Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

to which the Emperor had at one time given much sympathetic

consideration, were abruptly dropped. For many years it had been a

commonplace, and not in liberal circles alone, that agricultural slavery

was an economic as well as a social evil. Count Kiselev, whom

Nicholas trusted and had invited to be his 'Agrarian Chief of Staff',

held this view strongly, and even the landowners and the reactionary

bureaucrats who did their best to put difficulties in the pa.th of positive

reform had not, for some years, thought it profitable to question the

evil of the system itself. Now, however, the lead given by Gogo! in his

unfortunate Selected Extracts from a Correspondence with Friends was

followed in one or two government-approved school textbooks which

went further than the most extreme Slavophils, and began to represent

serfdom as divinely sanctioned, and resting on the same unshkeable

foundation as other patriarchal Russian institutions-as sacred in its

own way as the divine right of the Tsar himself. Projected reforms of

local government were likewise discontinued. The 'hydra of revolution' was threatening the Empire, and internal enemies, as so often I I

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in the history of Russia, were therefore to be handled with exemplary

severity. The first step taken was connected with censorship.

The steady stream of secret denunciation which issued from

Bulgarin and Grech at last had its effect. Baron Korf and Prince

Menshikov almost simultaneously, it appears, compiled memoranda

giving instances of the laxity of the censorship and the dangerous

liberal tone to be found in the periodical press. The Emperor declared

himself shocked and indignant that this had not been detected earlier.

A committee under Menshikov was immediately set up with instructions to look into the activities of the censors and tighten up existing regulations. This committee summoned the editors of SfJ'IJT"tmmnik

and of Otechesroennye zapisn and reproved them strongly for 'general

unsoundness'. The latter changed its tone, and its editor-publisher

Kraevsky produced in 1 849 a him pmstmt article denouncing western

Europe and all its works, and offering the government a degree of

sycophantic adulation at that time unknown even in Russia, and

scarcely to be found in Bulgarin's subservient St'Utrnaya pchela (Tht

Northern Btt). As for SD'UT"tmmnilt, its most effective contributor

Belinsky, whom nothing could corrupt or silence, had died early in

1 848.1 Henen and Bakunin were in Paris, Granovsky was too mild

and too unhappy to protest. Of major literary figures in Russia

Nekrasov was left almost alone to continue the fight; by displaying

his extraordinary agility and skill in dealing with officials, and by

lying low for a good many months, he managed to survive and even

publish, and so formed the living link between the proscribed radicals

of the 405 and the new and more fanatical generation, tried and

hardened by persecution, which carried on the struggle in the sos and

6os. The Menshikov Committee was duly superseded by a secret

committee (the Emperor was in the habit of submitting critical issues

to secret committees, which often worked at cross-purposes in ignor-

1 There is a story still to be found in the latest Soviet lives of the great

critic that at the time of his death a warrant had gone out for his arrest, and

it is true that Du belt later said that he regretted his death, as otherwise 'we

would have rotted him in a fortress' (M. K. Lemke, NiltolllffJsltit zho11tiormy

i liltroturo s826-s855 gotiw, 2nd ed. [St Petersburg, 1909], p. 190). But

Lemke has conclusively shown that no such warrant had ever been signed and

that the invitation to Belinsky to visit Dubelt, which had largely inspired the

story, was due mainly to a desire of the Third Department to get a specimen

of his handwriting in order to compare it with

letter circulating at the time (ibid., pp. 1 87-90).

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R U S S I A AND 1 84 8

ance of each other's existence) headed by Buturlin, and later by

Annenkov-commonly known as the 'Second of April Committee'.

Its duty was not that of pre-<:ensorship (which continued to be performed by censors under the direction of the Ministry of Education) but of scrutinising matter already published, with instructions to report

any trace of'unsoundness' to the Emperor himself, who undertook to

execute the necessary punitive measures. This committee was linked

with the political police through the ubiquitous Dubelt. It worked

with blind and relentless zeal, ignoring all other departn:ents and

institutions, and at one point, in an excess of enthusiasm, actually

denounced a satirical poem approved by the Tsar himself.1 By going

with a fine comb through every word published in the none too

numerous periodical press, it succeeded in virtually stiBing all forms of

political and social criticism- indeed everything but the conventional

expressions of unlimited loyalty to the autocracy and the Orthodox

Church. This proved too much even for Uvarov, and, on the plea of

ill-health, he resigned from the Ministry of Education. His successor

was an obscure nobleman- Prince Shirinsky-Shikhmatov,8 who had

submitted a memorandum to the Tsar, pointing out that one of the

mainsprings of disaffection was undoubtedly the freedom of philosophical speculation permitted in the Russian universities. The Emperor accepted this thesis and appointed him to his post with

express instructions to reform university teaching by introducing

stricter observance of the precepts of the Orthodox faith, and in

particular by the elimination of philosophical or other dangerous

leanings. This medieval mandate was carried out in the spirit and

the letter and led to a 'purge' of education which exceeded even the

notorious 'purification' of the University of Kazan ten years earlier

by Magnitsky. 1 848 to 1 855 is the darkest hour in the night of

Russian obscurantism in the nineteenth century. Even the craven and

sycophantic Grech, torn by anxiety to please the authorities,

whose letters from Paris in 1 848 denounce the mildest liberal measures

of the Second Republic with a degree of scorn hardly equalled by

Benkendorf himself-even this poor creature in his autobiographfl

written in the sos complains with something approaching bitter-

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

• 'Shikhmatov is Shakhmat [checkmate) to all education' was a popuJar

pun in St Petenburg.

• N. I. Grech, Ztlpisli o moti zhizni (Moscow, 1930).

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ness about the stupidities of the new double censorship. Perhaps

the most vivid description of this literary 'White Terror' is the

well-known passage in the memoirs of the populist writer Gleb

Uspensky.1

One could not move, one could not even dream; it was dangerous

to give any sign of thought-of the fact that you were' not afraid; on

the contrary, you were required to show that you were scared,

trembling, even when there was no real ground for it-that is what

those years have created in the Russian masses. Perpetual fear . . .

was then in the air, and crushed the public consciousness and robbed

it of all desire or capacity for thought • . . There was not a single

point oflight on the horizon- 'You are lost,' cried heaven and earth,

air and water, man and beast-and everything shuddered and fled