Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

structure composed of self-governing, socialised units both of producers

and of consumers. They held that it was desirable to organise, but not

to lose sight of other values in the pursuit of organisation as an end

in itself; to be governed primarily by ethical and humanitarian and

not solely by economic and technological-'ant-hill'-considerations.

They declared that to protect human individuals against exploitation

by turning them into an industrial army of collectivised robots was

self-stultifying and suicidal. The ideas of the populists wer:e often

unclear, and there were sharp differences among them, but there was

an area of agreement wide enough to constitute a genuine movement.

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R U SSIAN TH INKERS

Thus they accepted, in broad outline, the educational and moral

lessons, but not the state worship, of Rousseau. Some of them-indeed

perhaps the majority-shared Rousseau's belief in the goodness of

simple men, his conviction that the cause of corruption is the crippling

effect of bad institutions, his acute distrust of all forms of cleverness,

of intellectuals and specialists, of all self-isolating coteries and factions.

They accepted the anti-political ideas, but not the technocratic

centralism, of Saint-Simon. They shared the belief in conspiracy and

violent action preached by Babeuf and his disciple Buonarotti, but not

their Jacobin authoritarianism. They stood with Sismondi and

Proudhon and Lamennais and the other originators of the notion of

the welfare state, against, on the one hand, laissn-fairt, and, on the

other, central authority, whether nationalist or socialist, whether

temporary or permanent, whether preached by List, or Mazzini, or

Lassalle, or Marx. They came close at times to the positions of

western Christian socialists, without, however, any religious faith,

since, like the French Encyclopedists of the previous century, they

believed in 'natural' morality and scientific truth. These were some

of the beliefs that held them together. But they were divided by

differences no less profound.

The first and greatest of their problems was their attitude towards

the peasants in whose name all that they did was done. Who was to

show the peasants the true path to justice and equality? Individual

liberty is not, indeed, condemned by the populists, but it tends to be

regarded as a liberal catchword, liable to distract attention from

immediate social and economic tasks. Should one train experts to

teach the ignorant younger brothers-the tillers of the soil, and, if

need be, stimulate them to resist authority, to revolt and destroy the

old order before the rebels had themselves fully grasped the need or

meaning of such acts? That is the view of such dissimilar figures as

Bakunin and Speshnev in the 1 84os; it was preached by Chernyshevsky in the 50s, and was passionately advocated by Zaichnevsky and the Jacobins of 'Young Russia' in the 6os; it was preached by

Lavrov in the 70s and 8os, and equally by his rivals and opponentsthe believers in disciplined professional terrorism-Nechaev and Tkachev, and their followers who include-for this purpose alonenot only the Socialist-Revolutionaries but also some of the most fanatical Russian Marxists, in particular Lenin and Trotsky.

Some among them asked whether this training of revolutionary

groups might not create an arrogant elite of seekers of power and

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R U S SIAN POP U L I S M

autocracy, men who would, at best, believe i t their duty to give the

peasants not what the peasants asked for but what they-their selfappointed mentors-thought good for them, namely, that which the masses ought to ask for, whether they in fact did so or not. They

· pushed the question farther, and asked whether this would not, in due

course, breed fanatical men who would pay too little heed to the

actual wants of the vast majority of the Russian population, intent on

forcing upon them only what they-the dedicated order of professional

revolutionaries, cut off from the life of the masses by their own special

training and conspiratorial lives-had chosen for them, ignoring the

hopes and protests of the people itself. Was there not a terrible danger

here of the substitution of a new yoke for the old, of a despotic

oligarchy of intellectuals in the place of the nobility and the bureaucracy and the tsar? What reason was there for thinking that the new masters would prove less oppressive than the old?

This was argued by some among the terrorists of the 6os- lshutin

and Karakozov, for example-and even more forcibly by the majority

of the idealistic young men, who 'went among the people' in the 70s

and later, with the aim not so much of teaching others as of themselves learning how to live, in a state of mind inspired by Rousseau (and perhaps by Nekrasov or Tolstoy) at least as much as by the more

tough-minded social theorists. These young men, the so-called

'repentant gentry', believed themselves to have been corrupted not

merely by an evil social system but by the very process of liberal

education which makes for deep inequalities and inevitably lifts

scientists, writers, professors, experts, civilised men in general, too

high above the heads of the masses, and so itself becomes the richest

breeding-ground of injustice and class oppression; everything that

obstructs understanding between individuals or groups or nations, that

creates and keeps in being obstacles to human solidarity and fraternity

is to ipso evil; specialisation and university education build walls

between men, prevent individuals and groups from 'connecting', kill

love and friendship, and are among the major causes responsible for

what, after Hegel and his followers, came to be called the 'alienation'

of entire orders or classes or cultures.

Some among the populists contrived to ignore or evade this r-roblem.

Bakunin, for example, who, if not a populist himself, influenced

populism profoundly, denounced faith in intellectuals and experts as

liable to lead to the most ignoble of tyrannies-the rule of scientists

and pedants-but would not face the problem of whether the revolu-

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R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S

tionaries had come to teach o r to learn. I t was left uiWlswered by

the terrorists of the 'People's Will' and their sympathisers. More

sensitive and morally scrupulous thinkers- Chernyshevsky and

Kropotkin, for example-felt the oppressive weight of the question,

and did not attempt to conceal it from themselves; yet whenever they

asked themselves by what right they proposed to impose this or that

system of social organisation on the mass of peasants who had grown

up in a wholly different way of life, and one that might embody far

profounder values of its own, they gave no clear reply. The question

became even more acute when it was asked (as it increasingly came

to be in the 6os) what was to be done if the peasants actually resisted

the revolutionaries' plans for their liberation? Must the masses be

deceived, or, worse still, coerced? No one denied that in the end it

was the people and not the revolutionary elite that must govern, but

in the meanwhile how far was one allowed to go in ignoring the

majority's wishes, or in forcing them into courses which they plainly

loathed?