Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

itself a powerful factor in causing the final cleavage between liberal

and authoritarian socialism in 1 9 1 7, and the fatal divergence of paths

between Russia and Europe which followed. Perhaps F. I. Dan was

right in supposing that this was the parting of the ways which Herzen

had in mind when, addressing Edgar Quinet, he declared, 'You [will

go] by way of the proletariat towards socialism; we by way of socialism

to freedom.'2 The difference in the degree of political maturity

between Russia and the west at this period is vividly described in the

introduction to Letttrs from Franct and Italy which Herzen composed

in his Putney exile. His topic is the revolution of 1 848 in western

Europe:

The liberals, those political Protestants, became in their turn the

most fearful conservatives; behind the altered charters and con"'

stitutions they have discovered the spectre of socialism and have

grown pale with terror; nor is this surprising for they . . . have

something to lose, something to be afraid of. But we [Russians] are

not in that position at all. Our attitude to all public affairs is much

simpler and more naive.

The liberals are afraid of losing their liberty-we have none;

they are nervous of interference by governments in the industrial

sphere-with us the government interferes with everything anyhow;

they are afraid oflosing their personal rights-we have yet to acquire

them.

1 Quoted by F. I. Dan, Proislthozlulenit 6o/s�iZIIffl (New York, 1946),

PP· 36, 39·

1 Ko/oltol, No z 1o (1 December 1 865); referred to by Dan, ibid.

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R U S S IAN T H I NK E R S

The extreme contradictions of our still disordered existence, the

lack of stability in all our legal and constitutional notions, on the

one hand makes possible the most unlimited despotism, serfdom and

military settlements, and on the other creates conditions in which

such revolutionary steps as those of Peter I and Alexander II are

less difficult. A man who lives in furnished rooms finds it far

easier to move than one who has acquired a house of his own.

Europe is sinking because it cannot rid itself of its cargo-that

infinity of treasures accumulated in distant and perilous expeditions.

In our case, all this is artificial ballast; out with it and overboard,

and then full sail into the open sea ! We are entering history full of

strength and energy at precisely the moment when all political

parties are becoming faded anachronisms, and everyone is pointing,

some hopefully, others with despair, at the approaching thundercloud of economic revolution. And so we, too, when we look at our neighbours, begin to feel frightened of the coming storm, and

like them, think it best to say nothing about this peril . . . But you

have no need to fear these terrors; calm yourselves, for on our

estate there is a lightning conductor-communal owntrship of tht /and/1

In other words, the total absence of elementary rights and liberties,

the seven dark years which followed 1 848, so far from inducing

despair or apathy, brought home to more than one Russian thinker the

sense of complete antithesis between his country and the relatively

liberal institutions of Europe which, paradoxically enough, was made

the basis for subsequent Russian optimism. From it sprang the

strongest hope of a uniquely happy and glorious future, destined for

Russia alone.

Herzen's analysis of the facts was quite correct. There was no

Russian bourgeoisie to speak of: the journalist Polevoy and the highly

articulate literary tea merchant, Botkin, friend of Belinsky and Turgenev, and indeed Belinsky himself, were notl'lble exceptions-social conditions for drastic liberal refonns, let alone revolution, did not exist.

Yet this very fact, which was so bitterly lamented by liberals like

Kavelin and even Belinsky, brought its own remarkable compensation.

In Europe an international revolution had broken out and failed, and

its failure created among idealistic democrats and socialists a bitter

sense of disillusion and despair. In some cases it led to cynical detachment, or else a tendency to seek comfort either in apathetic resignation, 1 A. I. Herzen, 8o6rt1t1it sochifltflii o tridtst�ti tomt�lh (Moscow, 19S+-6S),

vol. ), pp. 1 3-1 +·

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R U SS I A AND 1 8 48

or in religion, or in the ranks of political reaction; very much as the

failure of the revolution of 1 90 5 in Russia produced the call to

repentance and spiritual values of the J?ekhi group. In Russia, Katkov

did become a conservative nationalist, Dostoevsky turned to orthodoxy,

Botkin turned his back upon radicalism, Bakunin signed a disingenuous

'confession'; but in general the very fact that Russia had suffered no

revolution, and no corresponding degree of disenchantment, led to a

development very different from that of western Europe. The important fact was that the passion for reform - the revolutionary fervour and the belief in the feasibility of change by means of public pressure,

agitation, and, as some thought, conspiracy-did not weaken. On the

contrary, it grew stronger. But the argument for a political revolution,

when its failure in the west was so glaring, clearly became less convincing. The discontented and rebellious Russian intellectuals of the next thirty years turned their attention to the peculiarities of their

own internal situation; and then, from ready-made solutions, imported

from the west and capable only of being artificially grafted on to the

recalcitrant growth provided by their own countrymen, to the creation

of new doctrines and modes of action adapted carefully to the peculiar

problems posed by Russia alone. They were prepared to learn and more

than learn-to become the most devoted and assiduous disciples of the

most advanced thinkers of western Europe, but the teachings of Hegel

and the German materialists, of Mill, Spencer and Comte, were

henceforth to be transformed to fit specifically Russian needs. Bazarov,

in Turgenev's Fathers and Childrm, for all his militant positivism

and materialism and respect for the west, has far deeper roots in Russian

soil, not without a certain self-conscious pride, than the men of the

1 84os with their genuinely cosmopolitan ideal: than, for example, the

imaginary Rudin, or indeed the supposed original of Rudin-Bakunin

himself, for all his pan-Slavism and Germanophobia.

The measures taken by the Government to prevent the 'revolutionary disease' from infecting the Russian Empire, did no doubt play a decisive part in preventing the possibility of revolutionary outbreaks:

but the important consequence of this 'moral quarantine' was to

weaken the influence of western liberalism; it forced Russian intellectuals in upon themselves and made it more difficult than before to escape from the painful issues before them into a kind of vague search

for panaceas from the west. There followed a sharp settling of internal

moral and political accounts: as hope receded of marching in step with

western liberalism, the Russian progressive movement tended to

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R U S SIAN T H I N KERS

become increasingly inward-looking and uncompromising. The most

crucial and striking fact is that there was no inner collapse on the part

of the progressives, and both revolutionary and reformist opinion,