Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

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

Chemyshevsky had evolved a simple form of historical materialism,

according to which social factors determined political ones, and not

vice versa. Consequently, he held with Fourier and Proudhon that

liberal and parliamentary ideals merely evaded the central issues: the

peasants and the workers needed food, shelter, boots; as for the right

to vote, or to be governed by liberal constitutions, or to obtain

guarantees of personal liberty, these meant little to hungry and halfnaked men. The social revolution must come first: appropriate political reforms would follow of themselves. For Chernyshevsky the principal

lesson of 1 848 was that the western liberals, the brave no less than the

cowardly, had demonstrated their political and moral bankruptcy, and

with it that of their Russian disciples- Herzen, Kavelin, Granovsky

and the rest. Russia must pursue her own path. Unlike the Slavophils,

and like the Russian Marxists of the next generation, he maintained

with a wealth of economic evidence that the historical development

of Russia, and in particular the peasant mir, were in no sense unique,

but followed the social and economic laws that governed all human

societies. Like the Marxists (and the Comtian positivists), he believed

that such laws could be discovered and stated; but unlike the Marxists,

he was convinced that by adopting western techniques, and educating

a body of men of trained and resolute wills and rational outlook,

Russia could 'leap over' the capitalist stage of social development, and

transform her village communes and free cooperative groups of craftsmen into agricultural and industrial associations of producers who would constitute the embryo of the new socialist society. Technological progress did not, in his view, automatically break up the peasant commune: 'savages can be taught to use Latin script and

safety-matches'; factories can be grafted on to workers' arttls without

destroying them; large-scale organisation could eliminate exploitation,

and yet preserve the predominantly agricultural nature of the Russian

economy.1

1 In II pDpulismo russo - translated into English as Roots of Rtr10/utiD11

(London, 1 960)- Franco Venturi very aptly quotes populist statistics (which

seem plausible enough) according to which the proportion of peasants to

that of landowners in the 1 86os was of the order of 3.f.I:I, while the land

owned by them stood to that of their masters in the ratio of I: 1 1 :, and their

incomes were :·s=97"S; as for industry, the proportion of city workers to

peasants was 1 :100. Given these ligures, it is perhaps not surprising that

Man: should have declared that his prognosis applied to the western economies,

and not 11ecessarily to that of the Russians, even though his Russian disciples

..

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

Chernyshevsky believed in the decisive historical role of the application of science to Ii(e, but, unlike Pisarev, did not regard individual enterprise, still less capitalism, as indispensable to this process. He

retained enough of the Fourierism of his yC"uth to look upon the free

associations of peasant communes and craftsmen's artels as the basis

of all freedom and progress. But at the same time, like the Saint­

Simonians, he was convinced that little would be achieved without

collective action-state socialism on a vast scale. These incompatible

beliefs were never reconciled ; Chernyshevsky's writings contain

statements both in favour of and against the desirability of large-scale

industry. He is similarly ambivalent about the part to be played (and

the part to be avoided) by the state as the stimulator and controller of

industry, about the function of managers of large collective industrial

enterprises, about the relations of the public and private sectors of the

economy, and about the political sovereignty of the democratically

elected parliament and its relation to the state as the source of centralised

economic planning and control.

The outlines of Chernyshevsky's social programme remained vague

or inconsistent, and often both. It is the concrete detail which.

founded as it was on real experience, spoke directly to the representatives of the great popular masses, who had at last found a spokesman and interpreter of their own needs and feelings. His deepest aspirations

and emotions were poured into What is to he done?, a social Utopia

which, grotesque as a work of art, had a literally epoch-making effect

on Russian opinion. This didactic novel described the 'new men' of

the free, morally pure, cooperative socialist commonwealth of the

future; its touching sincerity and moral passion bound their spell upon

the imaginations of the idealistic and guilt-stricken sons of prosperous

parents, and provided them with an ideal model in the light of which

an entire generation of revolutionaries educated and hardened itself

to the defiance of existing laws and conventions �d to the acceptance

of exile and death with sublime unconcern.

Chernyshevsky preached a naive utilitarianism. Like James Mill.

and perhaps Bentham, he held that basic human nature was a fixed,

physiologically analysable pattern of natural processes and faculties,

ignored this concession, and insisted that capitalism was making enormous

atridea in Russia. and would soon obliterate the differences that divided it

from the west. Plekhanov (who stoutly denied that Chemyshevsky �w:·ever

been a populist) elaborated this theory; Lenin acted upon it.

22.8

RU SSIAN POP U L I S M

and that the maximisation of human happiness could therefore be

scientifically planned and realised. Having decided that imaginative

writing and criticism were the only available media in Russia for

propagating radical ideas, he filled the Contemporary, a review which

he edited together with the poet Nekrasov, with as high a proportion

of direct socialist doctrine as could be smuggled in under the guise of

literature. In his work he was helped by the violent young critic

Dobrolyubov, a genuinely gifted man ofletters (which Chemyshevsky

was not) who, at times, went even further in his passionate desire to

preach and educate. The aesthetic views of the two zealots were

severely practical. Chernyshevsky laid it down that the function of

art was to help men to satisfy their wants more rationally, to disseminate knowledge, to combat ignorance, prejudice, and the antisocial passions, to improve life in the most literal and narrow sense of these words. Driven to absurd consequences, he embraced them gladly.

Thus he explained that the chief value of marine paintings was that

they showed the sea to those who, like, for instance, the inhabitants

of central Russia, lived too far away from it ever to see it for themselves; or that his friend and patron Nekrasov, because by his verse he moved men to greater sympathy with the oppressed than other

poets had done, was for this reason the greatest Russian poet, living or

dead. His earlier collaborators, civilised and fastidious men of letters

like Turgenev and Botkin, found his grim fanaticism increasingly

difficult to bear. Turgenev could not long live with this art-hating

and dogmatic schoolmaster. Tolstoy despised his dreary provincialism,