Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

owned by them stood to that of their masters in the ratio of I: 1 1 :, and their

incomes were :·s=97"S; as for industry, the proportion of city workers to

peasants was 1 :100. Given these ligures, it is perhaps not surprising that

Man: should have declared that his prognosis applied to the western economies,

and not 11ecessarily to that of the Russians, even though his Russian disciples

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R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S

Chernyshevsky believed in the decisive historical role of the application of science to Ii(e, but, unlike Pisarev, did not regard individual enterprise, still less capitalism, as indispensable to this process. He

retained enough of the Fourierism of his yC"uth to look upon the free

associations of peasant communes and craftsmen's artels as the basis

of all freedom and progress. But at the same time, like the Saint­

Simonians, he was convinced that little would be achieved without

collective action-state socialism on a vast scale. These incompatible

beliefs were never reconciled ; Chernyshevsky's writings contain

statements both in favour of and against the desirability of large-scale

industry. He is similarly ambivalent about the part to be played (and

the part to be avoided) by the state as the stimulator and controller of

industry, about the function of managers of large collective industrial

enterprises, about the relations of the public and private sectors of the

economy, and about the political sovereignty of the democratically

elected parliament and its relation to the state as the source of centralised

economic planning and control.

The outlines of Chernyshevsky's social programme remained vague

or inconsistent, and often both. It is the concrete detail which.

founded as it was on real experience, spoke directly to the representatives of the great popular masses, who had at last found a spokesman and interpreter of their own needs and feelings. His deepest aspirations

and emotions were poured into What is to he done?, a social Utopia

which, grotesque as a work of art, had a literally epoch-making effect

on Russian opinion. This didactic novel described the 'new men' of

the free, morally pure, cooperative socialist commonwealth of the

future; its touching sincerity and moral passion bound their spell upon

the imaginations of the idealistic and guilt-stricken sons of prosperous

parents, and provided them with an ideal model in the light of which

an entire generation of revolutionaries educated and hardened itself

to the defiance of existing laws and conventions �d to the acceptance

of exile and death with sublime unconcern.

Chernyshevsky preached a naive utilitarianism. Like James Mill.

and perhaps Bentham, he held that basic human nature was a fixed,

physiologically analysable pattern of natural processes and faculties,

ignored this concession, and insisted that capitalism was making enormous

atridea in Russia. and would soon obliterate the differences that divided it

from the west. Plekhanov (who stoutly denied that Chemyshevsky �w:·ever

been a populist) elaborated this theory; Lenin acted upon it.

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and that the maximisation of human happiness could therefore be

scientifically planned and realised. Having decided that imaginative

writing and criticism were the only available media in Russia for

propagating radical ideas, he filled the Contemporary, a review which

he edited together with the poet Nekrasov, with as high a proportion

of direct socialist doctrine as could be smuggled in under the guise of

literature. In his work he was helped by the violent young critic

Dobrolyubov, a genuinely gifted man ofletters (which Chemyshevsky

was not) who, at times, went even further in his passionate desire to

preach and educate. The aesthetic views of the two zealots were

severely practical. Chernyshevsky laid it down that the function of

art was to help men to satisfy their wants more rationally, to disseminate knowledge, to combat ignorance, prejudice, and the antisocial passions, to improve life in the most literal and narrow sense of these words. Driven to absurd consequences, he embraced them gladly.

Thus he explained that the chief value of marine paintings was that

they showed the sea to those who, like, for instance, the inhabitants

of central Russia, lived too far away from it ever to see it for themselves; or that his friend and patron Nekrasov, because by his verse he moved men to greater sympathy with the oppressed than other

poets had done, was for this reason the greatest Russian poet, living or

dead. His earlier collaborators, civilised and fastidious men of letters

like Turgenev and Botkin, found his grim fanaticism increasingly

difficult to bear. Turgenev could not long live with this art-hating

and dogmatic schoolmaster. Tolstoy despised his dreary provincialism,

his total lack of aesthetic sense, his intolerance, his rationalism, his

maddening self-assurance. But these very qualities, or, rather, the

outlook of which they were characteristic, helped to make him the

natural leader of the 'hard' young men who had succeeded the idealists

of the I 84-os. Chernyshevsky's harsh, flat, dull, humourless, grating

sentences, his preoccupation with concrete detail, his self-discipline,

his dedication to the material and moral good of his fellow-men, the

grey, self-effacing personality, the tireless, passionate, devoted, minute

i ndustry, the hatred of style or of any concessions to the graces, the

unquestionable sincerity, utter self-forgetfulness, brutal directness,

indifference to the claims of private life, innocence, personal kindness,

pedantry, disarming moral charm, capacity for self-sacrifice, created

the image that later became the prototype of the Russian revolutionary

hero and martyr. More than any other publicist he was responsible

for drawing the final line between 'us' and 'them'. All his life he

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preached that there must be no compromise with 'them', that the war

must be fought to the death and on every front; that there were no

neutrals; that, so long as this war was being fought, no work could

be too trivial, too repulsive, or too tedious for a revolutionary to

perform. His personality and outlook set their seal upon two generations

of Russian revolutionaries; not least upon Lenin, who admired him

devotedly.

In spite of his emphasis on economic or sociological arguments,

the basic approach, the tone and outlook of Chernyshevsky and of the

populists generally, is moral, and at times religious. These men believed

in socialism not because it was inevitable, nor because it was effective,

not even because it alone was rational, but because it was just. Concentrations of political power, capitalism, the centralised state, trampled on the rights of men and crippled them morally and spiritually.

The populists were stern atheists, but socialism and orthodox Christian

values coalesced in their minds. They shrank from the prospect of

industrialism in Russia because of its brutal cost, and they disliked the

west because it had paid this price too heartlessly. Their disciples, the

populist economists of the 1 88os and 90s, Danielson and Vorontsov

for example, for all their strictly economic arguments about the possibility of capitalism in Russia (some of which seem a good deal sounder than their Marxist opponents have represented them as being), were

in the last analysis moved by moral revulsion from the sheer mass of

suffering that capitalism was destined to bring, that is to say, by a

refusal to pay so appalling a price, no matter how valuable the results.

Their successors in the twentieth century, the Socialist-Revolutionaries,

sounded the note which runs through the whole of the populist

tradition in Russia: that the purpose of social action is not the power

of the state, but the welfare of the people; that to enrich the state and

provide it with military and industrial power, while undermining the

health, the education, the morality, the general cultural level of its

citizens, was feasible but wicked. They compared the progress of the

United States, where, they maintained, the welfare of the individual

was paramount, with that of Prussia, where it was not. They committed

themselves to the view (which goes back at least to Sismondi) that the

spiritual and physical condition of the individual citizen matters more

than the power of the state, so that if, as often happened, the two stood

in inverse ratio to one another, the rights and welfare of the individual

must come first. They rejected as historically false the proposition that

only powerful states could breed good or happy citizens, and as morally

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unacceptable the proposition that to lose oneself i n the life and welfare

of one's society is the highest form of individual self-fulfilment.

Belief in the primacy of human rights over other claims is the first

principle that separates pluralist from centralised societies, and welfare

states, mixed economies, 'New Deal' policies, from one-party governments, 'closed' societies, 'five-year plans', and, in general, forms of life built to serve a single goal that transcends the varied goals of differing

groups or individuals. Chernyshevsky was more fanatical than most

of his followers in the 18705 and 8os. and believed far more strongly

in organisation, but even he neither stopped his ears to the cries for

immediate help which he heard upon all sides, nor believed in the need

to suppress the wants of individuals who were making desperate efforts

to escape destruction, in the interests of even the most sacred and overmastering purpose. There were times when he was a narrow and unimaginative pedant, but at his worst he was never impatient, or

arrogant, or inhumane, and was perpetually reminding his readers and

himself that, in their zeal to help, the educators must not end by

bullying their would-be beneficiaries; that what 'we' -the rational

intellectuals-think good for the peasants may not be what they themselves want or need, and that to ram 'our' remedies down 'their'

throats is not permitted. Neither he nor Lavrov, nor even the most

ruthlessly Jacobin among the proponents of terror and violence, ever

took cover behind the inevitable direction of history as a justification

of what would otherwise have been patently unjust or brutal. If

violence was the only means to a given end, then there might be circumstances in which it was right to employ it; but this must be justified in each case by the intrinsic moral claim of the end-an increase in

happiness, or solidarity, or justice, or peace, or some other universal

human value that outweighs the evil of the means-never by the view

that it was rational and necessary to march in step with history,

ignoring one's scruples and dismissing one's own 'subjective' moral