Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

his total lack of aesthetic sense, his intolerance, his rationalism, his

maddening self-assurance. But these very qualities, or, rather, the

outlook of which they were characteristic, helped to make him the

natural leader of the 'hard' young men who had succeeded the idealists

of the I 84-os. Chernyshevsky's harsh, flat, dull, humourless, grating

sentences, his preoccupation with concrete detail, his self-discipline,

his dedication to the material and moral good of his fellow-men, the

grey, self-effacing personality, the tireless, passionate, devoted, minute

i ndustry, the hatred of style or of any concessions to the graces, the

unquestionable sincerity, utter self-forgetfulness, brutal directness,

indifference to the claims of private life, innocence, personal kindness,

pedantry, disarming moral charm, capacity for self-sacrifice, created

the image that later became the prototype of the Russian revolutionary

hero and martyr. More than any other publicist he was responsible

for drawing the final line between 'us' and 'them'. All his life he

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preached that there must be no compromise with 'them', that the war

must be fought to the death and on every front; that there were no

neutrals; that, so long as this war was being fought, no work could

be too trivial, too repulsive, or too tedious for a revolutionary to

perform. His personality and outlook set their seal upon two generations

of Russian revolutionaries; not least upon Lenin, who admired him

devotedly.

In spite of his emphasis on economic or sociological arguments,

the basic approach, the tone and outlook of Chernyshevsky and of the

populists generally, is moral, and at times religious. These men believed

in socialism not because it was inevitable, nor because it was effective,

not even because it alone was rational, but because it was just. Concentrations of political power, capitalism, the centralised state, trampled on the rights of men and crippled them morally and spiritually.

The populists were stern atheists, but socialism and orthodox Christian

values coalesced in their minds. They shrank from the prospect of

industrialism in Russia because of its brutal cost, and they disliked the

west because it had paid this price too heartlessly. Their disciples, the

populist economists of the 1 88os and 90s, Danielson and Vorontsov

for example, for all their strictly economic arguments about the possibility of capitalism in Russia (some of which seem a good deal sounder than their Marxist opponents have represented them as being), were

in the last analysis moved by moral revulsion from the sheer mass of

suffering that capitalism was destined to bring, that is to say, by a

refusal to pay so appalling a price, no matter how valuable the results.

Their successors in the twentieth century, the Socialist-Revolutionaries,

sounded the note which runs through the whole of the populist

tradition in Russia: that the purpose of social action is not the power

of the state, but the welfare of the people; that to enrich the state and

provide it with military and industrial power, while undermining the

health, the education, the morality, the general cultural level of its

citizens, was feasible but wicked. They compared the progress of the

United States, where, they maintained, the welfare of the individual

was paramount, with that of Prussia, where it was not. They committed

themselves to the view (which goes back at least to Sismondi) that the

spiritual and physical condition of the individual citizen matters more

than the power of the state, so that if, as often happened, the two stood

in inverse ratio to one another, the rights and welfare of the individual

must come first. They rejected as historically false the proposition that

only powerful states could breed good or happy citizens, and as morally

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unacceptable the proposition that to lose oneself i n the life and welfare

of one's society is the highest form of individual self-fulfilment.

Belief in the primacy of human rights over other claims is the first

principle that separates pluralist from centralised societies, and welfare

states, mixed economies, 'New Deal' policies, from one-party governments, 'closed' societies, 'five-year plans', and, in general, forms of life built to serve a single goal that transcends the varied goals of differing

groups or individuals. Chernyshevsky was more fanatical than most

of his followers in the 18705 and 8os. and believed far more strongly

in organisation, but even he neither stopped his ears to the cries for

immediate help which he heard upon all sides, nor believed in the need

to suppress the wants of individuals who were making desperate efforts

to escape destruction, in the interests of even the most sacred and overmastering purpose. There were times when he was a narrow and unimaginative pedant, but at his worst he was never impatient, or

arrogant, or inhumane, and was perpetually reminding his readers and

himself that, in their zeal to help, the educators must not end by

bullying their would-be beneficiaries; that what 'we' -the rational

intellectuals-think good for the peasants may not be what they themselves want or need, and that to ram 'our' remedies down 'their'

throats is not permitted. Neither he nor Lavrov, nor even the most

ruthlessly Jacobin among the proponents of terror and violence, ever

took cover behind the inevitable direction of history as a justification

of what would otherwise have been patently unjust or brutal. If

violence was the only means to a given end, then there might be circumstances in which it was right to employ it; but this must be justified in each case by the intrinsic moral claim of the end-an increase in

happiness, or solidarity, or justice, or peace, or some other universal

human value that outweighs the evil of the means-never by the view

that it was rational and necessary to march in step with history,

ignoring one's scruples and dismissing one's own 'subjective' moral

principles because they were necessarily provisional, on the ground

that history herself transformed all moral systems and retrospectively

justified only those principles which survived and succeeded.

The mood of the populists, particularly in the 1 87os, can fairly be

described as religious. This group of conspirators or propagandists saw

itself, and was seen by others, as constituting a dedicated order. The

first condition of membership was the sacrifice of one's entire life to

the movement, both to the particular group and party, and to the cause

of the revolution in general. But the notion of the dictatorship of the

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party o r o f i ts leaders over individual lives-in particular over the

beliefs of individual revolutionaries-is not part of this doctrine, and is

indeed contrary to its entire spirit. The only censor over the individual's

acts is his individual conscience. If one has promised obedience to the

leaders of the party, such an oath is sacred, but it extends only to the

specific revolutionary objectives of the party and not beyond them,

and ends with the completion of whatever specific goals the party

exists to promote-in the last resort, the revolution. Once the revolution has been made, each individual is free to act as he thinks fit, since discipline is a temporary means and not an end. The populists did