Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

their relative scarcity in Russia, these ideas and fragments of ideas

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would be seized upon with the utmost avidity. The social and economic

prophets in Europe seemed full of confidence in the new revolutionary

future, and their ideas had an intoxicating effect upon the young

Russians.

When such doctrines were pro1pulgated in the west, they sometimes excited their audience, and occasionally led to the formation of parties or sects, but they were not regarded by the majority of those

whom they reached as the final truth; and even those who thought

them crucially important did not immediately begin to put them into

practice with every means at their disposal. The Russians were liable

to do just this; to argue to themselves that if the premises were true

and the reasoning correct, true conclusions followed : and further, that

if these conclusions dictated certain actions as being necessary and

beneficial, then if one was honest and serious one had a plain duty to

try to realise them as swiftly and as fully as possible. Instead of the

generally held view of the Russians as a gloomy, mystical, self-lacerating,

somewhat religious nation, I should like to suggest, at least as far as

the articulate intelligentsia are concerned, that they were somewhat

exaggerated Westerners of the nineteenth century; and that so far

from being liable to irrationalism. or neurotic self-absorption, what

they possessed in a high, perhaps excessive, degree was extremely

devdoped powers of reasoning, extreme logic and lucidity.

It is true that when people tried to put these Utopian schemes

into operation and were almost immediately frustrated by the police,

disillusionment followed, and with it a liability to fall into a state of

apathetic melancholy or violent exasperation. But this came later. The

original phase was neither mystical nor introspective, but on the

contrary rationalist, bold, extroverted and optimistic. I think it was the

celebrated terrorist Kravchinsky who once said about the Russians

that, whatever other qualities they might have, they never recoiled

froin the consequences of their own reasoning. If you study the

Russian 'ideologies' of the nineteenth and indeed the twentieth

century, I think you will find, on the whole, that the more difficult,

the more paradoxical, the more unpalatable a conclusion is, the greater

is the degree of passion and enthusiasm with which some Russians, at

any rate, tend to embrace it; for to do so seems to them no more than

a proof of a man's moral sincerity, of the genuineness of his devotion

to the truth and of his seriousness as a human being; and although

th� consequences of one's reasoning may appear prima fane unplausible or even downright absurd, one must not for that reason 1 25

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recoil from them, for what would that be but cowardice, weakness,

or-worst of all- the setting up of comfort before the truth? Herzen

once said :

We are great doctrinaires and raisonneurs. To this German

capacity we add our own national . . . element, ruthless, fanatically

dry : we are only too willing to cut off heads . . . With fearless step we

march to the very limit, and go beyond it; never out of step with the

dialectic, only with the truth . . .

And this characteristically acid comment is, as a verdict on some of

his contemporaries, not altogether unjust.

VI

Imagine, then, a group of young men, living under the petrified

regime of Nicholas I -men with a degree of passion for ideas perhaps

never equalled in a European society, seizing upon ideas as they

come from the west with unconscionable enthusiasm, and making

plans to translate them swiftly into practice-and you will have some

notion of what the early members of the intelligentsia were like . .They

were a small group of litterateurs, both professional and amateur,

conscious of being alone in a bleak world, with a hostile an� arbitrary

government on the one hand, and a completely uncomprehending

mass of oppressed and inarticulate peasants on the other, conceiving

of themselves as a kind of self-conscious army, carrying a banner for

all to see- of reason and science, of liberty, of a better life.

Like persons in a dark wood, they tended to feel a certain solidarity

simply because they were so few and far between ; because they were

weak, because they were truthful, because they were sincere, because

they were unlike the others. Moreover, they had accepted the romantic

doctrine that every man is called upon to perform a mission beyond

mere selfish purposes of material existence; that because they had had

an education superior to that of their oppressed brothers they had a

direct duty to help them toward the light; that this duty was uniquely

binding upon them, and that, if they fulfilled it, as history surely

intended them to do, the future of Russia might yet be as glorious

as her past had been empty and dark; and that for this they must

preserve their inner solidarity as a dedicated group. They were a

persecuted minority who drew strength from their very persecution;

they were the self-conscious bearers of a western message, freed from

the chains of ignorance and prejudice, stupidity or cowardice, by

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some great western liberator-a German romantic, a French socialistwho had transformed their vision.

The act ofliberation is something not uncommon in the intellectual

history of Europe. A liberator is one who does not so much answer your

problems, whether of theory or conduct, as transform them-he ends

your anxieties and frustrations by placing you within a new framework where old problems CtZe to have meaning, and new ones appear which have their solutions, as it were, already to some degree prefigured in the new universe in which you find yourself. I mean that those who were liberated by the humanists of the Renaissance or the

philosophes of the eighteenth century did not merely think their old

questions answered more correctly by Plato or Newton than by

Albertus Magnus or the Jesuits- rather they had a sense of a new

universe. Questions which had troubled their predecessors suddenly

appeared to them senseless and unnecessary. The moment at which

ancient chains fall off, and you feel yourself recreated in a new image,

can make a life. One cannot tell by whom a man might not, in this

sense, be set free-Voltaire probably emancipated a greater number of

human beings in his own lifetime than anyone before or after him;

Schiller, Kant, Mill, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Samuel Butler, Freud have

liberated human beings. For all I know Anatole France, or even

Aldous Huxley, may have had this effect.

The Russians of whom I speak were 'liberated' by the great

German metaphysical writers, who freed them on the one hand from

the dogmas of the Orthodox Church, on the other from the dry

formulas of the eighteenth-century rationalists, which had been not

so much refuted as discredited by the failure of the French Revolution.