Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

Emperor, was remarkable enough. The limits of freedom were, of

course, exceedingly narrow; the most arresting Russian social document of this period, apart from the writings of the emigres, was Belinsky's open letter to Gogol denouncing his book Selected Extracts

1 'Za rubezhom', Pobrot Jolmmit Jocltirmrii (Moscow/Leningrad, 1933-

1 94 1 ), vol. 14. p. 16z.

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from a Corrtspondtnct with Frimds, and that remained unpublished in

Russia in its full version until 19 I 7. And no wonder, for it was an

exceptionally eloquent and savage onslaught on the regime, inveighing

violently against the Church, the social system and the arbitrary

authority of the Emperor and his officials, and accusing Gogo! of

traducing the cause of liberty and civilisation as well as the character

and the needs of his enslaved and helpless country. This celebrated

philippic, written in I 84-7, was secretly circulated in manuscript far

beyond the confines of Moscow or St Petersburg. Indeed, it was

largely for reading this letter aloud at a private gathering of disaffected

persons that Dostoevsky was condemned to death and so nearly

executed two years later. In I 843 subversive French doctrines were,

so Annenkov tells us, openly discussed in the capital : the police official,

Liprandi, found forbidden western texts openly displayed in the bookshops. In the year I 847, Henen, Belinsky and Turgenev met Bakunin and other Russian political emigre. in Paris-their new moral

and political experiences found some echo in the radical Russian press;

this year marks the highest point of relative toleration on the part of

the censorship. The revolution of I 848 put an end to all this for

some years to come.

The story is familiar and may be found in Shilder.1 Upon receipt

of the news of the abdication of Louis Philippe and the declaration of

a republic in France, the Emperor Nicholas, feeling that his worst

forebodings about the instability of European regimes were about to

be fulfilled, decided to take immediate action. According to Grimm's

(almost certainly apocryphal) account, as soon as he heard the disastrous news from Paris, he drove to the palace of his son, the future Tsar Alexander II, where an eve-of-Lent ball was in progress.

Bursting into the ballroom, he stopped the dancers with an imperious

gesture, cried 'Gentlemen, saddle your horses, a republic has been

proclaimed in France !' and with a group of courtiers swept out of the

room. Whether or not this dramatic episode ever occurred-Shilder

does not believe it-it conveys the general atmosphere accurately

enough. Prince Petr Volkonsky at about this time told V. I. Panaev

that the Tsar seemed bent on declaring a preventive war in Europe

and was only stopped by lack of money. As it was, large reinforce-

1 N. K. Shilder, lmptrator Nikolay PtrOJi, tgo :r.Aiu' i tsarslfJIJtJatrit

(St Petenburg, 1903), 'Primechaniya i prilozheniya ko vtoromu tomu'

('Notes and Supplements to Volume 2'), pp. 619-2 1 .

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ments were sent to guard the 'western provinces', i.e. Poland. That

unhappy country, broken not only by the savage repression of the

rebellion of 1 83 1 , but by the measures taken after the Galician

peasant rising in 1 846, did not stir. But Polish liberty was being

acclaimed, and Russian autocracy denounced, as a matter of course,

at every liberal banquet in Paris and elsewhere; and, although this

awoke no echo in Warsaw, then under the heel of Paskevich, the

Tsar suspected treason everywhere. Indeed, one of the principal

reasons why such importance was attached to the capture of Bakunin

was the Tsar's belief that he was in close touch with Polish emigreswhich was true-and that they were plotting a new Polish mutiny in which Bakunin was involved- which was false-although Bakunin's

extravagant public utterances may have lent some colour to such a

supposition. Bakunin at the time of his imprisonment seems to have

been entirely unaware of this obsession on the part of the Tsar and

therefore ignorant throughout of what was expected of him. He failed

to include the non-existent Polish plot in his otherwise imaginative

and altogether too accommodating confession. Soon after the outbreak

in Berlin, the Tsar published a manifesto, i n which he declared that

the wave of mutiny and chaos had fortunately not reached the impregnable frontiers of the Russian Empire; that he would do everything in his power to stop this spreading of the political plague, and that he

felt certain that all his loyal subjects would, at such a moment, rally

to him in order to avert the danger to the throne and to the Church.

The Chancellor, Count Nesselrode, caused an inspired commentary

on the Tsar's manifesto to appear in the 'Journal de St Pltershourg,

seeking to mitigate its bellicose tone. Whatever the effect on Europe,

in Russia the commentary seems to have deceived no one: it was

known that Nicholas had drafted the manifesto with his own hand,

and had read it to Baron Korf with tears in his eyes. Korf too was

apparently almost reduced to tears1 and at once destroyed the draft

which he had been commissioned to prepare, as unworthy. The heirapparent, Alexander, when he read the manifesto to a meeting of guards officers, was overcome by emotion; Prince Orlov, the head of

the gendarmerie, was no less deeply moved. The document stimulated

a genuine surge of patriotic feeling, although this does not appear to

have lasted long. The Tsar's policy corresponded to some degree with

1 See Shilder, op. cit. (p. 9, note I above), on which the account of this

episode is based.

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popular feeling, at any rate among th e upper and official �. I n

1 849, Russian armies, commanded by Paskevich, crushed the revolution in Hungary; Russian influence played a major part in the suppression of the revolution in the other provinces of the Austrian Empire and in Prussia; the power of Russia in Europe, and the terror

and hatred which it inspired in the breast of every liberal and constitutionalist beyond its borders, reached their zenith. Russia was to the democrats of this period very much what the fascist powers were

in our own time: the arch-enemy of freedom and enlightenment, the

reservoir of darkness, cruelty and oppression, the land most frequently,

most violently denounced by its own exiled sons, the sinister power,

served by innumerable spies and informers, whose hidden hand was

discovered in every political development unfavourable to the growth

of national or individual liberty in Europe. This wave of liberal

indignation confirmed Nicholas in his conviction that, by his example,

no less than by his exertions, he had saved Europe from moral and

political ruin: his duty had at all times been plain to him; he carried

it out methodically and ruthlessly, unmoved by either flattery or

abuse.

The effect of the revolution on internal affairs in Russia was

immediate and powerful. All plans for agrarian reform, and in particular all proposals for the alleviation of the condition of the serfs, both private and state-owned, not to speak of plans for their liberation

to which the Emperor had at one time given much sympathetic

consideration, were abruptly dropped. For many years it had been a

commonplace, and not in liberal circles alone, that agricultural slavery

was an economic as well as a social evil. Count Kiselev, whom

Nicholas trusted and had invited to be his 'Agrarian Chief of Staff',

held this view strongly, and even the landowners and the reactionary

bureaucrats who did their best to put difficulties in the pa.th of positive

reform had not, for some years, thought it profitable to question the

evil of the system itself. Now, however, the lead given by Gogo! in his

unfortunate Selected Extracts from a Correspondence with Friends was

followed in one or two government-approved school textbooks which

went further than the most extreme Slavophils, and began to represent

serfdom as divinely sanctioned, and resting on the same unshkeable

foundation as other patriarchal Russian institutions-as sacred in its

own way as the divine right of the Tsar himself. Projected reforms of

local government were likewise discontinued. The 'hydra of revolution' was threatening the Empire, and internal enemies, as so often I I

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in the history of Russia, were therefore to be handled with exemplary

severity. The first step taken was connected with censorship.

The steady stream of secret denunciation which issued from

Bulgarin and Grech at last had its effect. Baron Korf and Prince

Menshikov almost simultaneously, it appears, compiled memoranda

giving instances of the laxity of the censorship and the dangerous

liberal tone to be found in the periodical press. The Emperor declared

himself shocked and indignant that this had not been detected earlier.

A committee under Menshikov was immediately set up with instructions to look into the activities of the censors and tighten up existing regulations. This committee summoned the editors of SfJ'IJT"tmmnik

and of Otechesroennye zapisn and reproved them strongly for 'general

unsoundness'. The latter changed its tone, and its editor-publisher

Kraevsky produced in 1 849 a him pmstmt article denouncing western

Europe and all its works, and offering the government a degree of

sycophantic adulation at that time unknown even in Russia, and

scarcely to be found in Bulgarin's subservient St'Utrnaya pchela (Tht

Northern Btt). As for SD'UT"tmmnilt, its most effective contributor

Belinsky, whom nothing could corrupt or silence, had died early in

1 848.1 Henen and Bakunin were in Paris, Granovsky was too mild

and too unhappy to protest. Of major literary figures in Russia

Nekrasov was left almost alone to continue the fight; by displaying

his extraordinary agility and skill in dealing with officials, and by

lying low for a good many months, he managed to survive and even

publish, and so formed the living link between the proscribed radicals

of the 405 and the new and more fanatical generation, tried and

hardened by persecution, which carried on the struggle in the sos and

6os. The Menshikov Committee was duly superseded by a secret

committee (the Emperor was in the habit of submitting critical issues

to secret committees, which often worked at cross-purposes in ignor-

1 There is a story still to be found in the latest Soviet lives of the great

critic that at the time of his death a warrant had gone out for his arrest, and

it is true that Du belt later said that he regretted his death, as otherwise 'we

would have rotted him in a fortress' (M. K. Lemke, NiltolllffJsltit zho11tiormy

i liltroturo s826-s855 gotiw, 2nd ed. [St Petersburg, 1909], p. 190). But

Lemke has conclusively shown that no such warrant had ever been signed and

that the invitation to Belinsky to visit Dubelt, which had largely inspired the