Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

Yet this very fact, which was so bitterly lamented by liberals like

Kavelin and even Belinsky, brought its own remarkable compensation.

In Europe an international revolution had broken out and failed, and

its failure created among idealistic democrats and socialists a bitter

sense of disillusion and despair. In some cases it led to cynical detachment, or else a tendency to seek comfort either in apathetic resignation, 1 A. I. Herzen, 8o6rt1t1it sochifltflii o tridtst�ti tomt�lh (Moscow, 19S+-6S),

vol. ), pp. 1 3-1 +·

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R U SS I A AND 1 8 48

or in religion, or in the ranks of political reaction; very much as the

failure of the revolution of 1 90 5 in Russia produced the call to

repentance and spiritual values of the J?ekhi group. In Russia, Katkov

did become a conservative nationalist, Dostoevsky turned to orthodoxy,

Botkin turned his back upon radicalism, Bakunin signed a disingenuous

'confession'; but in general the very fact that Russia had suffered no

revolution, and no corresponding degree of disenchantment, led to a

development very different from that of western Europe. The important fact was that the passion for reform - the revolutionary fervour and the belief in the feasibility of change by means of public pressure,

agitation, and, as some thought, conspiracy-did not weaken. On the

contrary, it grew stronger. But the argument for a political revolution,

when its failure in the west was so glaring, clearly became less convincing. The discontented and rebellious Russian intellectuals of the next thirty years turned their attention to the peculiarities of their

own internal situation; and then, from ready-made solutions, imported

from the west and capable only of being artificially grafted on to the

recalcitrant growth provided by their own countrymen, to the creation

of new doctrines and modes of action adapted carefully to the peculiar

problems posed by Russia alone. They were prepared to learn and more

than learn-to become the most devoted and assiduous disciples of the

most advanced thinkers of western Europe, but the teachings of Hegel

and the German materialists, of Mill, Spencer and Comte, were

henceforth to be transformed to fit specifically Russian needs. Bazarov,

in Turgenev's Fathers and Childrm, for all his militant positivism

and materialism and respect for the west, has far deeper roots in Russian

soil, not without a certain self-conscious pride, than the men of the

1 84os with their genuinely cosmopolitan ideal: than, for example, the

imaginary Rudin, or indeed the supposed original of Rudin-Bakunin

himself, for all his pan-Slavism and Germanophobia.

The measures taken by the Government to prevent the 'revolutionary disease' from infecting the Russian Empire, did no doubt play a decisive part in preventing the possibility of revolutionary outbreaks:

but the important consequence of this 'moral quarantine' was to

weaken the influence of western liberalism; it forced Russian intellectuals in upon themselves and made it more difficult than before to escape from the painful issues before them into a kind of vague search

for panaceas from the west. There followed a sharp settling of internal

moral and political accounts: as hope receded of marching in step with

western liberalism, the Russian progressive movement tended to

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R U S SIAN T H I N KERS

become increasingly inward-looking and uncompromising. The most

crucial and striking fact is that there was no inner collapse on the part

of the progressives, and both revolutionary and reformist opinion,

though it grew more nationalist, often took on a grimmer tone. It

favoured self-consciously harsh, anti-aesthetic, exaggeratedly materialistic, crude, utilitarian forms, and continued to be self-confident and optimistic, inspired by the later writings of Belinsky rather than

Herzen. There is not, even at the lowest point-during the 'seven year

long night' after 1 848-that flatness and apathy which is so noticeable

in France and Germany during these years. But this was bought at

the price of a deep schism within the intelligentsia. The new men,

Chemyshevsky and the left-wing populists, are divided by a much

wider gap from the liberals, whether of the west or of their own

country, than any of their predecessors. In the years of repression,

1 848-56, lines of demarcation grew much more real; frontiers between

the Slavophils and the Westerners, which had hitherto been easily

crossed and re-crossed, became dividing walls; the framework of

frie:tdship and mutual respect between the two camps-'the Janus with

two faces but one heart'-which had made it possible for radicals like

Belinsky and Herzen to argue furiously but in an atmosphere of deep

regard, in some cases even of affection, with Katkov or Khomyakov

or the Aksakov brothers, no longer existed. When Herzen and

Chicherin met in London in 1 8 59, Herzen saw in him not an

opponent but an enemy, and with reason. There was an even more

painful process of polarisation in the radical camp itself. The quarrel

between the moderates of Kolokol (Tht Btl/) and the St Petersburg

radicals in the 6os grew bitter. Despite the continued existence of a

common enemy-the Imperial police state-the old solidarity was

fatally broken. Chernyshevsky's meeting with Herzen in London was

a stiff, awkward and almost formal affair. The gulf between what

became the left- and the right-wing oppositions grew steadily wider;

and this despite the fact that the left wing regarded western ideals far

more critically than before, and like the right looked for salvation to

native institutions and a specifically Russian solution, losing faith in

universal remedies, compounded out of liberal or socialist doctrines

'

imported from the west.

Thus it came about that, when at last direct western influence had

again reasserted itself in the form of the orthodox Marxism of the

Russian social democrats of the 1 89os, the revolutionary intelligentsia

was unbroken by the collapse of liberal hopes in Europe in 1 849-5 1 .

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Its beliefs and principles were preserved from contamination by the

very hostility of the regime, and remained free from the danger,

prevalent among their old allies in the west, of growing soft and blurred

as a result of too much successful compromise, mingled with disillusion.

Consequently, during the time of almost universal malaise among

socialists, the Russian left-wing movement retained its ideals and its

fighting spirit. It had broken with liberalism out of strength and not

out of despair. It had created and nurtured its own tough-minded,

radical, agrarian tradition, and it was an army ready to march. Some

of the factors responsible for this trend-the independent development

of Russian radicalism as it was born in the stonns of 1 848-9-may be

worth recalling.

Tsar Nicholas I remained all his life obsessed by the Decembrist

rising. He saw himself as the ruler appointed by Providence to save

his people from the horrors of atheism, liberalism and revolution; and

being an absolute autocrat in fact as well as in name, he made it the

first aim of his government to eliminate every form of political

heterodoxy or opposition. Nevertheless, even the severest censorship,

the sharpest political police, will tend to relax its attention to some

degree after twenty years of relative quiet; in this case the long peace

had been disturbed only by the Polish rebellion, with no signs of

serious internal conspiracy anywhere, and no greater dangers to the

regime th;m a few small and localised peasant disorders, two or three

groups of radical-minded university students, a handful of westernising

professors and writers, with here and there an odd defender of the

Roman Church like Chaadaev, or an actual convert to Rome like the

eccentric ex-professor of Greek, the Redemptorist Father Pecherin.

As a result of this, in the middle 40s the liberal journals, such as

Ottchestvmnye zapiski (Notts of tht Fatherland) or Sovrtmmnik (Tht

Conttmporary), took courage and began to print, not indeed articles in

open opposition to the government-with the existing censorship and

under the sharp eye of General Dubelt of the political police, this was

out of the question-but articles ostensibly concerned with conditions

in western Europe or in the Ottoman Empire, and written in an

apparently dispassionate manner; but containing, for those who could

read between the lines, vague hints and concealed allusions critical of

the existing regime. The centre of attraction to all progressive spirits

was, of course, Paris, the home of all that was most advanced and

freedom-loving in the world, the home of socialists and Utopians, of

Leroux and Cabet, of George Sand and Proudhon-the centre of a

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revolutionary art and literature, which i n the course of time were

bound to lead humanity towards freedom and happiness.

Saltykov-Shchedrin, who belonged to a typical liberal circle of the

40s, says in a famous passage of his memoirs:•

In Russia, everything seemed finished, sealed with five seals and

consigned to the Post Office for delivery to an addressee whom it

was beforehand decided not to find; in France, everything seemed

to be beginning . . . our (French] sympathies became particularly

intense towards 1 848. With unconcealed excitement we watched

all the periptteias of the drama provided by the last years of Louis

Philippe's reign. With passionate enthusiasm we read The History

of Ten Years, by Louis Blanc . . . : Louis Philippe and Guizot,

Duchatel and Thiers-these men were almost personal enemies,

perhaps more dangerous than even L. V. Dubelt.

The Russian censorship had evidently not at this period reached its

maximum severity; the censors were themselves at times inclined

towards a timid kind of right-wing liberalism; in any case they were

often no match for the ingenuity and, above all, unending persistence

of the 'disloyal' historians and journalists, and inevitably they let

through a certain amount of 'dangerous thought'. Those zealous

watchdogs of autocracy, the editors Bulgarin and Grech, who acted

as virtual agents of the political police, often denounced such oversights in private reports to their masters. But the Minister of Education, Count Uvarov, author of the celebrated patriotic triple watchword 'Orthodoxy, autocracy and the people', who could scarcely be accused of liberal leanings, was nevertheless anxious not to acquire

the reputation of a bigoted reactionary, and turned a blind eye to the

less blatant manifestations of independent writing. By western

standards, the censorship was exceptionally severe; Belinsky's letters,

for example, make quite plain the extent to which the censors managed

to mutilate his articles; nevertheless, liberal journals contrived to

survive in St Petersburg, and that in itself, to those who remembered

the years immediately following 1 82 5 and knew the temper of the