Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

story, was due mainly to a desire of the Third Department to get a specimen

of his handwriting in order to compare it with

letter circulating at the time (ibid., pp. 1 87-90).

1 2.

R U S S I A AND 1 84 8

ance of each other's existence) headed by Buturlin, and later by

Annenkov-commonly known as the 'Second of April Committee'.

Its duty was not that of pre-<:ensorship (which continued to be performed by censors under the direction of the Ministry of Education) but of scrutinising matter already published, with instructions to report

any trace of'unsoundness' to the Emperor himself, who undertook to

execute the necessary punitive measures. This committee was linked

with the political police through the ubiquitous Dubelt. It worked

with blind and relentless zeal, ignoring all other departn:ents and

institutions, and at one point, in an excess of enthusiasm, actually

denounced a satirical poem approved by the Tsar himself.1 By going

with a fine comb through every word published in the none too

numerous periodical press, it succeeded in virtually stiBing all forms of

political and social criticism- indeed everything but the conventional

expressions of unlimited loyalty to the autocracy and the Orthodox

Church. This proved too much even for Uvarov, and, on the plea of

ill-health, he resigned from the Ministry of Education. His successor

was an obscure nobleman- Prince Shirinsky-Shikhmatov,8 who had

submitted a memorandum to the Tsar, pointing out that one of the

mainsprings of disaffection was undoubtedly the freedom of philosophical speculation permitted in the Russian universities. The Emperor accepted this thesis and appointed him to his post with

express instructions to reform university teaching by introducing

stricter observance of the precepts of the Orthodox faith, and in

particular by the elimination of philosophical or other dangerous

leanings. This medieval mandate was carried out in the spirit and

the letter and led to a 'purge' of education which exceeded even the

notorious 'purification' of the University of Kazan ten years earlier

by Magnitsky. 1 848 to 1 855 is the darkest hour in the night of

Russian obscurantism in the nineteenth century. Even the craven and

sycophantic Grech, torn by anxiety to please the authorities,

whose letters from Paris in 1 848 denounce the mildest liberal measures

of the Second Republic with a degree of scorn hardly equalled by

Benkendorf himself-even this poor creature in his autobiographfl

written in the sos complains with something approaching bitter-

1 Shilder, op. cit. (p. 9, note 1 above).

• 'Shikhmatov is Shakhmat [checkmate) to all education' was a popuJar

pun in St Petenburg.

• N. I. Grech, Ztlpisli o moti zhizni (Moscow, 1930).

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

ness about the stupidities of the new double censorship. Perhaps

the most vivid description of this literary 'White Terror' is the

well-known passage in the memoirs of the populist writer Gleb

Uspensky.1

One could not move, one could not even dream; it was dangerous

to give any sign of thought-of the fact that you were' not afraid; on

the contrary, you were required to show that you were scared,

trembling, even when there was no real ground for it-that is what

those years have created in the Russian masses. Perpetual fear . . .

was then in the air, and crushed the public consciousness and robbed

it of all desire or capacity for thought • . . There was not a single

point oflight on the horizon- 'You are lost,' cried heaven and earth,

air and water, man and beast-and everything shuddered and fled

from disaster into the first available rabbit hole.

Uspensky's account is borne out by other evidence, perhaps most

vividly by the behaviour of Chaadaev. In 1 848, this remarkable man,

no longer a 'certified lunatic', was still living in Moscow. The

Te/esltop debacle of 1 836 had spread his fame. He seemed unbroken

by his misfortune. His pride, his originality, and his independence, the

charm and brilliance of his conversation, but above all his reputation

as a martyr in the cause of intellectual liberty, attracted and fascinated

even his political opponents. His salon was visited by both Russian

and eminent foreign visitors, who testify that until the blow fell in

1 848, he continued to express his pro-western sympathies with an

uncompromising and (considering the political atmosphere) astonishing

degree of freedom. The more extreme members of the Slavophil

brotherhood, especially the poet Y azykov, 1 attacked him from time

to time, and on one occasion virtually denounced him to the political

police. But his prestige and popularity were still so great that the

Third Department did not touch him, and he continued to receive a

variety of distinguished personalities, both Russian and foreign, in his

weekly salon. In 1 847 he expressed himself strongly against Gogol's

Selected Extracts from a Correspondence with Friends and i n a letter

to Alexander Turgenev damned it as a symptom of megalomania on

the part of that unhappy genius. Chaadaev was not a liberal, still

less a revolutionary: he was, if anything, a romantic conservative, an

1 G. I. Uspensky, Sod1iM11iya (St Petersburg, 1 889), vol. 1, pp. 175-6.

1 See the account in M. K. Lemke, op. cit. (p. u, note 1 above), p. 451.

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R U S SIA AND 1 8 4 8

admirer of the Roman Church and the western tradition, and an

aristocratic opponent of the Slavophil obsession with eastern orthodoxy and Byzantium; he was a figure of the right, not the left, but he was an avowed and fearless critic of the regime. He was admired

above all for his individualism, his unbreakable will, his incorruptible

purity and strength of character, and his proud refusal to bend to

authority. In 1 849, this paladin of western civilisation suddenly wrote

to Khomyakov that Europe was in chaos, and in deep need of Russian

help, and spoke with much enthusiasm of the Emperor's bold initiative

in crushing the Hungarian revolution. While this might have been

put down to the horror of popular risings felt by many intellectuals at

this time, this is not the end of the story. In 1 8 5 1 , Herzen published

a book abroad containing a passionate encomium of Chaadaev.1 As

soon as he heard of it, Chaadaev wrote to the head of the political

police, saying that he had learnt with annoyance and indignation that

he had been praised by so notorious a miscreant, and followed this with

sentiments of the most abject loyalty to the Tsar as an instrument of

the divine will sent to restore order in the world. To his nephew and

confidant, who asked him 'Pourquoi cette bassesse gratuite?', he

merely observed that, after all, 'One must save one's skin.' This act

of apparently cynical self-abasement on the part of the proudest and

most liberty-loving man in Russia of his time is tragic evidence of the

effect of protracted repression upon those members of the older

generation of aristocratic rebels who, by some miracle, had escaped

Siberia or the gallows.

This was the atmosphere in which the famous Petrashevsky case

was tried. Its main interest consists in the fact that it is the only

serious conspiracy under the direct influence of western ideas to be

found in Russia at that time. When Herzen heard the news, it was

'like the olive branch, which the dove brought to Noah's Ark'- the

first glimmering of hope after the Rood.2 A good deal has been written

about this case by those involved in it-among them Dostoevsky, who

was sent to Siberia for complicity in it. Dostoevsky, who in later years

detested every form of radicalism and socialism (and indeed secularism

in general) plainly tried to minimise his own part in it, and perpetrated

a celebrated caricature of revolutionary conspiracy in The Posussed.

1 Du Jlotlop�mml ties iJiti rlr?oluliotllltlirts til Ruuit (Paris, 1 8 5 1).

I A. I. Herzen, Soln-t111it sod1i1U11ii (see p. of.. note 1 above), vo]. 10,

P· 33 5·

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R U SS I AN T H I N KE R S

Baron Korf, one of the committee of inquiry into the Petrashevsky

affair, later said that the plot was not as serious or as widespread as

had been alleged-that it was mainly 'a conspiracy of ideas'. In the

light of later evidence, and in particular of the publication by the

Soviet Government of three volumes of documents, 1 this verdict may

be doubted. There is, of course, a sense in which there was no formal

conspiracy. All that had happened was that a certain number of

disaffected young men gathered together at regular intervals in two

or three houses and discussed the possibility of reform. It is also true

that in spite of the devotion of Butashevich-Petrashevsky himself to

the ideas of Fourier (the story that he set up a small phalanstery on

his estate for his peasants, who set fire to it almost immediately as an

invention of the devil, is unsupported by evidence) these groups were

not united by any clear body of principles accepted by them all: so,

for instance, Mombelli went no further than the desire to create

mutual aid institutions, not so much for the workers or peasants as

for members of the middle class like himself; Akhsharumov, Evropeus,

Pleshcheev were Christian Socialists; A. P. Milyukov's only crime

was apparently to have translated Lamennais. Balasoglo was a kindly

and impressionable young man, oppressed by the horrors of the Russian

social order-no more and no less than, for example, Gogo! himselfwho desired reform and improvement on mildly populist lines similar to the ideas of the more romantic Slavophils, and indeed not too unlike

the neo-medievalist nostalgia of such English writers as Cobbett, or

William Morris. Indeed, Petrashevsky's encyclopedic dictionary,

which contained 'subversive' articles disguised as scientific information,

resembles nothing so much as Cobbett's famous grammar. Nevertheless, these groups differed from the casual gatherings of such radical men of letters as Panaev, Korsh, Nekrasov and even Belinsky. Some,

at any rate, of the participants met for the specific purpose of considering concrete ideas of how to foment a rebeliion against the existing regime.

These ideas may have been impracticable, and may have contained

in them much that was fantastic drawn from the French Utopians

and other 'unscientific' sources, but their purpose was not the reform

but the overthrow of the regime, and the establishment of a . revolutionary government. Dostoevsky's descriptions in A Writer's Diary and elsewhere make it clear that Speshnev, for example, was by

1 Dtlo ptlrt�shtllltfl (Moscow/Leningrad, 1937, 19-f.l, 19S 1).

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RU S S I A AND 1 8 4 8

temperament and intention a genuine revolutionary agitator, who

believed in conspiracy at least as seriously as Bakunin (who disliked

him) and attended these discussion groups with a practical purpose.

The portrait of him as Stavrogin in The Possessed strongly stresses

this aspect. Similarly, Durov and Grigoriev and one or two others