Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

revolution into the peaceful paths of the service of the reactionary

state; propped up by such liberal measures, the unjust order would

continue and be strengthened. The activists argued that there was

nothing inevitable about revolutions: they were the fruit of human

will and human reason. If there were not enough of these, the

revolution might never take place at all. It was only the insecure

who craved social solidarity and communal life; individualism was

always a luxury, the ideal of the socially established. The new class

of technical specialists-the modern, enlightened, energetic men celebrated by liberals like Kavelin and Turgenev, and at times even by the radical individualist Pisarev-were for the Jacobin Tkachev 'worse

than cholera or typhus', for by applying scientific methods to social

life they were playing into the hands of the new, rising capitalist

oligarchs and thereby obstructing the path to freedom. Palliatives were

fatal when only an operation could save the patient : they merely prolonged his disease and weakened him so much that in the end not even an operation could save him. One must strike before these new, potentially conformist, intellectuals had grown too numerous and too comfortable and had obtained too much power, for otherwise it would

be too late: a Saint-Simonian elite of highly-paid managers would

preside over a new feudal order-an economically efficient but socially

immoral society, inasmuch as it was based on permanent inequality. ·

The greatest of all evils was inequality. Whenever any other ideal

came into conflict with equality, the Russian Jacobins always called

for its sacrifice or modification; the first principle upon which all

justice rested was that of equality; no society was equitable in which

there was not a maximum degree of equality between men. If the

revolution was to succeed, three major fallacies had to be fought and

rooted out. The first was that men of culture alone created progress.

This was not true, and had the bad consequence of inducing faith in

�lites. The second was the opposite illusion-that everything must be

learnt from the common people. This was equally false. Rousseau's

Arcadian peasants were so many idyllic figments. The masses were

ignorant, brutal, reactionary, and did not understand their own needs

or good. If the revolution depended upon their maturity, or capacity

for political judgment or organisation, it would certainly fail. The last

fallacy was that only a proletarian majority could successfully make a

revolution. No doubt a proletarian majority might do that, but if

Russia was to wait until it possessed one, the opportunity of destroying

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a corrupt and detested government would pass, and capitalism would

be found to be too firmly in the saddle.

What, then, must be done? Men must be trained to make the

revolution and destroy the present system and all obstacles to social

equality and democratic self-government. When this was achieved, a

democratic assembly was to be convened, and if those who made the

revolution took care to explain the reasons for it, and the social and

economic situation that made it necessary, then the masses, benighted

though they might be today, would assuredly, in the view of the

Jacobins, grasp their condition sufficiently to allow themselves to beindeed to welcome the opportunity of being-organised into the new free federation of productive associations.

But supposing they were still, on the morrow of a successful coup

d'etat, not mature enough to see this? Herzen did indeed ask this

awkward question again and again in his writings in the late 1 86os.

The majority of the populists were deeply troubled by it. But the

activist wing had · no doubt of the answer: strike the chains from the

captive hero, and he will stretch himself to his full height and live in

freedom and happiness for ever after. The views of these men were

astonishingly simple. They believed in terrorism and more terrorism

to achieve complete, anarchist liberty. The purpose of the revolution,

for them, was to establish absolute equality, not only economic and

social, but 'physical and physiological': they saw no discrepancy

between this bed of Procrustes and absolute freedom. This order

would be imposed in the beginning by the power and authority of

the state, after which, the state, having fulfilled its purpose, would

swiftly 'liquidate' itself.

Against this, the spokesmen of the main body of the populists

argued that J acobin means tended to bring about J acobin consequences:

if the purpose of the revolution was to liberate, it must not use the

weapons of despotism that were bound to enslave those whom they

were designed to liberate: the remedy must not prove more destructive

than the disease. To use the state to break the power of the exploiters

and to impose a specific form of life upon a people, the majority of

whom had not been educated to understand the need for it, was to

exchange the tsarist yoke for a flew, not necessarily less crushing

one-that of the revolutionary minority. The majority of the populists

were deeply democratic; they believed that all power tended to corrupt,

that all concentration of authority tended to perpetuate itself, that all

centralisation was coercive and evil, and, therefore, the sole hope of a

..

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just and free society lay in the peaceful conversion o f men by rational

argument to the truths of social and economic justice and democratic

freedom. In order to obtain the opportunity of converting men to this

vision, it might indeed be necessary to break the existing obstacles to

free and rational intercourse-the police state, the power of capitalists

or of landowners-and to use force in the process, whether mass

mutiny or individual terrorism. But this concept of temporary

measures presented itself to them as something wholly different from

leaving .absolute power in the hands of any party or group, however

virtuous, once the power of the enemy had been broken. Their case

is the classical case, during the last two centuries, of every libertarian

and federalist against Jacobins and centralisers; it is Voltaire's case

against both Helvetius and Rousseau; that of the left wing of the

Gironde against the Mountain; Herzen used these arguments against

doctrinaire communists of the immediately preceding period-Cabet

and the disciples of Babeuf; Bakunin denounced the Marxist demand

for the dictatorship of the proletariat as something that would merely

transfer power from one set of oppressors to another; the populists of

the 8os and 90s urged this against all those whom they suspected of

conspiring (whether they realised it or not) to destroy individual

spontaneity and freedom, whether they were laisuz-faire liberals who

allowed factory owners to enslave the masses, or radical collectivists

who were ready to do so themselves; whether they were capitalist

entrepreneurs (as Mikhailovsky wrote to Dostoevsky in his celebrated

criticism of his novel The Posse sud) or Marxist advocates of centralised

authority; he looked upon both as far more dangerous than the

pathological fanatics pilloried by Dostoevsky-as brutal, amoral social

Darwinists, profoundly hostile to variety and individual freedom and

character.

This, again, was the main political issue which, at the turn of the

century, divided the Russian Socialist-Revolutionaries from the Social­

Democrats; and over which, a few years later, both Plekhanov and

Martov broke with Lenin: indeed the great quarrel between the

Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks (whatever its ostensible cause) turned

upon it. In due course Lenin himself, two or three years after the

October Revolution, while he never abandoned the central Marxist

doctrine, expressed his bitter disappointment with those very consequences of it which his opponents had predicted-bureaucracy and the arbitrary despotism of the party officials; and Trotsky accused Stalin

of this same crime. The dilemma of means and ends is the deepest

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and most agonising problem that torments the revolutionary movements of our own day in all the continents of the world, not least in Asia and Africa. That this debate took so clear and articulate a form

within the populist movement makes its development exceptionaJly

relevant to our own predicament.

All these differences occurred within the framework of a common

revolutionary outlook, for, whatever their disagreements, all populists

were united by an unshakeable faith in the revolution. This faith

derived from many sources. It sprang from the needs and outlook of a

society still overwhelmingly pre-industrial, which gave the craving for

simplicity and fraternity, and the agrarian idealism which derives

ultimately from Rousseau, a reality which can still be seen in India

and Africa today, and which necessarily looks Utopian to the eyes of

social historians born in the industrialised west. It was a consequence

of the disillusionment with parliamentary democracy, liberal convictions, and the good faith of bourgeois intellectuals that resulted from the fiasco of the European revolutions of 1 848-9, and from the

particular conclusion drawn by Herzen that Russia, which had not

suffered this revolution, might find her salvation in the undestroyed

natural socialism of the peasant mir. It was deeply influenced by

Bakunin's violent diatribes against all forms of central authority, and

in particular the state; and by his vision of men as being by nature

peaceful and productive, and rendered violent only when they are

perverted from their proper ends, and forced to be either gaolers or

convicts. But it was also fed by the streams that flowed in a contrary

direction: by Tkachev's faith in a Jacobin �lite of professional revolutionaries as the only force capable of destroying the advance of capitalism, helped on its fatal path by innocent reformists and humanitarians and careerist intellectuals, and concealed behind the repulsive sham of parliamentary democracy; even more by the passionate

utilitarianism of Pisarev, and his brilliant polemics against all forms

of idealism and amateurishness, and, in particular, the sentimental

idealisation of the simplicity and beauty of peasants in general, and of

Russian peasants in particular, as beings touched by grace, remote from

the corrupting influences of the decaying west. It was supported by the

appeal which these 'critical realists' made to their compatriots to save

themselves by self-help and hard-headed energy-a kind of nee­

Encyclopedist campaign in favour of natural science, skill, and

professionalism, directed against the humanities, classical learning,

history, and other forms of 'sybaritic' self-indulgence. Above all, it

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