Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

certainly seem to have believed that the revolution might break out

at any moment; while they realised the impossibility of organising a

mass movement, they put their faith, like Weitling and the groups

of German communist workers, and perhaps Blanqui at this period,

in the organisation of small cells of trained revolutionaries, a professional elite which could act efficiently and ruthlessly and seize the leadership when the hour struck -when the oppressed elements would

rise and crush the knock-kneed army of courtiers and bureaucrats

that alone stood between the Russian people and its freedom. No

doubt much of this was idle talk, since nothing remotely resembling

a revolutionary situation existed in Russia at this time. Nevertheless,

the intentions of these men were as concrete and as violent as those

of Babeuf and his friends, and, in the conditions of a tightly controlled

autocracy, the only possible means of practical conspiracy. Speshnev

was quite definitely-a Communist, influenced not merely by Dezamy

but perhaps also by the early works of Marx-for example, the anti­

Proudhonist Misere de Ia philosophie. Balasoglo states in his evidencel

that one of the things which attracted him to Petrashevsky's discussion

group was that, on the whole, it avoided liberal patter and aimless

discussion and concerned itself with concrete issues, and conducted

statistical studies with a view to direct action. Dostoevsky's contemptuous references to the tendency of his fellow conspirators poliheral'nichat'-to play at being liberal-look mainly like an attempt to whitewash himself. In fact, the principal attraction of this circle for

Dostoevsky probably consisted precisely in that which had also

attracted Balasoglo-namely, that the atmosphere was serious and

intense, not amiably liberal, gay, informal and intimate, and given to

literary and intellectual gossip, like the lively evenings given by the

Panaevs, Sollogub or Herzen, at which he seems to have been snubbed

and had suffered acutely. Petrashevsky was a remorselessly earnest

man, and the groups, both his own and the subsidiary, even more

secret groups which sprang from it-as well as allied 'circles', for

example that to which Chernyshevsky belonged as a university student

1 Shilder, op. cit. (p. 9• note 1 above), vol. 2.

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-meant business. The conspiracy was broken up i n April 1 849• and the

Petrashevtsy were tried and sent into exile.

Between 1 849 and the death of Nicholas I in the last months of

the Crimean war, there is not a glimmering of liberal thought. Gogo!

died an unrepentant reactionary, but Turgenev, who ventured to

praise him as a satirical genius in an obituary article, was promptly

arrested for it. Bakunin was in prison, Herzen lived abroad, Belinsky

was dead, Granovsky was silent, depressed and developing Slavophil

sympathies. The centenary of Moscow University in 1 855 proved a

dismal affair. The Slavophils themselves, although they rejected the

liberal revolution and all its works, and continued a ceaseless campaign

against western inRuences, felt the heavy hand of official repression ;

the Aksakov brothers, Khomyakov, Koshelev and Samarin, fell under

official suspicion much as I van Kireevsky had done in the previous

decade. The secret police and the special committees considered all

ideas to be dangerous as such, particularly that of a nationalism which

took up the cause of the oppressed Slav nationalities of the Austrian

Empire, and by implication thereby placed itself in opposition to the

dynastic principle and to multi-racial empires. The battle between

the Government and the various opposition parties was not an ideological war, like the long conRict fought out in the 1 870s and 8os between the left and the right, between liberals, early populists and

socialists on one side, and such reactionary nationalists as, for instance,

Strakhov, Dostoevsky, Maikov, and above all Katkov and Leontiev

on the other. During 1 848-55, the Government, and the party (as it

was called) of 'official patriotism', appeared to be hostile to thought

as such, and therefore made no attempt to obtain intellectual supporters;

when volunteers offered themselves, they were accepted somewhat

disdainfully, made use of, and occasionally rewarded. If Nicholas I

made no conscious effort to fight ideas with ideas, it was because he

disliked all thought and speculation as such; he distrusted his own

bureaucracy so deeply, perhaps because he felt that it presupposed the

minimum of intellectual activity required by any form of rational

organisation.

'To those who lived through it, it seemed that this dark tunnel

was destined to lead nowhere,' wrote Herzen in the 6os. 'N evertheless, the effect of these years was by no means wholly negative.' And this is acute and true. The revolution of 1848 by its failure, by

discrediting the revolutionary intelligentsia of Europe which had been

put down so easily by the forces of law and order, was followed by a

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mood o f profound disillusionment, by a distrust of the very idea of

progress, of the possibility of the peaceful attainment of liberty and

equality by means of persuasion or indeed any civilised means open to

men of liberal convictions. Herzen himself never wholly recovered

from this collapse of his hopes and ideas. Bakunin was disoriented by

it; the older generation of liberal intellectuals in Moscow and St

Petersburg scattered, some to drift into the conservative camp, others

to seek comfort in non-political fields. But the principal effect which

the failure of 1 848 had had on the stronger natures among the

younger Russian radicals was to convince them firmly that no real

accommodation with the Tsar's government was possible-with the

result that during the Crimean war a good many of the leading

intellectuals were close to being defeatist: nor was this by any means

confined to the radicals and revolutionaries. Koshelev in his memoirs,

published in Berlin in the 8os, 1 declares that he and some of his friends

- nationalists and Slavophils-thought that a defeat would serve

RusSia's best interests, and dwells on public indifference to the outcome of the war-an admission far more shocking at the time of its publication, during the full tide of pan-Slav agitation, than the facts

themselves can have been during the Crimean war. The Tsar's

uncompromising line precipitated a moral crisis which finally divided

the tough core of the opposition from the opportunists: it caused the

former to turn in more narrowly upon themselves. This applied to

both camps. Whether they were Slavophils and rejected the west like

the Aksakovs and Samarin, or materialists, atheists and champions of

western scientific ideas like Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov and Pisarev,

they became increasingly absorbed in the specific national and social

problems of Russia and, in particular, in the problem of the peasanthis ignorance, his misery, the forms of his social life, their historical origins, their economic future. The liberals of the 40s may have been

stirred to genuine compassion or indignation by the plight of the

peasantry: the institution of serfdom had long been an acute public

problem and indeed a great and recognised evil. Yet, excited as they

were by the latest social and philosophical ideas which reached them

from the west, they felt no inclination to spend their time upon

detailed and tedious researches into the actual condition of the

peasantry, upon the multitude of unexplored social and economic data

which had been so superficially described by Custine, or later in

1 A. I. Koshelev, Zopisli (Berlin, 1 884), pp. 81-4.

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greater detail by Haxthausen. Turgenev had done something to

awaken interest in the day-to-day hyt1 of the peasants by the realism

of his Sportsman's Sketches. Grigorovich had moved both Belinsky

and Dostoevsky by his tragic but, to a later taste, lifeless and overwrought descriptions of peasants in The Yillage, and in Anton Goremyka, published in I 84 7. But these were ripples on the surf.lce. During the

period of enforced insulation �fter I 849, with Europe in the arms of

reaction, and only Herren's plaintive voice faintly audible from afar,

those socially conscious Russian intellectuals who had survived the

turmoil directed their sharp and fearless analytical apparatus upon the

actual conditions in which the vast majority of their countrymen were

living. Russia, which a decade or two earlier was in considerable

danger of becoming a permanent intellectual dependency of Berlin

or of Paris, was forced by this insulation to develop a native social and

political outlook of her own. A sharp change in tone is now noticeable;

the harsh, materialistic and 'nihilistic' criticism of the 6os and 70s

is due not merely to the change in economic and social conditions,

and the consequent emergence of a new class and a new tone in

Russia as in Europe, but in at least equal measure to the prison walls

within which Nicholas I had enclosed the lives of his thinking subjects.

This led to a sharp break with the polite civilisation and the nonpolitical interests of the past, to a general toughening of fibre and exacerbation of political and social differences. The gulf between the

right and the left-between the disciples of Dostoevsky and Katkov

and the followers of Chernyshevsky or Bakunin-all typical radical

intellectuals in I 848 -had grown very wide and deep. In due course

there emerged a vast and growing army of practical revolutionaries,

conscious-all too conscious-of the specifically Russian character of

their problems, seeking specifically Russian solutions. They were

forced away froo the general current of European development (with

which, in any case, their history seemed to have so little in common)

by the bankruptcy in Europe of the libertarian movement of I 848 :

they drew strength from the very harshness of the discipline which

the failure in the west had indirectly imposed upon them. Henceforth

the Russian radicals accepted the view that ideas and agitation wholly

unsupported by material force were necessarily doomed to impotence;

and they adopted this truth and abandoned sentimental liberalism

without being forced to pay for their liberation with that bitter,

1 Approximately, 'way of life'.

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personal disillusionment and acute frustration which proved too much

for a good many idealistic radials in the west. The Russian radials

learnt this lesson by means of precept and example, indirectly as it

were, without the destruction of their inner resources. The experience

obtained by both sides in the struggle during these dark years was a

decisive factor in shaping the uncompromising character of the later