groups, and populist sympathizers it was necessary to combine socialist and egalitarian proposals with constitutional reforms. Such proposals, however, alienated many provincial aristocrats and entrepreneurs. Many of those who had originally joined in the cry for constitutional reform and representative government at the turn of the century were willing to settle for the extension of civil liberties, the approval of a consultative national duma and the constitution of October, 1905. These 'Octobrists' dominated the third and fourth dumas with an essentially conservative emphasis on historical continuity and the danger of revolution. Even this cautious group showed signs of vitality, however. Octobrists, aristocratic zemstvo elements, and members of various splinter groups between the
Cadets and the Octobrists played the leading role in forming the remarkable ; 'village city' (zemgor) committees which helped finance the Russian war effort in 1915. The very divisions within the liberal camp in the early years of the twentieth century indicated, moreover, a certain vigor. Men of differing philosophic and economic outlooks sought to ally themselves with the traditions of constitutional democracy. Although the Cadets were unable to make their party the forum for all this diversified liberal sentiment, they were not nearly as timid and confused in the face of mounting chaos during the war as many other elements in Russian society. The Cadets were, indeed, the only major political group with a counter-program to that of the Bolsheviks in the critical years of revolution and civil war. The Cadets were both determined reformers and clear foes of totalitarian elements within the reforming camp.
In his elaborate post-mortems on the Revolution, Miliukov suggested that the abstract utopianism of the intelligentsia was a contributory factor to the success of Bolshevism. Criticism of the intelligentsia had been a constant theme in the writings of the ill-fated constitutional liberals of imperial Russia. In contrast to populists on the left and Pan-Slavs on the right, liberals stressed the importance of learning from the West and recognizing the rights and sanctity of the individual. But they generally favored a creative adaptation of Western liberal values to Russian conditions, not merely a slavish imitation. Kavelin, one* of the original Westernizers of the forties and an articulate aristocratic liberal throughout the rest of the century, was typical in his insistence that Russians avoid taking over 'outmoded forms in which Europe itself no longer believes.'28 He was as prophetically perceptive as Dostoevsky in his memorandum of 1866, depicting the revolutionary paths into which the intelligentsia was drifting; yet he also had the courage to challenge the confusion between universal values and Russian national characteristics in Dostoevsky's Pushkin speech of 1880.
One of the many neglected liberal critics of the intelligentsia in the nineteenth century was Eugene Markov, the widely traveled editor of the journal Russian Speech. He accused Russian intellectuals of being responsible for a new fanaticism that was the very antithesis of the pragmatism and empiricism of the positivists whom they were forever quoting.
The 'intellectual layer' of Russia has withdrawn from participation in the activity of this essentially 'practical' century. It has plunged Russia into a needless 'turmoil of thought' (smuta umov) that is far more dangerous than the turmoil (smuta) of the seventeenth century, because the intelligentsia bears within itself the 'sickness of narrow party-mindedness' (bolezn' parteinosti).2S Russia needs responsible citizens not 'ideologues,' deep criticism not 'talmudism in journalism' and 'judgment by shriek-
ing.'30 He rejects the 'Muscovite school in literature' for its 'zoological' chauvinism. In an article of the late seventies called 'Books and Life,' Markov relates the revolutionary crisis in Russia not just to the worsening of material conditions but to the continuing refusal of the intellectuals to apply anything but 'bookish theories' to Russian problems. In a perceptive passage that applies to the seventeenth as well as the nineteenth century, Markov notes:
Books, in the general course of Russian spiritual growth, have played a remarkably unimportant role, in any case considerably less than in other European countries. But, in Russia, books have produced something which they have not produced anywhere else-they have produced schism (raskol).31
The greatest need in Russia is to overcome schism, the separation between books and life. The future for Russia is almost unlimited, if its writers can 'open for Russian thought the broad path to practical activity.'82
Russian intellectuals are 'good-for-nothings' (nikchemnye), 'hypochondriacs,' who prefer to be 'ideologues rather than citizens or even people.' His model for imitation is English political life, which teaches one 'how to live, struggle, and accomplish things.'33 Everyone, Markov insists, has spiritual doubts and problems; but only the English have learned to separate these concerns from political life. Unfortunately in Russia
none of us know or want to know anything about local interests or local facts. Every schoolboy seeks first of all final ends, first causes, the fate of governments, questions of the world and all humanity.34
Markov issues an almost plaintive plea for an experimental approach to Russian problems and an end to sectarian intolerance:
Let us recognize honorably and clearly the existing world . . . cease the despotic system of proscriptions and intolerance. . . . Let us be, in a word, men, enlightened citizens of Russia and not of a party or a journal. Let us be grown men of experience and strength, and not children all excited about some little book.35
His hero is Alexander II. As Markov wrote immediately after the Tsar's assassination (and shortly before his own journal was shut down by Pobe-donostsev):
This Tsar-liberator suffered like Christ at Golgotha for the sins of others. May his sufferings, like those of Christ, point the way to salvation for his true people.30
But the path of liberalization was not the way taken by Russia. The sufferings of Alexander II were commemorated not by continuing his work of reform but by building on the spot where he died a large brick church in the artificially revived Muscovite style of the late imperial period. The intrusion of this pseudo-Muscovite style into the classical architectural milieu of St. Petersburg was a kind of symbol of the return to reactionary nationalism under Alexander III and Nicholas II. Constitutional democracy was given only a brief and troubled moment on the stage of history. Its temperate ideology was lost between the frozen Russia of Pobedonostsev and the flaming Russia of social revolution. However telling the critiques advanced by Markov, Miliukov, and other liberals, the more extreme traditions of the intelligentsia prevailed over the forces calling for more moderate and experimental approaches. Two new philosophies of the late imperial period-dialectical materialism and transcendental idealism- encouraged the very tendency toward doctrinal and metaphysical thought which the liberals had tried to challenge.
Dialectical Materialism
Of the two new philosophic currents that emerged in the silver age, dialectical materialism and transcendental idealism, one was more radical and one more conservative than constitutional liberalism. Unlike liberalism, these two traditions shared a common resolve to build on the previous experience of the intelligentsia. Each of them sought to fortify Russia through ideology rather than reform it with a political program. Each sought to answer the philosophic concerns of the intelligentsia rather than challenge the relevance of these concerns to Russian problems. Whereas the constitutional liberals tended to be sharp critics of the abstract traditions of the radical intelligentsia, both the new materialists and the new idealists were solidly rooted in these traditions. The materialists claimed to be the heirs to the traditions of the iconoclastic sixties; the idealists claimed to be developing the traditions of Dostoevsky's aesthetic and religious reaction to iconoclasm.
