Icon and Axe

1. The Turn to Social Thought

A DISTINCTIVE FEATURE of Russian culture from the 1840’s to the early 1880’s was its extraordinary preoccupation with what the Russians call “social thought” (obshchestvennaia mysl’). There is no exact equivalent for this category of thought in Western culture. It is too undisciplined and literary to be discussed fairly in the language of traditional moral philosophy or of modern sociology. Its concerns were not primarily political, and may be best understood in terms of psychology or religion.

In any event, Russian social thought is a phenomenon of the late imperial period. It represents in many ways an artificially delayed, and characteristically passionate, Russian response to the rich ferment of reformist ideas in France between the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. Social thought provided a kind of intellectual bridge between aristocratic and proletarian Russia. It reflects the impracticality and utopianism of the aristocracy, yet shows a new awareness that the time had come to move from philosophical to social questions—or, in Belinsky’s words, “from the blue skies into the kitchen.”¹ So morally pure was this tradition that almost all subsequent radical reformers felt constrained to represent themselves as heirs to its aspirations. Soviet ideologists have constructed for their citizens a kind of hagiographical guide that places Herzen and Belinsky, Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov, Pisarev, and (with some reservations) Lavrov and Plekhanov in the prophetic line that allegedly reached its fulfillment in Lenin.

But social thought in the middle and late nineteenth century was far more than a mere anticipation of Bolshevism or a mere critique of tsarism. It involved a free play of the mind and heart: an uncompromising earnestness that reflects the projection out into the broader arena of society of many of the deeper questions that had long been disturbing the aristocracy. The longing for a better world so evident in Russian social thought became subversive once more in the Stalin era; “social thought” in the profound, searching sense ceased to be tolerated in the public culture of the USSR; and even canonized prophets like Herzen and Chernyshevsky were expurgated or reinterpreted.

In a general sense the distinctively Russian tradition of social thought began with the economic and political discussions of Catherine’s time, with Radishchev’s anguished critique of serfdom, with the various proposals of Bentham, Owen, and Saint-Simon for including social reform in the program of Alexander’s Holy Alliance, with Pestel’s proposals for agrarian redistribution in the 1820’s, and with the Russian interest in Saint-Simon in the thirties.² But these were all subordinate or episodic concerns of an aristocracy still dominated by religious and aesthetic questions. Indeed, the only important socialist-style experiments on Russian soil during this period were the non-aristocratic communities of foreign sectarians, such as the Hutterites of southern Russia, who practiced a form of egalitarian communal living that has yet to be approached in the USSR.

A trend toward communalism among native sectarians was evidenced, however, in the 1830’s with the appearance of a new group called “the sect sharing all in common” (sekta obshchykh). This sect adopted the old flagellant idea of forming groups of twelve apostles, with the emphasis on Communist forms of organization rather than prophetic activities. Interpreting St. Paul literally, this sect insisted that each member was actually and literally but one part of a common body. All things were shared in common by the nine men and three women in each commune; public confessions were conducted in order to excoriate infection from any part of the body; and each person in the community was given a function corresponding to some bodily organ. Abstract thought was the exclusive province of the thinker (myslennik); physical work, of “the hands”; and so on. In this way, no one was complete in and of himself; each one depended on the community. The “tidings of Zion” sect of the 1840’s reveals the same preoccupation with a new ideal conception of society, insisting that the coming millennial kingdom should be divided into twelve inseparable parts and that each member of each kingdom should live in total equality. This form of social organization was to be accompanied by the divinization of man, the rearrangement where necessary of his physical organs, and the physical enlargement of the earth in order to accommodate his expanding physical needs.

In this same period one finds the first serious interest in social analysis and socialism among the aristocratic intellectuals. They turned to social thought because of deepening disillusionment in the possibility of peaceful political change. Russian thinkers of the late Nicholaevan period, seeking to develop a program of reform for the real world, gradually concluded that the Decembrists had chosen the wrong field of battle. Political programs constitutions, projects, and so on, were merely an elegant form of deception that the bourgeoisie of England and France had devised for deceiving and enslaving their people. The most magnetic figures of the decade all tended to reject political reform as a subject worthy of consideration. Herzen, Belinsky, and Bakunin all thought in terms of a social rather than a political transformation. All had brief periods of idealizing the ruling tsar as a possible instrument for effecting social reform; but none of them ever idealized the forms of political organization to be found in the liberal democracies of Western Europe. Whether one’s vision of social transformation began with liberating Slavs abroad or serfs at home, the ultimate objective remained that which a Serb explained to a radical itinerant Russian in the 1840’s: the creation of a new type of human society in which men can live simply and communicate with one another spontaneously “without any politics” (bez vsiakoi politiki).³

To be sure, there were some voices raised in behalf of the old Decembrist ideal of political reform and representative government. Nicholas Turgenev in his Russia and the Russians in 1847 eloquently restated the classical enlightened arguments for constitutional monarchy; but this was the voice of an old man writing in Paris. His tone is already that of the innumerable memoirists of the late imperial period: semi-fatalistic and elegiac regret combined with a scholarly desire to set the record straight. Turgenev’s work is a masterpiece of this genre, with his praise of the civilizing effects of pietism and Masonry under Alexander, his criticism of the “Adonises in uniform” who prevailed over right reason at the court, and his indictment of “the fatalism which seems to weigh on Russia as much as despotism.”⁴

One interesting new feature of Turgenev’s book is his admiration for the more advanced portions of the Russian Empire: Poland and Finland. Sympathy for subjugated Poland was to become a mark of the new radical social thinkers in Russia; and interest in Finland was to become in some respects even more important. Finland was, first of all, a Protestant state; and Turgenev was not alone in suggesting that Protestantism provided a more favorable atmosphere for free social development than Catholicism. One of the leading new journals devoted to the discussion of social questions in St. Petersburg was entitled The Finnish Herald, and there was a steady increase in Finnish settlement in the St. Petersburg region as well as increased contact through the Helsinki-St. Petersburg steamboat line.

Of particular interest to Russians was the fact that the Finnish diet included not only the standard three estates but also—following the model of the Swedish riksdag—representatives of a fourth estate: the peasantry. For it was the aristocratic discovery of the peasantry that was principally responsible for the turn to social reform in the 1840’s. Interest in the peasantry was stimulated by the gradual increase in peasant disorders under Nicholas I and by the attendant activities of the various commissions appointed to analyze and make recommendations on the peasant problem. At the same time, the peasantry appears as a kind of final object of romantic fascination for the alienated intellectuals. Having traveled in vain to foreign lands and studied at the feet of foreign sages, the Russian Faust now heard happy murmurs from the peasant masses calling him back to the provincial surroundings of his youth.

Although synthetic pastoral themes were sounded much earlier in Russian culture, they tended to become dominant for the first time in the 1840’s. Harbinger of the new trend was the posthumous critical praise heaped on the poems and folksongs of Alexis Kol’tsov by Belinsky, who found in the unaffected and unperfected art of the rough-hewn Kol’tsov a “new simplicity” that seemed to satisfy the “longing for normalcy” that was characteristic of his last years.⁵ “Sociality or death” had been Belinsky’s valedictory slogan to the aristocratic intellectuals just before his death in 1848. They were to find this “sociality” (or “social life,” sotsial’nost’) in the real or imagined company of the noble savages in the Russian countryside. With the appearance in 1846 of Dmitry Grigorovich’s The Village and of the first of Ivan Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches the following year, the peasant emerged as a new heroic type for Russian literature. In part, this new interest was just another Russian reflection of a Western trend noticeable in the sudden popularity of Berthold Auerbach’s Village Tales of the Black Forest and George Sand’s François de Champi. But there was a peculiar intensity to the Eastern European interest in the peasantry that resulted from the survival there of the brutalizing institution of serfdom, and is exemplified in such writers of the forties as the Pole Kraszewski and the Ukrainian Shevchenko.⁶

It is a measure of the Russian aristocrats’ alienation from their own peoples that they discovered the peasants not on their own estates but in books—above all in the three-volume study of Russian life by Baron Haxthausen, a German who had made a long trip through Russia in 1843. On the basis of his study, Russian aristocrats suddenly professed to find in the peasant commune (obshchina) the nucleus of a better society. Although the peasant commune had been idealized before—as an organic religious community by the Slavophiles and as a force for revolution by Polish extremists—Haxthausen’s praise was based on a detailed study of its social functions of regulating land redistribution and dispensing local justice. He saw in the commune a model for “free productive associations like those of the Saint-Simonians”; and the idea was born among Russians that a renovation of society on the model of the commune might be possible even if a political revolution were not.⁷

The belief in a coming transformation of social relationships was propagated actively by two influential social analysts of the late Nicholaevan era: Valerian Maikov and Vladimir Miliutin. Each was a highly pedigreed aristocrat (and one of three well-known brothers). Each was a teacher of law and a popularizer of Auguste Comte’s plea for a new non-metaphysical science of society; each enjoyed great influence in his day and died an early and unnatural death.

Maikov was the son of a famous painter, the grandson of a director of the imperial theater, and a descendant of the most famous masonic poet of the eighteenth century. Had he not died in a mysterious drowning in 1847, it is likely that this extraordinary child prodigy would have been the most famous of all the Maikovs, including his distinguished brother, the poet Apollon. He received a kandidat degree at the age of nineteen, founded a journal for the study of society, The Finnish Herald, at twenty-two, was the principal author of the first volume of the Pocket Dictionary of Foreign Words Used in Russian, and wrote two thick volumes of essays (and many others that remained unpublished) on every subject from chemistry to agriculture. He was hailed by many as the leading literary critic in Russia before dying shortly after his twenty-fourth birthday.

Maikov’s most important essay was his long and never completed “Social Sciences in Russia” of 1845, in which he called for a new “Philosophy of Society” to provide the basis for a regeneration of Russian life. This “philosophy of society” was to be a combination of the historical ideas of Auguste Comte and the moralistic socialism of Blanc and Proudhon. Only such a philosophy can provide the basis for an “organic” culture that will avoid the “disembodied” metaphysical speculations of German culture (“the Hindus of today”) and the “one-sided” and “soulless” English preoccupation with economic production. The preoccupation of Adam Smith and English liberal economists with wealth as something separable from the quality of social development he finds “false in theory and disastrous in practice.”⁸

Miliutin picked up where Maikov left off with his long study, “The Proletariat and Pauperism in England and France,” which was serialized in the first four issues of The Annals of the Fatherland (the journal on which Maikov had just succeeded Belinsky as chief literary critic) in 1847. Miliutin contrasts the vigor of French social thought with the degeneracy of bourgeois society. Both his articles and his lectures at Moscow University reflect a Comtian optimism about the possibility of resolving “the struggle of interests” characteristic of a growing economy like that of France and England through the “future development of science.” Miliutin was a friend of many Decembrists and a leading court advocate of reform in the institution of serfdom; and his two brothers were to become important court figures under Alexander II. But Miliutin succumbed to the melancholia of late Nicholaevan Russia and shot himself in 1855.

The translation of the new interest in social questions into socialist activity was the work of the last of the key circles of the Nicholaevan era: that of Michael Petrashevsky. In conscious imitation of the French Encyclopedists, Petrashevsky sought to gather a group that would lead the intellectual development of the Russian people. The Pocket Dictionary was drawn up by Petrashevsky and Maikov to serve as its Encyclopedia and also as a kind of ideological guidebook for combating German idealism. Young writers and civil servants largely from the petty nobility gathered to discuss the renovation of society as discussed by various French social thinkers. Lamennais’ Words of a Believer was read in a Church Slavonic translation at one meeting, and friends of the group scheduled a dinner to honor the birthday of Fourier on April 7, 1849.⁹

Though the various programs discussed by the Petrashevsky group came to nothing, its determination to find a program of action was a decided sign of change. Indeed, the Petrashevtsy developed the first network of affiliated provincial circles to appear since the time of the Decembrists— stretching thinly from Reval in Esthonia to Kazan on the middle Volga. A recent returnee from the revolutionary world of Western Europe, Speshnev, called himself a Communist rather than a socialist and urged the creation of a “central committee” of nine to eleven with two of its members to be associated with each affiliated group. A military officer from the East, Chernosvitov, suggested that eastern Siberia be separate from Russia and joined through revolution to a great Pacific empire that was to include Mexico, California, and Alaska.¹⁰ Others favored peaceful agitation designed to transform the peasant commune into the nucleus of a new socialist society.

Some of the most imaginative minds of the late nineteenth century served their intellectual apprenticeship in this stimulating atmosphere: the biologist and ideologist of militant Pan-Slavism, Nicholas Danilevsky, the satirist, Michael Saltykov-Shchedrin. Above all, in future importance, stands Fedor Dostoevsky, a young writer interested in the idea of propaganda among the Old Believers and socialism built on the village commune and artel forms of organization.¹¹ He was the one who read to the Petrashevsky group Belinsky’s famous letter rebuking Gogol for his reconciliation with official Russia. Belinsky’s contrasting of Christ’s example with that of official Christendom was to find an echo not only in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, but in much of the tortured thinking of Russian radicalism. The theme of Christ as a revolutionary social reformer of his day was, of course, a commonplace of early socialist thought, particularly in France. But Russian intellectuals also derived this idea from Russian traditions of religious dissent of which they were becoming increasingly aware through common persecution and imprisonment. Thus, the new “philosophy of society” which Maikov had called for tended from the first to be a kind of Christian socialism: a dedication to Christ without God—in opposition, as it were, to the God without Christ of Nicholaevan Russia.

Although the Petrashevtsy were not explicitly Christian (unlike the contemporaneous Ukrainian circle, the Brotherhood of Cyril and Methodius), they did claim to be rediscovering “the teaching of Christ in its original purity,” which “had as its basic doctrine charity and its aim the realization of freedom and the destruction of private ownership.”¹² Following Saint-Simon and Comte, they spoke of a “new Christianity”; a new “normal” and “natural” society of social harmony that was evolving peacefully from history.

Essential to the idea of a “new Christianity” among Russian social thinkers was the need to avoid the pattern of social and political life that was developing in the bourgeois West. Thus, the Petrashevtsy were sceptical (as the Decembrists had never been) of both the institution of private property and the value of constitutions.

Defenders of constitutions forget that the human character is contained not in personal property but in personality, and that in recognizing the political power of the rich over the poor, they are defending the most terrible despotism.¹³

The early social thinkers followed Belinsky in regarding socialism as “the idea of ideas” which “has absorbed history, religion, and philosophy.”¹⁴ Maikov used “socialism” as a synonym for his “philosophy of society” and specifically advocated the sharing of profits with all workers. The Pocket Dictionary guardedly uses the synonym “Owenism”; and Petrasheysky described Fourier as “my only God,” attempting rather pitifully to set up a communal house for seven peasant families on his estate near Novgorod. The peasants burned down his model phalanstery; but the detailed Fourierist blueprint for harmonizing passions and solving all the conflicts of man with nature, himself, and his fellow men had a profound impact on the formation of Russian social thought. Fourier’s plan was the most sensually appealing of all images of the coming golden age with its ideal of a free “play of passions.” The phalansteries were, moreover, to be built around agricultural and craft manufacturing activities and thus seemed peculiarly suited to Russian conditions. However passing the infatuation with Fourier, the belief in a kind of Christianized socialism remained a constant of Russian social thought. Those like Speshnev who advocated more violent and conspiratorial methods in the forties were careful to call themselves “Communists,” and Herzen went to some pains to distinguish ethical and aristocratic socialism from authoritarian and metaphysical communism, “the socialism of revenge.”¹⁵

Along with “socialism,” the social thinkers of the forties tended to believe in “democracy.” The Pocket Dictionary defined it as the form of government where “each citizen takes part in the review and decisions of the affairs of the whole nation.” It was destined to prevail everywhere, assuming different forms “in accordance with the stage of development of the moral forces in a people and the consciousness of true, rational freedom.”¹⁶ The political goal for Russia is never spelled out, but the Pocket Dictionary also includes entries under “opposition” and “national gatherings”; and some kind of a representative body permitting a free play of opposing political forces was clearly assumed.

“Democracy” in Russian social thought was, however, juxtaposed from the beginning to constitutionalism or liberalism as understood in the West. Democrats and liberals were in fact often contrasted, the former being portrayed as egalitarian socialists, the latter as English businessmen interested in purely formal liberties for the middle class. One article of the fifties insisted that Siberia was a more congenial land for true democrats than liberal England. A dictionary of foreign terms prepared in the early sixties in imitation of the Petrashevsky dictionary defines a liberal as

a man loving freedom, usually a boyar [who enjoys] freedom to look through a window without doing anything, then to go for a walk, to the theatre, or a ball—that is what is known as a liberal man.¹⁷

Democracy was something to be found in remote places like America, Switzerland, or ancient Greece. It involved the weakening of man’s authority over his fellow man and not the “new despotism” of a liberal “aristocracy of wealth” or “kingdom of property.”

The new concern with social questions in the forties coincided with a dramatic increase in the size of the reading public. Of 130 periodical journals in Russia in 1851, 106 had been founded since 1836. The university population had increased by more than 50 per cent from the early forties to 1848, and the secondary-school population was increasing even faster. The annual volume of mail, which had risen only three million items in the first fifteen years of Nicholas’ reign, increased by fifteen million from 1840 to 1845. In the following three years more than two million foreign publications were imported into Russia.¹⁸

At the same time, the center of intellectual gravity quietly moved back from Moscow to St. Petersburg in the 1840’s. St. Petersburg had dominated Russian cultural life under Catherine until the movement of Novikov and Schwarz to Moscow and the final disillusioned years of her reign. Peter’s city had also dominated the optimistic early years of Alexander’s reign until the burning and reconstruction of Moscow made that city the focus of the nationalist revival. But the gradual triumph of the Westernizers (or the “Europeans” and “Cosmopolitans” as they were more often called during the “remarkable decade”) was to a large extent a victory of St. Petersburg over Moscow, Chaadaev’s “city of the dead.” Belinsky’s move from Moscow to St. Petersburg in 1839 was accompanied by the ostentatious declaration: “To Petersburg, to Petersburg, therein lies my salvation.”¹⁹ St. Petersburg was the largest and most commercially active of Russian cities. The journals to which Belinsky contributed there, The Annals of the Fatherland and The Contemporary, attained by 1847 an unprecedented number of subscriptions (4,000 and 3,000, respectively)²⁰ and were to become the leading vehicles for the populism of the seventies and the radical iconoclasm of the sixties, respectively. By 1851, more than half of the privately operated journals in Russia were in St. Petersburg, and more of the remaining private journals were printed in Westward-looking Riga and Tartu than in Moscow. Pogodin’s Muscovite was the last effort of the romantic nationalists to found a major “thick journal” (that is, a journal with ideological pretensions supported by comprehensive bibliographical and critical sections) in Moscow. Despite (or perhaps because of) official support, it enjoyed nothing like the success of the new journals of social criticism in St. Petersburg. When it collapsed in 1856, most of its personnel moved to St. Petersburg, where the most important new anti-Westernizing journals were also to be published: ranging from Katkov’s Russian Herald to Aksakov’s Day.

The optimistic hope that a new social order might come into being in the West on the basis of advanced French social theories was dealt a profound blow by the failure of the revolutionary uprisings of 1848-9 in Western and Central Europe. Russia did not participate in this wave of revolutions and thus did not feel discredited by their failure. Indeed, the Russians were influenced by the impassioned writings of Herzen, who witnessed these events, and Bakunin, who participated in them, to conclude that the torch of leadership in the coming transformation of society had simply been passed from the defeated workers of the West to the slumbering peasants of the East.

The furious reaction of Nicholas I to the revolutionary events of 1848-9 further crystallized the sense of identification that Russian social thinkers came to feel with the frustrated Western hopes for social reform. The arrest of fifty-two Petrashevtsy (of whom twenty-three were convicted and exiled) and the dispatching of Russian troops to help put down the Kossuth rebellion in Hungary—both in late April of 1849—were followed by a crude effort to kill off the intellectual ferment of the “remarkable decade.” No more than three hundred students were to be enrolled in a university at one time. Philosophy was banned from the curriculum, and all public mention of Belinsky’s name was prohibited. Letters signed “all my love” were censored for the implied denial of affection to God and the Tsar, and the musical compositions of an astonished Rubinstein were confiscated as he returned from the West by border officials who feared that musical notes might be a secret revolutionary code.

Lacking as yet the “escape valve” of large-scale emigration to America that was draining off so many of the revolutionary intellectuals of Central Europe, the Russian intellectuals compensated themselves with the vague and appealing idea that Russia—or perhaps all of Slavdom—was in fact a kind of America in the making. Glorification of the communal peasant forms of organization among the Slavs was thus combined with the political ideal of a loose, democratic federalism. Bakunin proposed after the Slav Congress of 1848 in Prague the ideal of a revolutionary federation of Slavic peoples opposed to the “knouto-Germanic” rule of central authority. A friend of Herzen wrote a verse play praising the “socialist” William Penn, and spoke of America as the “natural ally” of a regenerated Russia.²¹ Herzen believed that the Pacific Ocean would become the “Mediterranean Sea of the future,” which Russia and America would jointly build.²² Russian radicals followed with romantic fascination the half-understood developments in the distant, continent-wide civilization, whose westward advance resembled the Russian eastward advance in so many respects; and the semi-anarchistic criticism of all existing political authorities which was to become commonplace in Russian radical social thought was rarely extended to America.

Saltykov spoke retrospectively of the Petrashevtsy as a group which wanted “to read without knowing the alphabet, to walk without knowing how to stand upright.”²³ Yet its strivings inside Russia and the prophetic reflections of Herzen and Bakunin outside reflect the turn in mid-century Russian thinking from philosophic to social thought: from Hamlet to Don Quixote, to use the terminology of Turgenev’s famous essay of the late fifties. In order for the brooding Hamlet to become the chivalric Don Quixote—to leave his castle and set forth into the countryside—there had to be an ideal to serve. This ideal was the vision of a coming golden age in which there would be no more serfdom, bureaucracy, private property, or oppressive central authority. In its place men would adopt a new, ethical Christianity, build socialism on the model of the peasant commune, and live under a loose federal system vaguely like that of distant America. These themes were to be developed more explicitly and fully during the reign of Alexander II, and particularly in the populist movement; but all of them are already present in this initial turn to social thought in the late Nicholaevan period.

More than any other single event, the Crimean War opened Russia up for a more serious and widespread discussion of social issues. Indeed, of all the leitmotivs of modern Russian history, few are more striking than the unsettling influence of great wars on Russian thought and culture. Just as the schism in the Church was an outgrowth of the first northern war and Peter’s reforms of the second, just as the agitation of the late years of Alexander I’s reign and the Decembrist uprising grew out of the Napoleonic invasion, so did the great wars of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century have a profound and unsettling impact on Russian cultural development. The Turkish war of the mid-seventies was followed by the movements of revolutionary populism inside Russia; the Japanese war of 1904-5, by the Revolution of 1905; and the First World War, by the revolutions of 1917. War invariably put new strains on the outmoded social and economic system and at the same time exposed Russian thinkers to the methods and ideas of the outside world.

The Crimean War appears as a watershed in Russian history. Resounding defeat on Russian soil shattered the pretentious complacency of Nicholaevan Russia and left a legacy of national bitterness as well as an incentive for innovation and reform. The failure of Russia’s traditional allies, Austria and Prussia, to come to her aid discredited these continental monarchies and forced Russia to look to the victorious liberal nations of the West, France and England, for techniques and ideas. Russia embarked hesitantly but irreversibly on the path toward industrialization and the redefinition of its social structure. No one realized better than the admirers of Nicholas’ rule what defeat in the Crimea meant for Russia. Even before the war was irrevocably lost, Tiutchev saw in it “the birthpangs of a new world.”²⁴ Pogodin summoned up the fire symbol with a strange mixture of apocalypticism and masochism that was to become characteristic of the new nationalism:

Burn with your burning fire which the English have lighted in hell, burn … all our political relations with Europe! Let everything be burned with fire! Qui perd gagne!²⁵

Of all the material signs of change in post-Crimean Russia, none was more tangible and inescapable than the building of railroads. Nothing spread to the provinces so directly and dramatically the news that a new world was in the making as the forward movement of iron roads from the northwest corner of Russia into the deep interior of Russia in the sixties and seventies. The old, winding, dirt roads of Russia had been in 1812 (as they were still to be in 1941) a form of defense against heavily equipped invaders from the West and a source of picturesque appeal to the romantic imagination. Radishchev, for all his reforming zeal, had been charmed by the old road used on his famous trip from St. Petersburg to Moscow; and Gogol had made them symbols of the beauty and mystery of Old Russia.

The new railroads were to become symbols of modern Russia with its interrelated process of spiritual destruction and material progress. At first some Russian nationalists dreamed of integrating railroads harmoniously into Russian culture. Fedor Chizhov, the son of a priest and a close friend of Gogol, Ivanov, and Khomiakov, lectured in physics and mathematics at St. Petersburg and published in 1837, at the age of 26, an anthology giving a history and description of steam machines. He wrote that “the railroad is for me the slogan of our time,” and his resolve to lead Russia into the railroad age was undampened by a long period of arrest for allegedly fostering discontent among the Slavs of the Hapsburg empire during the late years of Nicholas’ reign. When railroad building began in earnest under Alexander II, Chizhov became consumed with a passionate desire to prevent foreigners from controlling the development of Russian railroads. He sought to harness this new form of power to spiritual ends and in 1860 formed a company which had as its first project the penitential building of a railroad from Moscow to the Monastery of the Holy Trinity and St. Sergius. But he was soon outstripped by his Anglo-French rivals and died disillusioned in 1877, to be buried near Gogol.²⁶ The sense of confusion and bitterness toward the railroads is reflected in the speech which the rector of the Riga Theological Seminary made in December, 1872, when asked to bless a new railroad bridge:

Conflicting thoughts rise up in the soul when looking on a new route like this. What is it going to bring us? … Will it not be in part the expeditor of that would-be civilization, which under the guise of a false all-humanity and a common brotherhood of all … destroys … true humanity, true brotherhood?²⁷

Not only traditionalists but Westernizing reformers found themselves brooding over these harbingers of a new iron age. Although Belinsky professed admiration for railroads and loved to watch them being built, the “reality” from which he rebelled assumed the shape of a steam engine: an “iron” monster with “jaws of steel” that belched forth “smoke and tongues of fire.” The more moderate Westernizer, Prince Viazemsky, had written in 1847 in his “Review of Our Literature in the Decade since Pushkin”:

Railroads have already annihilated, and in time shall completely annihilate, all previous means of transportation. Other powers, other steams have already long ago put out the fire of the winged horse, whose weighted hoof has cut off the life-giving flow that has quenched the thirst of so many gracious and poetic generations.²⁸

In the novels of the age of Alexander II, the earth-bound Pegasus of Russian realism found itself repeatedly crossing railroad tracks. It is in a railroad coach that Dostoevsky’s Christ figure, Prince Myshkin, returns to Russia at the beginning of the Idiot and first meets the dark and venal figure with whom his fate becomes so strangely intermixed. Just as the peasants likened the railroads to the spinning of a giant spider web over the Russian land, so Dostoevsky’s Idiot sees in them the fallen star Wormwood spoken of in the Book of Revelation (8:11). Turgenev’s Smoke sees in the billows of the steam engines transporting Russians back and forth to the West an image of their confused state of mind and the obscurity surrounding Russia’s future. The early leader and guiding force in the movement toward programmatic realism in music, Mily Balakirev, worked as a porter in a railroad station in St. Petersburg in the 1870’s as his form of penitential “movement to the people.” Tolstoy died in an obscure railroad station, and his great novel Anna Karenina begins and ends with a human being crushed under a train. The poet Nekrasov coined the term “King Hunger” (Tsar Golod) in a poem he wrote in 1865, “The Railroad.”

At the same time, railroads became a symbol of light and hope to those who dreamed primarily of dramatic material transformations. The “Tidings of Zion” sect of the 1840’s had seen the millennium in terms of a new civilization to be built along a vast Eurasian railway whose stations were to serve as giant distribution centers of material benefits. Il’in, the founder of the sect, died in Solovetsk in 1890, just a year before his vision began to be realized through the building of the Trans-Siberian railway, which was to become and remain the longest in the world. Lenin’s arrival at the Finland station of St. Petersburg in a sealed train in April of 1917 was a key moment of charisma in the development of Bolshevism. Trotsky’s impassioned forensic forays into the countryside in his famed armored train played an important and dramatic role in rallying armed support for the Revolution, and the vast and pretentiously adorned stations of the Moscow subway became symbols of the new civic religion of the Stalin era.

The first Russian railroad had been a short line from St. Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo in 1835. Sixteen years later, Moscow was joined by rail with St. Petersburg, thanks largely to the American engineer George Washington Whistler (the husband of James Whistler’s famous mother), who helped standardize in Russia a track gauge broader than the accepted European norm. By 1856, the first year of Alexander’s reign, construction was under way on two new stations in St. Petersburg for lines leading to the west and east; construction accelerated rapidly under the new tsar. French Saint-Simonians, who financed much of this program, were fascinated by the parallel extension of railroads across America and Russia (“these two Hercules in their cradles”), considering the Russian expansion less impressive technically, but far more important historically in its linking of Europe with Asia. The Russian program was “an operation without parallel on our continent,” destined to replace political divisions with a new “economic community” that will unite Eastern and Western Europe, and become “like Russia itself … half European, half Asiatic.”²⁹

For Russia, the new railroads brought the first massive intrusion of mechanical force into the timeless, vegetating world of rural Russia, and a great increase in social and thus class mobility throughout the empire. The first train ride of the “liberated” peasant represented the traumatic moment of departure from native surroundings—probably for a lifetime in the army or the urban work force. The ride was long and cold; and he was denied the use of toilet facilities during brief station stops and then beaten for “offensive conduct” if caught relieving himself on or near the tracks.

Railroads nevertheless became a symbol of progress to the new materialistic and egalitarian students of the sixties, who generally enjoyed more comfortable initial rides. One of the most gifted young technologists of this generation, Nicholas Kibalchich, came eagerly to St. Petersburg in order to study the engineering subjects that would equip him to participate in the railroad-building program, declaring:

For Russia railroads are everything. This is the most necessary, most vital problem of our time. Covering Russia by sections with an interconnected network of railroads such as exists for example in England, we shall prosper and blossom forth [with] unheard-of progress … numberless factories.

Civilization will go rapidly forward, and we—true, not all at once— will overtake the rich and advanced nations of Western Europe.³⁰

Yet within a few years this apostle of progress and railroad building had become a full-time revolutionary, whose talents were completely absorbed in designing explosives to blow up the trains of Russian officials and—in 1881 —the body of Tsar Alexander II himself. This sense of lost opportunity was given added poignancy by the fact that he devoted his last days in prison prior to his hanging to designing a flying machine, which he felt was destined to supplant the railroad as a bearer of material progress. To understand why this gifted youth became an apostle and technician of assassination, one must turn to the disturbed reign of Alexander II and the psychology of the new revolutionary generation.

Under Alexander the dilemma of the reforming despot was lifted to the level of high irony as the virus of social thought began to infect wider circles of the population.

Like the reign of Alexander I, that of Alexander II lasted almost exactly a quarter of a century and can be roughly divided into two halves: a period of reform and one of reaction. The period of expectation and reform is generally referred to as “the sixties” even though it ran from 1856 to 1866. The period of reaction followed the first attempt on the life of the Tsar in 1866 and lasted until the successful assassination of 1881. Unlike Alexander I, Alexander II actually promulgated a series of profound reforms: freeing the serfs, instituting trial by jury, and creating zemstvos for limited local self-government. Yet Alexander II was far less popular. The most important cultural and intellectual development of the age was done outside of, and in opposition to, him and his court. Moreover, the period of most passionate rejection of official ideology occurred during the “sixties,” the period of greatest liberalization; whereas the most optimistic affirmations of the alienated intellectuals occurred during the period of governmental reaction in the seventies.

Clearly the concerns of the thinking class were developing their own independent dynamic. To understand it one must consider the psychology of the self-conscious, “new men of the sixties.” This iconoclastic student generation effected in a few short years one of the most thorough and far-reaching rejections of past tradition in the history of modern Europe. Out of this ferment Russia produced in the later years of Alexander’s reign a number of disturbing new ideologies of which the most important and original was the populist movement. So central was this movement to the cultural accomplishments and aspirations of the period that it is more correct to speak of it as the populist age than the age of Alexander II.

This new generation had been brought up in the harsh last years of Nicholas’ reign and had come to study in St. Petersburg amidst the great expectations for reform that prevailed under Alexander. They looked to the new regime with some of the optimism with which the reform-minded aristocracy a half century earlier had greeted the coming of Alexander I after the death of Paul But the new reformers lacked the broad aristocratic perspectives of earlier reformers. They included “men of various ranks” (raznochintsy): children of minor officials, priests, professional men, and various minority groups. They included many provincial figures, who brought with them the pent-up frustrations and sectarian religious ideas of the less developed regions of rural Russia. The new student generation was, in short, a motley group with social aspirations as well as reforming ideas, arriving on the stage of history at a time when the old regime—and not merely the tsar himself—was in disrepute because of defeat in battle.

The new student generation included an unusually large number of former seminarians, who brought with them a certain passion for absolute answers to the “cursed questions” which hypnotized and seduced many of their uprooted and impressionable fellow students. The most important among these were the “two Saint Nicholases,” Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov, two former seminarians who dominated an editorial staff known as “the consistory” of the journal with which Belinsky had ended his career, The Contemporary.

Taking the materialism of Feuerbach and the rationalism of the English utilitarians as their starting point, these influential critics helped lead the young generation into a systematic rejection of all past tradition and of the entire idealistic framework within which the discussions of the aristocratic century had been conducted. They championed a new system of ethics based on “rational egoism” and a strict application of the utilitarian calculus of maximizing material pleasure. They imitated Belinsky’s iconoclasm and glorified at the same time the art of the “Gogolian period” of Russian literature with its concerns for suffering humanity over that of the more composed “Pushkinians,” for whom art did not basically serve a social purpose. They preached the equality of sexes, the sanctity of the natural sciences, and the need for recognizing that material self-interest lay behind every ideological pose. They—and even more, their imitators—dramatized their complete sense of separation from the past by adopting bizarre forms of dress, practicing free love, and attempting to live and work communally. Medallions of Rousseau were worn in place of Orthodox medals; the staccato cry “Man is a worm” (chelovek-cherviak) was shouted out at theology lectures; insulting remarks were made about Shakespeare, Raphael, Pushkin, and other artists especially revered by the older generation.

The war of the generations was dramatized by Turgenev in his famous novel Father and Sons, which he published in 1862 just after he, as a representative of the “fathers”’ generation, had left The Contemporary, denouncing Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov as “literary Robespierres” “trying to wipe from the face of the earth poetry, the fine arts, all aesthetic pleasures, and to impose in their place mere seminarian principles.”³¹ The hero of the novel is Bazarov, the leader of the “sons” and a young medical student who rejects all established aesthetic, moral, or religious ideals and spends his time dissecting frogs. His credo is that “two and two is four and everything else is rubbish.” The term Turgenev used to describe Bazarov’s philosophy was “nihilism,” which accurately suggests the almost totally negative attitude of the “men of the sixties” to all traditional ideas and practices. Chernyshevsky’s associates considered Bazarov a caricature, but Pisarev, another rising young iconoclast, hailed Bazarov as a worthy model for the “new men” of the sixties. When Dobroliubov died in 1861 and Chernyshevsky was arrested the following year, Pisarev became the leading apostle of nihilistic materialism and remained so until 1868, when he—like Dobroliubov and so many others—went to an early death.

The importance of this spasm of negation would be hard to over-emphasize. Although it was almost entirely confined to the young generation, it affected precisely those talented figures who were to provide the leadership in almost every field of cultural endeavor for the remainder of the century. Pisarev was correct in saying that “if Bazarovism is a malady, it is the malady of our time.”³² No one was ever quite the same again, because the young generation had deliberately broken with the broader humanistic culture of the aristocracy as well as the official Orthodox culture of the tsarist regime. The first and perhaps most important result of the iconoclastic revolution was the opening of a decisive split between the new nihilists and the original moderate Westernizers of the forties. Chernyshevsky took the lead in breaking with Herzen for his friendliness with liberals like Kavelin and Chicherin and his “naive” hope for “reform from above” through Alexander II. “Let your ‘bell’ sound not for prayer but for the charge,” he wrote shortly after breaking with Herzen in 1859.³³ The lesson to be learned from the revolution of 1848 was that radicals must avoid ceding leadership of revolutionary movements to timid liberals. The imperfect and hesitant nature of the Alexandrian reforms—above all their purely formal emancipation of the peasantry, whose actual lot may in fact have worsened—seemed a perfect illustration to the extremist generation of what to expect from liberal reformers.

In addition to encouraging political extremism, the nihilism of the sixties virtually promoted the level of a new orthodoxy the new analytic and realistic approach in science and literature. Prose replaced poetry as the main vehicle of literary expression (a change which Petrashevsky had called indispensable for human progress at the last meeting of his ill-fated circle in 1849). There was a sudden passion for meticulously realistic presentations of scenes and problems from everyday life. A decade of strident insistence on the social responsibility of the artist—from Chernyshevsky’s Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality in 1855 to Pisarev’s Destruction of Aesthetics in 1865—resulted in the establishment of a kind of “censorship of the left” alongside that of the tsarist regime. Subtly but effectively the realistic story and the ideological novel replaced the poems and plays of the aristocratic century as the major literary milieu of the new culture in St. Petersburg. Buckle’s History of Civilization in England, with its attempts to explain cultures by climate, geography, and diet, was extraordinarily popular; and the beginnings of a purely materialist Russian school of physiology can be traced to the publication in 1863 of Ivan Sechenov’s Reflexes of the Brain. Following the lead of Claude Bernard (whose detailed descriptive study of the human heart was written while Sechenov was studying under him in Paris), Sechenov attempted to make a purely physiological study of the brain. He provided the basis for the famed Pavlovian theory of conditioned reflexes with his contention that all movements traditionally described as voluntary in physiology are in fact material reflexes in the strictest sense of the word.³⁴

But perhaps the most fateful result of the sixties was the emergence of the intelligentsia as a self-conscious and distinct social group and its creation of the new doctrine of populism (narodnichestvo). The idea that a half-hidden higher intelligence rules the world was, as we have seen, a commonplace of higher order Masonry; and Schwarz had actually introduced various forms of the Latin intelligentia and intellectus into the Russian language in this exalted sense in the early 1780’s. The Pocket Dictionary of the Petrashevtsy added the word “intellectual” (intellektual’ny) to the Russian vocabulary, suggesting that it had the all-embracing meaning of the Russian word for “spiritual” (dukhovny). This lofty conception of the ruling force of intelligence and the intellect was given a distinctly historical cast by Pisarev in his insistence that “the moving force of history is intelligentsia, the path of history is marked out by the level of theoretical development of intelligentsia.”³⁵

But the striking new feature about the use of the term “intelligentsia” in the sixties is that it meant not just “intelligence” but also a specific group of people. This group was essentially those who felt a certain sense of unity-through-alienation because of their participation in the iconoclasm of the sixties. The Russian term intelligent (pronounced with a hard “g,” accented on the last syllable, and conceived as a member of this intelligentsiia) was used by the novelist Boborykin to describe his own sense of estrangement from the petty concerns of provincial life after returning to Nizhny Novgorod from Tartu, the freest university in the Russian empire in the 1850’s. One of the reasons for the alienation of the intelligentsia from the ordinary folk of Russia was revealed in the verb that was derived from the name of this prolific writer: boborykat’ (“to talk endlessly”). But the ever-prophetic Herzen provided the best characterization of both the alienation and the eventual fate of the intelligentsia in the pages of the Bell in July, 1864. Having been long since rejected by the young generation, Herzen characterizes them as

… non-people (ne-narod) … intelligentsia … democratic lords (shliakhta), commanders, and teachers … you bear nothing.… You have not yet thought about what Holstein-Arakcheev, Petersburg-Tsarist democracy means, soon you will feel that it means a red cap on a Petrine cudgel. You shall be destroyed in the abyss … and upon your grave … there will look on, facing each other: from above a bodyguard the Emperor dressed in all his powers and all the self-willed arrogance in the world, and from below the boiling, ferocious ocean of the people in which you shall vanish without a trace.³⁶

Thus the intelligentsia are the leaders of the coming democracy who are destined to be devoured by it. They are alienated both from the ordinary people and from all the “self-willed” political authorities of the present, transitory world of repression.

The intelligentsia are not self-willed because they are dedicated men, as Shelgunov—a leading participant in the ferment of the sixties—stresses in his almost simultaneous article of May, 1864.

The intelligentsia of the XVIII century was purely bourgeois.… Only the intelligentsia of the XIX century, schooled in generalization, has posed as the aim of all its efforts the happiness of all … equality.³⁷

That which deepened and intensified the sense of common dedication within this alienated intelligentsia was its growing belief that progress was an inevitable historical law. Following Pisarev’s articles in 1865 on “The Historical Ideas of Auguste Comte” and several serialized works of the late sixties, such as Mikhailovsky’s “What is Progress?” and Lavrov’s Historical Letters, the nascent intelligentsia can be said to have found new encouragement and unity in the broad vision of progress presented by Auguste Comte. Comte’s idea that all of human activity moved from theology through metaphysics to a positive or scientific stage encouraged them to believe that all social problems would soon be resolved by the last and most promising of the positive sciences—the science of society. Thus, the appeal which Comte had addressed in vain to Nicholas I to overleap the West by adopting his new “religion of humanity” elicited, in effect, a belated response a decade later from the alienated intelligentsia. They were excited by his appeal for a new aristocracy of talent rather than privilege, which would hasten the inevitable transformation of society by pledging themselves to the service of humanity and a socialism that was “practical” and “positive” rather than “metaphysical” and revolutionary.

Newly infused with historical optimism, the intelligentsia required a further sense of identity through its common revulsion at the repressive policies that predominated in the late years of Alexander’s reign. They felt obliged to carry on the tradition of uncompromising protest and striving for social betterment that had been championed by the imprisoned Chernyshevsky; to carry on the critical traditions of the dead Dobroliubov and Pisarev and the journalistic traditions of the newly abolished Sovremennik. Ironically enough, the introduction of trial by jury in no way pacified the intelligentsia’s thirst for justice. On the contrary, it helped fortify their sense of unity-in-martyrdom by providing them with ample opportunities for self-defense through impassioned oration.

Thus, in the late sixties, the iconoclasts became the intelligents. The radicals had converted their youthful attachment to science into an optimistic theory of history and had developed a strong sense of identity with those like Chernyshevsky who had suffered for their beliefs. They viewed themselves as a dedicated elite of intelligentnye, kul’turnye, tsivilizovannye, though they were not necessarily “intelligent,” “cultured,” or even “civilized” in the usual Western sense of these terms. They thought of themselves as practical rather than “superfluous” people: students of science and servants of history. However much they debated over what the scientific “formula for progress” might be and what the coming “third age” of humanity might bring, they all viewed themselves as members of a common group which Pisarev and Shelgunov called the “thinking proletariat,” Lavrov “critically thinking personalities,” and others “cultural pioneers.”

In the summer of 1868, the group can be said to have been formally baptized as “the Russian intelligentsia.” For at that time Mikhailovsky entitled his critical column for the new “thick journal,” The Contemporary Review, “Letters on the Russian Intelligentsia.” This column was the central one in a journal designed to perpetuate the traditions of Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov (its title being deliberately chosen for its resemblance to that of their Contemporary). Although this journal did not last long, Mikhailovsky soon joined the revived Annals of the Fatherland, the old journal of Maikov and Belinsky in the forties, which now became the medium for propagating the belief that Russian social thought was providing a new elite who were the elect of history and the builders of a new world. From 1867 to 1870, the Annals increased its circulation from 2,000 to 8,000—the largest monthly circulation attained up to that time by any radical journal. Mikhailovsky, as chief critic of the journal, kept a bust of Belinsky over his writing desk. Other critics on it were Eliseev, a former associate of Chernyshevsky, and Skabichevsky, a former leader of the Sunday-school movement; and the belles-lettres department was dominated by the great satirist and former Petrashevets, Saltykov, and the “civic poet” and former editor of The Contemporary, Nekrasov. The Annals became “the bible of the Russian intelligentsia,” not only because of its self-conscious pose as heir to the radical traditions of Russian social thought, but also because of its propagation of the new optimistic theory of history. Another former associate of Chernyshevsky pointed independently in the summer of 1868 to the importance of the optimistic historical faith for the nascent intelligentsia:

the union of the heights and depths, of intelligentsia with the people is not an empty dream. This union is an inevitable historical law. It is the path of our progress.…³⁸

Intelligence must flow into people, just as the intelligentsia must go out among the people. This was the imperative that Herzen had first presented the young generation on the pages of the Bell late in 1861, when the University of St. Petersburg was closed because of student riots:

Whither should you go, youth from whom science has been taken away? … Listen—from all corners of the vast fatherland: from the Don and Urals, from the Volga and Dnieper the groans are increasing, the murmur is rising—It is the gathering roar of an ocean wave.… Into the people, to the people (v narod! k narodu)—there is your destination, banished men of science.…³⁹

Herzen’s plea had already been answered to a considerable extent by the extraordinary Sunday-school movement which flourished in Russia between 1859-62 and may properly be described as the first of the large-scale penitential efforts of the urban intellectuals to take the fruits of learning to the ordinary people. P. Pavlov, the professor of Russian history at Kiev, was the pioneer of this movement to provide free part-time instruction for the indigent.⁴⁰ He was but one of a large number of provincial historians to build an aura of heroic dignity about Russian popular institutions and stimulate the desire of urban intellectuals to rediscover the richness and spontaneity of rural Russia. A. Shchapov and G. Eliseev, two of the most influential populist journalists of the seventies, both began their careers as students of the raskol at the Kazan theological seminary. Kostomarov, a veteran of Ukrainian radical activities and professor of Russian history at St. Petersburg, lent a new glamor to the tradition of peasant revolution and was perhaps the most popular of all lecturers among the radical new men of the sixties. Ivan Pryzhov wrote a History of Taverns, contending that the true communal feelings and revolutionary spirit of the simple people can only be appreciated in their taverns. Herzen paid great attention to the Old Believers and printed up a special supplement for them. Even the rationalistic and utilitarian-minded Chernyshevsky began his journalistic career with an article in praise of the “fools for Christ’s sake” and ended it with a defense of the Old Believers. This extraordinary interest in the peculiarities of Russian rural life—and particularly in the unique traditions of popular religious dissent—helped convince the urban intellectuals that Russia had a special destiny to fulfill and untapped popular resources for realizing it.

Populism was a pure creation of intellectuals, who had become convinced by the late sixties that history was on their side whatever the Tsar and his ministers did or said; and that a direct reconstitution of society was morally necessary, logically implied by the progress of science, and uniquely possible among the Russian people. Following social themes that had been developing in Russia since the 1840’s, the populists believed that a special path for Russian social development lay in extending the principles of profit sharing and communal endeavor still prevailing in the peasant commune. This peaceful transformation of society could be accomplished only by dedicated servants of humanity who had no desire to aggrandize wealth in the English manner or power in the German fashion. They saw little hope in working through political media for reform, since European politics was dominated by the meaningless parliaments and constitutions of Anglo-French liberalism or the brutally centralizing tendencies of German militarism. They vaguely hoped for some kind of loose, decentralized federation on the American pattern—the Ukrainian populist group actually calling themselves “the Americans.” But their basic conviction was that of Shelgunov’s original Proclamation to the Young Generation of 1861 that “we not only can, but we must… arrive at some new order unknown even to America.”⁴¹

The major source of foreign inspiration was French socialist thought. Louis Blanc, who had attempted to set up actual socialist experiments among the people of Paris in the belief that a new age of brotherhood was dawning, replaced the “purely theoretical” Fourier and Owen as the socialist saint most revered by the populists. But the principal prophet of the new order for the populists was the passionate figure of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who dominated French socialist thought from the failure of the revolution of 1848 until his death in 1865. Proudhon introduced an element of passionate egalitarianism and heroic, semi-anarchistic opposition to political authority which made him a particularly sympathetic figure for survivors of the iconoclastic revolution in Russia. Proudhon was, like Rousseau, a French provincial who brought with him to Paris a certain plebeian indignation against aristocratic elites and centralized authority. He opposed a proposed constitution during the revolution of 1848, “not because it is bad, but because it is a constitution”; flatly labeled private property “theft”; and in his famous journals The People, The Representative of the People, and The Voice of the People, he developed a kind of mystical belief in “the people” as a mighty force capable of rejuvenating Europe.

All of this appealed to the alienated intellectuals of the Alexandrian era, who were also provincial outsiders in many cases with an iconoclastic attitude toward authority, an incisive and disjointed polemic style, and an anguished desire to establish or re-establish links with “the people.” Proudhon viewed himself, moreover, as a kind of Christian socialist, working intermittently all his adult life on a never-completed study of Christ as a social reformer and frequently introducing apocalyptical language—all tending to increase his appeal to the Russians, who tended to view socialism as an outgrowth of suppressed traditions within heretical Christianity. Both of the prophetic forerunners of the populist movement, Herzen and Bakunin, were friends and admirers of Proudhon, fellow provincials, so to speak, who had come to Paris, the Mecca of revolution in the late forties. They accepted Proudhon’s explanation that the debacle of 1848-9 resulted from the failure of the revolutionaries to link themselves unreservedly with the elemental power of the people. They, and Russian radical thought generally, had continued to hope that socialist transformation might yet be accomplished on French soil through a working-class movement led by Proudhon; but they gradually began to place their hopes for change in the unspoiled Russian people.

This transfer of hopes from West to East became complete in 1871 after Bismarck’s Germany defeated France in the Franco-Prussian War and “a republic without ideals” came into being over the ruins of the Paris Commune. France was now a center of fashions rather than “the lighthouse of the world”; it had become, in the title of Mikhailovsky’s famous essay of October, 1871, the land of “Darwinism and the Operettas of Offenbach.” All of Europe is now ruled by jungle laws of the survival of the fittest and a culture whose highest symbol is the cancan; and Mikhailovsky pointedly ends his piece with the phrase novus rerum mihi nascitur ordo.

The new order of things as envisaged by the main line of populist thought as it developed from Herzen and Chernyshevsky through to Lavrov, Mikhailovsky, and Shelgunov was a unique Russian variant of the general European phenomenon of moralistic, “utopian” socialism. The populists believed in “subjective socialism” to be brought about by moral ideals rather than “objective socialism” that is created irrespective of human wishes by economic forces. Friends of the populist movement abroad were closer to the French than the German tradition of socialism. Thus, Marx’s theories about revolutionary organization and economic determinism gained almost no support among Russians during the populist era, though the moral outrage of his denunciation of capitalism was warmly applauded.

Populist socialism did not involve just a reconstitution of society on the communal model of the peasant obshchina, but a creative development of the obshchina form itself in order to guarantee the full development of the human personality. Herzen stressed the need for assuring individual rights within the new socialist society, Chernyshevsky the need for maintaining individual incentives, and Mikhailovsky the need for preventing dehumanizing overspecialization. For all of them the full development of human personality was, in Belinsky’s words, “more important than the fate of the whole world.” Mikhailovsky described all of history as an endless “struggle for individuality” and described the coming golden age as one of “subjective anthropocentrism.” Nicholas Chaikovsky, whose circle in St. Petersburg was the real center of the populist movement, thought that he was founding a “religion of humanity” and included in his group several members of a “God-manhood sect” which taught that each individual was literally destined to become a god.⁴²

The populists professed to accept industrial development but wished to preserve the more moral type of society found in the commune while moving to the higher stage of civilization which scientific progress was bringing into being. Indeed, the first of the mass “movements to the people” in 1871-3 was directed by the Chaikovtsy at the urban workers of St. Petersburg, who were thought to hold the key to the future and be particularly capable of “mental and moral development.” This movement to the people appealed to intellectuals in other cities, who formed groups loosely affiliated with the Chaikovtsy in many major cities of the empire. This initial effort to educate urban workers and evangelize them with the new belief in the inevitability of progress involved many of the Russian radicals who were to become well known in the West through prolific later writings in exile: Peter Kropotkin and Serge Kravchinsky (Stepniak). Disillusioned with the lack of response to their teachings among the working class, the Chaikovtsy concluded that they must go instead to the peasantry, which still dominated the thinking of the Russian masses. Accordingly, they suddenly found themselves caught up in the “mad summer” of 1874, one of the most fantastic and unprecedented social movements of the entire nineteenth century.

Suddenly, without any central leadership or direction, more than two thousand students and a number of older people and aristocrats were swept away by a spirit of self-renunciation. In almost every province of European Russia, young intellectuals dressed as peasants and set out from the cities to live among them, join in their daily life, and bring to them the good news that a new age was dawning. Rich landowners gave away their possessions or agreed to let students use their estates for social propaganda and experiment; agnostic Jews had themselves baptised as Orthodox in order to be more at one with the peasantry; women joined in the exodus in order to share equally in the hopes and suffering.⁴³

The regime was perplexed and terrified by this “movement to the people,” arresting 770 and molesting many more in its effort to crush the movement. This harsh repression of a non-violent movement only pushed populism into more violent and extreme paths. Mikhailovsky, the leading popularizer of evolutionary populism in the seventies, always described populism as a middle way for Russia between the Scylla of reaction and the Charybdis of revolution. It was the fate of populism in the late seventies to be first dashed against the rock to the right and then sucked into the whirlpool to the left. To understand the fate of populism and the climactic events of the late seventies and early eighties, one must consider the peculiar nature of the reactionary and revolutionary traditions that had concurrently developed in Russia.

The Scylla of reaction was expressed not so much in the ruthless arrests of late 1874 as in the subsequent war with Turkey. This war was the direct result of the new imperialistic doctrine of messianic Pan-Slavism. It was a large-scale deliberate war of aggrandizement, brutally fought against a brutal foe by a citizen’s army that Russia had assembled through the introduction of a more systematic and universal conscription in 1874. This war gave Russian society and Russian social thought a feeling for violence and ideological fanaticism that made any return to the optimistic, evolutionary ideals of early populism extraordinarily difficult.

Reactionary Pan-Slavism began in the second half of Alexander’s reign to replace in many minds official nationality as the ideology of tsarist Russia. Faced with a many-sided ideological assault in the course of the sixties, the tsarist regime had turned from its initial policy of pragmatic liberal concessions to a new militant nationalism. Great Russian chauvinism first proved its worth as an antidote to revolutionary enthusiasm during the Polish uprising of 1863. The semi-official yellow press skillfully sought to discredit the revolutionaries as traitors because of their sympathy with the Poles and to glorify a series of Russian military leaders as popular folk heroes. A former radical, Michael Katkov, championed this approach in his new newspaper, Moscow News, which he proudly designated “the organ of a party which may be called Russian, ultra-Russian, exclusively Russian.”⁴⁴

To compete in the idealistic atmosphere of the sixties, however, a party bidding for public favor had to offer some noble, altruistic goal to the public. Thus, the “exclusively Russian party” of Katkov resurrected the old romantic ideal of Slavic union and presented it to the Russian public as a kind of latter-day crusade against both the “Romano-German” West and the heathen Turks.

The center of this new reactionary Pan-Slavism was Moscow, in which the Jacobin extremists of the left were concurrently gathering strength in the late sixties. The decisive event in the emergence of reactionary Pan-Slavism was the Moscow Slavic Congress of 1867, which was largely supported by the city of Moscow and loudly hailed by Aksakov’s journal Moscow as well as Katkov’s Moscow News. The only previous congress of Slavs had taken place in Prague in 1848, with the only Russian representatives being two outcasts: the revolutionary Bakunin and an Old Believer bishop. But the new congress was given lavish support and sponsorship by official Russia. It became, in effect, the first of those now-familiar “cultural” festivals whose main practical result is to advance Russian political objectives. The writing that most perfectly expressed the views of reactionary Pan-Slavs in Russia was a hitherto unpublished treatise by an obscure Slovakian called Slavdom and the World of the Future, which was suddenly vaulted to prominence in the closing days of the congress. It called for the unification of the Slavs under Russian leadership, with Moscow to be the capital, Russian to be the language, and Orthodoxy to be the religion.⁴⁵ The idea of a violent, irreconcilable conflict between the Slavic and the Romano-German worlds was given a kind of pseudo-scientific formulation by a biologist and former Petrashevets, Nicholas Danilevsky, in his Russia and Europe, published serially in 1868, and as a book in 1871.

Pan-Slavism became a kind of imperialist ideology through such works as the shorter and more blunt memorandum of General Rostislav Fadeev, Opinion on the Eastern Question, which was also published serially in the late sixties and then as a book in 1870. During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8, this frankly expansionist ideology proved strikingly effective in rallying mass support for a successful war effort. This autocratic, imperialistic Pan-Slavism bore little resemblance to the mellow and idealistic Slavophilism of an earlier generation, or even to the earlier Pan-Slav proclamations of men like Aksakov and Bakunin, who had linked Pan-Slavism with the federative principle and with support for the Polish efforts to break loose from the Tsarist yoke.

It was a brutal, but at the same time popular, doctrine. It provided a simple, dramatic picture of the world that glorified tsarist autocracy and channeled off domestic feuds and resentments into hatred of foreigners. It played on classic Russian prejudices by denouncing not only the Turks and Germans but also the Poles as Western traitors and the Hungarians as “Asian interlopers” in Eastern Europe.

Pan-Slavism can be described as Moscow’s prophetic alternative to the prophetic, St. Petersburg-based doctrine of populism. Like populism, Pan-Slavism challenged the earlier tendency of Russian intellectuals to flee to Berlin, Paris, or Rome in search of inspiration, holding out the promise of a new destiny and deliverance in the East. But, whereas the populists pointed prophetically to the Russian countryside, the Pan-Slavs harked back to the old imperial dream of reconquering Constantinople. Like the populists, the Pan-Slavs offered a theory of history based on the application of allegedly scientific principles to social problems; but they appealed to the Darwinistic principle of inevitable struggle and survival of the fittest, which the populists steadfastly refused to recognize as scientifically applicable to humanity. The violent repression of the movement to the people and the violence and fanaticism of the Turkish war seems to have subtly convinced many radicals that perhaps the Darwinistic image was right. In their desire to swerve away from the Scylla of reaction in the post-war years, they found themselves increasingly drawn into the Charybdis of Jacobin revolution, the opposite extremism of the Alexandrian period. The whirlpool of professional revolutionary activity had frequently beckoned to confused participants in the populist movement. But prior to the formation of a nationwide, populist revolutionary organization (the second organization to bear the title “Land and Liberty”) late in 1878 and the more explicitly terrorist People’s Will organization that supplanted it the following year, populism had been identified principally with evolutionary rather than revolutionary approaches.

The revolutionary Jacobinism of the left was, like the reactionary Pan-Slavism of the right, a Muscovite outgrowth of the restless iconoclasm of the sixties. The first call for secret revolutionary organization and direct action was contained in the pamphlet “Young Russia,” published in 1862 by a nineteen-year-old mathematics student at Moscow University, P. Zaichnevsky. He was one of a group of about twenty Moscow students who called themselves “The Society of Communists” and devoted themselves almost entirely to the reading and publishing of Western revolutionary literature. The most thoroughgoing program for nationwide revolutionary organization was provided, curiously enough, by Herzen’s old friend and collaborator, Nicholas Ogarev, in connection with the efforts to make a nationwide movement out of the Land and Liberty group of the early sixties. The first Land and Liberty group was based in St. Petersburg and accommodated a wide range of radical views; but Ogarev sought to transform it into a conspiratorial revolutionary organization run by a secret central committee with regional organization, veiled front groups as a mask for revolutionary organization, and a publication center abroad to provide ideological support and theoretical direction.⁴⁶ The first Land and Liberty group went out of existence in 1863 and never seems to have adopted a fully revolutionary program or organization. The next stage in the development of a professional revolutionary tradition occurred once more in Moscow, with the formation of two new extremist circles in 1865, those of N. Ishutin and N. Nefedov, respectively. The first group, known as “The Organization,” commissioned a young student, Dmitry Karakozov, to attempt an assassination of Tsar Alexander II the following year, thus launching the tradition of active revolutionary terrorism. It also formed a secret circle within the revolutionary group known as Hell (Ad) to combat police provocateurs and conduct terrorist activities. Members of the Hell group were expected to give up all family ties, assume new names, and be prepared to sacrifice their lives. The counter-revolutionary white terror that followed the Karakozov attempt drove the leading protégé of N. Nefedov, young Sergius Nechaev, to further extremes in outlining a course for professional revolutionaries.

Like the Ishutin group, Nechaev had visions of founding a professional revolutionary cadre that was to be linked with a vast, Europe-wide conspiratorial organization. He journeyed abroad, received a measure of approval from a fascinated Bakunin and Ogarev, and returned to Moscow in 1869 to put his fantastic plans into practice. He brought with him as a guide for his revolutionary organization the famous Revolutionary Catechism, with its doctrine of a revolutionary association (tovarishchestvo) that has “not just in words, but in deed, broken every tie with the civil order, with the educated world and all laws, conventions … ethics.”⁴⁷ The professional revolutionary was to be an ascetic, totally dedicated to overthrowing the civil order through a coldly rational campaign of terror, blackmail, manipulation, and deception. To implement his program Nechaev set up a series of “revolutionary fives,” each secret from the other and connected only by a hierarchy that exercised absolute discipline over all. Nechaev evolved the extraordinary technique of seeking to guarantee obedience by deliberately involving his fellow revolutionaries in a common crime. In a famous incident on November 21, 1869, he and the three other members of a Moscow “five” killed a young student and fellow conspirator because of incriminating information that Nechaev told them he had received from a (nonexistent) “central committee.” The Nechaev affair became a cause célèbre that did not leave the public eye for nearly five years. It took the Tsarist government two years to catch him and much of 1871 to try him. The courtroom revelations about his activities and the literary representation given them in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed precipitated a vigorous journalistic discussion that lasted throughout the early seventies.

The populists who dominated this period deliberately sought to represent themselves as an alternative to the Nechaevism which they considered a “monstrosity,” a survival of the bygone “eccentric” or “metaphysical” stage of history. They believed in Comte’s and Chaikovsky’s “religion of humanity” rather than Nechaev’s religion of revolution.

With, however, the general turn to violence and the triumph of reactionary Pan-Slavism, populists were no longer able to scoff at the cynical contention of Nechaev that “to love the people means to lead it by grape-shot.”⁴⁸ In order to sustain its all-important vision of a dramatic social transformation in Russia, the populists were forced to consider the long-neglected question of a political alternative to autocracy. The lack of any parliamentary or legal opposition bodies through which to work and the enduring superstition of “idea-less” liberal reformers left them no anchor to prevent drifting into the whirlpool of revolution.

The siren song which lured them was that of the last great theorist of Russian Jacobinism, Peter Tkachev. He was a veteran of almost every important conspiratorial organization of the sixties, a confirmed materialist and egalitarian who had led the war of the sons against the fathers by helping write “Young Russia” and urging at one point that mercy killing be administered to everyone over the age of twenty-five.

True to the tradition of professional revolutionaries, Tkachev was deeply opposed to the vagueness and optimism of the populist tradition; but unlike previous theoreticians of revolutionary organization, he saw in the intelligentsia that had created populism the logical social grouping from which to recruit revolutionary leadership. In a correspondence with Engels in 1874-5, he foresaw the emergence of an “intelligentnaia revolutionary party” in Russia. In his Russian-language journal Nabat (The Alarm Bell) published from 1875-81 and aimed only at the intelligent, elite audience, he urged the rootless intellectuals of Russia to form a disciplined, military revolutionary organization out of their own ranks. He opposed relying on the populist illusion of peasant support or waiting for the emergence of an urban proletariat to provide material for a Marxist type of revolution. The important thing was to develop a militant organization capable of overthrowing the existing regime through revolution. The nabat provided the signal to rally for emergency combat in Old Russia: and that was precisely what Tkachev intended that his journal should provide for Young Russia.

Tkachev did not exercise major influence on either the ideology or the tactics which the second Land and Liberty and the People’s Will adopted. These organizations were true to their populist heritage in continuing to believe in the possibilities of support from peasants, workers, sectarians, and other groups; in being reluctant revolutionaries and poor organizers whose principal technique of political struggle was random assassination; and in seeking to represent themselves as expressions of “the people’s will.” Nevertheless, the People’s Will organization represents a fulfillment of (if not a response to) Tkachev’s basic idea that Russia could and should produce out of its uprooted intellectual community a revolutionary organization with the conscious political objective of overthrowing tsarism.

With the formation of the People’s Will organization in the summer of 1879, revolutionary extremism obtained a dramatic program and a nationwide organization to parallel the program and organization that reactionary extremism had gained earlier through the Pan-Slav movement. Just as Muscovite Pan-Slavism had become the policy of the once-liberal government in St. Petersburg, so Muscovite Jacobinism had become the policy of the once-moderate populist counter-government in St. Petersburg. Peaceful, reformatorial optimism in both the government and the anti-government camps had given way to extremism. Moderate populists like Mikhailovsky and Shelgunov were carried along by the new extremist enthusiasm of the left just as moderate liberals had been by the Pan-Slav enthusiasms of the right. The terrorist campaigns and clandestine meetings and proclamations of the Executive Committee of the People’s Will provided the anti-government forces with a form of conflict as colorful and dramatic as the Turkish war. The People’s Will organization was a prophetic anticipation of and (to a greater extent than is generally realized) model for the next nationwide organization of professional revolutionaries seeking to overthrow tsardom, Lenin’s Bolshevik Party. At the same time, populist journalists were institutionalizing certain practices that anticipated those of Lenin: ritual denunciations of “enemies of the people,” “careerism,” and “lack of ideology” (bezideinost’), and a rigid editorial and critical insistence that art must have a realistic style and a clear social message.

But the People’s Will was still far more deeply rooted in the romantic, compassionate thought-world of populism than in the calculating Jacobinism of Tkachev and Lenin. As the Tsar lay dying by a canal in St. Petersburg on March 1, 1881, his legs shattered by a terrorist’s bomb, another terrorist forfeited his chance for escape by rushing in to prop up Alexander’s head with his own packaged bomb. The terrorists who were brought to trial were true to the populist courtroom tradition of confessing guilt but seeking to vindicate the ideals for which they had acted. Zheliabov insisted that “the essence of the teachings of Jesus Christ … was my primary moral incentive” and was at pains to point out how reluctant all the populists were to turn to terror and violence.⁴⁹ The executive committee of the People’s Will addressed its first action after the assassination, not to its own revolutionary affiliates or any potentially revolutionary segment of the populace, but to the new Tsar himself, urging him to summon a national assembly to initiate reforms and end the “sad necessity” of bloodshed.

The acceleration of the terrorist campaign which climaxed in the assassination of Alexander presents, however, one last piece of high irony. For this turn to extremism among the populists occurred at precisely the time that Alexander had begun to turn away from extremism. Serious discussions of social and political reform were once more being conducted among the Tsar’s inner circle of advisers. On March 1, the very day of his assassination, Alexander had tentatively approved a year-old project to include part of the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie in the machinery of government. The renewed interest and encouragement which the Tsar had shown the zemstvo movement (in an effort to enlist its support in combating terrorism) had led to a rapid increase in the vitality and political ambitions of this nationwide chain of provincial administrative groups. Journalistic friends of populism, such as Mikhailovsky in St. Petersburg and Zaitsev and Sokolov in Geneva, were actively working to encourage some kind of populist-liberal rapprochement. The objective possibilities for a broadly based moderate reform movement seem to have been bright in retrospect. Populism and liberalism were both St. Petersburg-based movements inherently opposed to extremism.

But the People’s Will knew nothing about the secret constitutional project that the Tsar had approved; and the Tsar’s liberal advisers had no knowledge of the more moderate trends that were still present within the populist movement. The differences between a populist intelligent and a pragmatic liberal were in many ways even deeper than those between populism and either of the Moscow-based extremist ideologies. Revolutionary Jacobinism, evolutionary populism, and reactionary Pan-Slav imperialism all developed out of the iconoclastic revolution. Each position contended that dramatic changes were about to take place in human history; and it was easier for proponents of one such ideology to drift into another than to leave ideology altogether for a more mundane liberal approach. Once begun, the search for truth could not be abandoned for the pursuit of pleasure or the consolation of half-truths. Fragmentary ideas of aristocratic intellectuals were becoming programs for action and articles of faith in the hands of the new intelligentsia. Whatever it might have been, the intelligentsia was to become what Katkov feared and Tkachev hoped it would be: the herald of revolution. The intelligentsia was a class above classes that in the populist age helped translate the cursed questions of the aristocratic century into the cursed movements of modern Russia.