cowardly, had demonstrated their political and moral bankruptcy, and
with it that of their Russian disciples- Herzen, Kavelin, Granovsky
and the rest. Russia must pursue her own path. Unlike the Slavophils,
and like the Russian Marxists of the next generation, he maintained
with a wealth of economic evidence that the historical development
of Russia, and in particular the peasant mir, were in no sense unique,
but followed the social and economic laws that governed all human
societies. Like the Marxists (and the Comtian positivists), he believed
that such laws could be discovered and stated; but unlike the Marxists,
he was convinced that by adopting western techniques, and educating
a body of men of trained and resolute wills and rational outlook,
Russia could 'leap over' the capitalist stage of social development, and
transform her village communes and free cooperative groups of craftsmen into agricultural and industrial associations of producers who would constitute the embryo of the new socialist society. Technological progress did not, in his view, automatically break up the peasant commune: 'savages can be taught to use Latin script and
safety-matches'; factories can be grafted on to workers' arttls without
destroying them; large-scale organisation could eliminate exploitation,
and yet preserve the predominantly agricultural nature of the Russian
economy.1
1 In II pDpulismo russo - translated into English as Roots of Rtr10/utiD11
(London, 1 960)- Franco Venturi very aptly quotes populist statistics (which
seem plausible enough) according to which the proportion of peasants to
that of landowners in the 1 86os was of the order of 3.f.I:I, while the land
owned by them stood to that of their masters in the ratio of I: 1 1 :, and their
incomes were :·s=97"S; as for industry, the proportion of city workers to
peasants was 1 :100. Given these ligures, it is perhaps not surprising that
Man: should have declared that his prognosis applied to the western economies,
and not 11ecessarily to that of the Russians, even though his Russian disciples
..
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
Chernyshevsky believed in the decisive historical role of the application of science to Ii(e, but, unlike Pisarev, did not regard individual enterprise, still less capitalism, as indispensable to this process. He
retained enough of the Fourierism of his yC"uth to look upon the free
associations of peasant communes and craftsmen's artels as the basis
of all freedom and progress. But at the same time, like the Saint
Simonians, he was convinced that little would be achieved without
collective action-state socialism on a vast scale. These incompatible
beliefs were never reconciled ; Chernyshevsky's writings contain
statements both in favour of and against the desirability of large-scale
industry. He is similarly ambivalent about the part to be played (and
the part to be avoided) by the state as the stimulator and controller of
industry, about the function of managers of large collective industrial
enterprises, about the relations of the public and private sectors of the
economy, and about the political sovereignty of the democratically
elected parliament and its relation to the state as the source of centralised
economic planning and control.
The outlines of Chernyshevsky's social programme remained vague
or inconsistent, and often both. It is the concrete detail which.
founded as it was on real experience, spoke directly to the representatives of the great popular masses, who had at last found a spokesman and interpreter of their own needs and feelings. His deepest aspirations
and emotions were poured into What is to he done?, a social Utopia
which, grotesque as a work of art, had a literally epoch-making effect
on Russian opinion. This didactic novel described the 'new men' of
the free, morally pure, cooperative socialist commonwealth of the
future; its touching sincerity and moral passion bound their spell upon
the imaginations of the idealistic and guilt-stricken sons of prosperous
parents, and provided them with an ideal model in the light of which
an entire generation of revolutionaries educated and hardened itself
to the defiance of existing laws and conventions �d to the acceptance
of exile and death with sublime unconcern.
Chernyshevsky preached a naive utilitarianism. Like James Mill.
and perhaps Bentham, he held that basic human nature was a fixed,
physiologically analysable pattern of natural processes and faculties,
ignored this concession, and insisted that capitalism was making enormous
atridea in Russia. and would soon obliterate the differences that divided it
from the west. Plekhanov (who stoutly denied that Chemyshevsky �w:·ever
been a populist) elaborated this theory; Lenin acted upon it.
22.8
RU SSIAN POP U L I S M
and that the maximisation of human happiness could therefore be
scientifically planned and realised. Having decided that imaginative
writing and criticism were the only available media in Russia for
propagating radical ideas, he filled the Contemporary, a review which
he edited together with the poet Nekrasov, with as high a proportion
of direct socialist doctrine as could be smuggled in under the guise of
literature. In his work he was helped by the violent young critic
Dobrolyubov, a genuinely gifted man ofletters (which Chemyshevsky
was not) who, at times, went even further in his passionate desire to
preach and educate. The aesthetic views of the two zealots were
severely practical. Chernyshevsky laid it down that the function of
art was to help men to satisfy their wants more rationally, to disseminate knowledge, to combat ignorance, prejudice, and the antisocial passions, to improve life in the most literal and narrow sense of these words. Driven to absurd consequences, he embraced them gladly.
Thus he explained that the chief value of marine paintings was that
they showed the sea to those who, like, for instance, the inhabitants
of central Russia, lived too far away from it ever to see it for themselves; or that his friend and patron Nekrasov, because by his verse he moved men to greater sympathy with the oppressed than other
poets had done, was for this reason the greatest Russian poet, living or
dead. His earlier collaborators, civilised and fastidious men of letters
like Turgenev and Botkin, found his grim fanaticism increasingly
difficult to bear. Turgenev could not long live with this art-hating
and dogmatic schoolmaster. Tolstoy despised his dreary provincialism,
his total lack of aesthetic sense, his intolerance, his rationalism, his
maddening self-assurance. But these very qualities, or, rather, the
outlook of which they were characteristic, helped to make him the
natural leader of the 'hard' young men who had succeeded the idealists
of the I 84-os. Chernyshevsky's harsh, flat, dull, humourless, grating
sentences, his preoccupation with concrete detail, his self-discipline,
his dedication to the material and moral good of his fellow-men, the
grey, self-effacing personality, the tireless, passionate, devoted, minute
i ndustry, the hatred of style or of any concessions to the graces, the
unquestionable sincerity, utter self-forgetfulness, brutal directness,
indifference to the claims of private life, innocence, personal kindness,
pedantry, disarming moral charm, capacity for self-sacrifice, created
the image that later became the prototype of the Russian revolutionary
hero and martyr. More than any other publicist he was responsible
for drawing the final line between 'us' and 'them'. All his life he
,,
R U S SIAN T H I N K E R S
preached that there must be no compromise with 'them', that the war
must be fought to the death and on every front; that there were no
neutrals; that, so long as this war was being fought, no work could
be too trivial, too repulsive, or too tedious for a revolutionary to
perform. His personality and outlook set their seal upon two generations
of Russian revolutionaries; not least upon Lenin, who admired him
devotedly.
In spite of his emphasis on economic or sociological arguments,
the basic approach, the tone and outlook of Chernyshevsky and of the
populists generally, is moral, and at times religious. These men believed
in socialism not because it was inevitable, nor because it was effective,
not even because it alone was rational, but because it was just. Concentrations of political power, capitalism, the centralised state, trampled on the rights of men and crippled them morally and spiritually.
The populists were stern atheists, but socialism and orthodox Christian
values coalesced in their minds. They shrank from the prospect of
industrialism in Russia because of its brutal cost, and they disliked the
west because it had paid this price too heartlessly. Their disciples, the
populist economists of the 1 88os and 90s, Danielson and Vorontsov
for example, for all their strictly economic arguments about the possibility of capitalism in Russia (some of which seem a good deal sounder than their Marxist opponents have represented them as being), were
in the last analysis moved by moral revulsion from the sheer mass of
suffering that capitalism was destined to bring, that is to say, by a
refusal to pay so appalling a price, no matter how valuable the results.
Their successors in the twentieth century, the Socialist-Revolutionaries,
sounded the note which runs through the whole of the populist
tradition in Russia: that the purpose of social action is not the power
of the state, but the welfare of the people; that to enrich the state and
provide it with military and industrial power, while undermining the
health, the education, the morality, the general cultural level of its
citizens, was feasible but wicked. They compared the progress of the
United States, where, they maintained, the welfare of the individual
was paramount, with that of Prussia, where it was not. They committed
themselves to the view (which goes back at least to Sismondi) that the
spiritual and physical condition of the individual citizen matters more
than the power of the state, so that if, as often happened, the two stood
in inverse ratio to one another, the rights and welfare of the individual
must come first. They rejected as historically false the proposition that
only powerful states could breed good or happy citizens, and as morally
2JO
R U S S IAN P O P U L I S M
unacceptable the proposition that to lose oneself i n the life and welfare
of one's society is the highest form of individual self-fulfilment.
Belief in the primacy of human rights over other claims is the first
principle that separates pluralist from centralised societies, and welfare
states, mixed economies, 'New Deal' policies, from one-party governments, 'closed' societies, 'five-year plans', and, in general, forms of life built to serve a single goal that transcends the varied goals of differing
groups or individuals. Chernyshevsky was more fanatical than most
of his followers in the 18705 and 8os. and believed far more strongly
in organisation, but even he neither stopped his ears to the cries for
immediate help which he heard upon all sides, nor believed in the need
to suppress the wants of individuals who were making desperate efforts
to escape destruction, in the interests of even the most sacred and overmastering purpose. There were times when he was a narrow and unimaginative pedant, but at his worst he was never impatient, or
arrogant, or inhumane, and was perpetually reminding his readers and
himself that, in their zeal to help, the educators must not end by
bullying their would-be beneficiaries; that what 'we' -the rational
intellectuals-think good for the peasants may not be what they themselves want or need, and that to ram 'our' remedies down 'their'
throats is not permitted. Neither he nor Lavrov, nor even the most
ruthlessly Jacobin among the proponents of terror and violence, ever
took cover behind the inevitable direction of history as a justification
of what would otherwise have been patently unjust or brutal. If
violence was the only means to a given end, then there might be circumstances in which it was right to employ it; but this must be justified in each case by the intrinsic moral claim of the end-an increase in
happiness, or solidarity, or justice, or peace, or some other universal
human value that outweighs the evil of the means-never by the view
that it was rational and necessary to march in step with history,
ignoring one's scruples and dismissing one's own 'subjective' moral
principles because they were necessarily provisional, on the ground
that history herself transformed all moral systems and retrospectively
justified only those principles which survived and succeeded.
The mood of the populists, particularly in the 1 87os, can fairly be
described as religious. This group of conspirators or propagandists saw
itself, and was seen by others, as constituting a dedicated order. The
first condition of membership was the sacrifice of one's entire life to
the movement, both to the particular group and party, and to the cause
of the revolution in general. But the notion of the dictatorship of the
·'
231
R U S S IAN T H I N K ER S
party o r o f i ts leaders over individual lives-in particular over the
beliefs of individual revolutionaries-is not part of this doctrine, and is
indeed contrary to its entire spirit. The only censor over the individual's
acts is his individual conscience. If one has promised obedience to the
leaders of the party, such an oath is sacred, but it extends only to the
specific revolutionary objectives of the party and not beyond them,
and ends with the completion of whatever specific goals the party
exists to promote-in the last resort, the revolution. Once the revolution has been made, each individual is free to act as he thinks fit, since discipline is a temporary means and not an end. The populists did
indeed virtually invent the conception of the party as a group of
professional conspirators with no private lives, obeying a total discipline
-the core of the 'hard' professionals as against mere"sympathisers and
fellow-travellers; but this sprang from the specific situation that
obtained in tsarist Russia, and the necessity and conditions for
effective conspiracy, and not from belief in hierarchy as a fonn of
life desirable or even tolerable in itself. Nor did the conspirators justify
their acts by appealing to a cosmic process which sanctified their every
act, since they believed in freedom of human choice and not in
determinism. The later Leninist conception of the revolutionary party
and its dictatorship, although historically it owed much to these
trained martyrs of an earlier day, sprang from a very different outlook.
The young men who poured into the villages during the celebrated
summer of 1 874 only to meet with non-comprehension, suspicion,
and often outright hostility on the part of the peasants, would have
been profoundly astonished and indignant if they had been told that
they were to look upon themselves as the sacred instruments of history,
and that their acts were therefore to be judged by a moral code
different from that common to other men.
The populist movement was a failure. 'Socialism bounced off people
like peas from a wall,' wrote the celebrated terrorist Kravchinsky
to his fellow-revolutionary Vera Zasulich in 1 876, two years after
the original wave of enthusiasm had died down. 'They listen to our
people as they do to the priest' - respectfully, without understanding,
without any effect upon their actions.
There is noise in the capitals
The prophets thunder
A furious war of words is waged
But in the depths, in the heart of Russia,
There all is still, there is ancient peace.
232
RU SSIAN P O P U L I S M
These lines by Nekrasov convey the mood of frustration which
followed the failure of the sporadic effons made by the revolutionary
idealists in the late 6os and early 70s, peaceful propagandists and
isolated terrorists alike-of whom Dostoevsky painted so violent a
picture in his novel The Possessed. The government caught these men,
exiled them, imprisoned them, and by its obstinate unwillingness to
promote any measures to alleviate the consequences of an · inadequate
land reform drove liberal opinion towards sympathy with the revolutionaries. They felt that public opinion was on their side, and finally resorted to organised terrorism. Yet their ends always remained
moderate enough. The open letter which they addressed to the new
Emperor in r 881 is mild and liberal in tone. 'Terror', said the celebrated revolutionary Vera Figner many years later, 'was intended to create opportunities for developing the faculties of men for service to
society.' The society for which violence was to blast the way was to
be peaceful, tolerant, decentralised and humane. The principal enemy
was still the state.
The wave of terrorism reached its climax with the assassination of
Alexander II in r 88 1 . The hoped-for revolution did not break out.
The revolutionary organisations were crushed, and the new Tsar
decided upon a policy of extreme repression. In this he was, on the
whole, supported by public opinion, which recoiled before the
assassination of an Emperor who had, after all, emancipated the
peasants, and was said to have been meditating other liberal measures.
The most prominent leaders of the movemen.t were executed or exiled ;
lesser figures escaped abroad, and the most gifted of those who were
still free- Plekhanov and Aksel rod-gradually moved towards Marxism.
They felt embarrassed by Marx's own concession that Russia could in
principle avoid passing through a capitalist stage even without the aid
of a communist world revolution -a thesis which Engels conceded far
more grudgingly and with qualifications-and maintained that Russia
had in fact already entered the capitalist stage. They declared that
since the development of capitalism in Russia was no more avoidable
than it had been in its day in the west, nothing was to be gained by
averting one's face from the 'iron' logic of history, and that for these
reasons, so far from resisting industrialisation, socialists should encourage it, indeed profit by the fact that it, and it alone, could breed the army of revolutionaries which would be sufficient to overthrow the
capitalist enemy-an army to be formed out of the growing city proletariat, organised and disciplined by the very conditions of its labour.
,,
233
R U S S IAN T H INKERS
The vast leap forward in industrial development made by Russia
in the I 89os seemed to support the Marxist thesis. It proved attractive
to revolutionary intellectuals for many reasons: because it claimed to
be founded on a scientific analysis of the laws of history which no
society could hope to evade; because it claimed to be able to prove
that, although, as the pattern of history inexorably unfolded itself,
much violence, misery, and injustice were bound to occur, yet the
story would have a happy ending. Hence the conscience of those who
felt guilty because they acquiesced in exploitation and poverty, or at
any rate because they did not take active-that is, violent- steps to
alleviate or prevent them, as populist policy had demanded, felt
assuaged by the 'scientific' guarantee that the road, covered though it
might be with the corpses of the innocent, led inevitably to the gates
of an earthly paradise. According to this view, the expropriators
would find themselves expropriated by the sheer logic of human
development, although the course of history might be shortened, and
the birth-pangs made easier, by conscious organisation, and above all
an increase in knowledge (that is, education) on the part of the workers
and their leaders. This was particularly welcome to those who, understandably reluctant to continue with useless terrorism which merely led to Siberia or the scaffold, now found doctrinal justification for
peaceful study and the life of ideas, which the intellectuals among them
found far more congenial than bomb-throwing.
The heroism, the disinterestedness, the personal nobility of the
populists were often admitted by their Marxist opponents. They were
regarded as worthy forerunners of a truly rational revolutionary party,
and Chernyshevsky was sometimes accorded an even higher status and
was credited with insights of genius-an empirical and unscientific,
but instinctively correct, approach to truths of which only Marx and
Engels could provide the demonstration, armed as they were with the
instrument of an exact science to which neither Chernyshevsky, nor
any other Russian thinker of his day, had yet attained. Marx and
Engels grew to be particularly indulgent to the Russians: they were
praised for having done wonders for amateurs, remote from the west
and using home-made tools. They alone in Europe had, by I 88o,
created a truly revolutionary situation in their country; nevertheless
it was made clear, particularly by Kautsky, that this was no substitute
for professional methods and the use of the new machinery provided
by scientific socialism. Populism was written off as an amalgam of
unorganised moral indignation and Utopian ideas in the muddled
234
R U S S IAN POP U L I S M
heads of self-taught peasants, well-meaning university intellectuals and
other social casualties of the confused interim between the end of an
obsolescent feudalism and the beginning of the new capitalist phase in
a backward country. Marxist historians still tend to describe it as a
movement compounded of systematic misinterpretation of economic
facts and social realities, noble but useless individual terrorism, and
spontaneous or ill-directed peasant risings-the necessary but pathetic
beginnings of real revolutionary activity, the prelude to the real play, a
scene of naive ideas and frustrated practice destined to be swept away
by the new revolutionary, dialectical science heralded by Plekhanov
and Lenin.
What were the ends of populism? Violent disputes took place about
means and methods, about timing, but not about ultimate purposes.
Anarchism, equality, a full life for all, these were universally accepted.
It is as if the entire movement-the motley variety of revolutionary
types which Franco Venturi describes in his book1 so well and so
lovingly-Jacobins and moderates, terrorists and educators, Lavrovists
and Bakuninists, 'troglodytes', 'recalcitrants', 'country folk', members
of 'Land and Liberty' and of 'The People's Will', were all dominated
by a single myth : that once the monster was slain, the sleeping
princess- the Russian peasantry-would awaken without further ado
and live happily for ever after.
This -is the movement of which Franco Venturi has written the
history, the fullest, clearest, best-written and most impartial account
of a particular stage of the Russian revolutionary movement in any
language. Yet if the movement was a failure, if it was founded on
false premises and was so easily extinguished by the tsarist police,
has it more than historical interest- that of a narrative of the life and
death of a party, of its acts and its ideas? On this question Venturi
discreetly, as behoves an objective historian, offers no direct opinion.
He tells the story in chronological sequence; he explains what occurs;
he describes origins and consequences; he illuminates the relations of
various groups of populists to one another, and leaves moral and
political speculation to others. His work is not an apologia either for
populism or its opponents. He does not praise or condemn, and seeks
only to understand. Success in this task plainly needs no further reward.
And yet one may, at moments, wonder whether populism should be
dismissed quite as easily as it still is today, both by communist and
1 op. cit. (p. 227, note 1 above).
..
235
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
bourgeois historians. Were the populists so hopelessly in error? Were
Chernyshevsky and Lavrov-and Marx who listened to them-totally
deluded?
Was capitalism, in fact, inevitable in Russia? The consequences of
accelerated industrialisation prophesied by the neo-populist economists
in the 1 88os, namely a degree of social and economic misery as great
as any undergone in the west during the Industrial Revolution, did
occur, both before, and, at an increasing tempo, after the October
revolution. Were they avoidable? Some writers on history consider
this type of question to be absurd as such. What happened, happened.
We are told that if we are not to deny causality in human affairs, we
must suppose that what took place can only have done so precisely as it
did ; to ask what might have happened if the situation had been
different is the idle play of the imagination, not worthy of serious
historians. Yet this academic question is not without acute contemporary relevance. Some countries, such as, for example, Turkey, India, and some states in the Middle East and Latin America, have adopted a
slower tempo of industrialisation and one less likely to bring immediate
ruin to backward areas before they can be rehabilitated, and have done
so in conscious preference to the forced marches of collectivisation
upon which, in our day, the Russians, and after them the Chinese,
have embarked. Are these non-Marxist governments inescapably set
upon a path to ruin ? For it is populist ideas which lie at the base of
much of the socialist economic policy pursued by these and other
countries today.
When Lenin organised the Bolshevik revolution in 1 9 1 7, the
technique that he adopted, prima facie at least, resembled those commended by the Russian Jacobins, Tkachev and his followers, who had learnt them from Blanqui or Buonarroti, more than any to be found
in the writings of Marx or Engels, at any rate after 1 8 5 1 . It was not,
after all, full-grown capitalism that was enthroned in Russia in 1 9 1 7.
Russian capitalism was a still growing force, not yet in power, struggling
against the fetters imposed upon it by the monarchy and the bureaucracy, as it had done in eighteenth-century France. But Lenin acted as if the bankers and industrialists were already in control. He acted
and spoke as if this w::os so, but his revolution succeeded not so much
by taking over the centres of finance and industry (which history
should already have undermined) but by a seizure of strictly political
power on the part of a determined and trained group of professional
revolutionaries, precisely as had been advocated by Tkachev. If
2J6
R U S S IAN POPU L I S M
Russian capitalism had reached the stage which, according to Marxist
historical theory, it had to reach before a proletarian revolution could
be successful, the seizure of power by a determined minority, and a
very small one at that-a mere Putsch-could not, ex hypothesi, have
retained it long. And this, indeed, is what Plekhanov said over and
over again in his bitter denunciations of Lenin in I 9 I 7 : ignoring his
argument that much may be permitted in a backward country provided
that the results were duly saved by orthodox Marxist revolutions successfully carried out soon after in the industrially more advanced west.
These conditions were not fulfilled; Lenin's hypothesis proved
historically irrelevant; yet the Bolshevik revolution did not collapse.
Could it be .that the Marxist theory of history was mistaken? Or had
the Mensheviks misunderstood it, and concealed from themselves the
anti-democratic tendencies which had always been implicit in it? In
which case were their charges against Mikhailovsky and his friends
wholly just? By I 9 I 7 their own fears of the Bolshevik dictatorship
rested upon the same basis. Moreover, the results of the October
revolution turned out to be oddly similar to those which Tkachev's
opponents had prophesied that his methods must inevitably produce:
the emergence of an elite, wielding dictatorial power, designed in
theory to wither away once the need for it had gone; but, as the
populist democrats had said over and over again, in practice more
likely to grow in aggressiveness and strength, with a tendency towards
self-perpetuation which no dictatorship seems able to resist.
The populists were convinced that the death of the peasant commune would mean death, or at any rate a vast setback, to freedom and equality in Russia; the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who were
their direct descendants, transformed this into a demand for a form of
decentralised, democratic self-government among the peasants, which
Lenin adopted when he concluded his temporary alliance with them
in October I 9 I 7. In due course the Bolsheviks repudiated this
programme, and transformed the cells of dedicated revolutionariesperhaps the most original contribution of populism to revolutionary practice-into the hierarchy of centralised political power, which the
populists had steadily and fiercely denounced until they were themselves finally, in the form of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, proscribed and annihilated. Communist practice owed much, as Lenin was always ready to admit, to the populist movement; for it borrowed
the technique of its rival and adapted it with conspicuous success to
serve the precise purpose which it had been invented to resist.
,,
237
Tolstoy and Enlightenment
'Two T H I N GS are always said about Count Tolstoy,' wrote the
celebrated Russian critic Mikhailovsky in a forgotten essay published
in the mid-1 87os, 'that he is an outstandingly good writer of fiction
and a bad thinker. This . . . has become a sort of axiom needing no
demonstration.' This almost universal verdict has reigned, virtually
unchallenged, for something like a hundred years; and Mikhailovsky's
attempt to question it remained relatively isolated. Tolstoy dismissed
his left-wing ally as a routine liberal hack, and expressed surprise that
anyone should take an interest in him. This was characteristic, but
unjust. The essay which its author called The Right Hand and the
Left Hand of Leo Tolstoy is a brilliant and convincing defence of
Tolstoy on both intellectual and moral grounds, directed mainly
against the liberals and socialists who saw in the novelist's ethical
doctrines, and in particular in his glorification of the peasants and
natural instinct, and his constant disparagement of scientific culture,
a perverse and sophisticated obscurantism which discredited the liberal
cause, and played into the hands of priests and reactionaries. Mikhailovsky rejected this view, and in the course of his long and careful attempt to sift the enlightened grain from the reactionary chaff in Tolstoy's
opinions, reached the conclusion that there was an unresolved, and
unavowed, conflict in the great novelist's conceptions both of human
nature and of the problems facing Russian and western civilisation.
Mikhailovsky maintained that, so far from being a 'bad thinker',
Tolstoy was no less acute, clear-eyed and convincing in his analysis of
ideas than of instincts or characters or actions. In his zeal for his
paradoxical thesis-paradoxical certainly at the time at which he wrote
it- Mikhailovsky sometimes goes too far; but in substance it seems to
me to be right; or at any rate, more right than wrong, and my own
remarks are no more than an extended gloss on it.
Tolstoy's opinions are always subjective and can be (as, for example,
in his writings on Shakespeare or Dante or Wagner) wildly perverse.
But the questions which in his most didactic essays he tries to answer
are nearly always cardinal questions of principle, always first-hand,
238
TOLSTOY AND EN L I G HTEN M ENT
and cut far deeper, in the deliberately simplified and naked form in
which he usually presents them, than those of more balanced and
'objective' thinkers. Direct vision always tends to be disturbing.
Tolstoy used this gift to the full to destroy both his own peace and
that of his readers. It was this habit of asking exaggeratedly simple
but fundamental questions, to which he did not himself-at any rate in
the 1 86os and- 7os-possess the answers; that gave him the reputation
of being a 'nihilist'. Yet he certainly had no desire to destroy for the
sake of destruction. He only desired, more than anything else in the
world, to know the truth. How annihilating this passion can be is
shown by others who have chosen to cut below the limits set by the
wisdom of their generation: Machiavelli, Pascal, Rousseau; the author
of the Book of Job. Like them, Tolstoy cannot be fitted into any of
the public movements of his own, or indeed any other age. The only
company to which Tolstoy belongs is the subversive one of questioners
to whom no answer has been, or seems likely to be, given-at least no
answer which they or those who understand them will begin to accept.
As for Tolstoy's positive ideas-and they varied less during his long
life than has sometimes been represented-they are not at all unique:
they have something in common with the French Enlightenment of
the eighteenth century; something with those of the twentieth century;
little with those of his own times. In Russia he belonged to neither
of the great ideological streams which divided educated opinion in that
country during his youth. He was not a radical intellectual, with his
eyes turned to the west; nor a Slavophil, that is to say, a believer in a
Christian and nationalist monarchy. His views cut across these
categories. Like the radicals he had always condemned political
repression, arbitrary violence, economic exploitation, and all that
creates and perpetuates inequality among men. But the rest of the
'W esternising' outlook- the heart of the ideology of the intelligentsiathe overwhelming sense of civic responsibility, the belief in natural science as the door to all truth, in social and political reform, in
democracy, material progress, secularism-this celebrated amalgam
Tolstoy rejected, early in life, out of hand. He believed in individual
liberty and, indeed, in progress too, but in a queer sense of his own.1
1 Education for him is 'an activit)l based on the human need for equality
and the immutable law of the advance of education', which he interprets as
the constant equalisation of knowledge, knowledge which is always growing
because I know what the child does not know; moreover, each generation
..
'-39
R U S S I A N T H I N K E R S
He looked with contempt on liberals and socialists, and with even
greater hatred on the right-wing parties of his time. His closest affinity,
as has often been remarked, is with Rousseau ; he liked and admired
Rousseau's views more than those of any other modern writer. Like
Rousseau, he rejected the doctrine of original sin, and believed that
man was born innocent, and had been ruined by his own bad institutions; especially by what passed for education among civilised men.
Like Rousseau again, he put the blame for this process of decadence
largely on the intellectuals-the self-appointed elites of experts, sophisticated coteries remote from common humanity, self-estranged from natural life. These men are damned because they have all but lost the
most precious of all human possessions, the capacity with which all
men are born-to see the truth, the immutable, eternal truth which
only charlatans and sophists represent as varying in different circumstances and times and places- the truth which is visible fully only to the innocent eye of those whose hearts have not been corrupted children, peasants, those not blinded by vanity and pride. the simple, the good. Education, as the west understands it, ruins innocence. That
is why children resist it bitterly and instinctively: that is why it has to
be rammed down their throats, and, like all coercion and violence,
maims the victim and at times destroys him beyond redress. Men crave
for truth by nature; therefore true education must be of such a kind
that children and unsophisticated, ignorant people will absorb it readily
and eagerly. But to understand this, and to discover how to apply this
knowledge, the educated must put away their intellectual arrogance,
and make a new beginning. They must purge their minds of theories,
of false, quasi-scientific analogies between the world of men and the
world of animals, or of men and inanimate things. Only then will they
be able to re-establish a personal relationship with the uneducated-a
relationship which only humanity and love can achieve.
In modern times only Rousseau, and perhaps Dickens, seem to him
to have seen this. Certainly the people's condition will never be
improved until not only the tsarist bureaucracy, but the 'progressists',
as Tolstoy called them, the vain and doctrinaire intelligentsia, are
knows what the previous generations have thought, whereas they do not
know what future generations would think. The equality is between the
teacher and the taught; this desire for equality on the part of both is itself
for him the spring of progress- progress in the sense of'advance in knowledge'
of what men are and what they should do.
240
TOLSTOY AND E N L I G H TENM ENT
'prised off the people's necks' -the common people's, and the children's
too. So long as fanatical theorists bedevil education, little is to be hoped
for. Even the old-fashioned village priest-so Tolstoy maintains in
one of his early tracts-was less harmful : he knew little and was clumsy,
idle, and stupid; but he treated his pupils as human beings, not as
scientists treat specimens in a laboratory; he did what he could; he
was often corrupt, ill-tempered, unjust, but these were human
'natural' -vices, and therefore their effects, unlike those of machinemade modern instructors, inflicted no permanent injury.
ТЕЛЕГРАМКанал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками
Книжный Вестник
Бот для удобного поиска книг (если не нашлось на сайте)
Поиск книг
Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах
Любовные романы
Детективы и триллеры, все новинки
Детективы
Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки
Фантастика
Отборные классические книги
Классика
ВКОНТАКТЕБиблиотека с любовными романами, которая наверняка придётся по вкусу женской части аудитории
Любовные романы
Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров
Фантастика
Самые популярные книги в формате фб2
Топ фб2
книги