Icon and Axe

3. New Perspectives of the Waning Century

THE EARLY MONTHS of 1881 brought the death of Musorgsky and Dostoevsky and the end of the populist period in the history of Russian culture. It seems strangely appropriate that Surikov’s “Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy,” one of the “wanderers”’ most famous historical canvases, was first exhibited in St. Petersburg on March 1, 1881, the very day of Alexander II’s assassination.¹ This murder precipitated a program of execution and purge that was as decisive, if not quite as bloody, as that to which Surikov’s canvas alluded. The wave of reaction and repression that followed the death of the “tsar-liberator” did not recede significantly until the revolutionary crisis of 1905, nearly a quarter of a century later.

The artists of the populist age had combined remorseless realism with a compulsive conviction that “the people” contained in some way the hidden key to the regeneration of Russian society. Artists and agitators alike—many of whom had been educated in seminaries—frequently subscribed to the vague but passionate belief that some new, primarily ethical form of Christianity was about to be realized on Russian soil. It was not uncommon for “liberty, equality, and fraternity” to be written on crosses; or for radicals to affirm their belief in “Christ, St. Paul, and Chernyshevsky.” The ideal of a new Christian form of society drew strength from the indigenous schismatic and sectarian traditions, from the Comtian idea of a religion of humanity, from the quasi-religious socialism of Proudhon, and even from official insistence that Christian Russia had a unique spiritual heritage to defend against the heathen Turks and the corrupt West.

It is hard to recapture the great sense of expectation that pervaded the atmosphere of Alexander’s last years. There was a general feeling that dramatic changes were inevitable precisely because of Russia’s increasing importance in the world and the need to be worthy of its calling. Dostoevsky’s famous speech in Moscow on June 8, 1880, extolling Pushkin as a uniquely Russian prophet of universal reconciliation, was the scene of a public demonstration typical of the age. For half an hour he was cheered as scores of people wept, and he was publicly embraced by everyone from the old Slavophile Aksakov to the old Westernizer (and his long-time antagonist) Turgenev. Voices in the crowd called out “prophet” just as they had burst forth in the court scenes of the late seventies to call out their approval for the pleas of political prisoners to fight “in the name of Christ” for “the humiliated and the weak.” The raised section in which the accused sat was referred to as Golgotha, and the revolutionaries frequently spoke of themselves as “true Christians” or a “Christian brotherhood.” Even the most positivistic of populists, Mikhailovsky and Lavrov, claimed Christ on occasion as the source of their moral ideas; and most “men of the seventies” believed that moral ideals—not political or economic forces—would ultimately determine the course of history.

The assassins of Alexander II seemed to believe that this act was a kind of spiritual duty which would in itself bring about the new age of brotherhood. The moral fervor and selflessness of the conspirators appealed to the intellectuals, many of whom (in the manner of the Karamazov brothers) felt responsible in some way for the assassination and involved in the trial and punishment. Prominent intellectuals like Tolstoy and Solov’ev appealed to the new Tsar for clemency—often precipitating emotional demonstrations of student support. Though few outside of the leadership of the People’s Will organization favored terroristic assassination, many believed that the Tsar now had a unique opportunity to perform an act of Christian forgiveness that could resolve the disharmonies in society. It seemed as if the thirty thousand who had flocked to Dostoevsky’s grave in January of 1881 were looking to Alexander III to be the “true Tsar,” the long-lost Ivan the Tsarevich who would realize the hopes of his suffering people.

Alexander, however, followed the path that Nicholas I had taken after the Decembrist uprising, hanging the killers and initiating a reign of reaction. In a series of manifestoes and decrees he attempted to suppress once and for all both the activity of the revolutionaries and the intellectual ferment that lay behind it. The steady expansion of the educational system (and the unusually liberal range of higher educational opportunities for women) under Alexander II was curtailed by a return to Uvarov’s idea of education as a form of civic discipline. By the end of 1884 all ministers even faintly interested in constitutional or federal rights had been dismissed, all publications of the People’s Will curtailed, and the leading journal of legal populism, The Annals of the Fatherland, outlawed forever. This determined dash of cold water produced a stunned silence among those who had shared in the great expectations of the populist period. From a cultural point of view the reign of Alexander III (1881-94) was a period of profound depression. The populist mythos continued to dominate Russian social thought, but gone were the old utopian expectations and excitement. The period was referred to as one of “small deeds” and “cultural populism” as distinct from the great deeds and socially revolutionary populism of the seventies.

Two long-labored masterpieces of populist art were completed during this period: Repin’s painting “The Zaporozhian Cossacks Write a Letter to the Turkish Sultan” and Borodin’s opera Prince Igor. They stand as final monuments of the new national art promised by the “wanderers” and the “mighty handful” respectively. Repin’s canvas, which occupied him from 1878 to 1891, depicts the idealized exuberance of the rough-hewn “people,” spontaneously and communally defying a would-be alien oppressor. Borodin’s opera, on which he worked from 1869 till his death in 1887, elaborates the epic tale of Igor’s ill-fated battle with the Polovtsy into a colorful stage pageant that harmoniously combined equal measures of earthy comedy, exotic dancing, and vocal lyricism.

Igor was Borodin’s only mature opera, and came close to being a collective enterprise of the Russian national school even before Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov were called on to finish the work after his death. Borodin often composed in the company of his friends. He used his knowledge as one of the outstanding chemists of his age to devise a special gelatin for preserving his crudely penciled scores and also to help develop Russian medical education. Despite his cosmopolitan education and mastery of many languages and disciplines, Borodin looked to Russian popular culture for his dramatic subject matter. He died in Russian national costume at a benefit ball, and was laid to rest near Musorgsky and Dostoevsky in the Alexander Nevsky cemetery. If subsequent generations were to remember Borodin’s opera primarily for the famed dances in the camp of the Polovtsy, those who first saw the opera in the melancholy Russia of the early 1890’s must have felt a special sense of identification with an earlier scene in the same act. The lonely figure of Igor, defeated in his great campaign and frustrated by his captivity, seeks private consolation by summoning up—in some of the most ecstatic music ever written for the bass voice—the image of his faithful wife; and by stepping forward to sing a line that is echoed by the surging orchestra and might well stand as the unanswered lyric prayer of the populist age: “O, give, give me freedom.”²

Left with “small deeds” and unfulfilled hopes, idealists in the age of Alexander III fled from the broad arena of history to private worlds of lyric lament. The failure of the populist age and its prophetic artists to find any new redemptive message for Russia was accepted as final. The only consolation was to find beauty in the very sadness of life. The fairy-tale beauty of Chaikovsky’s ballets, Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and The Sleeping Beauty, began during this period their long service to Russia of providing childlike interludes of graceful fancy for a harassed people. The talent that was to produce in 1890 the powerful, at times hallucinatory operatic masterpiece, The Queen of Spades, had already fashioned from another famous text of Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, the most popular opera of the 1880’s (thanks partly to Alexander III’s special passion for it). The preoccupation of this opera with unideological problems of personal relations and its mood of lush musical melancholy corresponded in many ways to the spirit of the times. Lensky’s tenor lament for his wasted youth and Onegin’s own farewell to his lost love amidst falling leaves in the last act seemed to drown sadness in a gush of melody. The composer who had entered the Russian musical scene with a buoyant cantata of 1865 based on Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” died in 1893, just nine days after conducting the first performance of his grief-laden Sixth Symphony, appropriately known as the “Pathétique.”

The leading painter of this period, Isaac Levitan, retreated altogether from the world of people to become perhaps the greatest of all Russian landscape painters. Not a single human figure appears in the paintings of the last twenty-one years of his life.³ Yet Levitan, like Chaikovsky, projects a deeply human sense of sadness into the beauty of his work. Many of his best compositions—“Evening on the Volga,” “Evening Bells,” and “The Golden Autumn”—depict the afterglow of nature rather than daylight or the promise of springtime.

An even sadder mood is set in the work of Levitan’s lifelong friend, Anton Chekhov. Nowhere more than in Chekhov’s plays does one find the pathos-in-comedy of human futility portrayed with more beauty and feeling. Although his greatest plays were written early in the reign of Nicholas II, they reflect the mood that had developed under Alexander III, the period of Chekhov’s development as a writer. “I am in mourning for my life,” explains the leading character at the beginning of Chekhov’s first great play, The Sea Gull. The idea of a dead sea gull as a symbol of pathos had been suggested to him by Levitan; but through Chekhov’s plays the symbol became equated with the slow and graceful gliding out to sea of old aristocratic Russia.

Characters wander across the stage unable to communicate with one another, let alone with the world about them. “There is nothing for it,” says Sonya at the end of Uncle Vanya. “We shall live through a long chain of days and weary evenings; we shall patiently bear the trials which fate sends us … and when our time comes we shall die without a murmur.” Consistently, Chekhov glorifies those who suffer and succumb, still believing in the ideals of populism, but no longer expecting to see them realized on earth. Sonya suggests that “beyond the grave we shall see all our sufferings drowned in mercy that will fill the world.” But this is only a lovely lyric moment like the melody from the “Pathétique Symphony.” Progressively in his dramas, Chekhov moves away from all hope and consolation—even those found in the familiar conventions of melodrama, such as the escape-through-suicide which he invoked in The Sea Gull and Three Sisters. Seeking perhaps the tranquil twilight of Levitan’s landscapes, Chekhov fled to a cherry orchard for his last play and went to the Black Forest to die. But he knew that the forces of material change were prevailing, and the offstage sound of the axe in the orchard brings down the final curtain in his last play.

Lyric lament was replacing the harsh but inclusive realism of the populist age. Short stories and sketches replaced the great works of the populist age. There is nothing in the late nineteenth century to compare in scope and realistic intensity with Nekrasov’s poem “Who Then Is Happy in Russia?” (1863-76) or Saltykov’s Golovlev Family (1872-6), let alone with Khovanshchina or The Brothers Karamazov. The golden age of the realistic novel came to an end in the eighties just as the golden age of Russian poetry had ended in the forties. Turgenev wrote his last novel (and Tolstoy his last great one) in the late seventies. Pisemsky, another pioneer of the realistic novel, died within a few weeks of Dostoevsky and Musorgsky in 1881. By the end of the decade Saltykov, Shelgunov, Eliseev, and Chernyshevsky had died, thus severing the last living links with the critical journalistic traditions of the sixties. Of the leading populist writers, only Uspensky and Mikhailovsky remained active in Russia and uncompromised in their fidelity to populist ideals throughout the eighties. But the former was going slowly insane after completing his bleak masterpiece The Power of the Land (1882) and such prophetic fragments as Man and the Machine (1884). Mikhailovsky had developed a marked nervous tic and was increasingly preoccupied with publishing the memoirs of himself and his friends.

It was, in general, a time for memoir writing and commemorative meetings in imitation of the Pushkin fete of 1880. Some former revolutionaries like Tikhomirov publicly renounced their previous beliefs and achieved notoriety inside Russia; others like Kravchinsky (Stepniak) and Kropotkin fled abroad and earned reputations in Western radical circles as martyred heroes and revolutionary theorists. The pathetic conspiratorial effort to kill Alexander III in 1887 (in which such unlikely bedfellows as Pilsudski and Lenin’s older brother were involved) reflected the futility and addiction to old patterns that prevailed among the few who continued as active revolutionaries inside Russia.

More typical of the age than this isolated act of terroristic heroism was the emotional but essentially apolitical student demonstration of 1886 on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Dobroliubov’s death. With the death of Ostrovsky in the same year and of Garshin and Saltykov in 1888 and 1889 respectively, the age of realism in Russian literature can be said to have ended.

In its place a new popular culture appeared that sought neither to depict reality nor to answer vexing questions but to distract the masses with sex, sensationalism, and crude chauvinism. Illustrated weeklies captured the attention of those who might previously have turned to the thick monthly journals for ideas and inspiration. One of these journals, Niva, grew rapidly from its relatively obscure origins in 1869 to gain, by the end of the reign of Alexander III, the totally unprecedented circulation of 200,000. It and other journals offered a new literature of faded romantic escapism. Exotic travel literature, sentimentalized love stories, and stereotyped historical novels rushed in to fill a void created both by the tightened censorship and by general exhaustion at the no-exit realism of the previous era.

Amidst the lassitude and bezideinost’ (“lack of ideology”) of the era, two powerful figures struggled, as it were, for the soul of Russia: Constantine Pobedonostsev and Leo Tolstoy. They had both opposed and outlived the revolutionaries of the sixties and were already relatively old men by the eighties, yet both were destined to live on into the twentieth century. Neither of them founded a movement, yet each contributed to the climate of fanaticism that made revolution rather than reform the path through which modernization was accomplished in twentieth-century Russia.

These two figures helped define the unresolved and often unacknowledged conflict of political ideas within the thought of the populist age: between irrational adherence to authoritarian tradition and rationalistic insistence on a direct transformation of society. Pobedonostsev, the lawyer and lay head of the Church Synod, was the symbol and author of Alexander III’s program of reaction. Tolstoy, the novelist turned barefoot religious teacher, was the enduring symbol and example of anarchistic populist protest. However bitterly they were opposed to one another, each was in a sense true to the populist age in which he was nurtured. For each of them was uniquely willing in the succeeding age of small deeds and great compromises to sacrifice his personal happiness and well-being to the ideal in which he believed. The ideal of each was, moreover, that of a totally renovated Christian society rather than of partial improvement through practical economic or political reforms.

Their paths first crossed in 1881, when Pobedonostsev withheld from Alexander III Tolstoy’s letter urging clemency for the assassins of the Tsar’s father. “As wax before the fire, every revolutionary struggle will melt away before the man-tsar who fulfills the law of Christ,” Tolstoy wrote; but Pobedonostsev correctly retorted that “our Christ is not your Christ.”⁴ They met again in 1899, when Tolstoy included in his last novel Resurrection a thinly veiled caricature of Pobedonostsev. The latter responded in 1902 by excommunicating Tolstoy, whose followers countered with the defiant statement that “your anathemas will far more surely open to us the doors of the Kingdom of Heaven than could your prayers.”

Like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, Pobedonostsev favored theocratic rule through mystery and authority. He was opposed to all freedom of expression and favored the systematic subordination of sectarian and minority cultures to a monolithic Russian Orthodox culture. Access to pernicious foreign ideas was to be confined to an intellectual elite; but otherwise education was to be limited to catechistic indoctrination in Russian traditions and moral values.

In some respects Pobedonostsev’s social doctrine resembles the theory of “freezing up Russia to avoid rotting” contemporaneously being advanced by Constantine Leont’ev. He detested the tendency toward uniformity in “the Europe of railroads and banks … of increasing material indulgence, and prosaic dreams about the common good.”⁵ Reminiscent of Nietzsche is his aesthetic antagonism to bourgeois mediocrity, which amplifies a sentiment already found in Herzen as well as Pisemsky and other anti-nihilist novelists of the populist era:

Is it not dreadful and humiliating to think that Moses went up upon Sinai, the Greeks built their lovely temples, the Romans waged their Punic Wars, Alexander, that handsome genius in a plumed helmet, fought his battles, apostles preached, martyrs suffered, poets sang, artists painted, knights shone at tournaments—only that some French, German or Russian bourgeois garbed in unsightly and absurd clothes should enjoy life “individually” or “collectively” on the ruins of all this vanished splendor?⁶

There will be no beauty in life without inequality and violence. To pluck the rose, man must be willing to pierce his fingers on the thorns. Even before the outbreak of the first Balkan War in the mid-seventies Leont’ev insisted that “liberal nihilism” has produced such “decrepitude of mind and heart” that what is needed for rejuvenation may well be “a whole period of external wars analogous to the Thirty Years’ War or at least to the epoch of Napoleon I.”⁷

For aristocratic and aesthetic reasons, Leont’ev rebelled at all reforms, proposing a total return to the ritual and discipline of Byzantine rule. He died as a monk in the monastery of the Holy Trinity, bemoaning the end of the age of poetry and human variety. Pobedonostsev, on the contrary, was a thoroughly prosaic lay figure, whose ideal was the gray efficiency and uniformity of the modern organization man. He was the prophet of duty, work, and order—shifting his bishops around periodically to prevent any distracting local attachments from impeding the smooth functioning of the ecclesiastical machine. He was unemotional, even cynical, about his methods. But they were generally effective and earn him a deserved place as one of the builders of the centralized bureaucratic state. Like the modern totalitarian regimes which his own rule often seems to anticipate, he has a low view of human nature and insists that regimes based on a more optimistic reading of the masses will collapse. “The state must show in itself a living faith. The popular mind is suspicious and may not be seduced … by compromise,”⁸ he insists in criticizing advocates of constitutional processes for Russia. Any efforts to transplant democratic institutions to Russia will merely lead to revolution.

Organization and bribery are the two mighty instruments used with such success for the manipulation of the masses.… In our time a new means has been found of working the masses for political ends … this is the art of rapid and dexterous generalization of ideas disseminated with the confidence of burning conviction as the last word of science.⁹

In a sense Pobedonostsev foresaw the program of revolution that would prevail in Russia even before the revolutionaries themselves. He sought to combat it with his own forms of organization, indoctrination, and forced conformity.

The most consistent opponent of his policies was Tolstoy, who after completing Anna Karenina in 1876 had given up his brilliant career as a novelist to preach his own form of Christian living to the Russian masses. The extraordinary spectacle of a magnificent writer and exuberant aristocrat wandering in peasant garb among the peasants of his estate and writing elementary primers on Christian morality attracted world-wide attention and deprived Tsarist absolutism of its moral authority among many thinking people. By the end of his long life many Russians spoke of their “two Tsars”: the crowned Tsar in St. Petersburg and the uncrowned Tsar in Yasnaya Polyana.

Tolstoy was such a formidable figure that he transcends the environment in which he lived, yet he was deeply rooted in it. His greatest novel, War and Peace, is a panoramic, epic tale of Russian history. His other monumental work, Anna Karenina, is an effort to solve the problem of family happiness and social adjustment that had plagued Russian aristocratic literature from Pushkin through Turgenev. In the character of Platon Karataev in the first work and Levin in the second, Tolstoy begins to develop his new ethical philosophy of returning to the harmony of the natural world. In contrast to the Karamazovs’ love of the elemental and sensuous, of “life more than the meaning of life,” Tolstoy’s Levin insists that life without meaning is unbearable, that life “has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.” The last thirty years of Tolstoy’s own life were spent in trying to define “the meaning of goodness” and to saddle his own earthy personality to the task of bringing good into the corrupted life of late Imperial Russia.

During this long and baffling period of religious teaching, Tolstoy develops a number of concepts that had become important in the Russian intellectual tradition. His moral puritanism and rejection of sexual lust and artistic creativity are in the tradition of the sixties; his personal passion for identity with the peasants and the unspoiled natural world is a reflection of the populist ethos of the seventies. His belief in human perfectibility puts him in the main stream of Russian radical thought, as does his anarchistic rejection of institutional coercion and constitutional processes. Most important of all, Tolstoy avidly defended and was deeply influenced by the Russian sectarians. He viewed his own ethical teaching as the “true Christianity” of morals rather than metaphysics, a rational syncretic religion that required no church or dogma.

What is unique in Tolstoy is the relentlessness with which he developed lines of thought that his predecessors had never carried to their logical conclusions. Implicitly throughout War and Peace and explicitly in the second epilogue he extends belief in the power of the people to the point where he denies any significance to the individual. In his religious writings he develops the populist faith in the power of moral ideals to the point where he renounces all use of coercion in support of such ideals. The populist belief that the search for justice must be accompanied by the search for truth led him to renounce his art and finally his family: to go off like Stepan Trofimovich at the end of The Possessed on a last pathetic pilgrimage into the countryside, which led to death in 1910 in a lonely provincial railroad station.

The contrast is frequently made between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, two of Russia’s greatest thinkers and of the world’s greatest novelists. The epic, pastoral world of Tolstoy, the high aristocrat and rationalistic “seer of the flesh” is in many ways the very antithesis of the dramatic, urban world of Dostoevsky, the low aristocrat and often irrational “seer of the spirit.”¹⁰ One image perhaps goes to the heart of the difference. In contrast to Dostoevsky’s early love of Schiller and final apotheosis of the play instinct in The Brothers stands Tolstoy’s early statement that “life is not a game but a serious matter”—which is repeated almost verbatim in his last letter to his wife. As he put it in his What Is To Be Done? of the mid-eighties:

Human life … has no other object than to elucidate moral truths … and this elucidation is not only the chief but ought to be the sole business of man.

Life was a serious matter for Tolstoy because it was the arena in which man’s quest for moral perfection and universal happiness had to be realized. Unlike Dostoevsky, for whom evil and death were part of the greater drama of suffering and redemption, they were for Tolstoy unaccountable intrusions into his world of Promethean perfectibility.

Tolstoy was terrified by death—an event which he portrayed in his works with the vividness and psychological insight of one who had obviously dwelt deeply on the problem. He was fascinated in his late years by Nicholas Fedorov, the librarian of the Rumiantsev museum (now Lenin Library) in Moscow, who taught that the advance of science would make possible the perpetuation of life and even the resurrection of those already dead. He also returned periodically to the idea that the assertive, artificial world of men contains less wisdom than that of animals, and that of animals less than that of the composed and earth-bound vegetable world.

In all these interests, the naturalistic mind of Tolstoy seems to be pointing toward the areas in which Russian scientists of the 1880’s and 1890’s were to make some of their most distinctive theoretical innovations. The idea of prolonging life through dietary means and the establishment of new moral and biological harmonies within the body was an idée fixe of Russia’s greatest biologist of the period, Elie Mechnikov. He subsequently became Pasteur’s assistant in Paris and Nobel Prize winner in 1908. But his predominant interest in his later years lay in the science of geriatrics, or the prolongation of life—a field that was to continue to fascinate scientists of the Soviet period.

The idea that many secrets of the universe are contained in the natural harmonies that exist between the earth and the vegetable world was the point of departure for Russia’s greatest geologist of this period, Vladimir Dokuchaev. This imaginative figure from Nizhny Novgorod believed that all of Russia was divided into five “natural historical zones,” each of which determined the forms of life and activity that developed on it. He was the founder of the untranslatable Russian science of “soil learning” (pochvovedenie), which is a kind of combination of soil genetics and soil mechanics. Like Mechnikov in biology, Dokuchaev in geology tended to be progressively more interested in the philosophic implications of his work, though Soviet hagiographers prefer to concentrate exclusively on the detailed investigations and practical discoveries of their earlier periods. Dokuchaev sought to study

those eternal, genetic, and invariably regular links which exist between forces, bodies, and events; between living and dead nature; between the plant, animal, and mineral kingdoms on the one side and man, his life, and even the spiritual world on the other.¹¹

Dokuchaev was extremely critical of Western geology, which studied the soil only for utilitarian reasons. Pochvovedenie, in contrast, sought to gain an inner understanding not just of the soil but of the life that comes from it. Dokuchaev believed that there were “extremely close and everlasting interrelationships between water, air, land, plant and animal organisms” as well as the growth and changes in human society.¹² Dokuchaev’s science —together with the idealistic polemics of a former populist writer on village life for The Annals of the Fatherland, Alexander Engel’gardt—began the first serious interest in forest conservation in Russia as well as a vast reorganization and improvement in higher agricultural education. He compared water in the soil to blood in the body and inspired his followers to establish a science of “phyto-sociology,” the study of forests as “social organisms.”¹³ Raised in a clerical family and partly educated in a seminary, Dokuchaev freely acknowledged his debt to Schellingian Naturphilosophie. Most Western geologists still consider him an eccentric. But Dokuchaev’s combination of detailed regional investigations and general idealistic enthusiasm was largely responsible for placing Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century at the forefront of scientific discovery in many fields of soil mechanics, permafrost research, and so on.

Dokuchaev and Fedorov died a few years before Tolstoy and Mechnikov. None of these idealistic naturalists found the secrets of the tangible, physical world for which they all searched. Tolstoy lived longest, dying at the age of eighty-two. In accordance with the decrees of Pobedonostsev (who had preceded him to the grave by three years) Tolstoy was denied any religious rites at his burial. He was laid to rest on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana by the green stick on which, he had thought as a youth, could be found the secret by which all men could live in happiness and brotherhood.

It was primarily this secret—the secret of a rational moral society— that Tolstoy had sought in vain to find. The passionate sincerity of his quest had kept alive, however, the populist tradition of moral dedication and utopian hope. In contrast to the traditionalism and coerciveness of Pobedonostsev, Tolstoy presented the ideal of a non-violent moral revolution. In his religious teachings there is a curious blend of sectarian Protestant puritanism and Oriental resignation before the mysteries of nature. He has always been admired (and was to some extent influenced by) the more syncretic and anti-traditional forms of Protestantism.¹⁴ As a student at Kazan he had originally studied Oriental languages; he had a life-long admiration for Buddhism; and his own religious search brought him to admire Confucianism as the model for a religion of morality rather than metaphysics. It seems appropriate that his religious ideas were to have by far their greatest impact in the Orient—above all through Gandhi’s adoption of Tolstoy’s doctrine of non-violent resistance.¹⁵ Whereas Europeans have tended to view his later religious writings as a marked decline from the glories of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, non-Europeans often tend to view the latter as the minor youthful works of a man on the path toward rediscovering in the fullness of years the abiding truths of the agrarian East.

Within Russia Tolstoy had only a handful of real followers. Neither he nor his foe Pobedonostsev was able to address himself to new problems and concerns. They were old men defending established traditions of the imperial bureaucracy and the truth-seeking aristocratic intelligentsia respectively. The power exercised by Pobedonostsev and the spell cast by Tolstoy helped weaken the effectiveness of more moderate reformers. Yet neither Pobedonostsev nor Tolstoy was able to dispel the prevailing melancholia of the eighties, let alone point the way to any new approaches to the problems of the day.

Both looked on the major new trends in the surrounding world with fear and antagonism. The intellectual and political agitation of contemporary Europe seemed to them irrelevant, corrupting, and self-serving. In exasperation more than exultation, they both fled to a Christianity of their own devising: linked in Pobedonostsev’s case to Oriental despotism and in Tolstoy’s to Oriental mysticism.

Yet it would be unjust to link the protean Tolstoy with the narrow Pobedonostsev. Tolstoy was, in many ways, the last true giant of the reformist aristocratic intelligentsia. He sought to find both their lost links with the soil and, at the same time, the answers to “the cursed questions” about the meaning of art, history, and life itself. The greatest novelist of his age, Tolstoy died wandering far from home muttering the words: “Truth … I love much … how they.”¹⁶

Here, truly, was a case of Gulliver held down by the Lilliputians: that fallen giant in one of Goya’s last drawings over whose body an antlike army of little people swarms, planting their banner atop his sleeping head. Yet Tolstoy, like so much of the aristocratic intelligentsia, volunteered for his bondage to the people. Indeed, he identified the people with Gulliver in a characteristic entry in the diary of his later years:

I went through the village and looked into windows. Poverty and ignorance were everywhere, and I reflected on the slavery of earlier days. Formely, the cause was visible, and the chain which bound the peasants easily perceived. Now there is no chain. In Europe there are threads —as many as bound Gulliver. With us one can still see ropes, or at least strings; there, threads—but they all still hold down that giant, the people, so firmly that it cannot move. There is only one salvation: not to lie down, not to fall asleep.¹⁷

This restless ethical passion was to dominate the new and sleepless century. Indeed, the new bondage of the Soviet era was to be built in part out of attitudes of humorless puritanism and ethical fanaticism that the later Tolstoy shared with the revolutionary tradition. Tolstoy, however, rejected revolution,¹⁸ and died like a lonely sectarian pilgrim in search of truth. The admonition “life is not a joke”¹⁹ in his last letter to his wife is strikingly similar to the last entry in Ivanov’s notebooks: “It is not permissible to joke with God.”²⁰ The icon for his peculiar faith was the famous canvas “What Is Truth?” in which his friend Nicholas Ge portrayed a harried Christ before an imposing and imperious Pilate. The paintings and drawings by Ilya Repin of the aging Tolstoy in peasant garb on his estate served as the last icons of a dying faith that inspired awe but not imitation. There was no desire to be “very like” the late Tolstoy. His links were with the past, and his ideas developed in a world largely out of touch with the urban and industrial Russia that was coming into being.

During Tolstoy’s last years, which were the early years of Nicholas II’s reign, a number of fresh ideas took root among the more cosmopolitan and better-educated populace.²¹ The 1890’s began the richly creative final period of imperial culture known variously as “the Russian Renaissance” and “the silver age.” There was a kind of renaissance quality to the variety and virtuosity of new accomplishment. If silver is less precious than gold, it nonetheless enjoys wider circulation. Never before had the high culture of art and theater, of politics and ideology, involved so many people.

Reduced to its essence, the silver age may be said to have presented Russia of the 1890’s with three new and very different perspectives: constitutional liberalism, dialectical materialism, and transcendental idealism. Each of these schools of thought sought to relieve the general air of Chekhovian despondency that was settling over much of Russia; each sought to break sharply with the confining reactionary rule of Pobedonostsev and the atmosphere of Russian particularism that had been characteristic of populist and Pan-Slav alike. Each school of thought benefited from renewed cultural and diplomatic contact with Western Europe and related its ideas to those of Europe as a whole. The leading figure in each new movement of ideas—the liberal Miliukov, the Marxist Plekhanov, and the idealist Solov’ev—was born in the fifties and nurtured on the optimistic Comtian view of history. Each had participated in the radical unrest of the populist era, but had found the populist ideology inadequate and sought to provide a new antidote for the confusion and pessimism of the late imperial period.

Constitutional Liberalism

THE FIRST broadly based liberal movement in Russia dates from the 1890’s. Only then did proponents of moderate reform, constitutional rule, and increased civil liberties acquire a nationwide platform and an intellectual respectability comparable to that which had long been enjoyed by more extreme positions to the right and left. Suddenly in the new atmosphere of the late 1890’s a number of forces rapidly came together and coalesced under the banners of “liberation” and “zemstvo constitutionalism” into a nationwide political movement that found expression in the formation of the Constitutional Democratic (Cadet) party in 1905.

The interesting question for those brought up in the liberal democratic tradition of the West is: Why was constitutional liberalism so late in coming to Russia? Basically, of course, the reason lies in the different pattern followed in Russian social and economic development. Russia remained until the very end of the nineteenth century a relatively backward society still dominated by religious habit and a traditional agricultural economy. The intelligentsia had fused elements of religious utopianism and of aristocratic snobbery into an attitude of contempt for such partial measures as constitutional reform and representative government. The very term “liberalism” was in disrepute throughout the nineteenth century; and the genuinely liberal movement of the late century carefully avoided using the label “liberal” in its official titles.

The Russian bourgeoisie had not developed the same interest in political and civil liberties as the bourgeoisie of Western Europe. As late as 1895, the liberal Herald of Europe explained the absence of bourgeois liberalism in Russia by the lack of “a bourgeoisie in the West European sense of the word.” Much of the native Russian business class was more interested in commerce than manufacture, and thus was attached to an essentially conservative, agrarian way of life. Russian entrepreneurs seemed generally more anxious to gain government support for their developmental projects than to limit governmental interference. The involvement of Jews, Germans, and Armenians in Russian trade and the growing influx of foreign capital made laissez-faire liberalism seem synonymous with turning Russia over to foreign masters. Finally—and in many ways most important—there was an enduring contempt for the bourgeoisie within the intellectual community. Rooted in the traditional distaste of the intelligentsia for meshchanstvo and nourished by aristocratic aestheticism, this prejudice against the bourgeois form of life was confirmed in the late nineteenth century by a tendency to equate the bleak world of Ibsen’s plays with bourgeois society as a whole.²²

Despite these practical and psychological difficulties, liberalism (both political and economic) had attracted articulate and at times influential spokesmen inside Russia throughout the nineteenth century. Liberalism in the sense of a constitutional rule of law rather than of men dates back to the time of Catherine. The Decembrists had sought constitutional rule, as had many influential advisers to both Alexander I and Alexander II. The idea of a national assembly on the model of the old zemsky sobors had found many advocates, including Herzen and numerous Slavophiles. Liberalism in the Manchesterian sense of freeing the economy from government interference and restraint had also found advocates—particularly in the Free Economic Society which had been founded by Catherine the Great. Adam Smith was known and studied earlier in Russia than in many other countries; a period of almost complete economic laissez faire was enjoyed during the finance ministry of Count Reutern in the early 1860’s; and Manchesterian liberalism gained the support of an influential journal, The Herald of Europe, and an articulate pressure group, The Society for the Promotion of Trade with the Fatherland.

A coherent Russian liberal tradition began not with aristocratic plans for constitutional rule under Alexander II or arguments advanced for laissez faire under Alexander II, but with the social and economic changes of the 1890’s: the beginning of the Trans-Siberian railway in 1891; the famine and accelerated flight to the cities of 1891-2; the expansion of mining and industry in the Donets Basin; the growth of the Baku oil complex into the largest in the world; and the tremendous general expansion of transportation and communication facilities under the ministry of Count Witte from 1892 to 1903.²³

The logic of modernization created the need for uniform laws, of greater rights for suppressed minorities and nationalities—particularly those with badly needed technical and administrative skills, such as Finns, Baltic Germans, and Jews. Efficiency in economic development required that large numbers of people be consulted before embarking on any course of action; and some form of consultative if not legislative body seemed clearly desirable.

Arguments for rational laws and increased popular participation in government were advanced mainly by two very different groups in late-nineteenth-century Russia. The first group were those connected with the provincial zemstvos, the organs of local administration that Alexander II had created in 1864 without ever clearly defining their purpose and authority. Through their involvement in such problems as the supervision of local road-building and conservation projects, the zemstvos almost immediately became involved in broad matters of public policy. Already in the sixties, the aristocratic leaders of several of the zemstvos in relatively Westernized regions like Tver and Chernigov sought to convert the zemstvos into organs of self-government as a kind of federative counter to the authoritarianism and bureaucratic sloth of the central government. The Tsar placed new restrictions and checks on the zemstvos during the general reaction of the late sixties, but called them back to life in the seventies to help in the mobilization of local resources and opinion first against the Turks and then against terrorism and revolution.

The zemstvos aided the central government in both enterprises but sought to exact a price for their aid in the form of a constitution that would protect them from “terrorism from above” as well as “terrorism from below.” Many joined the informal organization of zemstvo constitutionalists organized by Ivan Petrunkevich in 1878-9 and seconded his call for a constitutional assembly. When the new Tsar once more restricted zemstvo activities during the reaction of the early eighties, zemstvo liberals acquired a voice abroad in the journal Free Word, published by the “Society of Zemstvo Union and Self-Government.” Although this society proved shortlived and nationwide political agitation by the zemstvos was drastically curtailed after the assassination of Alexander II, the zemstvos continued to grow in importance because of the great increase in their non-aristocratic, professional staffs (the so-called third element, after the government-appointed and locally elected elements). There were nearly 70,000 zemstvo employees by the late nineties. The zemstvo ceased being an exclusively aristocratic preserve, and the two key organizations of constitutional liberalism at the turn of the century each included professional along with aristocratic “elements”: the Moscow discussion group, “the Symposium,” and the émigré journal Liberation.

The new generation of educated professional men in the cities provided the real cement for the emerging liberal movement. The growth of professional competence in an increasingly educated and diversified society created a growing fund of exasperation with what seemed to them an outmoded and irrational legal system. Prophet of this new no-nonsense professionalism was Vladimir Bezobrazov, an imaginative follower of Saint-Simon, who organized a series of “economic dinners” to discuss various hypothetical patterns of future development for Russia. Following his French teacher, he urged the replacement of the old aristocracy of privilege by a new aristocracy of talent. He believed that the hope for Russia lay in the development of a practical, professional attitude toward the solution of its economic problems and attached particular importance to his own Saint-Simonian plan for a network of canals inside Russia. As early as 1867 he argued that the zemstvos were the natural organ for developing in Russia this thirst for “practical results” (prakticheskie rezul’taty), and that the growing professionalism of the zemstvos must be protected both from the traditionalism of the local aristocracy and the “bureaucratism” of the central government.²⁴

Increased confidence in the “practical results” being achieved by the various professions in Russia led to an increased desire for political and social recognition. The static political and social system of Imperial Russia offered little place for the new professional groups that formed in the late nineteenth century: student unions, committees on illiteracy, doctors and lawyers associations, and so on. These associations tended to be second only to the zemstvos as a recruiting ground for the future Constitutional Democratic Party.

Russian liberalism was—more than any other current of ideas in nineteenth-century Russia—the work of college professors. The most influential university professors tended to sympathize with liberalism from the time when Professor Granovsky first tried to present some of its salient ideas in his lectures at Moscow University in the 1840’s. Granovsky, the spiritual father of the original Westernizers, was the first to lecture in detail to Russians on the historical development of laws and liberties in the democratic West.²⁵ He suggested that this pattern of development was preferable to that of Russia—without raising utopian hopes that it could be duplicated overnight on Russian soil. Although the radicals of the sixties soon overshadowed and disregarded their more moderate liberal professors, the latter were largely responsible for some of the most important liberalizing reforms of the sixties: the introduction of trial by jury and the extension of higher educational rights to women (well before such rights were recognized in the liberal democratic United States).

Chicherin, who became mayor of Moscow and outlived his friend Granovsky by nearly half a century, was the prototype of the moderate Rechtsstaat liberal.²⁶ In his lectures as professor of law at Moscow, he stressed the importance of rational laws rather than of parliamentary bodies as an effective limitation on arbitrary autocratic power.

By the 1890’s, however, a new generation of reform-minded intellectuals was once more viewing Chicherin as a timid conservative, just as Herzen had forty years earlier. The major spokesman for this new, more radical liberalism was another professor, Paul Miliukov, the learned and encyclopedic historian of Russian thought and culture. Miliukov’s interpretation of Russian culture generally followed the line sketched out by Alexander Pypin, an Anglophile and positivist whose learned articles in The Herald of Europe had really begun the dispassionate, analytical study of the development of Russian thought. In the unfriendly atmosphere of the populist age, he took refuge in exhaustive studies of Russian thought and culture—a path which Miliukov was to follow on several occasions. Though a cousin of Chernyshevsky, Pypin opposed all extremism and sought to continue the tradition of the liberal Westernizers of the forties.

Miliukov translated this wish into practical political activity at the turn of the century. He fortified his liberal, constitutional convictions with extensive travel in France, England, and America and was influential in steering the amorphous liberal movement into a clear-cut program for “the political liberation of Russia.” The older aristocratic idea of increased local autonomy and personal liberty was subordinated in the program of the Union of Liberation to the abolition of autocracy. Miliukov urged the immediate convention of a legislative assembly during the war and upheaval of 1904-5; and the Cadet party, of which he was a leading spokesman, consistently sought to extend the authority of the consultative dumas which technically acquired legislative rights in August of 1905.

By identifying themselves psychologically with a still distant and idealized America even more than with England and France, the new Russian liberals were able to think of themselves as apostles of progress rather than apologists for bourgeois self-interest. Miliukov was only the first of a series of Russians to lecture widely in America and write for American journals; and the writings of Woodrow Wilson were known in Russia even before he entered the political arena in the United States. The introduction to a 1905 Russian translation of Wilson’s The State, by Maxim Kovalevsky, a long-time government official from one of Russia’s most learned families, is as urbanely insistent on the rational rule of law (whether through constitutional monarchy or representative republicanism) as any contemporary Western essay. Two years earlier, Paul Vinogradoff, an émigré Russian veteran of the zemstvo constitutional movement, had climaxed his career as an authority on English constitutional law by his appointment to the Corpus chair of Jurisprudence at Oxford. Miliukov, however, went beyond their moderate demand for a state of laws rather than men, insisting that the constitution of 1905 did not go far enough.

In addition to demanding popular sovereignty as the prerequisite for any reform, the Miliukov brand of liberals also contended that social reform and partial agrarian redistribution were necessary concomitants of political reform. The radicalism of the Cadet party led in 1906 to the introduction of new restrictions on the activities of the second duma: the most representative national political forum that had existed in Russia since the zemsky sobors of the early seventeenth century. The Cadets had dominated the first duma, seeking in effect to turn it into a legislative body. They protested its dissolution and stated their program in even more radical terms in the Vyborg manifesto of 1906. These radical liberals continued to try to bring Russian political practices into line with those of the Western democracies with which Russia was now allied diplomatically through the triple entente. Miliukov, because of his extensive knowledge of Western practice as well as Russian history, became an increasingly important spokesman for the tradition of constitutional democracy. He was one of the few to accept—indeed claim—the title of liberal; and he was the leading figure in the agitation of the so-called progressive bloc in the last duma of 1915-16: the eleventh-hour effort of liberal reformism to seize the reins of power from the corrupt and inefficient monarchy of the last Romanov.²⁷

The fact that the constitutional liberals were inundated by the revolutionary upheaval of March, 1917, and outlawed by the Bolshevik coup of November should not be taken as indication of any inherent Russian antipathy to liberalism. These events occurred during a war which Russia was technically ill-equipped to continue. Considering the obstacles under which liberals had been laboring in Russia, their progress had been rapid and their programs intelligently conceived. Indeed, the Bolsheviks were in many ways more fearful of the liberals than of any other group during their initial efforts to seize and consolidate power. The Cadets were among the first to be imprisoned; and the appeal of the liberal democratic idea of a constituent assembly had become so great even among the revolutionaries that the Bolsheviks were forced to permit the elections for it to take place in November, 1917. Thirty-six million Russians cast ballots; and when only one fourth voted for the Bolsheviks, the dissolution of the assembly became almost a foregone conclusion. The liberal tradition had come to Russia with too little too late. It was denounced by Lenin as “parliamentary cretinism.” Miliukov and other Cadet leaders had sought to overcome the uncertainty and political inexperience of Russian liberals. But it is doubtful if even a more confident and experienced liberal party could have established constitutional and parliamentary frameworks for evolutionary change amidst conditions of war, revolution, and social disintegration.

Through the more radical program of Miliukov, the constitutional democrats had succeeded in gaining new appeal among the intellectuals and in overcoming the indifference to political reform that had been characteristic of the populists. The liberals were aided in this task by chastened, non-revolutionary elements in the populist camp. Mikhailovsky pointed the way for this more moderate populism. After refusing to collaborate with the zemstvo constitutionalists in 1878, he began to argue—on the very pages of the People’s Will journal of the late seventies—that socialists should reconsider their traditional hostility toward Russian liberals. His “Political Letters of a Socialist” recognized that political reforms and constitutional liberties might facilitate the non-violent transformation of society envisaged by the evolutionary populists. A number of influential populists also assigned increased priority to political reform in the émigré journal of the late eighties, Self-Government. The “People’s Justice” organization of 1893-4 committed Mikhailovsky and some three thousand other populist sympathizers inside Russia to the proposition that abolition of autocratic government in Russia was—in the words of one of their pamphlets—“the pressing question” of present-day Russian life. The liberal movement adopted many of the folk rites of populism in order to broaden their intellectual appeal. Banquets, circle discussion meetings, commemorative gatherings, and illegal publications abroad were all utilized by the new generation of liberals as they had been by earlier radicals. Many populists and Marxists, who sought to advance their socialist objectives through practical political activity rather than illegal revolutionary agitation, formed tactical alliances with the constitutional liberals in the late imperial period.

Nevertheless, the constitutional democratic cause in Russia was handicapped by the split among non-revolutionary reformers between radical and conservative impulses. In order to gain the support of many intellectuals, minority groups, and populist sympathizers it was necessary to combine socialist and egalitarian proposals with constitutional reforms. Such proposals, however, alienated many provincial aristocrats and entrepreneurs. Many of those who had originally joined in the cry for constitutional reform and representative government at the turn of the century were willing to settle for the extension of civil liberties, the approval of a consultative national duma and the constitution of October, 1905. These “Octobrists” dominated the third and fourth dumas with an essentially conservative emphasis on historical continuity and the danger of revolution. Even this cautious group showed signs of vitality, however. Octobrists, aristocratic zemstvo elements, and members of various splinter groups between the Cadets and the Octobrists played the leading role in forming the remarkable “village city” (zemgor) committees which helped finance the Russian war effort in 1915. The very divisions within the liberal camp in the early years of the twentieth century indicated, moreover, a certain vigor. Men of differing philosophic and economic outlooks sought to ally themselves with the traditions of constitutional democracy. Although the Cadets were unable to make their party the forum for all this diversified liberal sentiment, they were not nearly as timid and confused in the face of mounting chaos during the war as many other elements in Russian society. The Cadets were, indeed, the only major political group with a counter-program to that of the Bolsheviks in the critical years of revolution and civil war. The Cadets were both determined reformers and clear foes of totalitarian elements within the reforming camp.

In his elaborate post-mortems on the Revolution, Miliukov suggested that the abstract utopianism of the intelligentsia was a contributory factor to the success of Bolshevism. Criticism of the intelligentsia had been a constant theme in the writings of the ill-fated constitutional liberals of imperial Russia. In contrast to populists on the left and Pan-Slavs on the right, liberals stressed the importance of learning from the West and recognizing the rights and sanctity of the individual. But they generally favored a creative adaptation of Western liberal values to Russian conditions, not merely a slavish imitation. Kavelin, one of the original Westernizers of the forties and an articulate aristocratic liberal throughout the rest of the century, was typical in his insistence that Russians avoid taking over “outmoded forms in which Europe itself no longer believes.”²⁸ He was as prophetically perceptive as Dostoevsky in his memorandum of 1866, depicting the revolutionary paths into which the intelligentsia was drifting; yet he also had the courage to challenge the confusion between universal values and Russian national characteristics in Dostoevsky’s Pushkin speech of 1880.

One of the many neglected liberal critics of the intelligentsia in the nineteenth century was Eugene Markov, the widely traveled editor of the journal Russian Speech. He accused Russian intellectuals of being responsible for a new fanaticism that was the very antithesis of the pragmatism and empiricism of the positivists whom they were forever quoting.

The “intellectual layer” of Russia has withdrawn from participation in the activity of this essentially “practical” century. It has plunged Russia into a needless “turmoil of thought” (smuta umov) that is far more dangerous than the turmoil (smuta) of the seventeenth century, because the intelligentsia bears within itself the “sickness of narrow party-mindedness” (bolezn’ parteinosti).²⁹ Russia needs responsible citizens not “ideologues,” deep criticism not “talmudism in journalism” and “judgment by shrieking.”³⁰ He rejects the “Muscovite school in literature” for its “zoological” chauvinism. In an article of the late seventies called “Books and Life,” Markov relates the revolutionary crisis in Russia not just to the worsening of material conditions but to the continuing refusal of the intellectuals to apply anything but “bookish theories” to Russian problems. In a perceptive passage that applies to the seventeenth as well as the nineteenth century, Markov notes:

Books, in the general course of Russian spiritual growth, have played a remarkably unimportant role, in any case considerably less than in other European countries. But, in Russia, books have produced something which they have not produced anywhere else—they have produced schism (raskol).³¹

The greatest need in Russia is to overcome schism, the separation between books and life. The future for Russia is almost unlimited, if its writers can “open for Russian thought the broad path to practical activity.”³²

Russian intellectuals are “good-for-nothings” (nikchemnye), “hypochondriacs,” who prefer to be “ideologues rather than citizens or even people.” His model for imitation is English political life, which teaches one “how to live, struggle, and accomplish things.”³³ Everyone, Markov insists, has spiritual doubts and problems; but only the English have learned to separate these concerns from political life. Unfortunately in Russia

none of us know or want to know anything about local interests or local facts. Every schoolboy seeks first of all final ends, first causes, the fate of governments, questions of the world and all humanity.³⁴

Markov issues an almost plaintive plea for an experimental approach to Russian problems and an end to sectarian intolerance:

Let us recognize honorably and clearly the existing world … cease the despotic system of proscriptions and intolerance.… Let us be, in a word, men, enlightened citizens of Russia and not of a party or a journal. Let us be grown men of experience and strength, and not children all excited about some little book.³⁵

His hero is Alexander II. As Markov wrote immediately after the Tsar’s assassination (and shortly before his own journal was shut down by Pobedonostsev):

This Tsar-liberator suffered like Christ at Golgotha for the sins of others. May his sufferings, like those of Christ, point the way to salvation for his true people.³⁶

But the path of liberalization was not the way taken by Russia. The sufferings of Alexander II were commemorated not by continuing his work of reform but by building on the spot where he died a large brick church in the artificially revived Muscovite style of the late imperial period. The intrusion of this pseudo-Muscovite style into the classical architectural milieu of St. Petersburg was a kind of symbol of the return to reactionary nationalism under Alexander III and Nicholas II. Constitutional democracy was given only a brief and troubled moment on the stage of history. Its temperate ideology was lost between the frozen Russia of Pobedonostsev and the flaming Russia of social revolution. However telling the critiques advanced by Markov, Miliukov, and other liberals, the more extreme traditions of the intelligentsia prevailed over the forces calling for more moderate and experimental approaches. Two new philosophies of the late imperial period—dialectical materialism and transcendental idealism—encouraged the very tendency toward doctrinal and metaphysical thought which the liberals had tried to challenge.

Dialectical Materialism

OF THE TWO NEW philosophic currents that emerged in the silver age, dialectical materialism and transcendental idealism, one was more radical and one more conservative than constitutional liberalism. Unlike liberalism, these two traditions shared a common resolve to build on the previous experience of the intelligentsia. Each of them sought to fortify Russia through ideology rather than reform it with a political program. Each sought to answer the philosophic concerns of the intelligentsia rather than challenge the relevance of these concerns to Russian problems. Whereas the constitutional liberals tended to be sharp critics of the abstract traditions of the radical intelligentsia, both the new materialists and the new idealists were solidly rooted in these traditions. The materialists claimed to be the heirs to the traditions of the iconoclastic sixties; the idealists claimed to be developing the traditions of Dostoevsky’s aesthetic and religious reaction to iconoclasm.

A major reason for the simultaneous appeal of these two ideologies in the nineties was the exasperation of a new student generation with the subjectivism, pessimism, and introspection of the age of small deeds. This new generation no longer hoped to find a positive message among the oppressed Slavs of the Ottoman Empire or the oppressed peasants of the Russian Empire. The new generation felt the need to check the preoccupation with personal salvation and the self-defeating drift toward an anarchistic rejection of all authority that was characteristic of reformers of the seventies and eighties. Evolutionary populists, such as Mikhailovsky, spoke of history as a “struggle for individuality” against all forms of collective authority and all “books of fate, however learned.” Revolutionary populists drifted into the indiscriminate terrorism of the People’s Will and its anarchistic “disorganization section.”

The passionately anti-authoritarian and semi-anarchistic Proudhon was the most important single teacher of Russian radicals during the populist age. The violent anarchism of Bakunin, the non-violent moralistic anarchism of Tolstoy, and the optimistic evolutionary anarchism of Kropotkin —all represented creative developments of Proudhon’s widely studied social teachings.³⁷ Tolstoy probably took the title War and Peace from Proudhon’s tract of the same name. The tradition of courtroom oratory by radicals tried under the new jury system first caught the public eye in 1866, with Nicholas Sokolov’s impassioned defense of Proudhon’s anarchistic socialism as the true Christian answer to the problems of society. Sokolov had talked with Proudhon in Brussels in 1860 and, in his book The Heretics, designated Proudhon as “the model heretic” and last in a long line of “true Christian” revolutionaries. Proudhon’s insistence on a Christianity of ethics rather than metaphysics and his opposition to all forms of political authority (including that which is “made respectable by having it proceed from the people”) made him the leading prophet of the moralistic anarchism which dominated much of the thinking of the populist era.³⁸ Following Proudhon, Russian populism was a highly emotional and moralistic doctrine that appealed to men through idealistic exhortations, which are difficult to sustain in the face of prolonged adversity. Its passionate plea for simplicity and morality in human relationships seemed inadequate to a generation that was entering the more complex world of industrialized modernity; its philosophic thinness and frequent anti-intellectualism made it repellant to the better-educated and more widely read student generation of the nineties.

Thus, the spirit of protest led the new radicals of both right and left to seek some new philosophic bedrock on which to stand. The lonely anarchistic dreamer was beginning to feel out of place in the busy society of the nineties. The subjective depression, the disjointed memoirs and sketches of the era of small deeds began to give way to the ideologies of two new prophetic figures: the Marxist George Plekhanov and the idealist Vladimir Solov’ev. Subjectivity and a sense of isolation were challenged by these two influential prophets of objective truth. Plekhanov and Solov’ev were both real philosophers rather than publicists or journalists. Each had been active in the agitation of the populist age; each went abroad in the eighties to discover a new faith for the Russian intelligentsia. Each looked to the West—but to different Wests. Solov’ev, the partial model for Alyosha Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, was interested in religious and philosophic ideas. He went to the Catholic West in search of spiritual union and the regeneration of society through a new mystical and aesthetic attitude toward life. Plekhanov, who had led the first major demonstration of revolutionary populism in front of the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg in 1878, was interested in economic and social problems. He went to the West of the international working class movement and became the father of Russian Marxism.

Prior to Plekhanov’s conversion Russians had known and venerated Marx, but had either neglected or misunderstood the main tenets of Marxism. Engels’ Situation of the Working Class in England and Marx’s Critique of Political Economy and Capital had been widely studied in Russia during the populist era. But populists tended to view Marx’s works as an eloquent argument for bypassing capitalism altogether. The populists insisted that the way to socialism in Russia lay in preventing rather than undergoing a capitalist stage of development; in relying on the moral idealism of the educated classes rather than the material forces of historical inevitability. Russian radicals remained close to Proudhon—Marx’s original ideological foe in the European socialist movement—in their suspicion of the centralized state and of all dogma, and in their ideal of peasant simplicity and a “conservative revolution.” Russian revolutionaries abroad sympathized almost to a man with the revolutionary anarchist Bakunin in his struggles with Marx in the First Socialist International (1864-76). Populist writers inside Russia looked on Marx’s philosophy as a complicated Germanic theory with little application to Russian reality.

Marx himself disliked most Russians that he met, generally favored the extension of German over Russian influence in Europe, and consistently viewed Russian developments as a minor sideshow in a historical drama centered on the industrialized West. Nonetheless, he was flattered by the attention his writings received in Russia. Particularly after the failure of the French Commune in 1871, he became interested in the possibility that unrest in Russia might serve as a catalyst for a new wave of revolutionary risings in the West. He also began to study the economic development of Russia, suggesting that many Russian peasants would have to become urban workers but that the economic analysis of “capital is neither for nor against the peasant commune,” which might well serve as a “point of support for social regeneration.”³⁹ Marx died in 1883 without leaving any clear analysis of Russian developments and possibilities. Engels, who was less interested in Russia than Marx, never took the time to make any detailed study of Russian developments prior to his death in 1895; but he recognized that populism was related to the idealistic forms of socialism which he and Marx had long opposed within the international socialist movement. Shortly before his death he wrote one of his Russian correspondents that “it is necessary to fight populism everywhere—be it German, French, English, or Russian.”⁴⁰

It fell on the shoulders of Plekhanov to conduct the Russian phase of the international struggle between authoritarian and libertarian socialism. It is curious that Marxism, which theoretically down-graded the role of the individual in history, was in practice extraordinarily dependent on the leadership of individuals. Plekhanov almost single-handedly introduced Marxism into Russia as a serious alternative to the populist ideology; just as the “three who made a revolution”—Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin—were responsible for enthroning it as a new state ideology after the unrest of 1917-21.

The essence of Plekhanov’s Marxist position is contained in “Socialism and the Political Struggle” of 1883, his first major work published after his flight abroad in 1880. Plekhanov had strongly opposed the political terrorism of the People’s Will while in Russia, forming his own splinter group, Black Redistribution, which attached priority to redistributing land among the dispossessed “black” elements of the population. After the failure of terrorism to produce anything but a swing to reaction, Plekhanov was in a position to claim vindication. Instead, he sought to conciliate the rival camp, to discard his own previous ultra-populist attachment to peasant ways and to federal dilution of power, and to provide a new outlook altogether for Russian radicalism.

Plekhanov begins his pamphlet of 1883 by praising the populist tradition for its “practical” orientation in going “among the people” and leading them into a “conscious political struggle.”⁴¹ However, he insists that such a struggle will fail unless based on “scientific socialism” and above all on the repudiation of the anarchistic romanticism and abstract moralism of Proudhon, “the French Kant.”⁴² A rational understanding of economic development is indispensable for those who seek revolutionary political change. He returns regularly to this theme, most effectively in his long essay “Socialism and Anarchism,” where he challenges the implicit populist idea that these two social philosophies are in some sense complementary. Socialism is the necessary form which social life must take in a modern society where the means of production have been socialized. Anarchism is an irrational form of protest against these processes. Plekhanov and his “liberation of labor” organization were the first important group of Russians to become familiar with the German Social Democratic tradition, with its emphasis on ordered progress; and they shared some of the German contempt for anarchism, which was at best a “bourgeois sport” and at worst an invitation to irrationalism of all kinds:

In the name of revolution anarchists serve the cause of reaction; in the name of morality they encourage the most immoral actions; in the name of individual freedom they trample underfoot the rights of their neighbors.⁴³

Marxism provides the theoretical basis for the revolutionary movement in Russia as elsewhere by providing an objective science of society and history. In contrast to the dualism of the populists, which was unable to “build a bridge across this seemingly bottomless abyss”⁴⁴ between noble ideals and harsh realities, Plekhanov’s philosophy is totally monistic. The material world alone is real, he proclaims repeatedly in a series of studies on materialism that was climaxed by his most influential book (and the only one published in Russia prior to the revolution), On the Question of the Development of the Monistic View of History: In Defence of Materialism. Absolute objectivity is possible, because “the criterion of truth lies not in me, but in the relations which exist outside of me.”⁴⁵

Plekhanov thus offered to a new generation of radical thinkers a monistic, objective philosophy that would liberate them from schism and subjectivity. As distinct from classical materialism of France in the eighteenth century (and Russia in the 1860’s), Plekhanov’s materialism contained a built-in guarantee of revolutionary change, for it is “historical” or “dialectic” materialism. Following Marx, it contends that the material world is in a state of motion and conflict and that the liberation of all humanity will inevitably come out of the clash of opposing forces in the material world. The driving forces in human society are social classes; and the social class to whom the future ultimately belongs is the proletariat.

As early as his 1884 pamphlet, “Our Differences,” Plekhanov bluntly insisted that Russia was already in a capitalist stage of development. It was irrelevant to him whether private or state capitalism was controlling the economy; the practical result was that a new urban proletariat was coming into being. This class—rather than the demagogic and self-important intelligentsia or the confused and primitive peasantry—was the true bearer of progress in Russia. The proletariat had a practical familiarity with the tools of material progress and would not be so easily misled by demagogic talk of a “people’s will.” The growth of a proletariat was historically inevitable, and the old communal forms of organization no longer had any realistic potential for serving as socialist alternatives to the pattern of economic development which Marx had outlined in Capital. In his consistent attempt to “appeal to reason, not feelings,” Plekhanov insisted that the Russian revolutionary movement must effect an “unconditional break with its present theories” by accepting “a revolutionary theory” rather than “theories of revolutionaries.”⁴⁶ The program of the Liberation of Labor group urges not the dissolution of other radical groups but rather that the revolutionary struggle be fortified by a group recognizing the importance of “organizing a Russian workers’ socialist party” and acknowledging the “international character of the present-day working-class movement.”⁴⁷

Plekhanov brought into the light of day many of the inconsistencies and presumptions of populist thought: the romantic attachment to the idea of a special path for Russia, the exaggerated belief in the ability of individuals to change the course of history, and the palpably unscientific theories of history and “formulas of progress” advanced by populist writers. The rational cosmopolitanism of Plekhanov’s Marxism had a particular appeal to leaders of some of the minority cultures within the Russian empire, whose peoples were subjected to new indignities by the Russification campaigns of the late imperial period. Even before the first Marxist circle was formed inside Russia proper in 1885, a Marxist circle and journal had appeared in Russian-occupied Latvia; and the rapidly growing Social Democratic movement of the nineties had particular strength among the more advanced and Westernized peoples of the Russian empire: Poles, Finns, and Georgians. Plekhanov’s chief lieutenant, Paul Axelrod, was a Jew, and the Jewish Bund was one of the most important catalysts in bringing together the Social Democrats of the Russian Empire for their first national congress in 1898.

Plekhanov’s Marxism also had a more general appeal for the increasing number of thinking Russians who were becoming preoccupied with problems of material growth and economic analysis. Economic analysis became in the last two decades of the century a major subject of intellectual interest in Russia. There were sophisticated populist economists like Nicholas Danielson (Marx’s most regular Russian correspondent), liberal economists like Alexander Chuprov (a lecturer on political economy at the University of Moscow and a regular economic analyst for the daily newspaper Russkie Vedomosti—Russian Reports), and an increasing number of professional economists in the service of the central government and local zemstvos. The predominant influence on Witte and most government economists was Friedrich List’s national system urging protective tariffs and state investment in order to develop a balanced and self-sufficient national economy.⁴⁸ Also influenced by List was the great chemist Dmitry Mendeleev, who devoted much of his energy to devising the regional and industrial patterns and the necessary tariff structure for the development of a Russian national economy. He visited and admired America, but not the “politic-mongering” (politikanstvo) of democratic politicians. As early as 1882 he advocated separating the ministry of industry from that of finance in order to stimulate economic growth; and he was active in the agitation that led to the founding in 1903 at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute of the first separate faculty of economics in a Russian institution of higher learning.⁴⁹

Amidst all this interest in economic problems, Marxism with its unique and unequivocal insistence on the primacy of the economic factor to all of life and history was bound to have a strong intellectual appeal. So great was the infatuation with Marxist ideas in Russian intellectual circles of the nineties that Marxism rapidly became caught up in the factional debates that were simultaneously raging in the liberal camp. Some Russian Marxists, the so-called economists, accepted a Marxist analysis of economic development but wished to concentrate on improving the economic lot of the workers rather than working for a political revolution. Somewhat more radical were the “legal” Marxists, who built on Marxist economic analysis and accepted the need for a political struggle against autocracy but favored a merging of the socialist and liberal causes in a common struggle for the democratic liberties that were prerequisite for social democracy.⁵⁰

The leading spokesman for the “legal” or “revisionist” Marxists was Peter Struve, one of the most ranging minds of the late imperial period, who also participated in the new currents of liberalism and idealism. Grandson of the Danish-German first director of the Pulkovo Observatory, Struve spent much of his early life in Stuttgart, and brought to the study of Russian reality a deep grounding in the philosophical and economic thinking of the German universities and the German Social Democratic movement. His Critical Comments on the Economic Development of Russia, written in 1894 at the age of twenty-four, was the first full-length original Marxist work to be published in Russia, and it provided the guidelines for the general assault of economists in the late nineties on the populist contention that the capitalist phase of development might be avoided or bypassed in Russia. He also wrote a seminal philosophic critique of the shallow progressivist ideology of Mikhailovsky and other populists in his long introduction, in 1901, to Nicholas Berdiaev’s first book, Subjectivism and Individualism in Social Philosophy. This work also reflected his critical attitude toward rigid philosophical orthodoxy and revolutionary “Jacobinism” within Russian Marxism. His Marxist Theory of Social Evolution of 1899 had denied that there was a fundamental, dialectical opposition between capitalism and socialism, and foresaw a natural, continuing progression toward socialism along lines proclaimed in Eduard Bernstein’s famous work of the same year, Evolutionary Socialism.⁵¹

All three of the new perspectives of the late imperial period came to play a role in Struve’s protean intellectual development. Although retaining an essentially Marxist approach to social and economic analysis, Struve became an active leader in the movement for constitutional liberalism, beginning with his founding of the semi-monthly journal Liberation in Stuttgart in June, 1902. His continuing interest in the Russian cultural and intellectual tradition brought him into increasingly sympathetic contact with philosophic idealists and neo-Orthodox thinkers. In his incisive contribution to their famous symposium, Landmarks, Struve blamed Bakunin and the modern tradition of “irreligious alienation from government” for the lack of constructive evolution in contemporary Russian social and political life.⁵²

Plekhanov resented Struve’s blurring of the revolutionary element in Marxism, and insisted on fidelity to the ideology of dialectical materialism and on the development of a working-class movement distinct from those of bourgeois liberals. The main body of Russian Social Democrats (who became known as Mensheviks after the split with Lenin’s Bolsheviks at the Second Congress of the Social Democrats in 1903) remained faithful to Plekhanov’s doctrine, looking to him for intellectual guidance and a continuing link with the Second Socialist International, which had come into being in 1889.

Plekhanov and the Mensheviks represented the rationalistic middle way in Russian Marxism. They rejected any accommodation with political liberalism or philosophic idealism. But at the same time they rejected as a reversion to the discredited tactics of earlier Russian Jacobins Lenin’s call for a professional revolutionary elite in his What Is To Be Done? of 1902 and his speculations on the possibility of a proletarian alliance with the revolutionary peasantry in his Two Tactics of 1906. Only amidst the turmoil of the revolutionary period would these Bolshevik ideas gain widespread popularity in Russia—along with the even more un-Marxist idea advanced during the Revolution of 1905 by Trotsky that the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions might be compressed into one uninterrupted revolutionary transformation.

Plekhanov was unable to return to Russia until the collapse of tsardom in 1917, at which time he urged continuing the war and avoiding any premature proletarian bids for power. Ill and increasingly unnoticed amidst the rushing tide of events in the late summer of 1917, the father of Russian Marxism went, together with Vera Zasulich, his old friend and associate through the long years of emigration, on one last nostalgic climb up the Sparrow Hills, which were shortly to be renamed for Lenin. It was a melancholy reprise of the excited youthful climb of Herzen and Ogarev more than a century before, when they had sworn their oath to avenge the fallen Decembrists on the same spot. After the October Revolution, his house was ransacked by the victorious Bolsheviks, and he was deliberately called “citizen” rather than “comrade” in view of his “pedantic” insistence that a democratic revolution must precede a proletarian one. An old and lonely man now in disgrace with left and right alike, Plekhanov left Russia shortly thereafter for newly independent Finland, where he died of tuberculosis early in 1918.⁵³ With him perished Marxism as an extension of Western radical humanism into Russia and a rational doctrine of economic progress and cultural enrichment. Plekhanov had hoped to overcome the conspiratorial attitudes and peasant-bred, utopian fanaticism of the Russian revolutionary tradition on which Lenin with his greater opportunism—and perhaps deeper roots in Russian popular thinking—was building.

Plekhanov dying in Finland while Russia was in flames in 1918 resembled in many ways Miliukov dying in France while Russia was again in flames in 1943. Both men were intellectuals, men of European culture who were at the same time profound analysts of Russian thought. Both wished to correct the errors and irrationalities of past Russian traditions by introducing rational methods of analysis and encouraging greater familiarity with the reformist traditions of the West. Both maintained concern for their native country even in defeat and oblivion, Plekhanov calling for resistance to White as well as Red terror in his last lonely days, just as Miliukov called for support of Russia against Hitler’s invasion.

Both were rejected in the early twentieth century partly because of the primitiveness of Russian thought and the unfamiliarity and complexity of their proposals. Even more decisive, however, in the defeat of both liberal and social democracy was the failure of the West either to prevent the great war which crushed and disintegrated Russian society, or to support fully in the aftermath of that war those forces that still clamored for a chance to relate Russian development to the patterns of Western democracy.

Mystical Idealism

IF DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM provided a method for a new generation of radicals to rise above the isolation and pessimism of the age of small deeds, mystical idealism provided the way out of subjectivism for more conservative thinkers. If Plekhanov, the prophet of Marxism, was a critic of populist particularism, Solov’ev, the spokesman for the new mysticism, was a trenchant critic of Pan-Slav and Orthodox parochialism. No less than Miliukov and Plekhanov, Solov’ev was a man of broad European interests who was steeped in Comtian philosophy and widely traveled in the West. But his preoccupations were religious and aesthetic rather than political. He was concerned for spiritual rather than political reasons with the fate of the Poles and the Jews within the Russian empire, and was anxious to affect a rapprochement with Roman Catholicism in the interests of a reunited and totally renovated “universal church”: a “free theocracy” that would include Jews as well as Christians and would harmonize science and religion with a “free and scientific theosophy.”

Like Plekhanov and Miliukov, Solov’ev was born in the fifties and deeply affected by the ideological trends of the sixties. He was the second son and fourth child of Sergius Solov’ev, author of a history of Russia which has never been equaled either in size or in encyclopedic command of sources. From his early years young Vladimir seems to have dreamed of accomplishing something equally remarkable. As a boy, however, he was less close to his stern, humorless father than to his part-Polish mother and his grandfather, who was a priest. His youth was enlivened by a vivid imagination and a Schilleresque love of play. Known as “the pecheneg” (the most feared and adventuresome of the early steppe people), he was fascinated by tales of Spanish knights in his youth. At the age of nine he had the first of his visions of the divine feminine principle which would inspire both his poetry and his social theories. The image of the divine woman, whom he later called sophia, came to him holding a flower in the midst of shining light and is typical of the occult mystical tradition which he did much to revive and make respectable in Russia. A second vision of sophia came to him in the British Museum, where on a traveling scholarship in the mid-seventies he was studying Gnostic philosophy. He set off immediately for Egypt, where he had a third vision of sophia, before returning to Russia to present his new theories to a large and excited audience. The major philosophic rival in late Imperial Russia to the materialistic doctrine which Marx had drawn up from the economic treatises and revolutionary reflections in the British Museum proved to be the new idealism that Solov’ev conceived from religious writings and mystical visions in another part of the same great library.

Solov’ev’s conception of renovation was, in many respects, even more revolutionary and utopian than that of the Marxists. No less than the materialist Plekhanov, the idealist Solov’ev offered an absolute, monistic philosophy to the new generation. “Not only do I believe in everything supernatural,” he wrote, “but strictly speaking I believe in nothing else.”⁵⁴ The material world was “a kind of nightmare of sleeping humanity.”⁵⁵ But just as Plekhanov’s materialism appealed to the younger generation because it was a dynamic, historical form of materialism, so does Solov’ev’s idealistic supernaturalism have a dynamic, historical cast. It is based on the belief that all things in the world are in search of a unity that is bound to be realized in the concrete world through sophia. The sophia of his visions is the feminine principle of Jacob Boehme’s theosophy as well as the “divine wisdom” of the Greek East. In seeking a kind of mystical erotic union with sophia, man puts himself in communion with the ideal “all-unity” (vseedinstvo) which pervades God’s cosmos. Solov’ev does not, however, advocate a contemplative retreat from the world. On the contrary, the striving for “all-unity” impels one into the world of the concrete. God himself seeks “all-unity” through his creation, which is an intimate form of God’s own self-expression. Man must seek this same unity and self-expression through art, personal relations, and all other areas of creative experience.

Solov’ev’s běte noire in the Russian intelligentsia is Tolstoy, whose later philosophy sought to deny man’s sensual and creative nature. Like Dostoevsky, Solov’ev was haunted by the problems of division and separation; but the Tolstoyan idea that human striving was itself the cause of evil was deeply repellent. Whereas Tolstoy, the exuberant lover of family life, ended up denying the validity of sexual desire, Solov’ev, the lonely bachelor, saw in it one of the positive impulses through which the sense of division in humanity was overcome. Tolstoy’s morality is shallow because it seeks to repress rather than engage the passions of men; because it is general and abstract rather than concrete and specific. Solov’ev pointedly entitled his long philosophic treatise of 1880 A Criticism of Abstract Principles. Abstraction followed from the separation from God, which had produced “The Crisis of Western Philosophy” (the title of his first major philosophic treatise of 1874).

A new integral philosophy was still possible in the East, Solov’ev felt, if Russia were willing to be “the East of Christ” rather than “the East of Xerxes.” God demonstrated His own approval of the urge toward the concrete and sensual by taking on human form through Christ; and this act was only the first in the divinization of the world and the transfiguration of the cosmos. His famous lectures on God-manhood, which were delivered in the first half of 1878, affirm bluntly that “Christianity has a content of its own, and that content is solely and exclusively Christ.”⁵⁶ The important thing is not Christ’s teachings—as Tolstoy might have said—for these, Solov’ev agrees, are all contained in the higher ethical pronouncements of other great religious teachers. The important thing about Christ was the concrete, integral fact of his life and mission in overcoming the separation between man and God. Men are drawn to Christ—and thus to the possibility of overcoming their own separation from God—not by the abstract thought that He is the word (logos) incarnate but by concrete attraction to the goodness and beauty of Christ’s life. Man is attracted thus to the quality of sophia in Christ Himself; for sophia is “the idea which God has before him as Creator and which He realizes” in his creation.⁵⁷

But how is one concretely to find sophia, to help attain God’s “all-unity” on earth? Solov’ev offered a variety of programs and ideas for overcoming conflict in the course of the late seventies. He began by donating the substantial amount of money that he received for his twelve lectures on God-manhood to the Red Cross on the one hand and to the fund for restoring the Santa Sophia Cathedral in Constantinople on the other. Practical steps to alleviate immediate suffering and renewed reverence for the older spiritual unity of Christendom—these were the main points in his program. In May, 1878, he joined Dostoevsky (who had attended his lectures) on a pilgrimage to visit the elders of the Optyna Pustyn. The death of his father in October, 1879, further intensified his sense of spiritual calling.

The split between science and faith could be overcome by less dogmatic philosophies in both fields. He proposed a “free and scientific theosophy” which—following Boehme—would recognize as equally valid and ultimately complementary three methods of knowledge: the mystical, the intellectual, and the empirical. The split between East and West could be overcome if each recognized that it had something to learn from the other. The East believes in God but not humanity; the West believes in humanity without God. Each needs to believe in both. Secular humanism cannot survive on a philosophic base which contends in effect that “man is a hairless monkey and therefore must lay down his life for his friends.⁵⁸ But the Orthodox East is equally doomed with its contention that man is made in the image of God and must therefore be ruled with the knout. Russia must learn from the West, and particularly from Auguste Comte’s humanistic positivism. In Comte’s religion of humanity and his identification of humanity as le Grand Ětre, or as a kind of feminine goddess, Solov’ev detected an idea strikingly akin to that of sophia. The Comtian idea that history moved from a theological to a metaphysical to a final “positive” stage and a rational, altruistic society seemed entirely compatible with Solov’ev’s concept of God Himself moving toward self-realization in the concrete world of men. The good society is for Solov’ev, as for Comte, that of “normal” man; and the divisions in humanity are only passing and irrational hold-overs from the senseless doctrinal quarrels of the past.⁵⁹

In the late seventies Solov’ev began to speak out sharply against excessive chauvinism, denouncing, for instance, the proposal made by some Pan-Slavs for using chemical warfare against the Turks. His famous lecture after the assassination of Alexander II, in which he urged the new Tsar to forgive the assassins and thus usher in a new era of Christian love in Russia, was received with tears of joy by a large audience, including Dostoevsky’s widow, who assured Solov’ev that her husband would have approved.

As a result of this experience, Solov’ev was publicly reprimanded and temporarily prohibited from giving public lectures. He decided to resign from his teaching position and also from a post in the ministry of public education. Like Miliukov and Plekhanov, Solov’ev used the period of reaction in the eighties as one of “withdrawal and return”: of intellectual reassessment in order to provide new answers for Russia’s problems. Like Miliukov and Plekhanov, Solov’ev acquired a new appreciation for the importance of change in the social and political sphere; but he advocated neither liberal democracy nor proletarian socialism but “free theocracy.”

This highly original conception, which Solov’ev sought to perfect throughout his writings and travels of the eighties and early nineties, was designed to reconcile total freedom with a recognition of the authority of God. God was to have three earthly vicars: the Tsar, the Pope, and the Prophet. The Tsar would bring into the new age the ideal of a Christian ruler, the Pope of a unified church, and the prophet would speak in the poetic language of the higher unity yet to come. Free theocracy would come about not through coercion but through man’s free impulse toward “all-unity” through sophia, “to whom our ancestors with wonderful prophetic feeling built temples and altars without yet knowing who she was.”⁶⁰

He urged Alexander III to become “the new Charlemagne,” who would unite Christendom politically; and he was blessed by the Pope and leading Western Catholic officials, many of whom were deeply impressed by his project for reunification. Solov’ev was perhaps the most profound and searching apostle of Christian unity in the nineteenth-century world. For, although he was in his later years more sympathetic with Catholicism than with Orthodoxy or Protestantism, he had (almost alone in nineteenth-century Russia) a sympathetic understanding of all three branches of Christendom. Moreover, he conceived of the problem of unification not in terms of conversion but in terms of leading all the churches to a higher form of unity that none of them had yet found. The Catholic Church was admired as the germ of a social order that transcended nationalism. The isolation and persecution of the Jews in Russia was condemned not only for humane reasons but also because the coming theocracy needed the prophetic spirit and interest in social justice that the Jews had kept alive:

Their only fault perhaps is that they remain Jews and preserve their isolationism. Then show them visible and tangible Christianity so that they should have something to adhere to. They are practical people—show them Christianity in practice.… The Jews are certainly not going to accept Christianity so long as it is rejected by Christians themselves.…⁶¹

Solov’ev seems to have regarded himself as the prophet of this new theocracy; and the poems, fables, and essays on art that he wrote in his last years are in many ways an effort to give concrete form to this prophetic spirit. But pessimism began to replace his earlier hopeful expectation of a “free theocracy.” A new and violent paganism was rising to challenge the Judaeo-Christian world; and the symbol of this new force was Asia, which was just being discovered by the Russian popular mind, thanks to the completion of the Trans-Siberian railroad and the beginnings of Russian imperialistic adventures in the Far East.⁶² Solov’ev was both repulsed and fascinated by the rising East. Even before the first Sino-Japanese War in the mid-nineties, Solov’ev wrote a poem, “Pan-Mongolism,” which depicted the conquest of Russia by a horde of Mongolians. In his Three Conversations with a Short Story of the Antichrist, written in 1900, the year of his death, Solov’ev portrays Japan as having unified the Orient and overrun the world. This anticipation of the surprising triumph that Japan was shortly to register over Russia is only one of the many prophetic elements in the work. The Antichrist has come to rule over this new world empire —claiming like Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor to be carrying on and perfecting Christ’s work. The Antichrist is rather uncharitably given many of the opinions and attributes of Solov’ev’s ideological opponent, Tolstoy. All three Christian churches have declined in strength with the growth of material prosperity and new forms of entertainment. They are easily subordinated to his rule. But a few from each communion have the strength to resist and retire to the desert, including an Orthodox community under the leadership of an elder.

Russian Orthodoxy had lost millions of its nominal members when political events changed the official position of the Church, but it had the joy of being united to the best elements among the Old Believers and even among many sectarians.… The regenerated Church, while not increasing in numbers, grew in spiritual power.⁶³

These Orthodox are reunited with all other Christians when the Jews, who had helped build the rule of Antichrist, suddenly realize that he is not the Messiah and begin a rebellion against him. Thus, the Jews are reunited in solidarity with Christians, the pagan cities are swallowed up by rivers of fire, the dead are resurrected, and Christ comes again to launch his millennial rule on earth together with his saints and “the Jews and Christians executed by Antichrist.”⁶⁴

Solov’ev’s prophetic writings and magnetic personality helped inspire a variety of new developments of the silver age. First of all, he played a leading role in the revival of idealism as an intellectually respectable philosophy. He attempted to show that philosophic idealism was logically implied by the moral idealism of the populist tradition. Whereas Plekhanov cited this same fact to criticize the populists, Solov’ev cited it in order to beckon the moral idealists on to idealism and his own brand of dynamic mysticism. Many who started out as Marxists in the nineties soon went over to the new idealism under Solov’ev’s influence: Berdiaev, Struve, and others. His Justification of the Good, which began to appear serially in 1894 (and was republished as a book in 1897 and 1899), vigorously contended that idealism was the only possible basis on which moral imperatives could be elevated above material self-interest and defended from philosophic scepticism.

Related to his rehabilitation of idealism is Solov’ev’s more general role in helping launch a tradition of serious critical philosophy in Russia. Only with the lifting of curricular restrictions on the teaching of philosophy in 1889 did such a tradition become possible in Russia. With the founding of the journal Questions of Philosophy and Psychology in the same year, Russia at last acquired its first professional journal of technical philosophy. At last there was a medium for critical absorption of Western ideas rather than voracious consumption in the manner of earlier thick journals. The bracketing together of philosophy and psychology in the new journal indicates an immediate willingness for fresh approaches. Solov’ev contributed not only to this journal but also to an even more widely read medium for philosophic education in the 1890’s, the Brockhaus-Efron encyclopedia. This eighty-six-volume collection remains even to this day the greatest single treasure chest of published information in the Russian language; and Solov’ev, as the director of its philosophy section and author of many individual articles, contributed richly both to its literacy and to its sophistication.

Solov’ev also had an influence on the small but significant return to the Russian Orthodox Church that began to take place after his death in the early twentieth century. Dostoevsky’s late works and Solov’ev’s writings combined to enable a number of former radicals suddenly to discover in the Orthodox Church something more than the organ of state discipline that it appeared to be for Pobedonostsev. Men like Bulgakov, Frank, and Berdiaev were willing to brave ridicule by their intellectual associates in order to reaffirm allegiance to the Church in Landmarks of 1909 and several other collections. These intellectuals professed to believe in the new rather than the old Christianity, insisting that true Christianity taught freedom rather than coercion and was not in conflict with social change but was rather necessary to fulfill and sanctify it. The movement for renewal in the Russian Orthodox Church was part of the general movement toward religious modernism that was noticeable in most Christian communities in the early twentieth century. Although the Russian Orthodox Church was remarkably slow in acknowledging the need for new approaches, it did demonstrate an element of independent vitality amidst the disintegration of authority in 1917, convening a church council in August of 1917, which re-established the long-abolished Patriarchate and launched a belated but nonetheless important claim to be an institution with a destiny and mission that should continue even though the old dream of an Eastern Christian empire should be shattered.

Finally, and perhaps most important, Solov’ev had a profound impact on the remarkable artistic revival of the silver age. Solov’ev was one of the pioneers in the rediscovery of the joys of poetry. Although his own poems are, for the most part, not masterpieces, his idea that the world is but a symbolic reflection of a more vital ideal world all around us gave poets a new impulse to discover and proclaim these higher beauties and harmonies. Solov’ev’s cosmological theories revived the old idea of prophetic poetry common to Schelling and Saint-Martin. His philosophy was as important in calling forth the poetry of the silver age as had the philosophy of these earlier romantic figures been in inspiring the poetry of the golden age a half century earlier. The rediscovery of poetic beauty, of viewing the sensual world as an avenue to a higher spiritual world, came as a welcome relief from the increasingly dry prose of realism in decline. The art of social utility and photographic naturalism had held the stage for several decades; but with the decline of the thick journals, whose critics had consistently shouted down all believers in art for art’s sake, the way was being opened for fresh artistic approaches. With the acquisition of The Northern Herald by Solov’ev and several other religiously oriented poets in 1891, the idea that beauty has a meaning of its own gained a new mouthpiece. The publication of Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s “Symbols” in 1892 and his “On the Present Condition of Russian Literature and the Causes of Its Decline” the following year gave new popularity to the idea that the real world is only a shadow of the ideal and that the artist is uniquely able to penetrate through the former to the latter.

Solov’ev’s poetic references to a mysterious “beautiful lady” were both a symptom and a cause of the new turn toward mystical idealism. The beautiful lady was in part Comte’s goddess (vièrge positive) of humanity, in part the missing madonna of a revived romanticism, and in part the divine wisdom (sophia) of Orthodox theology and occult theosophy. Although Solov’ev died earlier than either Plekhanov or Miliukov, his immediate posthumous influence in early-twentieth-century Russia was probably as great as the living impact of these other figures. Solov’ev appealed to visionary impulses which were still very much alive in Russia. He offered Russia, so to speak, one last chance to transcend the world of the ordinary and immediate, the “conglomerated mediocrity” (posredstvennost’) that so repelled the intelligentsia. The political and economic thought of Plekhanov and Miliukov influenced those who contended for power in an age of revolutionary change; but the extraordinary cultural revival of the early twentieth century was born under the brilliant if evanescent star of Solov’ev.

The change in artistic styles from populist realism to the idealism of the silver age may be likened to the change in drinking tastes from the harsh and colorless vodka of the earlier agitators and reformers to the sweet, ruby-colored mesimarja, which became popular among the new aristocratic aesthetes. Mesimarja was a rare, exotic drink, extremely costly and best appreciated at the end of a large and leisurely meal. Like the art of the silver age, mesimarja was the product of an unnatural, half-foreign environment. Mesimarja came from Finnish Lapland, where it was distilled from a rare berry that was ripened by the midnight sun during the brief Arctic summer. The culture of early-twentieth-century Russia was equally exotic and superlative. It was a feast of delicacies tinged with foreboding. As with the mesimarja berry, premature ripeness carried with it the promise of rapid decay. Sunlight at midnight in one season led to darkness at noon in the next.