Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

political speculation to others. His work is not an apologia either for

populism or its opponents. He does not praise or condemn, and seeks

only to understand. Success in this task plainly needs no further reward.

And yet one may, at moments, wonder whether populism should be

dismissed quite as easily as it still is today, both by communist and

1 op. cit. (p. 227, note 1 above).

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bourgeois historians. Were the populists so hopelessly in error? Were

Chernyshevsky and Lavrov-and Marx who listened to them-totally

deluded?

Was capitalism, in fact, inevitable in Russia? The consequences of

accelerated industrialisation prophesied by the neo-populist economists

in the 1 88os, namely a degree of social and economic misery as great

as any undergone in the west during the Industrial Revolution, did

occur, both before, and, at an increasing tempo, after the October

revolution. Were they avoidable? Some writers on history consider

this type of question to be absurd as such. What happened, happened.

We are told that if we are not to deny causality in human affairs, we

must suppose that what took place can only have done so precisely as it

did ; to ask what might have happened if the situation had been

different is the idle play of the imagination, not worthy of serious

historians. Yet this academic question is not without acute contemporary relevance. Some countries, such as, for example, Turkey, India, and some states in the Middle East and Latin America, have adopted a

slower tempo of industrialisation and one less likely to bring immediate

ruin to backward areas before they can be rehabilitated, and have done

so in conscious preference to the forced marches of collectivisation

upon which, in our day, the Russians, and after them the Chinese,

have embarked. Are these non-Marxist governments inescapably set

upon a path to ruin ? For it is populist ideas which lie at the base of

much of the socialist economic policy pursued by these and other

countries today.

When Lenin organised the Bolshevik revolution in 1 9 1 7, the

technique that he adopted, prima facie at least, resembled those commended by the Russian Jacobins, Tkachev and his followers, who had learnt them from Blanqui or Buonarroti, more than any to be found

in the writings of Marx or Engels, at any rate after 1 8 5 1 . It was not,

after all, full-grown capitalism that was enthroned in Russia in 1 9 1 7.

Russian capitalism was a still growing force, not yet in power, struggling

against the fetters imposed upon it by the monarchy and the bureaucracy, as it had done in eighteenth-century France. But Lenin acted as if the bankers and industrialists were already in control. He acted

and spoke as if this w::os so, but his revolution succeeded not so much

by taking over the centres of finance and industry (which history

should already have undermined) but by a seizure of strictly political

power on the part of a determined and trained group of professional

revolutionaries, precisely as had been advocated by Tkachev. If

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R U S S IAN POPU L I S M

Russian capitalism had reached the stage which, according to Marxist

historical theory, it had to reach before a proletarian revolution could

be successful, the seizure of power by a determined minority, and a

very small one at that-a mere Putsch-could not, ex hypothesi, have

retained it long. And this, indeed, is what Plekhanov said over and

over again in his bitter denunciations of Lenin in I 9 I 7 : ignoring his

argument that much may be permitted in a backward country provided

that the results were duly saved by orthodox Marxist revolutions successfully carried out soon after in the industrially more advanced west.

These conditions were not fulfilled; Lenin's hypothesis proved

historically irrelevant; yet the Bolshevik revolution did not collapse.

Could it be .that the Marxist theory of history was mistaken? Or had

the Mensheviks misunderstood it, and concealed from themselves the

anti-democratic tendencies which had always been implicit in it? In

which case were their charges against Mikhailovsky and his friends

wholly just? By I 9 I 7 their own fears of the Bolshevik dictatorship

rested upon the same basis. Moreover, the results of the October

revolution turned out to be oddly similar to those which Tkachev's

opponents had prophesied that his methods must inevitably produce:

the emergence of an elite, wielding dictatorial power, designed in

theory to wither away once the need for it had gone; but, as the

populist democrats had said over and over again, in practice more

likely to grow in aggressiveness and strength, with a tendency towards

self-perpetuation which no dictatorship seems able to resist.

The populists were convinced that the death of the peasant commune would mean death, or at any rate a vast setback, to freedom and equality in Russia; the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who were

their direct descendants, transformed this into a demand for a form of

decentralised, democratic self-government among the peasants, which

Lenin adopted when he concluded his temporary alliance with them

in October I 9 I 7. In due course the Bolsheviks repudiated this

programme, and transformed the cells of dedicated revolutionariesperhaps the most original contribution of populism to revolutionary practice-into the hierarchy of centralised political power, which the

populists had steadily and fiercely denounced until they were themselves finally, in the form of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, proscribed and annihilated. Communist practice owed much, as Lenin was always ready to admit, to the populist movement; for it borrowed

the technique of its rival and adapted it with conspicuous success to

serve the precise purpose which it had been invented to resist.

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Tolstoy and Enlightenment

'Two T H I N GS are always said about Count Tolstoy,' wrote the

celebrated Russian critic Mikhailovsky in a forgotten essay published

in the mid-1 87os, 'that he is an outstandingly good writer of fiction

and a bad thinker. This . . . has become a sort of axiom needing no

demonstration.' This almost universal verdict has reigned, virtually

unchallenged, for something like a hundred years; and Mikhailovsky's

attempt to question it remained relatively isolated. Tolstoy dismissed

his left-wing ally as a routine liberal hack, and expressed surprise that

anyone should take an interest in him. This was characteristic, but

unjust. The essay which its author called The Right Hand and the

Left Hand of Leo Tolstoy is a brilliant and convincing defence of

Tolstoy on both intellectual and moral grounds, directed mainly

against the liberals and socialists who saw in the novelist's ethical

doctrines, and in particular in his glorification of the peasants and

natural instinct, and his constant disparagement of scientific culture,

a perverse and sophisticated obscurantism which discredited the liberal

cause, and played into the hands of priests and reactionaries. Mikhailovsky rejected this view, and in the course of his long and careful attempt to sift the enlightened grain from the reactionary chaff in Tolstoy's

opinions, reached the conclusion that there was an unresolved, and

unavowed, conflict in the great novelist's conceptions both of human

nature and of the problems facing Russian and western civilisation.

Mikhailovsky maintained that, so far from being a 'bad thinker',

Tolstoy was no less acute, clear-eyed and convincing in his analysis of

ideas than of instincts or characters or actions. In his zeal for his

paradoxical thesis-paradoxical certainly at the time at which he wrote

it- Mikhailovsky sometimes goes too far; but in substance it seems to

me to be right; or at any rate, more right than wrong, and my own

remarks are no more than an extended gloss on it.

Tolstoy's opinions are always subjective and can be (as, for example,

in his writings on Shakespeare or Dante or Wagner) wildly perverse.

But the questions which in his most didactic essays he tries to answer

are nearly always cardinal questions of principle, always first-hand,

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and cut far deeper, in the deliberately simplified and naked form in

which he usually presents them, than those of more balanced and

'objective' thinkers. Direct vision always tends to be disturbing.

Tolstoy used this gift to the full to destroy both his own peace and

that of his readers. It was this habit of asking exaggeratedly simple

but fundamental questions, to which he did not himself-at any rate in

the 1 86os and- 7os-possess the answers; that gave him the reputation

of being a 'nihilist'. Yet he certainly had no desire to destroy for the

sake of destruction. He only desired, more than anything else in the

world, to know the truth. How annihilating this passion can be is

shown by others who have chosen to cut below the limits set by the

wisdom of their generation: Machiavelli, Pascal, Rousseau; the author

of the Book of Job. Like them, Tolstoy cannot be fitted into any of

the public movements of his own, or indeed any other age. The only

company to which Tolstoy belongs is the subversive one of questioners

to whom no answer has been, or seems likely to be, given-at least no

answer which they or those who understand them will begin to accept.

As for Tolstoy's positive ideas-and they varied less during his long

life than has sometimes been represented-they are not at all unique:

they have something in common with the French Enlightenment of

the eighteenth century; something with those of the twentieth century;

little with those of his own times. In Russia he belonged to neither

of the great ideological streams which divided educated opinion in that

country during his youth. He was not a radical intellectual, with his

eyes turned to the west; nor a Slavophil, that is to say, a believer in a

Christian and nationalist monarchy. His views cut across these

categories. Like the radicals he had always condemned political

repression, arbitrary violence, economic exploitation, and all that

creates and perpetuates inequality among men. But the rest of the

'W esternising' outlook- the heart of the ideology of the intelligentsiathe overwhelming sense of civic responsibility, the belief in natural science as the door to all truth, in social and political reform, in

democracy, material progress, secularism-this celebrated amalgam

Tolstoy rejected, early in life, out of hand. He believed in individual

liberty and, indeed, in progress too, but in a queer sense of his own.1

1 Education for him is 'an activit)l based on the human need for equality

and the immutable law of the advance of education', which he interprets as

the constant equalisation of knowledge, knowledge which is always growing

because I know what the child does not know; moreover, each generation

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He looked with contempt on liberals and socialists, and with even

greater hatred on the right-wing parties of his time. His closest affinity,

as has often been remarked, is with Rousseau ; he liked and admired

Rousseau's views more than those of any other modern writer. Like