Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

This was by no means a merely academic problem. The first

enthusiastic adherents of radical populism-the missionaries who went

'to the people' in the famous summer of I 874-were met by mounting

indifference, suspicion, resentment, and sometimes active hatred and

resistance, on the part of their would-be beneficiaries, who, as often

as not, handed them over to the police. The populists were thus

forced to define their attitude explicitly, since they believed passionately in the need to justify their activities by rational argument. Their answers, when they came, were far from unanimous. The activists,

men like Tkachev, Nechaev, and, in a less political sense, Pisarev,

whose admirers came to be known as 'nihilists', anticipated Lenin in

their contempt for democratic methods. Since the days of Plato it has

been argued that the spirit is superior to the flesh, and that those who

know must govern those who do not. The educated cannot listen to

the uneducated and ignorant masses. The masses must be rescued by

whatever means were available, if necessary against their own foolish

wishes, by guile or fraud, or violence if need be. But it was only a

minority in the movement who accepted this division and the authoritarianism that it entailed. The majority were horrified by the open advocacy of such Machiavellian tactics, and thought that no end,

however good, could fail to be destroyed by the adoption of monstrous

means.

A similar conflict broke out over the attitude to the state. All

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Russian populists were agreed that the state was the embodiment of

a system of coercion and inequality, and therefore intrinsically evil;

neither justice nor happiness was possible until it was eliminated.

But in the meanwhile what was to be the immediate aim of the

revolution? Tkachev is quite clear that until the capitalist enemy had

been finally destroyed, the weapon of coercion-the pistol torn from

his hand by the revolutionaries-must on no account be thrown away,

but must itself be turned against him. In other words the machinery

of the state must not be destroyed, but must be used against the

inevitable counter-revolution; it cannot be dispensed with until the

last enemy has been-in Proudhon's immortal phrase-successfully

liquidated, and mankind consequently has no further need of any

instrument of coercion. In this doctrine he was followed by Lenin

more faithfully than mere adherence to the ambivalent Marxist

formula about the dictatorship of the proletariat seemed to require.

Lavrov, who represents the central stream of populism, and reRects

all its vacillations and confusions, characteristically advocated not

indeed the immediate or total elimination of the state but its systematic

reduction to something vaguely described as the minimum. Chernyshevsky, who is the least anarchistic of the populists, conceives of the state as the organiser and protector of the free associations of peasants

or workers, and contrives to see it at once as centralised and decentralised, a guarantee of order and efficiency, and of equality and individual liberty too.

All these thinkers share one vast apocalyptic assumption: that once

the reign of evil-autocracy, exploitation, inequality-is consumed in the

fire of the revolution, there will arise naturally and spontaneously out

of its ashes a natural, harmonious, just order, needing only the gentle

guidance of the enlightened revolutionaries to attain its proper perfection. This great Utopian dream, based on simple faith in regenerated human nature, was a vision which the populists shared with Godwin

and Bakunin, Marx and Lenin. Its heart is the pattern of sin and

death and resurrection-of the road to the earthly paradise, the gates

of which will only open if men find the one true way and follow it.

Its roots lie deep in the religious imagination of mankind; and there is

therefore nothing surprising in the fact that this secular version of it

had strong affinities with the faith of the Russian Old Believers-the

dissenting sects-for whom, since the great religious schism of the

seventeenth century, the Russian state and its rulers, particularly

Peter the Great, represented the rule of Satan upon earth; this

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persecuted religious underground provided a good many potential

allies whom the populists made efforts to mobilise.

There were deep divisions among the populists; they differed about

the future role of the intellectuals, as compared with that of the

peasants; they differed about the historical importance of the rising

class of capitalists, gradualism versus conspiracy, education and propaganda versus terrorism and preparation for immediate risings. All these questions were interrelated and they demanded immediate solutions.

But the deepest rift among the populists arose over the urgent question

of whether a truly democratic revolution could �ibly occur before

a sufficient number of the oppressed had become fully conscious-that

is, capable of understanding and analysing the causes of their intolerable condition. The moderates argued that no revolution could justly be called democratic unless it sprang from the rule of the revolutionary

majority. But in that event, there was perhaps no alternative to

waiting until education and propaganda had created this majority-a

course that was being advocated by almost all western socialists­

Marxist and non-Marxist alike-in the second half of the nineteenth

century.

Against this the Russian Jacobins argued that to wait, and in the

meanwhile to condemn all forms of revolt organised by resolute

minorities as irresponsible terrorism or, worse still, as the replacement

of one despotism by another, would lead to catastrophic results: while

the revolutionaries procrastinated, capitalism would develop rapidly;

the breathing space would enable the ruling class to develop a social

and economic base incomparably stronger than that which it possessed

at present; the growth of a prosperous and energetic capitalism would

create opportunities of employment for the radical intellectuals themselves: doctors, engineers, educators, economists, technicians, and experts of all types would be assigned profitable tasks and positions;

their new bourgeois masters (unlike the existing regime) would be

intelligent enough not to force them into any kind of political conformity; the intelligentsia would obtain special privileges, status, and wide opportunities for self-expression-harmless radicalism would be

tolerated, a good deal of personal liberty permitted-and in this way

the revolutionary cause would lose its more valuable recruits. Once

those whom insecurity and discontent had driven into making common

cause with the oppressed had been partially satisfied, the incentive to

revolutionary activity would be weakened, and the prospects of a

radical transformation of society would become exceedingly dim. The

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radical wing of the revolutionaries argued with great force that the

advance of capitalism, whatever Marx might say, was not inevitable;

it might be so in western Europe, but in Russia it could still be arrested

by a revolutionary coup, destroyed in the root before it had had time

to grow too strong. If recognition of the need to awaken the 'political