Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The Slavophiles insisted that Russia was an entirely different civilization from Western Civilization and was much superior because it had a profound spirituality (as contrasted with Western materialism), it had a deep irrationality in intimate touch with vital forces and simple living virtues (in contrast to Western rationality, artificiality, and hypocrisy), it had its own native form of social organization, the peasant village (commune) providing a fully satisfying social and emotional life (in contrast to Western frustration of atomistic individualism in sordid cities); and that a Socialist society could be built in Russia out of the simple self-governing, cooperative peasant commune without any need to pass along the Western route marked by industrialism, bourgeoisie supremacy, or parliamentary democracy.

As industrialism grew in the West, in the period 1830-1850, the Russian Westernizers like P. Y. Chaadayev (1793-1856) and Alexander Herzen (1812-1870) became increasingly disillusioned with the West, especially with its urban slums, factory system, social disorganization, middle-class money-grubbing and pettiness, its absolutist state, and its advanced weapons. Originally the Westernizers in Russia had been inspired by French thinkers, while the Slavophiles had been inspired by German thinkers like Schelling and Hegel, so that the shift from Westernizers to Slavophiles marked a shift from French to Germanic teachers.

The Slavophiles supported orthodoxy and monarchy, although they were very critical of the existing Orthodox Church and of the existing autocracy. They claimed that the latter was a Germanic importation, and that the former, instead of remaining a native organic growth of Slavic spirituality, had become little more than a tool of autocracy. Instead of supporting these institutions, many Slavophiles went out into the villages to get in touch with pure Slavic spirituality and virtue in the shape of the untutored peasant. These missionaries, called “narodniki,” were greeted with unconcealed suspicion and distaste by the peasants, because they were city-bred strangers, were educated, and expressed anti-Church and antigovernmental ideas.

Already disillusioned with the West, the Church, and the government, and now rejected by the peasants, the Intelligentsia could find no social group on which to base a reform program. The result was the growth of nihilism and of anarchism.

Nihilism was a rejection of all conventions in the name of individualism, both of these concepts understood in a Russian sense. Since man is a man and not an animal because of his individual development and growth in a society made up of conventions, the nihilist rejection of conventions served to destroy man rather than to liberate him as they expected. The destruction of conventions would not raise man to be an angel, but would lower him to be an animal. Moreover, the individual that the nihilists sought to liberate by this destruction of conventions was not what Western culture understands by the word “individual.” Rather it was “humanity.” The nihilists had no respect whatever for the concrete individual or for individual personality. Rather, by destroying all conventions and stripping all persons naked of all conventional distinctions, they hoped to sink everyone, and especially themselves, into the amorphous, indistinguishable mass of humanity. The nihilists were completely atheist, materialist, irrational, doctrinaire, despotic, and violent. They rejected all thought of self so long as humanity suffered; they “became atheists because they could not accept a Creator Who made an evil, incomplete world full of suffering”; they rejected all thought, all art, all idealism, all conventions, because these were superficial, unnecessary luxuries and therefore evil; they rejected marriage, because it was conventional bondage on the freedom of love; they rejected private property, because it was a tool of individual oppression; some even rejected clothing as a corruption of natural innocence; they rejected vice and licentiousness as unnecessary upper-class luxuries; as Nikolai Berdyaev put it: “It is Orthodox asceticism turned inside out, and asceticism without Grace. At the base of Russian nihilism, when grasped in its purity and depth, lies the Orthodox rejection of the world … the acknowledgment of the sinfulness of all riches and luxury, of all creative profusion in art and in thought.… Nihilism considers as sinful luxury not only art, metaphysics, and spiritual values, but religion also.… Nihilism is a demand for nakedness, for the stripping of oneself of all the trappings of culture, for the annihilation of all historical traditions, for the setting free of the natural man.… The intellectual asceticism of nihilism found expression in materialism; any more subtle philosophy was proclaimed a sin.… Not to be a materialist was to be taken as a moral suspect. If you were not a materialist, then you were in favour of the enslavement of man both intellectually and politically.” *

*N. Berdyaev, Origin of Russian Communism (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1948), p. 45.

This fantastic philosophy is of great significance because it prepared the ground for Bolshevism. Out of the same spiritual sickness which produced nihilism emerged anarchism. To the anarchist, as revealed by the founder of the movement, Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), the chief of all enslaving and needless conventionalities was the state. The discovery that the state was not identical with society, a discovery which the West had made a thousand years earlier than Russia, could have been a liberating discovery to Russia if, like the West, the Russians had been willing to accept both state and society, each in its proper place. But this was quite impossible in the Russian tradition of fanatical totalitarianism. To this tradition the totalitarian state had been found evil and must, accordingly, be completely destroyed, and replaced by the totalitarian society in which the individual could be absorbed. Anarchism was the next step after the disillusionment of the narodniki and the agitations of the nihilists. The revolutionary Intelligentsia, unable to find any social group on which to base a reform program, and convinced of the evil of all conventional establishments and of the latent perfection in the Russian masses, adopted a program of pure political direct action of the simplest kind: assassination. Merely by killing the leaders of states (not only in Russia but throughout the world), governments could be eliminated and the masses freed for social cooperation and agrarian Socialism. From this background came the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, of King Humbert of Italy in 1900, of President McKinley in 1901, as well as many anarchist outrages in Russia, Spain, and Italy in the period 1890-1910. The failure of governments to disappear in the face of this terrorist agitation, especially in Russia, where the oppression of autocracy increased after 1881, led, little by little, to a fading of the Intelligentsia’s faith in destructive violence as a constructive action, as well as in the satisfying peasant commune, and in the survival of natural innocence in the unthinking masses.

Just at this point, about 1890, a great change began in Russia. Western industrialism began to grow under governmental and foreign auspices; an urban proletariat began to appear, and Marxist social theory came in from Germany. The growth of industrialism settled the violent academic dispute between Westerners and Slavophiles as to whether Russia must follow the path of Western development or could escape it by falling back on some native Slavic solutions hidden in the peasant commune; the growth of a proletariat gave the revolutionaries once again a social group on which to build; and Marxist theory gave the Intelligentsia an ideology which they could fanatically embrace. These new developments, by lifting Russia from the impasse it had reached in 1885, were generally welcome. Even the autocracy lifted the censorship to allow Marxist theory to circulate, in the belief that it would alleviate terrorist pressure since it eschewed direct political action, especially assassination, and postponed revolution until after industrialization had proceeded far enough to create a fully developed bourgeois class and a fully developed proletariat. To be sure, the theory created by Marx’s mid-nineteenth century Germanic background was (as we shall see) gradually changed by the age-long Russian outlook, at first by the Leninist Bolshevik triumph over the Mensheviks and later by Stalin’s Russian nationalist victory over Lenin’s more Western rationalism, but in the period 1890-1914 the stalemate of opposed violence was broken, and progress, punctuated by violence and intolerance, appeared.