there existed a small cultivated class, largely French-speaking, aware
of the enormous gap between the way in which life could be livedor was lived-in the west and the way in which it was lived by the Russian masses. They were, for the most part, men acutely conscious
of the difference between justice and injustice, civilisation and barbarism, but aware also that conditions were too difficult to alter, that they had too great a stalce in the regime themselves, and that reform
might bring the whole structure toppling down. Many among them
were reduced either to an easy-going quasi-Voltairean cynicism, at
once subscribing to liberal principles and whipping their serfs; or to
noble, eloquent and futile despair.
This situation altered with the invasion ofNapoleon,which brought
Russia into the middle of Europe. Almost overnight, Russia found
herself a great power in the heart of Europe, conscious of her crushing
strength, dominating the entire scene, and accepted by Europeans
with some terror and great reluctance, as not merely equal but
superior to them in sheer brute force.
The triumph over Napoleon and the march to Paris were events
in the history of Russian ideas as vitally important as the reforms of
Peter. They made Russia aware of her national unity, and generated
in her a sense of herself as a great European nation, recognised as
such; as being no longer a despised collection of barbarians teeming
behind a Chinese wall, sunk in medieval darkness, half-heartedly and
clumsily imitating foreign models. Moreover, since the long Napoleonic
war had brought about great and lasting patriotic fervour, and, as a
result of a general participation in a common ideal, an increase in the
feeling of equality between the orders, a number of relatively idealistic
young men began to feel new bonds between themselves and their
nation which their education could not by itself have inspired. The
growth of patriotic nationalism brought with it, as its inevitable concomitant, a growth of the feeling of responsibility for the chaos, the squalor, the poverty, the inefficiency, the brutality, the appalling
disorder in Russia. This general moral uneasiness affected the least
sentimental and perceptive, the hardest-hearted of the semi-civilised
members of the ruling class.
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B I RT H OF T H E R U S S IAN INTE L L I G E NTSIA
Ill
There were other factors which contributed to this collective sense of
guilt. One, certainly, was the coincidence (for coincidence it was) of
the rise of the romantic movement with the entrance of Russia into
Europe. One of the cardinal romantic doctrines (connected with the
cognate doctrines that history proceeds according to discoverable laws
or patterns, and that nations are unitary 'organisms', not mere collections, and 'evolve' in an 'organic', not a mechanical or haphazard fashion) is that everything in the world is as and where and when it
is because it participates in a single universal purpose. Romanticism
encourages the idea that not only individuals but groups, and not only
groups but institutions-states, churches, professional bodies, associations that have ostensibly been created for definite, often purely utilitarian purposes - come to be possessed by a 'spirit' of which they
themselves might well be unaware-awareness of which is, indeed,
the very process of enlightenment.
The doctrine that every human being, country, race, institution
has its own unique, individual, inner purpose which is itself an
'organic' element in the wider purpose of all that exists, and that in
becoming conscious of that purpose it is, by this very fact, participating
in the march towards light and freedom- this secular version of an
ancient religious belief powerfully impressed the minds of the young
Russians. They imbibed it all the more readily as a result of two causes,
one material, one spiritual.
The material cause was the unwillingness of the government to
let its subjects travel to France, which was thought of, particularly
after 1 830, as a chronically revolutionary country, liable to perpetual
upheavals, blood-letting, violence and chaos. By contrast, Gennany
lay peaceful under the heel of a very respectable despotism. Consequently young Russians were encouraged to go to German universities, where they would obtain a sound training in civic principles that
would, so it was supposed, make them still more faithful servants of
the Russian autocracy.
The result was the exact opposite. Crypto-francophile sentiment
in Gennany itself was at this time so violent, and enlightened Cennans
themselves believed in ideas-in this case those of the French enlightenment-so much more intensely and fanatically than the French themselves, that the young Russian Anacharsises who dutifully went to Gennany were infected by dangerous ideas far more violently there
,,
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R U S S IAN T H IN K E R S
than they could ever have been had they gone to Paris in the easygoing early years of Louis Philippe. The government of Nicholas I could hardly have foreseen the chasm into which it was destined to fall.
If this was the first cause of romantic ferment, the second was its
direct consequence. The young Russians who had travelled to
Germany, or read German books, became possessed with the simple
idea that if, as ultramontane Catholics in France and nationalists in
Germany were sedulously maintaining, the French Revolution and
the decadence that followed were scourges sent upon the people for
abandoning their ancient faith and ways, the Russians were surely
free from these vices, since, whatever else might be true of them, no
revolution had been visited upon them. The German romantic
historians were particularly zealous in preaching the view that, if the
west was declining because of its scepticism, its rationalism, its
materialism, and its abandonment of its own spiritual tradition, then
the Germans, who had not suffered this melancholy fate, should be
viewed as a fresh and youthful nation, with habits uncontaminated
by the corruption of Rome in decay, barbarous indeed, but full of
violent energy, about to come into the inheritance falling from the
feebie hands of the French.
The Russians merely took this process of reasoning one step
further. They rightly judged that if youth, barbarism, and lack of
education were criteria of a glorious future, they had an even more
powerful hope of it than the Germans. Consequently the vast outpouring of German romantic rhetoric about the unexhausted forces of the Germans and the unexpended German language with its
pristine purity and the young, unwearied German nation, directed
as it was against the 'impure', Latinised, decadent western nations,
was received in Russia with understandable enthusiasm. Moreover, it
stimulated a wave of social idealism which began to possess all classes,
from the early 20s of the century until well into the early 40s. The
proper task of a man was to dedicate himself to the ideal for which