Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

consciousness' of the majority of the workers and peasants (which by

this time, and partly as a result of the failure of the intellectuals in

I 848, had been pronounced absolutely indispensable to the revolution

both by Marxists and by the majority of the populist leaders) was

tantamount to the adoption of a gradualist programme, the moment

for action would surely be missed; and i n place of the populist or

socialist revolution would there not arise a vigorous, imaginative,

predatory, successful capitalist regime which would succeed Russian

semi-feudalism as surely as it had replaced the feudal order in western

Europe? And then who could tell how many decades or centuries

might elapse before the arrival, at long last, of the revolution? When

it did arrive, who could tell what kind of order it would, by that time,

install-resting upon what social basis?

All populists were agreed that the village commune was the ideal

embryo of those socialist groups on which the future society was to be

based. But would the development of capitalism not automatically

destroy the commune? And if it was maintained (although perhaps

this was not explicitly asserted before the I 88os) that capitalism was

already destroying the mir, that the class struggle, as analysed by Marx,

was dividing the villages as surely as the cities, then the plan of action

was clear: rather than sit with folded hands and watch this disintegration fatalistically, resolute men could and must arrest this process, and save the village commune. Socialism, so the Jacobins argued, could be

introduced by the capture of power to which all the energies of the

revolutionaries must be bent, even at the price of postponing the task

of educating the peasants in moral, social, and political realities; indeed,

such education could surely be promoted more rapidly and efficiently

after the revolution had broken the resistance of the old regime.

This line of thought, which bears an extraordinary resemblance, if

not to tl1e actual words, then to the policies pursued by Lenin in

191 7, was basically very different from the older Marxist determinism.

Its perpetual refrain was that there was no time to lose. Kulaks were

devouring the poorer peasants in the country, capitalists were breeding

fast in the towns. If the government possessed even a spark of intelligence, it would make concessions and promote reforms, and by this

,,

219

R U S S IAN T H IN K E R S

m eans divert educated men whose will and brain were needed for the

revolution into the peaceful paths of the service of the reactionary

state; propped up by such liberal measures, the unjust order would

continue and be strengthened. The activists argued that there was

nothing inevitable about revolutions: they were the fruit of human

will and human reason. If there were not enough of these, the

revolution might never take place at all. It was only the insecure

who craved social solidarity and communal life; individualism was

always a luxury, the ideal of the socially established. The new class

of technical specialists-the modern, enlightened, energetic men celebrated by liberals like Kavelin and Turgenev, and at times even by the radical individualist Pisarev-were for the Jacobin Tkachev 'worse

than cholera or typhus', for by applying scientific methods to social

life they were playing into the hands of the new, rising capitalist

oligarchs and thereby obstructing the path to freedom. Palliatives were

fatal when only an operation could save the patient : they merely prolonged his disease and weakened him so much that in the end not even an operation could save him. One must strike before these new, potentially conformist, intellectuals had grown too numerous and too comfortable and had obtained too much power, for otherwise it would

be too late: a Saint-Simonian elite of highly-paid managers would

preside over a new feudal order-an economically efficient but socially

immoral society, inasmuch as it was based on permanent inequality. ·

The greatest of all evils was inequality. Whenever any other ideal

came into conflict with equality, the Russian Jacobins always called

for its sacrifice or modification; the first principle upon which all

justice rested was that of equality; no society was equitable in which

there was not a maximum degree of equality between men. If the

revolution was to succeed, three major fallacies had to be fought and

rooted out. The first was that men of culture alone created progress.

This was not true, and had the bad consequence of inducing faith in

�lites. The second was the opposite illusion-that everything must be

learnt from the common people. This was equally false. Rousseau's

Arcadian peasants were so many idyllic figments. The masses were

ignorant, brutal, reactionary, and did not understand their own needs

or good. If the revolution depended upon their maturity, or capacity

for political judgment or organisation, it would certainly fail. The last

fallacy was that only a proletarian majority could successfully make a

revolution. No doubt a proletarian majority might do that, but if

Russia was to wait until it possessed one, the opportunity of destroying

220

R U S S IAN P O P U L I S M

a corrupt and detested government would pass, and capitalism would

be found to be too firmly in the saddle.

What, then, must be done? Men must be trained to make the

revolution and destroy the present system and all obstacles to social

equality and democratic self-government. When this was achieved, a

democratic assembly was to be convened, and if those who made the

revolution took care to explain the reasons for it, and the social and

economic situation that made it necessary, then the masses, benighted

though they might be today, would assuredly, in the view of the

Jacobins, grasp their condition sufficiently to allow themselves to beindeed to welcome the opportunity of being-organised into the new free federation of productive associations.

But supposing they were still, on the morrow of a successful coup

d'etat, not mature enough to see this? Herzen did indeed ask this

awkward question again and again in his writings in the late 1 86os.

The majority of the populists were deeply troubled by it. But the

activist wing had · no doubt of the answer: strike the chains from the

captive hero, and he will stretch himself to his full height and live in

freedom and happiness for ever after. The views of these men were

astonishingly simple. They believed in terrorism and more terrorism

to achieve complete, anarchist liberty. The purpose of the revolution,

for them, was to establish absolute equality, not only economic and

social, but 'physical and physiological': they saw no discrepancy

between this bed of Procrustes and absolute freedom. This order

would be imposed in the beginning by the power and authority of

the state, after which, the state, having fulfilled its purpose, would

swiftly 'liquidate' itself.

Against this, the spokesmen of the main body of the populists

argued that J acobin means tended to bring about J acobin consequences:

if the purpose of the revolution was to liberate, it must not use the

weapons of despotism that were bound to enslave those whom they

were designed to liberate: the remedy must not prove more destructive

than the disease. To use the state to break the power of the exploiters

and to impose a specific form of life upon a people, the majority of