A history of Russia

away from the issues of the day. Over a period of years reaction also expressed itself in the curbing of the press, in restrictions on the collection of taxes by the zemstvo and on the uses to which these taxes could be put, in the exemption of political and press cases from regular judicial procedure, in continuing Russification, in administrative pressure on magistrates, and the like. On the other hand, despite the reactionary nature of the period, the municipal reform took place in 1870 and the army reform as late as 1874.

New Radicalism and the Revolutionary Movement

Russian history came increasingly to be dominated by a struggle between the government Right and the radical and revolutionary Left, with the moderates and the liberals in the middle powerless to influence the fundamental course of events. The government received unexpected support from the nationalists. It was in 1863, at the time of the Polish rebellion and diplomatic pressure by Great Britain, France, and Austria on behalf of Poland, that the onetime Westernizer, Anglophile, and liberal, journalist Michael Katkov, came out emphatically in support of the government and

Russian national interests. Katkov's stand proved very popular during the Polish war. In a sense Katkov and his fellow patriots who enthusiastically defended the Russian state acted much like the liberals in Prussia and Germany when they swung to the support of Bismarck. Yet, in the long run, it proved more characteristic of the situation in Russia that, although the revolutionaries remained a small minority, they attracted the sympathy of broad layers of the educated public.

While the intellectual history of Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century will be summarized in a later chapter, some aspects of Russian radicalism of the 1860's and 1870's must be mentioned here. Following Turgenev, it has become customary to speak of the generation of the sixties as 'sons' and 'nihilists' and to contrast these 'sons' with the 'fathers' of the forties. A powerful contrast does emerge. The transformation in Russia formed part of a broader change in Europe which has been described as a transition from romanticism to realism. In Russian conditions the shift acquired an exaggerated and violent character.

Whereas the 'fathers' grew up on German idealistic philosophy and romanticism in general, with its emphasis on the metaphysical, religious, aesthetic, and historical approaches to reality, the 'sons,' led by such young radicals as Nicholas Chernyshevsky, Nicholas Dobroliubov, and Dmitrii Pisarev, hoisted the banner of utilitarianism, positivism, materialism, and especially 'realism.' 'Nihilism' - and also in large part 'realism,' particularly 'critical realism' - meant above all else a fundamental rebellion against accepted values and standards: against abstract thought and family control, against lyric poetry and school discipline, against religion and rhetoric. The earnest young men and women of the 1860's wanted to cut through every polite veneer, to get rid of all conventional sham, to get to the bottom of things. What they usually considered real and worthwhile included the natural and physical sciences - for that was the age when science came to be greatly admired in the Western world - simple and sincere human relations, and a society based on knowledge and reason rather than ignorance, prejudice, exploitation, and oppression. The casting down of idols - and there surely were many idols in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, as elsewhere - emancipation, and freedom constituted the moral strength of nihilism. Yet few in our age would fail to see the narrowness of its vision, or neglect the fact that it erected cruel idols of its own.

It has been noted that the rebels of the sixties, while they stood poles apart from the Slavophiles and other idealists of the 1830's and 1840's, could be considered disciples of Herzen, Bakunin, and to some extent Belinsky, in their later, radical, phases. True in the very important field of doctrine, this observation disregards the difference in tone and manner: as Samarin said of Herzen, even the most radical Westernizers

always retained 'a handful of earth from the other shore,' the shore of German idealism and romanticism, the shore of their youth; the new critics came out of a simpler and cruder mold. Socially too the radicals of the sixties differed from the 'fathers,' reflecting the progressive democratization of the educated public in Russia. Many of them belonged to a group known in Russian as raznochintsy, that is, people of mixed background below the gentry, such as sons of priests who did not follow the calling of their fathers, offspring of petty officials, or individuals from the masses who made their way up through education and effort. The 1860's and the 1870's With their iconoclastic ideology led also to the emancipation of a considerable number of educated Russian women - quite early compared to other European countries - and to their entry into the arena of radical thought and revolutionary politics. The word and concept 'intelligentsia,' which came to be associated with a critical approach to the world and a protest against the existing Russian order, acquired currency during that portentous period. Finally, the consecutive history of the Russian revolutionary movement - which, to be sure, had such early and isolated forerunners as the Decembrists - began in the years following the 'great reforms.'

The Russian revolutionary movement can be traced to the revolutionary propaganda and circles of the 1860's. It first became prominent, however, in the 1870's. By that time the essentially individualistic and anarchic creed of nihilism, with its stress on a total personal emancipation, became combined with and in part replaced by a new faith, populism - narod-nichestvo - which gave the 'critical realists' their political, social, and economic program. While populism also has a broad meaning which could include as adherents Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, certain ideologists of the Right, and other diverse Russian figures, in the narrow sense it came to be associated with the teachings of such intellectuals as Herzen, Bakunin, Nicholas Chernyshevsky, Peter Lavrov, and Nicholas Mikhailovsky - who will be discussed in a later chapter - and the main trend of the Russian radical and revolutionary movement in the last third of the nineteenth century. If nihilists gloried in their emancipation, independence, and superiority to the rotten world around them, populists felt compelled to turn to the masses, which in Russia meant the peasants. They wanted to repay their debt for acquiring education - which had brought the precious emancipation itself - at the expense of the sweat and even the blood of the muzhik, and to lead the people to a better future. The intellectuals, it must be added, desired to learn as well as to teach. In particular, following Herzen and Bakunin, they believed in the unique worth and potential of the peasant commune, which could serve as an effective foundation for the just social order of the future. In one way or another most populists hoped to find in the people that moral purity and probity - truth, if you

will - which their own environment had denied them. Whether their search stemmed from critical realism or not, represents another matter. Venturi, Itenberg, and others, with all their determined erudition, cannot quite convince the reader that reason ruled the populist movement.

The climax came in 1873, 1874, and the years immediately following. When in 1873 the imperial government ordered Russian students to abandon their studies in Switzerland - where Russians, especially women, could often pursue higher education more easily than in their fatherland - and return home, a considerable number of them, together with numerous other young men and women who had stayed in Russia, decided to 'go to the people.' And they went to the villages, some two and a half thousand of them, to become rural teachers, scribes, doctors, veterinarians, nurses, or storekeepers. Some meant simply to help the people as best they could. Others nurtured vast radical and revolutionary plans. In particular, the followers of Bakunin put their faith in a spontaneous, elemental, colossal revolution of the people which they had merely to help start, while the disciples of Lavrov believed in the necessity of gradualism, more exactly, in the need for education and propaganda among the masses before they could overturn the old order and establish the new.

The populist crusade failed. The masses did not respond. The only uprising that the populists produced resulted from an impressive but forged manifesto, in which the tsar ordered his loyal peasants to attack his enemies, the landlords. Indeed the muzhiks on occasion handed over the strange newcomers from the cities to the police. The police, in turn, were frantically active, arresting all the crusaders they could find. Mass trials of the 193 and of the 50 in 1877 marked the sad conclusion of the 'going to the people' stage of populism. The peasants, to repeat, would not revolt, nor could satisfactory conditions be established to train them for later revolutionary action.

Yet, one more possibility of struggle remained: the one advocated by another populist theoretician, Peter Tkachev, and by an amoral and dedicated revolutionist, Serge Nechaev, and given the name 'Jacobin' in memory of the Jacobins who seized power to transform France during the great French Revolution. If the peasants would not act, it remained up to the revolutionaries themselves to fight and defeat the government. Several years of revolutionary conspiracy, terrorism, and assassination ensued. The first instances of violence occurred more or less spontaneously, sometimes as countermeasures against brutal police officials. Thus, early in 1878 Vera Zasulich shot and wounded the military governor of St. Petersburg, General Theodore Trepov, who had ordered a political prisoner to be flogged; a jury failed to convict her, with the result that political cases were withdrawn from regular judicial