Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

into commodities and the consequent 'alienation' of individuals and

groups and degradation of human lives-these notions are fully

intelligible only in the context of expanding industrialism. Russia,

even as late as the I 8 50s, was one of the least industrialised states in

Europe. Nevertheless, exploitation and misery had long been amongst

the most familiar and universally recognised characteristics of its social

life, the principal victims of the system being the peasants, both serfs

and free, who formed over nine-tenths of its population. An industrial

proletariat had indeed come into being, but by mid-century did not

exceed two or three per cent of the population of the Empire. Hence

the cause of the oppressed was still at that date overwhelmingly that

of the agricultural workers, who formed the lowest stratum of the

population, the vast majority being serfs in state or private possession.

The populists looked upon them as martyrs whose grievances they

were determined to avenge and remedy, and as embodiments of

simple uncorrupted virtue, whose social organisation (which they

largely idealised) was the natural foundation on which the future of

Russian society must be rebuilt.

The central populist goals were social justice and social equality.

Most of them were convinced, following Herzen, whose revolutionary

propaganda in the I 8 50s influenced them more than any other single

set of ideas, that the essence of a just and equal society existed already

in the Russian peasant commune-the ohshchina organised in the form

of a collective unit called the mir. The mir was a free association of

peasants which periodically redistributed the agricultural land to be

tilled; its decisions bound all its members, and constituted the cornerstone on which, so the populists maintained, a federation of socialised, self-governing units, conceived along lines popularised by the French

socialist Proudhon, could be erected. The populist leaders believed

that this form of cooperation offered the possibility of a free and

democratic social system in Russia, originating as it did in the deepest

moral instincts and traditional values of Russian, and indeed all human,

society, and they believed that the workers (by which they meant all

productive human beings), whether in town or country, could bring

this system into being with a far smaller degree of violence or coercion

than had occurred in the industrial west. This system, since it alone

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sprang naturally from fundamental human needs and a sense of the

right and the good that existed in all men, would ensure justice,

equality, and the widest opportunity for the full development of

human faculties. As a corollary of this, the populists believed that the

development of large-scale centralised industry was not 'natural', and

therefore led inexorably to the degradation and dehumanisation of all

those who were caught in its tentacles: capitalism was an appalling

evil, destructi�e of body and soul; but it was not inescapable. They

denied that social or economic progress was necessarily bound up with

the Industrial Revolution. They maintained that the application of

scientific truths and methods to social and individual problems (in

which they passionately believed), although it might, and often did,

lead to the growth of capitalism, could be realised without this fatal

sacrifice. They believed that it was possible to improve life by scientific techniques without necessarily destroying the 'natural' life of the peasant village, or creating a vast, pauperised, faceless city proletariat.

Capitalism seemed irresistible only because it had not been sufficiently

resisted. However it might be in the west, in Russia 'the curse of

bigness' could still be successfully fought, and federations of small

self-governing units of producers, as Fourier and Proudhon had

advocated, could be fostered, and indeed created, by deliberate action.

Like their French masters, the Russian disciples held the institution

of the state in particular hatred, since to them it was at once the

symbol, the result and the main source of injustice and inequalitya weapon wielded by the governing class to defend its own privilegesand one that, in the face of increasing resistance from its victims, grew progressively more brutal and blindly destructive.

The defeat of liberal and radical movements in the west in I 848-9

confirmed them in their conviction that salvation did not lie in politics

or political parties: it seemed clear to them that liberal parties and their

leaders had neither understood nor made a serious effort to forward

the fundamental interests of the oppressed populations of their

countries. What the vast majority of peasants in Russia (or workers

in Europe) needed was to be fed and clothed, to be given physical

security, to be rescued from disease, ignorance, poverty, and humiliating inequalities. As for political rights, votes, parliaments, republican forms, these were meaningless and useless to ignorant, barbarous, halfnaked and starving men; such programmes merely mocked their misery. The populists shared with the nationalistic Russian Slavophils

(with whose political ideas they had otherwise little in common) a

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loathing of the rigidly class-conscious social pyramid of the west that

was complacently accepted, or fervently believed in, by the conformist

bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy to whom this bourgeoisie looked up.

The satirist Saltykov, in his famous dialogue between a German

and a Russian boy, immortalised this attitude when he declared his

faith in the Russian boy, hungry and in rags, stumbling in the mud

and squalor of the accursed, slave-owning tsarist regime, because he

had not, like the neat, docile, smug, well-fed, well-dressed German

bOy, bartered away his soul for the few pence that the Prussian official

had offered him, and was consequently capable, if only he was allowed

to do so (as the Gennan boy no longer was), of rising one day to his

full human height. Russia was in darkness and in chains, but her

spirit was not captive; her past was black, but her future promised

more than the death in life of the civilised middle classes in Germany

or France or England, who had long ago sold themselves for material

security and had become so apathetic in their shameful, self-imposed

servitude that they no longer knew how to want to be free.

The populists, unlike the Slavophils, did not believe in the unique

character or destiny of the Russian people. They were not mystical

nationalists. They believed only that Russia was a backward nation

which had not reached the stage of social and economic development

at which the western nations (whether or not they could have avoided

this) had entered upon the path of unrestrained industrialism. They

were not, for the most part, historical determinists; consequently they

believed that it was possible for a nation in such a predicament to

avoid this fate by the exercise of intelligence and will. They saw no

reason why Russia could not benefit by western science and western

technology without paying the appalling price paid by the west. They

argued that it was possible to avoid the despotism of a centralised

economy or a centralised government by adopting a loose, federal