Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

R U S SIAN TH I N KE RS

contrasted 'realism' with the literary culture which had lulled the best

men in Russia into a condition where corrupt bureaucrats, stupid and

brutal landowners, and an obscurantist Church could exploit them or

let them rot, while aesthetes and liberals looked the other way.

But the deepest strain of all, the very centre of the populist outlook,

was the individualism and rationalism of Lavrov and Mikhailovsky.

With Herzen they believed that history followed no predetermined

pattern, that it possessed 'no libretto', that neither the violent conflicts

between cultures, nations, classes (which for Hegelians constituted

the essence of human progress), nor the struggles for power by one

class over another (represented by Marxists as being the motive force

of history) were inevitable. Faith in human freedom was the cornerstone of populist humanism: the populists never tired of repeating that ends were chosen by men, not imposed upon them, and that men's

wills alone could construct a happy and honourable life-a life in

which the interests of intellectuals, peasants, manual workers and the

liberal professions could be reconciled; not indeed made wholly to

coincide, for that was an unattainable ideal; but adjusted in an unstable

equilibrium, which human reason and constant human care could

adjust to the largely unpredictable consequences of the interaction of

men with each other and with nature. It may be tltat the tradition

of the Orthodox Church with its conciliar and communal principles

and deep antagonism both to the authoritarian hierarchy of the Roman

Church, and the individualism of the Protestants, also exercised its

share of influence. These doctrines and these prophets and their

western masters- French radicals before and after the French revolution, as well as Fichte and Buonarotti, Fourier and Hegel, Mill and Proudhon, Owen and Marx-played their part. But the largest figure

in the populist movement, the man whose temperament, ideas and

activities dominated it from beginning to end, is undoubtedly Nikolay

Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky. The influence of his life and teachings,

despite a multitude of monographs, still awaits its interpreter.

Nikolay Chernyshevsky was not a man of original ideas. He did

not possess the depth, the imagination, or the brilliant intellect and

literary talent of Herzen; nor the eloquence, the boldness, the temperament or the reasoning power of Bakunin, nor the moral genius and unique social insight of Belinsky. But he was a man of unswerving

integrity, immense industry, and a capacity rare among Russians for

concentration upon concrete detail. His deep, steady, lifelong hatred

of slavery, injustice and irrationality did not express itself in large

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theoretical generalisations, or the creation of a sociological or metaphysical system, or violent action against authority. It took the form of slow, uninspired, patient accumulation of facts and ideas-a crude,

dull, but powerful intellectual structure on which one might found a

detailed policy of practical action appropriate to the specific Russian

environment which he desired to alter. Chernyshevsky was in greater

sympathy with the concrete, carefully elaborated socialist plans, however mistaken they might be, of the Petrashevsky group (to which Dostoevsky had belonged in his youth), crushed by the government in

I 849, than with the great imaginative constructions of Herzen,

Bakunin and their followers.

A new generation had grown up during the dead years after 1 849.

These young men had witnessed vacillation and outright betrayals on

the part of liberals, which had led to the victories of the reactionary

parties in 1 849. Twelve years later they saw the same phenomenon

in their own country when the manner in which the peasants had

been emancipated in Russia seemed to them to be a cynical travesty of

all their plans and hopes. Such men as these found the plodding genius

of Chernyshevsky-his attempts to work out sped fie solutions to specific

problems in terms of concrete statistical data; his constant appeals to

facts; his patient efforts to indicate attainable, practical, immediate

ends rather than desirable states of affairs to which there was no

visible road; his flat, dry, pedestrian style, his very dullness and lack

of inspiration-more serious and ultimately more inspiring than the

noble flights of the romantic idealists of the 1 84os. His relatively low

social origin (he was the son of a parish priest) gave him a natural

affinity with the humble folk whose condition he was seeking to

analyse, and an abiding distrust, later to turn into fanatical hatred, of

all liberal theorists, whether in Russia or the west. These qualities

made Chernyshevsky a natural leader of a disenchanted generation of

socially mingled origins, no longer dominated by good birth, embittered

by the failure of their own early ideals, by government repression, by

the humiliation of Russia in the Crimean war, by the weakness,

heartlessness, hypocrisy, and chaotic incompetence of the ruling class.

To these tough-minded, socially insecure, angry, suspicious young

radicals, contemptuous of the slightest trace of eloquence or 'literature',

Chernyshevsky was a father and a confessor as neither the aristocratic

and ironical Herzen nor the wayward and ultimately frivolous

Bakunin could ever become.

Like all populists, Chernyshevsky believed in the need to preserve

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the peasant commune and to spread its principles to industrial production. He believed that Russia could profit directly by learning from the scientific advances of the west, without going through the agonies of

an industrial revolution. 'Human development is a form of chronological unfairness,' Herzen had once characteristically observed, 'since lat�mers are able to profit by the labours of their predecessors

without paying the same price.' 'History is fond of her grandchildren,'

Chernyshevsky repeated after him, 'for it offers them the marrow of

the bones, which the previous generation had hurt its hands in

breaking.' For Chernyshevsky history moved along a spiral, in

Hegelian triads, since every generation tends to repeat the experience

not of its parents, but of its grandparents, and repeats it at a 'higher

level'.

But it is not this historicist element in his doctrine that bound its

spell upon the populists. They were most of all influenced by his

acute distrust of reforms from above, by his belief that the essence of

history was a struggle between the classes, above all by his conviction

(which derives nothing, so far as we know, from Marx, but draws upon

socialist sources common to both) that the state is always the instrument

of the dominant class, and cannot, whether it consciously desires this

or not, embark on those necessary reforms, the success of which would

end its own domination. No order can be persuaded to undertake its

own dissolution. Hence all attempts to convert the tsar, all attempts

to evade the horrors of revolution, must (he concluded in the early 6os)

remain necessarily vain. There was a moment in the 'late sos when,

like Herzen, he had hoped for reforms from above. The final form of

the Emancipation, and the concessions which the government had

made to the landowners, cured him of this illusion. He pointed out

with a good deal of historical justification that liberals, who hoped to

influence the government by Fabian tactics, had thus far merely

succeeded in betraying both the peasants and themselves: first they

compromised themselves with the peasants by their relations with their

masters; after that, the governing class found little difficulty whenever

this suited their convenience in representing them as false friends to

the peasants, and turning the latter against them. This had occurred

in both France and Germany in 1 849. Even if the moderates withdrew

in time, and advocated violent measures, their ignorance of conditions

and blindness to the peasants' and workers' actual needs usually led

them to advocate Utopian schemes which in the end cost their

followers a terrible price.

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Chemyshevsky had evolved a simple form of historical materialism,

according to which social factors determined political ones, and not

vice versa. Consequently, he held with Fourier and Proudhon that

liberal and parliamentary ideals merely evaded the central issues: the

peasants and the workers needed food, shelter, boots; as for the right

to vote, or to be governed by liberal constitutions, or to obtain

guarantees of personal liberty, these meant little to hungry and halfnaked men. The social revolution must come first: appropriate political reforms would follow of themselves. For Chernyshevsky the principal

lesson of 1 848 was that the western liberals, the brave no less than the

cowardly, had demonstrated their political and moral bankruptcy, and

with it that of their Russian disciples- Herzen, Kavelin, Granovsky

and the rest. Russia must pursue her own path. Unlike the Slavophils,

and like the Russian Marxists of the next generation, he maintained

with a wealth of economic evidence that the historical development

of Russia, and in particular the peasant mir, were in no sense unique,

but followed the social and economic laws that governed all human

societies. Like the Marxists (and the Comtian positivists), he believed

that such laws could be discovered and stated; but unlike the Marxists,

he was convinced that by adopting western techniques, and educating

a body of men of trained and resolute wills and rational outlook,

Russia could 'leap over' the capitalist stage of social development, and

transform her village communes and free cooperative groups of craftsmen into agricultural and industrial associations of producers who would constitute the embryo of the new socialist society. Technological progress did not, in his view, automatically break up the peasant commune: 'savages can be taught to use Latin script and

safety-matches'; factories can be grafted on to workers' arttls without

destroying them; large-scale organisation could eliminate exploitation,

and yet preserve the predominantly agricultural nature of the Russian

economy.1

1 In II pDpulismo russo - translated into English as Roots of Rtr10/utiD11

(London, 1 960)- Franco Venturi very aptly quotes populist statistics (which

seem plausible enough) according to which the proportion of peasants to

that of landowners in the 1 86os was of the order of 3.f.I:I, while the land