A major reason for the simultaneous appeal of these two ideologies in the nineties was the exasperation of a new student generation with the subjectivism, pessimism, and introspection of the age of small deeds. This new generation no longer hoped to find a positive message among the oppressed Slavs of the Ottoman Empire or the oppressed peasants of the Russian Empire. The new generation felt the need to check the preoccupa-
tion with personal salvation and the self-defeating drift toward an anarchistic rejection of all authority that was characteristic of reformers of the seventies and eighties. Evolutionary populists, such as Mikhailovsky, spoke of history as a 'struggle for individuality' against all forms of collective authority and all 'books of fate, however learned.' Revolutionary populists drifted into the indiscriminate terrorism of the People's Will and its anarchistic 'disorganization section.'
The passionately anti-authoritarian and semi-anarchistic Proudhon was the most important single teacher of Russian radicals during the populist age. The violent anarchism of Bakunin, the non-violent moralistic anarchism of Tolstoy, and the optimistic evolutionary anarchism of Kropotkin -all represented creative developments of Proudhon's widely studied social teachings.37 Tolstoy probably took the title War and Peace from Proudhon's tract of the same name. The tradition of courtroom oratory by radicals tried under the new jury system first caught the public eye in 1866, with Nicholas Sokolov's impassioned defense of Proudhon's anarchistic socialism as the true Christian answer to the problems of society. Sokolov had talked with Proudhon in Brussels in i860 and, in his book The Heretics, designated Proudhon as 'the model heretic' and last in a long line of 'true Christian' revolutionaries. Proudhon's insistence on a Christianity of ethics rather than metaphysics and his opposition to all forms of political authority (including that which is 'made respectable by having it proceed from the •people') made him the leading prophet of the moralistic anarchism which dominated much of the thinking of the populist era.38 Following Proudhon, Russian populism was a highly emotional and moralistic doctrine that appealed to men through idealistic exhortations, which are difficult to sustain in the face of prolonged adversity. Its passionate plea for simplicity and morality in human relationships seemed inadequate to a generation that was entering the more complex world of industrialized modernity; its philosophic thinness and frequent anti-intellectualism made it repellant to the better- educated and more widely read student generation of the nineties.
Thus, the spirit of protest led the new radicals of both right and left to seek some new philosophic bedrock on which to stand. The lonely anarchistic dreamer was beginning to feel out of place in the busy society of the nineties. The subjective depression, the disjointed memoirs and sketches of the era of small deeds began to give way to the ideologies of two new prophetic figures: the Marxist George Plekhanov and the idealist Vladimir Solov'ev. Subjectivity and a sense of isolation were challenged by these two influential prophets of objective truth. Plekhanov and Solov'ev were both real philosophers rather than publicists or journalists. Each had been active in the agitation of the populist age; each went abroad in the
eighties to discover a new faith for the Russian intelligentsia. Each looked to the West-but to different Wests. Solov'ev, the partial model for Alyosha Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, was interested in religious and philosophic ideas. He went to the Catholic West in search of spiritual union and the regeneration of society through a new mystical and aesthetic attitude toward life. Plekhanov, who had led the first major demonstration of revolutionary populism in front of the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg in 1878, was interested in economic and social problems. He went to the West of the international working class movement and became the father of Russian Marxism.
Prior to Plekhanov's conversion Russians had known and venerated Marx, but had either neglected or misunderstood the main tenets of Marxism. Engels' Situation of the Working Class in England and Marx's Critique of Political Economy and Capital had been widely studied in Russia during the populist era. But populists tended to view Marx's works as.an eloquent argument for bypassing capitalism altogether. The populists insisted that the way to socialism in Russia lay in preventing rather than undergoing a capitalist stage of development; in relying on the moral idealism of the educated classes rather than the material forces of historical inevitability. Russian radicals remained close to Proudhon-Marx's original ideological foe in the European socialist movement-in their suspicion of the centralized state and of all dogma, and in their ideal of peasant simplicity and a 'conservative revolution.' Russian revolutionaries abroad sympathized almost to a man with the revolutionary anarchist Bakunin in his struggles with Marx in the First Socialist International (1864-76). Populist writers inside Russia looked on Marx's philosophy as a complicated Germanic theory with little application to Russian reality.
Marx himself disliked most Russians that he met, generally favored the extension of German over Russian influence in Europe, and consistently viewed Russian developments as a minor sideshow in a historical drama centered on the industrialized West. Nonetheless, he was flattered by the attention his writings received in Russia. Particularly after the failure of the French Commune in 1871, he became interested in the possibility that unrest in Russia might serve as a catalyst for a new wave of revolutionary risings in the West. He also began to study the economic development of Russia, suggesting that many Russian peasants would have to become urban workers but that the economic analysis of 'capital is neither for nor against the peasant commune,' which might well serve as a 'point of support for social regeneration.'39 Marx died in 1883 without leaving any clear analysis of Russian developments and possibilities. Engels, who was less interested in Russia than Marx, never took the time to make any detailed study of
Russian developments prior to his death in 1895; but he recognized that populism was related to the idealistic forms of socialism which he and Marx had long opposed within the international socialist movement. Shortly before bis death he wrote one of his Russian correspondents that 'it is necessary to fight populism everywhere-be it German, French, English, or Russian.'40
It fell on the shoulders of PlekhanoyJo conduct the Russian phase of the international struggle between authoritarian and libertarian socialism. It is curious that Marxism, which theoretically down-graded the role of the individual in history, was in practice extraordinarily dependent on the leadership of individuals. Plekhanov almost single-handedly introduced Marx-i ism into Russia as a serious alternative to the populist ideology; just as thei 'three who made a revolution'-Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin-were responsible for enthroning it as a new state ideology after the unrest of 1917-21.
The essence of Plekhanov's Marxist position is contained in 'Socialism and the Political Straggle' of 1883, his first major work published after his flight abroad in 1880. Plekhanov had strongly opposed the political terrorism of the People's Will while in Russia, forming his own splinter group, Black Redistribution, which attached priority to redistributing land among the dispossessed 'black' elements of the population. After the failure of terrorism to produce anything but a swing to reaction, Plekhanov was in a position to claim vindication. Instead, he sought to conciliate the rival camp, to discard his own previous ultra-populist attachment to peasant ways and to federal dilution of power, and to provide a new outlook altogether for Russian radicalism.
Plekhanov begins his pamphlet of 1883 by praising the populist tradition for its 'practical' orientation in going 'among the people' and leading them into a 'conscious political struggle.'41 However, he insists that such a struggle will fail unless based on 'scientific socialism' and above all on the repudiation of the anarchistic romanticism and abstract moralism of Proudhon, 'the French Kant.'42 A rational understanding of economic development is indispensable for those who seek revolutionary political-change. He returns regularly to this theme, most effectively in his long essay 'Socialism and Anarchism,' where he challenges the implicit populist idea that these two social philosophies are in some sense complementary. Socialism is the necessary form which social life must take in a modern society where the means of production have been socialized. Anarchism is an irrational form of protest against these processes. Plekhanov and his 'liberation of labor' organization were the first important group of Russians to become familiar with the German Social Democratic tradition, with its emphasis on ordered progress; and they shared some of the German con-
