mutual aid institutions, not so much for the workers or peasants as
for members of the middle class like himself; Akhsharumov, Evropeus,
Pleshcheev were Christian Socialists; A. P. Milyukov's only crime
was apparently to have translated Lamennais. Balasoglo was a kindly
and impressionable young man, oppressed by the horrors of the Russian
social order-no more and no less than, for example, Gogo! himselfwho desired reform and improvement on mildly populist lines similar to the ideas of the more romantic Slavophils, and indeed not too unlike
the neo-medievalist nostalgia of such English writers as Cobbett, or
William Morris. Indeed, Petrashevsky's encyclopedic dictionary,
which contained 'subversive' articles disguised as scientific information,
resembles nothing so much as Cobbett's famous grammar. Nevertheless, these groups differed from the casual gatherings of such radical men of letters as Panaev, Korsh, Nekrasov and even Belinsky. Some,
at any rate, of the participants met for the specific purpose of considering concrete ideas of how to foment a rebeliion against the existing regime.
These ideas may have been impracticable, and may have contained
in them much that was fantastic drawn from the French Utopians
and other 'unscientific' sources, but their purpose was not the reform
but the overthrow of the regime, and the establishment of a . revolutionary government. Dostoevsky's descriptions in A Writer's Diary and elsewhere make it clear that Speshnev, for example, was by
1 Dtlo ptlrt�shtllltfl (Moscow/Leningrad, 1937, 19-f.l, 19S 1).
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RU S S I A AND 1 8 4 8
temperament and intention a genuine revolutionary agitator, who
believed in conspiracy at least as seriously as Bakunin (who disliked
him) and attended these discussion groups with a practical purpose.
The portrait of him as Stavrogin in The Possessed strongly stresses
this aspect. Similarly, Durov and Grigoriev and one or two others
certainly seem to have believed that the revolution might break out
at any moment; while they realised the impossibility of organising a
mass movement, they put their faith, like Weitling and the groups
of German communist workers, and perhaps Blanqui at this period,
in the organisation of small cells of trained revolutionaries, a professional elite which could act efficiently and ruthlessly and seize the leadership when the hour struck -when the oppressed elements would
rise and crush the knock-kneed army of courtiers and bureaucrats
that alone stood between the Russian people and its freedom. No
doubt much of this was idle talk, since nothing remotely resembling
a revolutionary situation existed in Russia at this time. Nevertheless,
the intentions of these men were as concrete and as violent as those
of Babeuf and his friends, and, in the conditions of a tightly controlled
autocracy, the only possible means of practical conspiracy. Speshnev
was quite definitely-a Communist, influenced not merely by Dezamy
but perhaps also by the early works of Marx-for example, the anti
Proudhonist Misere de Ia philosophie. Balasoglo states in his evidencel
that one of the things which attracted him to Petrashevsky's discussion
group was that, on the whole, it avoided liberal patter and aimless
discussion and concerned itself with concrete issues, and conducted
statistical studies with a view to direct action. Dostoevsky's contemptuous references to the tendency of his fellow conspirators poliheral'nichat'-to play at being liberal-look mainly like an attempt to whitewash himself. In fact, the principal attraction of this circle for
Dostoevsky probably consisted precisely in that which had also
attracted Balasoglo-namely, that the atmosphere was serious and
intense, not amiably liberal, gay, informal and intimate, and given to
literary and intellectual gossip, like the lively evenings given by the
Panaevs, Sollogub or Herzen, at which he seems to have been snubbed
and had suffered acutely. Petrashevsky was a remorselessly earnest
man, and the groups, both his own and the subsidiary, even more
secret groups which sprang from it-as well as allied 'circles', for
example that to which Chernyshevsky belonged as a university student
1 Shilder, op. cit. (p. 9• note 1 above), vol. 2.
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R U S S I AN TH I N K E R S
-meant business. The conspiracy was broken up i n April 1 849• and the
Petrashevtsy were tried and sent into exile.
Between 1 849 and the death of Nicholas I in the last months of
the Crimean war, there is not a glimmering of liberal thought. Gogo!
died an unrepentant reactionary, but Turgenev, who ventured to
praise him as a satirical genius in an obituary article, was promptly
arrested for it. Bakunin was in prison, Herzen lived abroad, Belinsky
was dead, Granovsky was silent, depressed and developing Slavophil
sympathies. The centenary of Moscow University in 1 855 proved a
dismal affair. The Slavophils themselves, although they rejected the
liberal revolution and all its works, and continued a ceaseless campaign
against western inRuences, felt the heavy hand of official repression ;
the Aksakov brothers, Khomyakov, Koshelev and Samarin, fell under
official suspicion much as I van Kireevsky had done in the previous
decade. The secret police and the special committees considered all
ideas to be dangerous as such, particularly that of a nationalism which
took up the cause of the oppressed Slav nationalities of the Austrian
Empire, and by implication thereby placed itself in opposition to the
dynastic principle and to multi-racial empires. The battle between
the Government and the various opposition parties was not an ideological war, like the long conRict fought out in the 1 870s and 8os between the left and the right, between liberals, early populists and
socialists on one side, and such reactionary nationalists as, for instance,
Strakhov, Dostoevsky, Maikov, and above all Katkov and Leontiev
on the other. During 1 848-55, the Government, and the party (as it
was called) of 'official patriotism', appeared to be hostile to thought
as such, and therefore made no attempt to obtain intellectual supporters;
when volunteers offered themselves, they were accepted somewhat
disdainfully, made use of, and occasionally rewarded. If Nicholas I
made no conscious effort to fight ideas with ideas, it was because he
disliked all thought and speculation as such; he distrusted his own
bureaucracy so deeply, perhaps because he felt that it presupposed the
minimum of intellectual activity required by any form of rational
organisation.
'To those who lived through it, it seemed that this dark tunnel
was destined to lead nowhere,' wrote Herzen in the 6os. 'N evertheless, the effect of these years was by no means wholly negative.' And this is acute and true. The revolution of 1848 by its failure, by
discrediting the revolutionary intelligentsia of Europe which had been
put down so easily by the forces of law and order, was followed by a
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R U S S I A AND 1 8 4 8
mood o f profound disillusionment, by a distrust of the very idea of
progress, of the possibility of the peaceful attainment of liberty and