A history of Russia

Russian social, political, and philosophical thought also underwent considerable evolution between the emancipation of the serfs and the First World War. As already mentioned, the radicals of the generation of the sixties, Turgenev's 'sons,' found their spiritual home first in nihilism, in the denial of all established authorities. As their spokesman, the gifted young literary critic Dmitrii Pisarev, 1840-68, said: 'What can be broken, should be broken.' The new radical spirit reflected both the general materialistic and realistic character of the age and special Russian conditions, such as a reaction to the stifling of intellectual life under Nicholas I, the autocratic and oppressive nature of the regime, the weak development of the middle class or other elements of moderation and compromise, and a gradual democratization of the educated public.

While nihilism emancipated the young Russian radicals from any alle-

giance to the established order, it was, to repeat a point, individual rather than social by its very nature and lacked a positive program - both Pisarev and Turgenev's hero Bazarov died young. The social creed came with a vengeance in the form of narodnichestvo, or populism, which arose in the 1860's and '70's to dominate much of Russian radicalism until the October Revolution. We have already seen its political impact in such events as the celebrated 'going to the people' of 1874, the terrorism of the 'Will of the People,' and the activities of the Socialist Revolutionary party. Although in a broad sense Russian populism belonged ideologically to the general European radicalism of the age, it also possessed a distinctively Russian character - for Russia was a peasant country par excellence - and numerous Russian prophets. The first prophets were the radical West-ernizers Herzen and Bakunin, the former surviving until 1870 and the latter until 1876, who both preached that radical intellectuals should turn to the people and proclaimed the virtues of the peasant commune. Bakunin's violent anarchism in particular inspired many of the more impatient populists. Anarchism, it might be added, appealed to a variety of Russian intellectuals, including such outstanding figures as Tolstoy and Prince Peter Kro-potkin, a noted geographer, geologist, and radical, who lived from 1842 to 1921 and devoted most of his life to the spreading of anarchism. Kropot-kin's activities as a radical included a fantastic escape from the Peter and Paul Fortress, which was described in his celebrated Memoirs of a Revolutionist written in English for The Atlantic Monthly in 1898-99.

Whereas Herzen and Bakunin were emigres, populist leaders also arose in Russia after 1855. Nicholas Chernyshevsky, whose views and impact were not limited to populism, but who nevertheless exercised a major influence on Russian populists, deserves special attention. Born in 1828, Chernyshevsky actually enjoyed only a few years of public activity as journalist and writer, especially as editor of a leading periodical, The Contemporary, before his arrest in 1862. He returned from Siberian exile only in 1883 and died in 1889. It was probably Chernyshevsky more than anyone else who contributed to the spread of utilitarian, positivist, and in part materialist views in Russia. A man of vast erudition, Chernyshevsky concerned himself with esthetics - developing further Belinsky's ideas on the primacy of life over art - as much as with economics, and wrote on nineteenth-century French history, demonstrating the failure of liberalism, as well as on Russian problems. His extremely popular novel, What Is To Be Done?, dealt with the new generation of 'critical realists,' their ethics and their activities, and sketched both the revolutionary hero and forms of co-operative organization. As to the peasant commune, Chernyshevsky showed more reserve than certain of his contemporaries. Yet he generally believed that it could serve as a direct transition to socialism in Russia,

provided socialist revolution first triumphed in Europe. For a time Cherny-shevsky collaborated closely in spreading his ideas with an able radical literary critic, Nicholas Dobroliubov, who died in 1861 at the age of twenty- five.

Chernyshevsky's and Dobroliubov's work was continued, with certain differences, by Peter Lavrov and Nicholas Mikhailovsky. Lavrov, 1823-1900, another erudite adherent of positivism, utilitarianism, and populism, emphasized in his Historical Letters of 1870 and in other writings the crucial role of 'critically thinking individuals' in the revolutionary struggle and the transformation of Russia. Mikhailovsky, a literary critic who lived from 1842 to 1904, employed the 'subjective method' in social analysis to stress moral values rather than mere objective description and to champion the peasant commune, which provided for harmonious development of the individual, by contrast with the industrial order, which led to narrow specialization along certain lines and the atrophy of other aspects of personality. The populist defense of the peasant commune became more desperate with the passage of time, because Russia was in fact developing into a capitalist country and because an articulate Marxist school arose to point that out as proof that history was proceeding according to Marxist predictions. Yet the Socialist Revolutionaries of the twentieth century, led by Victor Chernov, although they borrowed much from the Marxists and had to modify their own views, remained essentially faithful to populism, staking the future of Russia on the peasants and on a 'socialization of land.'

Marxists proved to be strong competitors and opponents of populists. While Marxism will be discussed in a later chapter, it should be kept in mind that Marxism offered to its followers an 'objective knowledge' of history instead of a mere 'subjective method' and a quasi-scientific certainty of victory in lieu of, or rather in addition to, moral earnestness and indignation. It claimed to be 'tough,' where populism was 'soft.' Moreover, the actual development of Russia seemed to follow the Marxist rather than the populist blueprint. Beginning with the 1890's Marxism made important inroads among Russian intellectuals, gaining adherents both among scholars and in the radical and revolutionary movement. The Social Democrats, divided into the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, and their rivals, the Socialist Revolutionaries, gave political expression to the great ideological debate and cleavage of radical Russia.

To be sure, not all thinking and articulate Russians were radicals. But the Right, the conservatives and the reactionaries, had very little to offer. The government did little more than repeat the obsolete formula of Official Nationality, and its ablest theoretician, Constantine Pobedonostsev, determinedly refused to come to terms with the modern world. A few reactionary intellectuals not associated with the government, such as the brilliant writer

Constantine Leontiev, engaged in violent but fruitless criticism of the trends of the time and placed their hopes - desperate hopes indeed - in freezing the social process, in freezing everything!

Perhaps the new-style violent and demagogic Right had brighter prospects than the conservatives did. Its potential might be suggested by the nationalist rally led by Katkov in 1863, by Pan-Slavism in the late 1870's and at certain other times - although Pan-Slavism, especially when it expanded, was by no means limited to the Right - and by the 'Black Hundreds' of the twentieth century. Yet all these movements lacked effective organization, continuity, and cohesion, as well as solid ideology. Pan-Slavism, for example, although it had several prophets, including Dostoev-sky, and a painstaking theoretician of the quasi-scientific racist variety, Nicholas Danilevsky, whose magnum opus, Russia and Europe, was published in 1869, remained an 'attitude of mind and feeling' rather than an 'organized policy or even a creed.' In other words, in times of Balkan crises many Russians sympathized with the Balkan Slavs, but they forgot them once a crisis passed. As a political factor, Pan- Slavism was more a Western bugaboo than a reality. And, in general, whatever racist and fascist possibilities existed in imperial Russia, they failed to develop beyond an incipient stage. Their flowering required a more modern setting than the one offered by the ancien regime of the Romanovs.

It can be argued that liberalism, on the other hand, represented a promising alternative for Russia. Moreover, Karpovich, Fischer, and other scholars, as well as a wealth of sources, have demonstrated that Russian liberalism was by no means a negligible quantity. On the contrary, with its bases in the zemstvo system and the professions, it gained strength steadily and it produced able ideologists and leaders such as Paul Miliukov and Basil Maklakov. The important position of the Cadets in the first two Dumas, the only Dumas elected by a rather democratic suffrage, emphasizes the liberal potential. But the government never accepted the liberal viewpoint, nor, of course, did the Russian radical and revolutionary movement accept it. The liberals thus had little opportunity to influence state policies or even to challenge them. Whether liberalism could have satisfied Russian needs will remain an arguable question, because Russian liberalism never received its chance in imperial Russia.

The 'silver age' affected Russian thought as well as Russian literature and art. Notably, it marked a return to metaphysics, and often to religion eventually, on the part of a significant sector of Russian intellectuals. Other educated Russians, especially the writers and the artists, tended to become apolitical and asocial, often looking to esthetics for their highest values. The utilitarianism, positivism, and materialism dominant from the time of the '60's, finally had to face a serious challenge.

Philosophy in Russia experienced a revival in the work of Vladimir