chiefly engaged in holding its subjects down, preventing change
largely because this might lead to yet further change, even though its
more intelligent members obscurely realised that reform-and that of
a very radical kind- for instance with regard to the serf system or
the systems of justice and education-was both desirable and inevitable.
The second factor was the condition of the vast mass of the Russian
population-an ill-treated, economically wretched peasantry, sullen
and inarticulately groaning, but plainly too weak and unorganised to
act effectively in its own defence. Finally, between the two, a small,
educated class, deeply and sometimes resentfully influenced by western
ideas, with minds tantalised by visits to Europe and by the great new
social and intellectual movement at work in the centres of its culture.
May I remind you again that there was in the air, as much in
Russia as in Germany, a romantic conviction that every man had a
unique mission to fulfil if only he could know what it was; and that
this created a general enthusiasm for social and metaphysical ideas,
perhaps as a kind of ethical substitute for a dying religion, that was
not dissimilar to the fervour with which philosophical systems and
political Utopias had, for more than a century, been acclaimed in
France and Germany, by men in search of a new theodicy uncompromised by association with some discredited political or religious establishment. But in Russia there was, in addition, among the
educated classes, a moral and intellectual vacuum due to the absence
1 23
R U S S IAN T H IN K E R S
of a Renaissance tradition of secular education, and maintained by
the rigid censorship exercised by the government, by widespread
illiteracy, by the suspicion and disfavour with which all ideas as such
were regarded, by the acts of a nervous and often massively stupid
bureaucracy. In this situation, ideas which in the west competed
with a large number of other doctrines and attitudes, so that to become
dominant they had to emerge victorious from a fierce struggle for
survival, in Russia came to lodge in the minds of gifted individuals
and, indeed, obsess them, often enough simply for lack of other ideas
to satisfy their intellectual needs. Moreover, there existed in the capital
cities of the Russian Empire a violent thirst for knowledge, indeed
for mental nourishment of any kind, together with an unparalleled
sincerity (and sometimes a disarming naivety) of feeling, intellectual
freshness, passionate resolve to panicipate in world affairs, a troubled
consciousness of the social and political problems of a vast country,
and very little to respond to this new state of mind. What there was,
was mostly imponed from abroad-scarcely one single political and
social idea to be found in Russia in the nineteenth century was born
on native soil. Perhaps Tolstoy's idea of non-resistance was something
genuinely Russian-a restatement of a Christian position so original
that it had the force of a new idea when he preached it. But, in general,
I do not think that Russia has contributed a single new social or
political idea: nothing that was not traceable, not merely to some
ultimate western root, but to some doctrine discoverable in the west
eight or ten or twelve years earlier than its first appearance in Russia.
v
You must conceive, therefore, of an astonishingly impressionable
society with an unheard of capacity for absorbing ideas- ideas which
might waft across, in the most casual fashion, because someone
brought back a book or collection of pamphlets from Paris (or because
some audacious bookseller had smuggled them in) ; because someone
attended the lectures of a neo-Hegelian in Berlin, or had made friends
with Schelling, or had met an English missionary with strange ideas.
Genuine excitement was generated by the arrival of a new 'message'
emanating from some disciple of Saint-Simon or FouJier, of a book
by Proudhon, by Cabet, by Leroux, the latest social Messiahs in
France; or again, by an idea attributed to Davia Strauss or Ludwig
Feuerbach or Lamennais or some other forbidden author. Because of
their relative scarcity in Russia, these ideas and fragments of ideas
1 24
B I RTH OF T H E R U S S I AN I N T E L L I G ENTSIA
would be seized upon with the utmost avidity. The social and economic
prophets in Europe seemed full of confidence in the new revolutionary
future, and their ideas had an intoxicating effect upon the young
Russians.
When such doctrines were pro1pulgated in the west, they sometimes excited their audience, and occasionally led to the formation of parties or sects, but they were not regarded by the majority of those
whom they reached as the final truth; and even those who thought
them crucially important did not immediately begin to put them into
practice with every means at their disposal. The Russians were liable
to do just this; to argue to themselves that if the premises were true
and the reasoning correct, true conclusions followed : and further, that
if these conclusions dictated certain actions as being necessary and
beneficial, then if one was honest and serious one had a plain duty to
try to realise them as swiftly and as fully as possible. Instead of the
generally held view of the Russians as a gloomy, mystical, self-lacerating,
somewhat religious nation, I should like to suggest, at least as far as
the articulate intelligentsia are concerned, that they were somewhat
exaggerated Westerners of the nineteenth century; and that so far
from being liable to irrationalism. or neurotic self-absorption, what
they possessed in a high, perhaps excessive, degree was extremely
devdoped powers of reasoning, extreme logic and lucidity.
It is true that when people tried to put these Utopian schemes
into operation and were almost immediately frustrated by the police,
disillusionment followed, and with it a liability to fall into a state of
apathetic melancholy or violent exasperation. But this came later. The
original phase was neither mystical nor introspective, but on the
contrary rationalist, bold, extroverted and optimistic. I think it was the
celebrated terrorist Kravchinsky who once said about the Russians
that, whatever other qualities they might have, they never recoiled
froin the consequences of their own reasoning. If you study the
Russian 'ideologies' of the nineteenth and indeed the twentieth
century, I think you will find, on the whole, that the more difficult,
the more paradoxical, the more unpalatable a conclusion is, the greater
is the degree of passion and enthusiasm with which some Russians, at
any rate, tend to embrace it; for to do so seems to them no more than
a proof of a man's moral sincerity, of the genuineness of his devotion
to the truth and of his seriousness as a human being; and although
th� consequences of one's reasoning may appear prima fane unplausible or even downright absurd, one must not for that reason 1 25