Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

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R U S S IAN POP U L I S M

heads of self-taught peasants, well-meaning university intellectuals and

other social casualties of the confused interim between the end of an

obsolescent feudalism and the beginning of the new capitalist phase in

a backward country. Marxist historians still tend to describe it as a

movement compounded of systematic misinterpretation of economic

facts and social realities, noble but useless individual terrorism, and

spontaneous or ill-directed peasant risings-the necessary but pathetic

beginnings of real revolutionary activity, the prelude to the real play, a

scene of naive ideas and frustrated practice destined to be swept away

by the new revolutionary, dialectical science heralded by Plekhanov

and Lenin.

What were the ends of populism? Violent disputes took place about

means and methods, about timing, but not about ultimate purposes.

Anarchism, equality, a full life for all, these were universally accepted.

It is as if the entire movement-the motley variety of revolutionary

types which Franco Venturi describes in his book1 so well and so

lovingly-Jacobins and moderates, terrorists and educators, Lavrovists

and Bakuninists, 'troglodytes', 'recalcitrants', 'country folk', members

of 'Land and Liberty' and of 'The People's Will', were all dominated

by a single myth : that once the monster was slain, the sleeping

princess- the Russian peasantry-would awaken without further ado

and live happily for ever after.

This -is the movement of which Franco Venturi has written the

history, the fullest, clearest, best-written and most impartial account

of a particular stage of the Russian revolutionary movement in any

language. Yet if the movement was a failure, if it was founded on

false premises and was so easily extinguished by the tsarist police,

has it more than historical interest- that of a narrative of the life and

death of a party, of its acts and its ideas? On this question Venturi

discreetly, as behoves an objective historian, offers no direct opinion.

He tells the story in chronological sequence; he explains what occurs;

he describes origins and consequences; he illuminates the relations of

various groups of populists to one another, and leaves moral and

political speculation to others. His work is not an apologia either for

populism or its opponents. He does not praise or condemn, and seeks

only to understand. Success in this task plainly needs no further reward.

And yet one may, at moments, wonder whether populism should be

dismissed quite as easily as it still is today, both by communist and

1 op. cit. (p. 227, note 1 above).

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

bourgeois historians. Were the populists so hopelessly in error? Were

Chernyshevsky and Lavrov-and Marx who listened to them-totally

deluded?

Was capitalism, in fact, inevitable in Russia? The consequences of

accelerated industrialisation prophesied by the neo-populist economists

in the 1 88os, namely a degree of social and economic misery as great

as any undergone in the west during the Industrial Revolution, did

occur, both before, and, at an increasing tempo, after the October

revolution. Were they avoidable? Some writers on history consider

this type of question to be absurd as such. What happened, happened.

We are told that if we are not to deny causality in human affairs, we

must suppose that what took place can only have done so precisely as it

did ; to ask what might have happened if the situation had been

different is the idle play of the imagination, not worthy of serious

historians. Yet this academic question is not without acute contemporary relevance. Some countries, such as, for example, Turkey, India, and some states in the Middle East and Latin America, have adopted a

slower tempo of industrialisation and one less likely to bring immediate

ruin to backward areas before they can be rehabilitated, and have done

so in conscious preference to the forced marches of collectivisation

upon which, in our day, the Russians, and after them the Chinese,

have embarked. Are these non-Marxist governments inescapably set

upon a path to ruin ? For it is populist ideas which lie at the base of

much of the socialist economic policy pursued by these and other

countries today.

When Lenin organised the Bolshevik revolution in 1 9 1 7, the

technique that he adopted, prima facie at least, resembled those commended by the Russian Jacobins, Tkachev and his followers, who had learnt them from Blanqui or Buonarroti, more than any to be found

in the writings of Marx or Engels, at any rate after 1 8 5 1 . It was not,

after all, full-grown capitalism that was enthroned in Russia in 1 9 1 7.

Russian capitalism was a still growing force, not yet in power, struggling

against the fetters imposed upon it by the monarchy and the bureaucracy, as it had done in eighteenth-century France. But Lenin acted as if the bankers and industrialists were already in control. He acted

and spoke as if this w::os so, but his revolution succeeded not so much

by taking over the centres of finance and industry (which history

should already have undermined) but by a seizure of strictly political

power on the part of a determined and trained group of professional

revolutionaries, precisely as had been advocated by Tkachev. If

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R U S S IAN POPU L I S M

Russian capitalism had reached the stage which, according to Marxist

historical theory, it had to reach before a proletarian revolution could

be successful, the seizure of power by a determined minority, and a

very small one at that-a mere Putsch-could not, ex hypothesi, have

retained it long. And this, indeed, is what Plekhanov said over and

over again in his bitter denunciations of Lenin in I 9 I 7 : ignoring his

argument that much may be permitted in a backward country provided

that the results were duly saved by orthodox Marxist revolutions successfully carried out soon after in the industrially more advanced west.

These conditions were not fulfilled; Lenin's hypothesis proved

historically irrelevant; yet the Bolshevik revolution did not collapse.

Could it be .that the Marxist theory of history was mistaken? Or had

the Mensheviks misunderstood it, and concealed from themselves the

anti-democratic tendencies which had always been implicit in it? In

which case were their charges against Mikhailovsky and his friends

wholly just? By I 9 I 7 their own fears of the Bolshevik dictatorship

rested upon the same basis. Moreover, the results of the October

revolution turned out to be oddly similar to those which Tkachev's

opponents had prophesied that his methods must inevitably produce:

the emergence of an elite, wielding dictatorial power, designed in

theory to wither away once the need for it had gone; but, as the

populist democrats had said over and over again, in practice more

likely to grow in aggressiveness and strength, with a tendency towards

self-perpetuation which no dictatorship seems able to resist.

The populists were convinced that the death of the peasant commune would mean death, or at any rate a vast setback, to freedom and equality in Russia; the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who were

their direct descendants, transformed this into a demand for a form of

decentralised, democratic self-government among the peasants, which

Lenin adopted when he concluded his temporary alliance with them