Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

rlgime, and at the same time he knew that the new world which had

risen to avenge these wrongs must, if it was given its head, create its

own excesses and drive millions of human beings to useless mutual

extermination. Herzen's sense of reality, in particular of the need for,

and the price of, revolution, is unique in his own, and perhaps in any

age. His sense of the critical moral and political issues of his time is a

good deal more specific and concrete than that of the majority of the

professional philosophers of the nineteenth century, who tended to try

to derive general principles from observation of their society, and to

recommend solutions which are deduced by rational methods from

premises formulated in terms of the tidy categories in which they

sought to arrange opinions, principles and forms of conduct. Herzen

was a publicist and an essayist whom his early Hegelian training had

not ruined : he had acquired no taste for academic classifications: he

had a unique insight into the 'inner feel' of social and political predicaments: and with it a remarkable power of analysis and exposition.

Consequently he understood and stated the case, both emotional and

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intellectual, for violent revolution, for saying that a pair of boots was

of more value than all the plays of Shakespeare (as the 'nihilistic'

critic Pisarev once said in a rhetorical moment), for denouncing

liberalism and parliamentarism, which offered the masses votes and

slogans when what they needed was food, shelter, clothing; and understood no less vividly and dearly the aesthetic and even moral value of civilisations which rest upon slavery, where a minority produces

divine masterpieces, and only a small number of persons have the

freedom and the self-confidence, the imagination and the gifts, to be

able to produce forms of life that endure, works which can be shored

up against the ruin of our time.

This curious ambivalence, the alternation of indignant championship of revolution and democracy against the smug denunciation of them by liberals and conservatives, with no less passionate attacks

upon revolutionaries in the name of free individuals; the defence of

the claims of life and art, human decency, equality and dignity, with

the advocacy of a society in which human beings shall not exploit or

trample on one another even in the name of justice or progress or

civilisation or democracy or other abstractions-this war on two, and

often more, fronts, wherever and whoever the enemies of freedom

might turn out to be-makes Herren the most realistic, sensitive,

penetrating and convincing witness to the social life and the social

issues of his own time. His greatest gift is that of untrammelled understanding: he understood the value of the so-called 'superfluous' Russian idealists of the +OS because they were exceptionally free, and morally

attractive, and formed the most imaginative, spontaneous, gifted,

civilised and interesting society which he had ever known. At the

same time he understood the protest against it of the exasperated,

deeply earnest, rrooltls young radicals, repelled by what seemed to

them gay and irresponsible chatter among a group of aristocratic

jl4nmrs, unaware of the mounting resentment of the sullen mass of

the oppressed peasants and lower officials that would one day sweep

them and their world away in a tidal wave of violent, blind, but justified hatred which it is the business of true revolutionaries to foment and direct. Herren understood this conflict, and his autobiography

conveys the tension between individuals and classes, personalities and

opinions both in Russia and in the west, with marvellous vividness

and precision.

My Past and Thoughts is dominated by no single clear purpose, it

is not committed to a thesis; its author was not enslaved by any formula

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or any political doctrine, and for this reason, it remains a profound

and living masterpiece, and Herzen's greatest title to immortality. He

possesses other clai;ns: his political and social views were arrestingly

original, if only because he was among the very few thinkers of his

time who in principle rejected all general solutions, and grasped, as

very few thinkers have ever done, the crucial distinction between

words that are about words, and words that are about persons or

things in the real world. Nevertheless it is as a writer that he survives.

His autobiography is one of the great monuments to Russian literary

and psychological genius, worthy to stand beside the great novels of

Turgenev and Tolstoy. Like War and Peau, like Fathers and

Children, it is wonderfully readable, and, save in inferior translation,

not dated, not Victorian, still astonishingly contemporary in feeling.

One of the elements in political genius is a sensibility to characteristics and processes in society while they are still in embryo and invisible to the naked eye. Herzen possessed this capacity to a high

degree, but he viewed the approaching cataclysm neither with the

savage exultation of Marx or Bakunin nor with the pessimistic

detachment of Burckhardt or T ocqueville. Like Proudhon he believed

the destruction of individual freedom to be neither desirable nor

inevitable, but, unlike him, as being highly probable, unless it was

averted by deliberate human effort. The strong tradition of libertarian

humanism in Russian socialism, defeated only in October 1 9 1 7,

derives from his writings. His analysis of the forces at work in his

day, of the individuals in whom they were embodied, of the moral

presupposition of their creeds and words, and of his own principles,

remains to this day one of the most penetrating, moving, and morally

formidable indictments of the great evils which have grown to maturity

in our own time.

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Russian Populism

R us s I A N populism is the name not of a single political party, nor of

a coherent body of doctrine, but of a widespread radical movement in

Russia in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was born during

the great social and intellectual ferment which followed the death of

Tsar Nicholas I and the defeat and humiliation of the Crimean war,

grew to fame and influence during the I 86os and I 87os, and reached

its culmination with the assassination of Tsar Alexander I I, after

which it swiftly declined. Its leaders were men of very dissimilar

origins, outlooks and capacities; it was not at any stage more than

loose congeries of small independent groups of conspirators or their

sympathisers, who sometimes united for common action, and at other

times operated in isolation. These groups tended to differ both about

ends and about means. Nevertheless they held certain fundamental

beliefs in common, and possessed sufficient moral and political solidarity

to entitle them to be called a single movement. Like their predecessors,

the Decembrist conspirators in the 20s, and the circles that gathered

round Alexander Herz.en and Belinsky in the 30s and 40s, they

looked on the government and the social structure of their country

as a moral and political monstrosity-obsolete, barbarous, stupid and

odious-and dedicated their lives to its total destruction. Their general

ideas were not original. They shared the democratic ideals of the

European radicals of their day, and in addition believed that the

struggle between social and economic classes was the determining

factor in politics; they held this theory not in its Marxist form (which

did not effectively reach Russia until the 1 87os) but in the form in

which it was taught by Proudhon and Herzen, and before them by

Saint-Simon, Fourier and other French socialists and radicals whose

writings had entered Russia, legally and illegally, in a thin but steady

stream for several decades.

The theory of social history as dominated by the class war-the

heart of which is the notion of the coercion of the 'have-nots' by the

'haves'-was born in the course of the Industrial Revolution in the

west; and its most characteristic concepts belong to the capitalist

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phase of economic development. Economic classes, capitalism, cutthroat competition, proletarians and their exploiters, the evil power of unproductive finance, the inevitability of increasing centralisation

and standardisation of all human activities, the transformation of men

into commodities and the consequent 'alienation' of individuals and

groups and degradation of human lives-these notions are fully

intelligible only in the context of expanding industrialism. Russia,

even as late as the I 8 50s, was one of the least industrialised states in

Europe. Nevertheless, exploitation and misery had long been amongst

the most familiar and universally recognised characteristics of its social

life, the principal victims of the system being the peasants, both serfs

and free, who formed over nine-tenths of its population. An industrial

proletariat had indeed come into being, but by mid-century did not

exceed two or three per cent of the population of the Empire. Hence

the cause of the oppressed was still at that date overwhelmingly that

of the agricultural workers, who formed the lowest stratum of the

population, the vast majority being serfs in state or private possession.

The populists looked upon them as martyrs whose grievances they

were determined to avenge and remedy, and as embodiments of

simple uncorrupted virtue, whose social organisation (which they

largely idealised) was the natural foundation on which the future of

Russian society must be rebuilt.

The central populist goals were social justice and social equality.

Most of them were convinced, following Herzen, whose revolutionary

propaganda in the I 8 50s influenced them more than any other single

set of ideas, that the essence of a just and equal society existed already

in the Russian peasant commune-the ohshchina organised in the form

of a collective unit called the mir. The mir was a free association of

peasants which periodically redistributed the agricultural land to be

tilled; its decisions bound all its members, and constituted the cornerstone on which, so the populists maintained, a federation of socialised, self-governing units, conceived along lines popularised by the French

socialist Proudhon, could be erected. The populist leaders believed

that this form of cooperation offered the possibility of a free and

democratic social system in Russia, originating as it did in the deepest

moral instincts and traditional values of Russian, and indeed all human,

society, and they believed that the workers (by which they meant all

productive human beings), whether in town or country, could bring

this system into being with a far smaller degree of violence or coercion

than had occurred in the industrial west. This system, since it alone

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sprang naturally from fundamental human needs and a sense of the