Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

whom had not been educated to understand the need for it, was to

exchange the tsarist yoke for a flew, not necessarily less crushing

one-that of the revolutionary minority. The majority of the populists

were deeply democratic; they believed that all power tended to corrupt,

that all concentration of authority tended to perpetuate itself, that all

centralisation was coercive and evil, and, therefore, the sole hope of a

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just and free society lay in the peaceful conversion o f men by rational

argument to the truths of social and economic justice and democratic

freedom. In order to obtain the opportunity of converting men to this

vision, it might indeed be necessary to break the existing obstacles to

free and rational intercourse-the police state, the power of capitalists

or of landowners-and to use force in the process, whether mass

mutiny or individual terrorism. But this concept of temporary

measures presented itself to them as something wholly different from

leaving .absolute power in the hands of any party or group, however

virtuous, once the power of the enemy had been broken. Their case

is the classical case, during the last two centuries, of every libertarian

and federalist against Jacobins and centralisers; it is Voltaire's case

against both Helvetius and Rousseau; that of the left wing of the

Gironde against the Mountain; Herzen used these arguments against

doctrinaire communists of the immediately preceding period-Cabet

and the disciples of Babeuf; Bakunin denounced the Marxist demand

for the dictatorship of the proletariat as something that would merely

transfer power from one set of oppressors to another; the populists of

the 8os and 90s urged this against all those whom they suspected of

conspiring (whether they realised it or not) to destroy individual

spontaneity and freedom, whether they were laisuz-faire liberals who

allowed factory owners to enslave the masses, or radical collectivists

who were ready to do so themselves; whether they were capitalist

entrepreneurs (as Mikhailovsky wrote to Dostoevsky in his celebrated

criticism of his novel The Posse sud) or Marxist advocates of centralised

authority; he looked upon both as far more dangerous than the

pathological fanatics pilloried by Dostoevsky-as brutal, amoral social

Darwinists, profoundly hostile to variety and individual freedom and

character.

This, again, was the main political issue which, at the turn of the

century, divided the Russian Socialist-Revolutionaries from the Social­

Democrats; and over which, a few years later, both Plekhanov and

Martov broke with Lenin: indeed the great quarrel between the

Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks (whatever its ostensible cause) turned

upon it. In due course Lenin himself, two or three years after the

October Revolution, while he never abandoned the central Marxist

doctrine, expressed his bitter disappointment with those very consequences of it which his opponents had predicted-bureaucracy and the arbitrary despotism of the party officials; and Trotsky accused Stalin

of this same crime. The dilemma of means and ends is the deepest

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and most agonising problem that torments the revolutionary movements of our own day in all the continents of the world, not least in Asia and Africa. That this debate took so clear and articulate a form

within the populist movement makes its development exceptionaJly

relevant to our own predicament.

All these differences occurred within the framework of a common

revolutionary outlook, for, whatever their disagreements, all populists

were united by an unshakeable faith in the revolution. This faith

derived from many sources. It sprang from the needs and outlook of a

society still overwhelmingly pre-industrial, which gave the craving for

simplicity and fraternity, and the agrarian idealism which derives

ultimately from Rousseau, a reality which can still be seen in India

and Africa today, and which necessarily looks Utopian to the eyes of

social historians born in the industrialised west. It was a consequence

of the disillusionment with parliamentary democracy, liberal convictions, and the good faith of bourgeois intellectuals that resulted from the fiasco of the European revolutions of 1 848-9, and from the

particular conclusion drawn by Herzen that Russia, which had not

suffered this revolution, might find her salvation in the undestroyed

natural socialism of the peasant mir. It was deeply influenced by

Bakunin's violent diatribes against all forms of central authority, and

in particular the state; and by his vision of men as being by nature

peaceful and productive, and rendered violent only when they are

perverted from their proper ends, and forced to be either gaolers or

convicts. But it was also fed by the streams that flowed in a contrary

direction: by Tkachev's faith in a Jacobin �lite of professional revolutionaries as the only force capable of destroying the advance of capitalism, helped on its fatal path by innocent reformists and humanitarians and careerist intellectuals, and concealed behind the repulsive sham of parliamentary democracy; even more by the passionate

utilitarianism of Pisarev, and his brilliant polemics against all forms

of idealism and amateurishness, and, in particular, the sentimental

idealisation of the simplicity and beauty of peasants in general, and of

Russian peasants in particular, as beings touched by grace, remote from

the corrupting influences of the decaying west. It was supported by the

appeal which these 'critical realists' made to their compatriots to save

themselves by self-help and hard-headed energy-a kind of nee­

Encyclopedist campaign in favour of natural science, skill, and

professionalism, directed against the humanities, classical learning,

history, and other forms of 'sybaritic' self-indulgence. Above all, it

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contrasted 'realism' with the literary culture which had lulled the best

men in Russia into a condition where corrupt bureaucrats, stupid and

brutal landowners, and an obscurantist Church could exploit them or

let them rot, while aesthetes and liberals looked the other way.

But the deepest strain of all, the very centre of the populist outlook,

was the individualism and rationalism of Lavrov and Mikhailovsky.

With Herzen they believed that history followed no predetermined

pattern, that it possessed 'no libretto', that neither the violent conflicts

between cultures, nations, classes (which for Hegelians constituted

the essence of human progress), nor the struggles for power by one

class over another (represented by Marxists as being the motive force

of history) were inevitable. Faith in human freedom was the cornerstone of populist humanism: the populists never tired of repeating that ends were chosen by men, not imposed upon them, and that men's

wills alone could construct a happy and honourable life-a life in

which the interests of intellectuals, peasants, manual workers and the

liberal professions could be reconciled; not indeed made wholly to

coincide, for that was an unattainable ideal; but adjusted in an unstable