Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

the enemy had hitherto always been on the right-monarchists,

clericals, aristocratic supporters of political or economic oligarchies,

men whose rule promoted, or was indifferent to, poverty, ignorance,

injustice and the exploitation and degradation of men. The natural

inclination of liberals has been, and still is, towards the left, the party

of generosity and humanity, towards anything that destroys barriers

between men. Even after the inevitable split they tend to be deeply

reluctant to believe that there can be real enemies on the left. They

may feel morally outraged by the resort to brutal violence by some of

their allies; they protest that such methods will distort or destroy the

common goal. The Girondins were driven into this position in 1 792;

liberals like Heine or Lamartine in 1 848; Mazzini, and a good many

socialists, of whom Louis Blanc was the most representative, were

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repelled by the methods of the Paris Commune of 1 87 1 . These crises

passed. Breaches were healed. Ordinary politial warfare was

resumed. The hopes of the moderates began to revive. The desperate

dilemmas in which they found themselves could be viewed as being

due to moments of sudden aberration which could not last. But in

Russia, from the 1 86os until the revolution of 191 7, this uneasy

feeling, made more painful by periods of repression and horror, became

a chronic condition -a long, unceasing malaise of the entire enlightened

section of society. The dilemma of the liberals became insoluble, They

wished to destroy the regime which seemed to them wholly evil. They

believed in reason, secularism, the rights of the individual, freedom

of speech, of association, of opinion, the liberty of groups and races

and nations, greater social and economic equality, above all in the rule

of justice. They admired the selfless dedication, the purity of motive,

the martyrdom of those, no matter how extremist, who offered their

lives for the violent overthrow of the status quo. But they feared

that the losses entailed by terrorist or Jacobin methods might be

irreparable, and greater than any possible gains; they were horrified by the fanaticism and barbarism of the extreme left, by its contempt for the only culture that they knew, by its blind faith in what seemed to them Utopian fantasies, whether anarchist or populist or

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Marxist.

These Russians believed in European civilisation as converts

believe in a newly acquired faith. They could not bring themselves

to contemplate, still less to sanction, the destruction of much that

seemed to them of infinite value for themselves and for all men in

the past, even the tsarist past. Caught between two armies, denounced

by both, they repeated their mild and rational words without much

genuine hope of being heard by either side. They remained obstinately

reformist and non-revolutionary. Many suffered from complex forms

of guilt: they sympathised more deeply with the goals upon their left;

but, spumed by the radials, they tended to question, like the selfcritial, open-minded human beings that they were, the validity of their own positions; they doubted, they wondered, they felt tempted,

from time to time, to jettison their enlightened principles and find

peace by conversion to a revolutionary faith, above all by submission

to the domination of the zealots. To stretch themselves upon a

comfortable bed of dogma would, after all, save them from being

plagued by their own uncertainties, from the terrible suspicion that

the simple solutions of the extreme left might, in the end, be as

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irrational and as repressive as the nationalism, or elitism, or mysticism

of the right. Moreover, despite all its shortcomings the left still seemed

to them to stand for a more human faith than the frozen, bureaucratic,

heartless right, if only because it was always better to be with the

persecuted than with the persecutors. But there was one conviction

which they never abandoned : they knew that evil means destroyed

good ends. They knew that to extinguish existing liberties, civilised

habits, rational behaviour, to abolish them today, in the belief that,

like a phoenix, they would arise in a purer and more glorious form

tomorrow, was to fall into a terrible snare and delusion. Herzen told

his old friend, the anarchist Bakunin, in 1 869 that to order the intellect

to stop because its fruits might be misused by the enemy, to arrest

science, invention, the progress of reason, until men were made pure

by the fires of a total revolution-until 'we are free' -was nothing but

a self-destructive fallacy. 'One cannot stop intelligence', Herzen wrote

in his last and magnificent essay, 'because the majority lacks understanding, while the minority makes evil use of it . . . Wild cries to close books, abandon science, and go to some senseless battle of

destruction-that is the most violent and harmful kind of demagoguery.

It will be followed by the eruption of the most savage passions . • . No!

Great revolutions are not achieved by the unleashing of evil passions

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I

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do not believe in the seriousness of men who prefer crude force

and destruction to development and arriving at settlements • • . '1 and

then, in an insufficiently remembered phrase, 'One must open men's

eyes, not tear them out. '1 Bakunin had declared that one must first

clear the ground: then we shall see. That savoured to Herzen of the

dark ages of barbarism. In this he spoke for his entire generation in

Russia. This is what Turgenev, too, felt and wrote during the last

twenty years of his life. He declared that he was a European; western

culture was the only culture that he knew; this was the banner under

which be had marched as a young man: it was his banner still.8_ His

spokesman is Potugin in Smoit, when he says 'I am devoted to

Europe, or to be more precise to • . . civilisation . . . this word is pure

and holy, while other words, "folk", for example, or . • • yes, or

"glory", smell of blood . . .' His condemnation of political mysticism

1 'K ataromu tovarishchu', Fourth Letter, 1 869, Bllllrfltlit 111'11;,,,;;, vol.

zo, PP· 59z-3.

I ibid., P· 593·

• Letter to Herzen of zs November 1 86z.

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and irrationalism, populist and Slavophil, conservative or anarchist,

remained absolute.

But short of this, these 'men of the 40s' were less sure: to support

the left in its excesses went against the civilised grain; but to go against

it, or even to remain indifferent to its fate, to abandon it to the forces

of reaction, seemed even more unthinkable. The moderates hoped,

against all evidence, that the ferocious anti-intellectualism, which,

liberals in Russia told Turgenev, was spreading like an infectious

disease among the young, the contempt for painting, music, books,

the mounting political terrorism, . were passing excesses due to immaturity, lack of education; they were results of a long frustration; they would disappear once the pressures that had generated them

were removed. Consequently they explained away the violent language