Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

are a vindication of the belief which he has preached to his English

audience over many years: that enthusiasm for ideas is not a failing or

a vice; that on the contrary, the evils of narrow and despotic visions of

the world can be effectively resisted only through an unswerving moral

and intellectual clarity of vision that can penetrate to and expose the

hidden implications and extreme consequences of social and political

ideals.

As he points out in his Four Essays on Liberty, no philosopher has

ever succeeded in finally proving or refuting the determinist proposition that subjective ideals have no influence on historical events: but the essays in this book, with their deep perception of the moral essence

of a man as the source of his humanity, of the way in which ideals are

'lived through' in inner conflicts, argue more powerfully than any

logical demonstration in support of the belief which penetrates all

Isaiah Berlin's writings: that men are morally free and are (more often

than the determinists who hold the field believe) able to influence

events for good or evil through their freely held ideals and convictions.

AILEEN KELLY

xxiv

T H .E year 1 848 is not usually considered to be a landmark in Russian

history. The revolutions of that year, which seemed to Herzen like

a life-giving storm on a sultry day, did not reach the Russian Empire.

The drastic changes of policy on the part of the imperial government

after the suppression of the Decembrist rising in 1825 seemed all too

effective: literary storms like the Chaadaev affair in 1836, the loose

student talk for which Herzen and his friends were punished, even

minor peasant disorders in the early 40s in remote provincial districts,

were easily disposed of; in 1848 itself not a ripple disturbed the peace

of the vast and still expanding empire. The gigantic straitjacket of

bureaucratic and military control which, if not devised, was reinforced and pulled tighter by Nicholas I, appeared despite frequent cases of stupidity or corruption to be conspicuously successful.

There was nowhere any sign of effective independent thought or

action.

Eighteen years earlier, in 1830, the news from Paris had put new

life into Russian radicals; French Utopian socialism made a deep

impression on Russian social thought; the Polish rebellion became the

rallying point of democrats everywhere, very much as did the republic

in the Spanish civil war a century later. But the rebellion was crushed,

and all embers of the great conflagration, at any rate so far as open

expression was concerned, were by 1848 virtually stamped out-in St

Petersburg no less than in Warsaw. To observers in western Europe,

sympathetic and hostile alike, . the autocracy seemed unshakeable.

Nevertheless the year 1848 is a turning-point in the development of

Russia as of Europe, not only because of the decisive part played in

subsequent Russian history by revolutionary socialism, heralded by the

Manifesto composed by Marx and Engels to celebrate its birth; but

more immediately because of the effect which the failure of the

European revolution was destined to have upon Russian public opinion,

and in particular upon the Russian revolutionary movement. At the

time, however, this could scarcely have been foreseen: well might a

sober p(>lirical observer-a Granovsky or Koshelev-feel gloomy about

I

R U S SIAN THINKERS

the possibility of even moderate reforms; revolution seemed too remote

to contemplate.

It seems unlikely that anyone in the 184os, even among the bolder

spirits, except perhaps Bakunin and one or two members of the

Petrashevsky circle, counted on the possibility of an immediate revolution in Russia. The revolutions that broke out in Italy, France, Prussia and the Austrian Empire had been made by more or less

organised political parties, openly opposed to the existing regimes.

These were composed of, or acted in coalition with, radical or socialist

intellectuals, were led by prominent democrats identified with recognised political and social doctrines and sects, and found support among the liberal bourgeoisie, or from frustrated national _movements at

various stages of development and animated by different ideals. They

tended also to draw a good deal of strength from disaffected workers

and peasants. None of these elements was articulate or organised in

Russia in any sense resembling the situation in the west. Parallels

between Russian and western European development are always liable

to be superficial and misleading, but if a C!)mparison is to be drawn at

all the eighteenth century in Europe offers a closer analogy. The

opposition of Russian liberals and radicals which, after the severe

repressions following the Decembrist rising, began to grow bolder and

more articulate in the middle 30s and early 40s, resembled the guerrilla

warfare against the Church and absolute monarchy conducted by the

Encyclopedists in France or by the leaders of the German Aufkliirung,

far more than the mass organisations and popular movements in western

Europe of the nineteenth century. The Russian liberals and radicals of

the 30s and 40s, whether they confined themselves to philosophical or

aesthetic issues, like the circle gathered round Stankevich, or concerned

themselves with political and social issues, like Herzen and Ogarev,

remained isolated lumieres, a small and highly self-conscious intellectual

elite; they met and argued and influenced each other in the drawingrooms and salons of Moscow or St Petersburg, but they had no popular support, no widely extended political or social framework either in the

form of political parties or even in the kind of unofficial but widespread

middle-class opposition which had preceded the great French Revolution. The scattered Russian intellectuals of this period had no middle class to lean upon, nor could they look for help from the peasantry.

'The people feel the need of potatoes, but none whatever of a constitution-that is desired only by educated townspeople who are quite powerless,' wrote Belinsky to his friends in 1846. And this was

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R U S S IA AND 1 8 4 8

echoed thirteen years later by Chernyshevsky in a characteristic

hyperbole: 'There is no European country in which the vast majority

of the people is not absolutely indifferent to the rights which are the

object of desire and concern only to the liberals.'1 While this was

scarcely true of most of western Europe, then or earlier, it reflected

the backward state of Russia accurately enough. Until the economic

development of the Russian Empire created industrial and labour

problems and with them a middle class and a proletariat of the western

type, the democratic revolution remained a dream: and when such

conditions finally materialised, as they did with increasing tempo in

the last decades of the nineteenth century, the revolution did not lag

far behind. The 'Russian 1 848' occurred in that country in 1905,

by which time the middle class in the west was no longer revolutionary

or even militantly reformist; and this time-lag of half a century was·

itself a powerful factor in causing the final cleavage between liberal

and authoritarian socialism in 1 9 1 7, and the fatal divergence of paths

between Russia and Europe which followed. Perhaps F. I. Dan was

right in supposing that this was the parting of the ways which Herzen

had in mind when, addressing Edgar Quinet, he declared, 'You [will

go] by way of the proletariat towards socialism; we by way of socialism

to freedom.'2 The difference in the degree of political maturity

between Russia and the west at this period is vividly described in the

introduction to Letttrs from Franct and Italy which Herzen composed

in his Putney exile. His topic is the revolution of 1 848 in western

Europe:

The liberals, those political Protestants, became in their turn the

most fearful conservatives; behind the altered charters and con"'

stitutions they have discovered the spectre of socialism and have

grown pale with terror; nor is this surprising for they . . . have

something to lose, something to be afraid of. But we [Russians] are

not in that position at all. Our attitude to all public affairs is much

simpler and more naive.

The liberals are afraid of losing their liberty-we have none;

they are nervous of interference by governments in the industrial

sphere-with us the government interferes with everything anyhow;

they are afraid oflosing their personal rights-we have yet to acquire

them.

1 Quoted by F. I. Dan, Proislthozlulenit 6o/s�iZIIffl (New York, 1946),

PP· 36, 39·

1 Ko/oltol, No z 1o (1 December 1 865); referred to by Dan, ibid.

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R U S S IAN T H I NK E R S

The extreme contradictions of our still disordered existence, the

lack of stability in all our legal and constitutional notions, on the

one hand makes possible the most unlimited despotism, serfdom and

military settlements, and on the other creates conditions in which

such revolutionary steps as those of Peter I and Alexander II are

less difficult. A man who lives in furnished rooms finds it far

easier to move than one who has acquired a house of his own.

Europe is sinking because it cannot rid itself of its cargo-that

infinity of treasures accumulated in distant and perilous expeditions.

In our case, all this is artificial ballast; out with it and overboard,

and then full sail into the open sea ! We are entering history full of

strength and energy at precisely the moment when all political

parties are becoming faded anachronisms, and everyone is pointing,

some hopefully, others with despair, at the approaching thundercloud of economic revolution. And so we, too, when we look at our neighbours, begin to feel frightened of the coming storm, and

like them, think it best to say nothing about this peril . . . But you

have no need to fear these terrors; calm yourselves, for on our

estate there is a lightning conductor-communal owntrship of tht /and/1

In other words, the total absence of elementary rights and liberties,

the seven dark years which followed 1 848, so far from inducing

despair or apathy, brought home to more than one Russian thinker the

sense of complete antithesis between his country and the relatively

liberal institutions of Europe which, paradoxically enough, was made

the basis for subsequent Russian optimism. From it sprang the

strongest hope of a uniquely happy and glorious future, destined for

Russia alone.

Herzen's analysis of the facts was quite correct. There was no

Russian bourgeoisie to speak of: the journalist Polevoy and the highly

articulate literary tea merchant, Botkin, friend of Belinsky and Turgenev, and indeed Belinsky himself, were notl'lble exceptions-social conditions for drastic liberal refonns, let alone revolution, did not exist.