Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

right and the good that existed in all men, would ensure justice,

equality, and the widest opportunity for the full development of

human faculties. As a corollary of this, the populists believed that the

development of large-scale centralised industry was not 'natural', and

therefore led inexorably to the degradation and dehumanisation of all

those who were caught in its tentacles: capitalism was an appalling

evil, destructi�e of body and soul; but it was not inescapable. They

denied that social or economic progress was necessarily bound up with

the Industrial Revolution. They maintained that the application of

scientific truths and methods to social and individual problems (in

which they passionately believed), although it might, and often did,

lead to the growth of capitalism, could be realised without this fatal

sacrifice. They believed that it was possible to improve life by scientific techniques without necessarily destroying the 'natural' life of the peasant village, or creating a vast, pauperised, faceless city proletariat.

Capitalism seemed irresistible only because it had not been sufficiently

resisted. However it might be in the west, in Russia 'the curse of

bigness' could still be successfully fought, and federations of small

self-governing units of producers, as Fourier and Proudhon had

advocated, could be fostered, and indeed created, by deliberate action.

Like their French masters, the Russian disciples held the institution

of the state in particular hatred, since to them it was at once the

symbol, the result and the main source of injustice and inequalitya weapon wielded by the governing class to defend its own privilegesand one that, in the face of increasing resistance from its victims, grew progressively more brutal and blindly destructive.

The defeat of liberal and radical movements in the west in I 848-9

confirmed them in their conviction that salvation did not lie in politics

or political parties: it seemed clear to them that liberal parties and their

leaders had neither understood nor made a serious effort to forward

the fundamental interests of the oppressed populations of their

countries. What the vast majority of peasants in Russia (or workers

in Europe) needed was to be fed and clothed, to be given physical

security, to be rescued from disease, ignorance, poverty, and humiliating inequalities. As for political rights, votes, parliaments, republican forms, these were meaningless and useless to ignorant, barbarous, halfnaked and starving men; such programmes merely mocked their misery. The populists shared with the nationalistic Russian Slavophils

(with whose political ideas they had otherwise little in common) a

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loathing of the rigidly class-conscious social pyramid of the west that

was complacently accepted, or fervently believed in, by the conformist

bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy to whom this bourgeoisie looked up.

The satirist Saltykov, in his famous dialogue between a German

and a Russian boy, immortalised this attitude when he declared his

faith in the Russian boy, hungry and in rags, stumbling in the mud

and squalor of the accursed, slave-owning tsarist regime, because he

had not, like the neat, docile, smug, well-fed, well-dressed German

bOy, bartered away his soul for the few pence that the Prussian official

had offered him, and was consequently capable, if only he was allowed

to do so (as the Gennan boy no longer was), of rising one day to his

full human height. Russia was in darkness and in chains, but her

spirit was not captive; her past was black, but her future promised

more than the death in life of the civilised middle classes in Germany

or France or England, who had long ago sold themselves for material

security and had become so apathetic in their shameful, self-imposed

servitude that they no longer knew how to want to be free.

The populists, unlike the Slavophils, did not believe in the unique

character or destiny of the Russian people. They were not mystical

nationalists. They believed only that Russia was a backward nation

which had not reached the stage of social and economic development

at which the western nations (whether or not they could have avoided

this) had entered upon the path of unrestrained industrialism. They

were not, for the most part, historical determinists; consequently they

believed that it was possible for a nation in such a predicament to

avoid this fate by the exercise of intelligence and will. They saw no

reason why Russia could not benefit by western science and western

technology without paying the appalling price paid by the west. They

argued that it was possible to avoid the despotism of a centralised

economy or a centralised government by adopting a loose, federal

structure composed of self-governing, socialised units both of producers

and of consumers. They held that it was desirable to organise, but not

to lose sight of other values in the pursuit of organisation as an end

in itself; to be governed primarily by ethical and humanitarian and

not solely by economic and technological-'ant-hill'-considerations.

They declared that to protect human individuals against exploitation

by turning them into an industrial army of collectivised robots was

self-stultifying and suicidal. The ideas of the populists wer:e often

unclear, and there were sharp differences among them, but there was

an area of agreement wide enough to constitute a genuine movement.

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Thus they accepted, in broad outline, the educational and moral

lessons, but not the state worship, of Rousseau. Some of them-indeed

perhaps the majority-shared Rousseau's belief in the goodness of

simple men, his conviction that the cause of corruption is the crippling

effect of bad institutions, his acute distrust of all forms of cleverness,

of intellectuals and specialists, of all self-isolating coteries and factions.

They accepted the anti-political ideas, but not the technocratic

centralism, of Saint-Simon. They shared the belief in conspiracy and

violent action preached by Babeuf and his disciple Buonarotti, but not

their Jacobin authoritarianism. They stood with Sismondi and

Proudhon and Lamennais and the other originators of the notion of

the welfare state, against, on the one hand, laissn-fairt, and, on the

other, central authority, whether nationalist or socialist, whether

temporary or permanent, whether preached by List, or Mazzini, or

Lassalle, or Marx. They came close at times to the positions of

western Christian socialists, without, however, any religious faith,

since, like the French Encyclopedists of the previous century, they

believed in 'natural' morality and scientific truth. These were some

of the beliefs that held them together. But they were divided by

differences no less profound.

The first and greatest of their problems was their attitude towards

the peasants in whose name all that they did was done. Who was to

show the peasants the true path to justice and equality? Individual

liberty is not, indeed, condemned by the populists, but it tends to be

regarded as a liberal catchword, liable to distract attention from

immediate social and economic tasks. Should one train experts to

teach the ignorant younger brothers-the tillers of the soil, and, if

need be, stimulate them to resist authority, to revolt and destroy the

old order before the rebels had themselves fully grasped the need or

meaning of such acts? That is the view of such dissimilar figures as

Bakunin and Speshnev in the 1 84os; it was preached by Chernyshevsky in the 50s, and was passionately advocated by Zaichnevsky and the Jacobins of 'Young Russia' in the 6os; it was preached by

Lavrov in the 70s and 8os, and equally by his rivals and opponentsthe believers in disciplined professional terrorism-Nechaev and Tkachev, and their followers who include-for this purpose alonenot only the Socialist-Revolutionaries but also some of the most fanatical Russian Marxists, in particular Lenin and Trotsky.

Some among them asked whether this training of revolutionary

groups might not create an arrogant elite of seekers of power and

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autocracy, men who would, at best, believe i t their duty to give the

peasants not what the peasants asked for but what they-their selfappointed mentors-thought good for them, namely, that which the masses ought to ask for, whether they in fact did so or not. They

· pushed the question farther, and asked whether this would not, in due

course, breed fanatical men who would pay too little heed to the

actual wants of the vast majority of the Russian population, intent on

forcing upon them only what they-the dedicated order of professional

revolutionaries, cut off from the life of the masses by their own special

training and conspiratorial lives-had chosen for them, ignoring the

hopes and protests of the people itself. Was there not a terrible danger

here of the substitution of a new yoke for the old, of a despotic

oligarchy of intellectuals in the place of the nobility and the bureaucracy and the tsar? What reason was there for thinking that the new masters would prove less oppressive than the old?

This was argued by some among the terrorists of the 6os- lshutin

and Karakozov, for example-and even more forcibly by the majority

of the idealistic young men, who 'went among the people' in the 70s

and later, with the aim not so much of teaching others as of themselves learning how to live, in a state of mind inspired by Rousseau (and perhaps by Nekrasov or Tolstoy) at least as much as by the more

tough-minded social theorists. These young men, the so-called

'repentant gentry', believed themselves to have been corrupted not

merely by an evil social system but by the very process of liberal

education which makes for deep inequalities and inevitably lifts

scientists, writers, professors, experts, civilised men in general, too

high above the heads of the masses, and so itself becomes the richest

breeding-ground of injustice and class oppression; everything that

obstructs understanding between individuals or groups or nations, that

creates and keeps in being obstacles to human solidarity and fraternity

is to ipso evil; specialisation and university education build walls

between men, prevent individuals and groups from 'connecting', kill

love and friendship, and are among the major causes responsible for

what, after Hegel and his followers, came to be called the 'alienation'

of entire orders or classes or cultures.

Some among the populists contrived to ignore or evade this r-roblem.

Bakunin, for example, who, if not a populist himself, influenced

populism profoundly, denounced faith in intellectuals and experts as

liable to lead to the most ignoble of tyrannies-the rule of scientists

and pedants-but would not face the problem of whether the revolu-