Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

drew them in both a reactionary and a progressive direction. You

cauld believe that life or history was a river, which it was useless and

perilous to resist or deflect, and with which you could only merge

your identity-according to Hegel by discursive, logical, rational

activity of the Spirit; according to Schelling intuitively and imaginatively, by a species of inspiration the depth of which is the measure of human genius, from which spring myths and religions, art and

science. This led in the conservative direction of eschewing everything analytical, rational, empirical, everything founded upon experiment and natural science. On the other hand, you might declare that you felt within the earth the pangs of a new world struggling to be

born. You felt-you knew-that the crust of the old institutions was

about to crack under the violent inner heavings of the Spirit. If you

genuinely believed this, then you would, if you were a reasonable

being, be ready to risk identifying yourself with the revolutionary

cause, for otherwise it would destroy you. Everything in the cosmos

was progressive, everything moved. And if the future lay in the

fragmentation and the explosion of your present universe into a new

form of existence, it would be foolish not to collaborate with this

violent and inevitable process.

German romanticism, in particular the Hegelian school, was

divided on this issue; there were movements in both directions in

Germany, and consequently also in Russia, which was virtually an

intellectual dependency of German academic thought. But whereas

in the west ideas of this kind had for many years been prevalenttheories and opinions, philosophical, social, theological, political, had since the Renaissance at feast, clashed and collided with each other

in a vast variety · of patterns, and formed a general process of rich

intellectual activity in which no one idea or opinion could for long

hold undisputed supremacy-in Russia this was not the case.

One of the great differences between the areas dominated by the

1 22

B I RT H O F THE R U SSIAN INTEL L I G ENTSIA

eas.:em and the western Churches was that the former had had no

Renaissance and no Reformation. The Balkan peoples could blame

th'e Turkish conquest for their backwardness. But the case was little

better in Russia, which did not have a gradually expanding, literate,

educated class, connecting-by a series of social and intellectual stepsthe most and the least enlightened. The gap between the illiterate peasants and those who could read and write was wider in Russia

than in other European states, in so far as Russia could be called

European at this time.

Thus the number and variety of social or political ideas to be heard

if you moved in the salons of St Petersburg and Moscow were nothing

like so great as you would find in the intellectual ferment of Paris or

Berlin. Paris was, of course, the great cultural Mecca of the time. But

even Berlin was scarcely less agitated with intellectual, theological,

artistic controversies, despite the repressive Prussian censorship.

You must therefore imagine in Russia a situation dominated by

three main factors: a dead, oppressive, unimaginative government

chiefly engaged in holding its subjects down, preventing change

largely because this might lead to yet further change, even though its

more intelligent members obscurely realised that reform-and that of

a very radical kind- for instance with regard to the serf system or

the systems of justice and education-was both desirable and inevitable.

The second factor was the condition of the vast mass of the Russian

population-an ill-treated, economically wretched peasantry, sullen

and inarticulately groaning, but plainly too weak and unorganised to

act effectively in its own defence. Finally, between the two, a small,

educated class, deeply and sometimes resentfully influenced by western

ideas, with minds tantalised by visits to Europe and by the great new

social and intellectual movement at work in the centres of its culture.

May I remind you again that there was in the air, as much in

Russia as in Germany, a romantic conviction that every man had a

unique mission to fulfil if only he could know what it was; and that

this created a general enthusiasm for social and metaphysical ideas,

perhaps as a kind of ethical substitute for a dying religion, that was

not dissimilar to the fervour with which philosophical systems and

political Utopias had, for more than a century, been acclaimed in

France and Germany, by men in search of a new theodicy uncompromised by association with some discredited political or religious establishment. But in Russia there was, in addition, among the

educated classes, a moral and intellectual vacuum due to the absence

1 23

R U S S IAN T H IN K E R S

of a Renaissance tradition of secular education, and maintained by

the rigid censorship exercised by the government, by widespread

illiteracy, by the suspicion and disfavour with which all ideas as such

were regarded, by the acts of a nervous and often massively stupid

bureaucracy. In this situation, ideas which in the west competed

with a large number of other doctrines and attitudes, so that to become

dominant they had to emerge victorious from a fierce struggle for

survival, in Russia came to lodge in the minds of gifted individuals

and, indeed, obsess them, often enough simply for lack of other ideas

to satisfy their intellectual needs. Moreover, there existed in the capital

cities of the Russian Empire a violent thirst for knowledge, indeed

for mental nourishment of any kind, together with an unparalleled

sincerity (and sometimes a disarming naivety) of feeling, intellectual

freshness, passionate resolve to panicipate in world affairs, a troubled

consciousness of the social and political problems of a vast country,

and very little to respond to this new state of mind. What there was,

was mostly imponed from abroad-scarcely one single political and

social idea to be found in Russia in the nineteenth century was born

on native soil. Perhaps Tolstoy's idea of non-resistance was something

genuinely Russian-a restatement of a Christian position so original

that it had the force of a new idea when he preached it. But, in general,

I do not think that Russia has contributed a single new social or

political idea: nothing that was not traceable, not merely to some

ultimate western root, but to some doctrine discoverable in the west

eight or ten or twelve years earlier than its first appearance in Russia.

v

You must conceive, therefore, of an astonishingly impressionable

society with an unheard of capacity for absorbing ideas- ideas which

might waft across, in the most casual fashion, because someone

brought back a book or collection of pamphlets from Paris (or because

some audacious bookseller had smuggled them in) ; because someone

attended the lectures of a neo-Hegelian in Berlin, or had made friends

with Schelling, or had met an English missionary with strange ideas.

Genuine excitement was generated by the arrival of a new 'message'

emanating from some disciple of Saint-Simon or FouJier, of a book

by Proudhon, by Cabet, by Leroux, the latest social Messiahs in

France; or again, by an idea attributed to Davia Strauss or Ludwig

Feuerbach or Lamennais or some other forbidden author. Because of