Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

principles because they were necessarily provisional, on the ground

that history herself transformed all moral systems and retrospectively

justified only those principles which survived and succeeded.

The mood of the populists, particularly in the 1 87os, can fairly be

described as religious. This group of conspirators or propagandists saw

itself, and was seen by others, as constituting a dedicated order. The

first condition of membership was the sacrifice of one's entire life to

the movement, both to the particular group and party, and to the cause

of the revolution in general. But the notion of the dictatorship of the

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party o r o f i ts leaders over individual lives-in particular over the

beliefs of individual revolutionaries-is not part of this doctrine, and is

indeed contrary to its entire spirit. The only censor over the individual's

acts is his individual conscience. If one has promised obedience to the

leaders of the party, such an oath is sacred, but it extends only to the

specific revolutionary objectives of the party and not beyond them,

and ends with the completion of whatever specific goals the party

exists to promote-in the last resort, the revolution. Once the revolution has been made, each individual is free to act as he thinks fit, since discipline is a temporary means and not an end. The populists did

indeed virtually invent the conception of the party as a group of

professional conspirators with no private lives, obeying a total discipline

-the core of the 'hard' professionals as against mere"sympathisers and

fellow-travellers; but this sprang from the specific situation that

obtained in tsarist Russia, and the necessity and conditions for

effective conspiracy, and not from belief in hierarchy as a fonn of

life desirable or even tolerable in itself. Nor did the conspirators justify

their acts by appealing to a cosmic process which sanctified their every

act, since they believed in freedom of human choice and not in

determinism. The later Leninist conception of the revolutionary party

and its dictatorship, although historically it owed much to these

trained martyrs of an earlier day, sprang from a very different outlook.

The young men who poured into the villages during the celebrated

summer of 1 874 only to meet with non-comprehension, suspicion,

and often outright hostility on the part of the peasants, would have

been profoundly astonished and indignant if they had been told that

they were to look upon themselves as the sacred instruments of history,

and that their acts were therefore to be judged by a moral code

different from that common to other men.

The populist movement was a failure. 'Socialism bounced off people

like peas from a wall,' wrote the celebrated terrorist Kravchinsky

to his fellow-revolutionary Vera Zasulich in 1 876, two years after

the original wave of enthusiasm had died down. 'They listen to our

people as they do to the priest' - respectfully, without understanding,

without any effect upon their actions.

There is noise in the capitals

The prophets thunder

A furious war of words is waged

But in the depths, in the heart of Russia,

There all is still, there is ancient peace.

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These lines by Nekrasov convey the mood of frustration which

followed the failure of the sporadic effons made by the revolutionary

idealists in the late 6os and early 70s, peaceful propagandists and

isolated terrorists alike-of whom Dostoevsky painted so violent a

picture in his novel The Possessed. The government caught these men,

exiled them, imprisoned them, and by its obstinate unwillingness to

promote any measures to alleviate the consequences of an · inadequate

land reform drove liberal opinion towards sympathy with the revolutionaries. They felt that public opinion was on their side, and finally resorted to organised terrorism. Yet their ends always remained

moderate enough. The open letter which they addressed to the new

Emperor in r 881 is mild and liberal in tone. 'Terror', said the celebrated revolutionary Vera Figner many years later, 'was intended to create opportunities for developing the faculties of men for service to

society.' The society for which violence was to blast the way was to

be peaceful, tolerant, decentralised and humane. The principal enemy

was still the state.

The wave of terrorism reached its climax with the assassination of

Alexander II in r 88 1 . The hoped-for revolution did not break out.

The revolutionary organisations were crushed, and the new Tsar

decided upon a policy of extreme repression. In this he was, on the

whole, supported by public opinion, which recoiled before the

assassination of an Emperor who had, after all, emancipated the

peasants, and was said to have been meditating other liberal measures.

The most prominent leaders of the movemen.t were executed or exiled ;

lesser figures escaped abroad, and the most gifted of those who were

still free- Plekhanov and Aksel rod-gradually moved towards Marxism.

They felt embarrassed by Marx's own concession that Russia could in

principle avoid passing through a capitalist stage even without the aid

of a communist world revolution -a thesis which Engels conceded far

more grudgingly and with qualifications-and maintained that Russia

had in fact already entered the capitalist stage. They declared that

since the development of capitalism in Russia was no more avoidable

than it had been in its day in the west, nothing was to be gained by

averting one's face from the 'iron' logic of history, and that for these

reasons, so far from resisting industrialisation, socialists should encourage it, indeed profit by the fact that it, and it alone, could breed the army of revolutionaries which would be sufficient to overthrow the

capitalist enemy-an army to be formed out of the growing city proletariat, organised and disciplined by the very conditions of its labour.

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The vast leap forward in industrial development made by Russia

in the I 89os seemed to support the Marxist thesis. It proved attractive

to revolutionary intellectuals for many reasons: because it claimed to

be founded on a scientific analysis of the laws of history which no

society could hope to evade; because it claimed to be able to prove

that, although, as the pattern of history inexorably unfolded itself,

much violence, misery, and injustice were bound to occur, yet the

story would have a happy ending. Hence the conscience of those who

felt guilty because they acquiesced in exploitation and poverty, or at

any rate because they did not take active-that is, violent- steps to

alleviate or prevent them, as populist policy had demanded, felt

assuaged by the 'scientific' guarantee that the road, covered though it

might be with the corpses of the innocent, led inevitably to the gates

of an earthly paradise. According to this view, the expropriators

would find themselves expropriated by the sheer logic of human

development, although the course of history might be shortened, and

the birth-pangs made easier, by conscious organisation, and above all

an increase in knowledge (that is, education) on the part of the workers

and their leaders. This was particularly welcome to those who, understandably reluctant to continue with useless terrorism which merely led to Siberia or the scaffold, now found doctrinal justification for

peaceful study and the life of ideas, which the intellectuals among them

found far more congenial than bomb-throwing.

The heroism, the disinterestedness, the personal nobility of the

populists were often admitted by their Marxist opponents. They were

regarded as worthy forerunners of a truly rational revolutionary party,

and Chernyshevsky was sometimes accorded an even higher status and

was credited with insights of genius-an empirical and unscientific,

but instinctively correct, approach to truths of which only Marx and

Engels could provide the demonstration, armed as they were with the

instrument of an exact science to which neither Chernyshevsky, nor

any other Russian thinker of his day, had yet attained. Marx and

Engels grew to be particularly indulgent to the Russians: they were

praised for having done wonders for amateurs, remote from the west

and using home-made tools. They alone in Europe had, by I 88o,

created a truly revolutionary situation in their country; nevertheless

it was made clear, particularly by Kautsky, that this was no substitute

for professional methods and the use of the new machinery provided

by scientific socialism. Populism was written off as an amalgam of

unorganised moral indignation and Utopian ideas in the muddled

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heads of self-taught peasants, well-meaning university intellectuals and

other social casualties of the confused interim between the end of an

obsolescent feudalism and the beginning of the new capitalist phase in

a backward country. Marxist historians still tend to describe it as a

movement compounded of systematic misinterpretation of economic

facts and social realities, noble but useless individual terrorism, and

spontaneous or ill-directed peasant risings-the necessary but pathetic

beginnings of real revolutionary activity, the prelude to the real play, a

scene of naive ideas and frustrated practice destined to be swept away

by the new revolutionary, dialectical science heralded by Plekhanov

and Lenin.

What were the ends of populism? Violent disputes took place about

means and methods, about timing, but not about ultimate purposes.

Anarchism, equality, a full life for all, these were universally accepted.

It is as if the entire movement-the motley variety of revolutionary

types which Franco Venturi describes in his book1 so well and so

lovingly-Jacobins and moderates, terrorists and educators, Lavrovists

and Bakuninists, 'troglodytes', 'recalcitrants', 'country folk', members

of 'Land and Liberty' and of 'The People's Will', were all dominated

by a single myth : that once the monster was slain, the sleeping

princess- the Russian peasantry-would awaken without further ado

and live happily for ever after.

This -is the movement of which Franco Venturi has written the

history, the fullest, clearest, best-written and most impartial account

of a particular stage of the Russian revolutionary movement in any

language. Yet if the movement was a failure, if it was founded on

false premises and was so easily extinguished by the tsarist police,

has it more than historical interest- that of a narrative of the life and

death of a party, of its acts and its ideas? On this question Venturi

discreetly, as behoves an objective historian, offers no direct opinion.

He tells the story in chronological sequence; he explains what occurs;

he describes origins and consequences; he illuminates the relations of

various groups of populists to one another, and leaves moral and