Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

from disaster into the first available rabbit hole.

Uspensky's account is borne out by other evidence, perhaps most

vividly by the behaviour of Chaadaev. In 1 848, this remarkable man,

no longer a 'certified lunatic', was still living in Moscow. The

Te/esltop debacle of 1 836 had spread his fame. He seemed unbroken

by his misfortune. His pride, his originality, and his independence, the

charm and brilliance of his conversation, but above all his reputation

as a martyr in the cause of intellectual liberty, attracted and fascinated

even his political opponents. His salon was visited by both Russian

and eminent foreign visitors, who testify that until the blow fell in

1 848, he continued to express his pro-western sympathies with an

uncompromising and (considering the political atmosphere) astonishing

degree of freedom. The more extreme members of the Slavophil

brotherhood, especially the poet Y azykov, 1 attacked him from time

to time, and on one occasion virtually denounced him to the political

police. But his prestige and popularity were still so great that the

Third Department did not touch him, and he continued to receive a

variety of distinguished personalities, both Russian and foreign, in his

weekly salon. In 1 847 he expressed himself strongly against Gogol's

Selected Extracts from a Correspondence with Friends and i n a letter

to Alexander Turgenev damned it as a symptom of megalomania on

the part of that unhappy genius. Chaadaev was not a liberal, still

less a revolutionary: he was, if anything, a romantic conservative, an

1 G. I. Uspensky, Sod1iM11iya (St Petersburg, 1 889), vol. 1, pp. 175-6.

1 See the account in M. K. Lemke, op. cit. (p. u, note 1 above), p. 451.

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R U S SIA AND 1 8 4 8

admirer of the Roman Church and the western tradition, and an

aristocratic opponent of the Slavophil obsession with eastern orthodoxy and Byzantium; he was a figure of the right, not the left, but he was an avowed and fearless critic of the regime. He was admired

above all for his individualism, his unbreakable will, his incorruptible

purity and strength of character, and his proud refusal to bend to

authority. In 1 849, this paladin of western civilisation suddenly wrote

to Khomyakov that Europe was in chaos, and in deep need of Russian

help, and spoke with much enthusiasm of the Emperor's bold initiative

in crushing the Hungarian revolution. While this might have been

put down to the horror of popular risings felt by many intellectuals at

this time, this is not the end of the story. In 1 8 5 1 , Herzen published

a book abroad containing a passionate encomium of Chaadaev.1 As

soon as he heard of it, Chaadaev wrote to the head of the political

police, saying that he had learnt with annoyance and indignation that

he had been praised by so notorious a miscreant, and followed this with

sentiments of the most abject loyalty to the Tsar as an instrument of

the divine will sent to restore order in the world. To his nephew and

confidant, who asked him 'Pourquoi cette bassesse gratuite?', he

merely observed that, after all, 'One must save one's skin.' This act

of apparently cynical self-abasement on the part of the proudest and

most liberty-loving man in Russia of his time is tragic evidence of the

effect of protracted repression upon those members of the older

generation of aristocratic rebels who, by some miracle, had escaped

Siberia or the gallows.

This was the atmosphere in which the famous Petrashevsky case

was tried. Its main interest consists in the fact that it is the only

serious conspiracy under the direct influence of western ideas to be

found in Russia at that time. When Herzen heard the news, it was

'like the olive branch, which the dove brought to Noah's Ark'- the

first glimmering of hope after the Rood.2 A good deal has been written

about this case by those involved in it-among them Dostoevsky, who

was sent to Siberia for complicity in it. Dostoevsky, who in later years

detested every form of radicalism and socialism (and indeed secularism

in general) plainly tried to minimise his own part in it, and perpetrated

a celebrated caricature of revolutionary conspiracy in The Posussed.

1 Du Jlotlop�mml ties iJiti rlr?oluliotllltlirts til Ruuit (Paris, 1 8 5 1).

I A. I. Herzen, Soln-t111it sod1i1U11ii (see p. of.. note 1 above), vo]. 10,

P· 33 5·

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R U SS I AN T H I N KE R S

Baron Korf, one of the committee of inquiry into the Petrashevsky

affair, later said that the plot was not as serious or as widespread as

had been alleged-that it was mainly 'a conspiracy of ideas'. In the

light of later evidence, and in particular of the publication by the

Soviet Government of three volumes of documents, 1 this verdict may

be doubted. There is, of course, a sense in which there was no formal

conspiracy. All that had happened was that a certain number of

disaffected young men gathered together at regular intervals in two

or three houses and discussed the possibility of reform. It is also true

that in spite of the devotion of Butashevich-Petrashevsky himself to

the ideas of Fourier (the story that he set up a small phalanstery on

his estate for his peasants, who set fire to it almost immediately as an

invention of the devil, is unsupported by evidence) these groups were

not united by any clear body of principles accepted by them all: so,

for instance, Mombelli went no further than the desire to create

mutual aid institutions, not so much for the workers or peasants as

for members of the middle class like himself; Akhsharumov, Evropeus,

Pleshcheev were Christian Socialists; A. P. Milyukov's only crime

was apparently to have translated Lamennais. Balasoglo was a kindly

and impressionable young man, oppressed by the horrors of the Russian

social order-no more and no less than, for example, Gogo! himselfwho desired reform and improvement on mildly populist lines similar to the ideas of the more romantic Slavophils, and indeed not too unlike

the neo-medievalist nostalgia of such English writers as Cobbett, or

William Morris. Indeed, Petrashevsky's encyclopedic dictionary,

which contained 'subversive' articles disguised as scientific information,

resembles nothing so much as Cobbett's famous grammar. Nevertheless, these groups differed from the casual gatherings of such radical men of letters as Panaev, Korsh, Nekrasov and even Belinsky. Some,

at any rate, of the participants met for the specific purpose of considering concrete ideas of how to foment a rebeliion against the existing regime.

These ideas may have been impracticable, and may have contained

in them much that was fantastic drawn from the French Utopians

and other 'unscientific' sources, but their purpose was not the reform

but the overthrow of the regime, and the establishment of a . revolutionary government. Dostoevsky's descriptions in A Writer's Diary and elsewhere make it clear that Speshnev, for example, was by

1 Dtlo ptlrt�shtllltfl (Moscow/Leningrad, 1937, 19-f.l, 19S 1).

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RU S S I A AND 1 8 4 8

temperament and intention a genuine revolutionary agitator, who

believed in conspiracy at least as seriously as Bakunin (who disliked

him) and attended these discussion groups with a practical purpose.

The portrait of him as Stavrogin in The Possessed strongly stresses

this aspect. Similarly, Durov and Grigoriev and one or two others