not dated, not Victorian, still astonishingly contemporary in feeling.
One of the elements in political genius is a sensibility to characteristics and processes in society while they are still in embryo and invisible to the naked eye. Herzen possessed this capacity to a high
degree, but he viewed the approaching cataclysm neither with the
savage exultation of Marx or Bakunin nor with the pessimistic
detachment of Burckhardt or T ocqueville. Like Proudhon he believed
the destruction of individual freedom to be neither desirable nor
inevitable, but, unlike him, as being highly probable, unless it was
averted by deliberate human effort. The strong tradition of libertarian
humanism in Russian socialism, defeated only in October 1 9 1 7,
derives from his writings. His analysis of the forces at work in his
day, of the individuals in whom they were embodied, of the moral
presupposition of their creeds and words, and of his own principles,
remains to this day one of the most penetrating, moving, and morally
formidable indictments of the great evils which have grown to maturity
in our own time.
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Russian Populism
R us s I A N populism is the name not of a single political party, nor of
a coherent body of doctrine, but of a widespread radical movement in
Russia in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was born during
the great social and intellectual ferment which followed the death of
Tsar Nicholas I and the defeat and humiliation of the Crimean war,
grew to fame and influence during the I 86os and I 87os, and reached
its culmination with the assassination of Tsar Alexander I I, after
which it swiftly declined. Its leaders were men of very dissimilar
origins, outlooks and capacities; it was not at any stage more than
loose congeries of small independent groups of conspirators or their
sympathisers, who sometimes united for common action, and at other
times operated in isolation. These groups tended to differ both about
ends and about means. Nevertheless they held certain fundamental
beliefs in common, and possessed sufficient moral and political solidarity
to entitle them to be called a single movement. Like their predecessors,
the Decembrist conspirators in the 20s, and the circles that gathered
round Alexander Herz.en and Belinsky in the 30s and 40s, they
looked on the government and the social structure of their country
as a moral and political monstrosity-obsolete, barbarous, stupid and
odious-and dedicated their lives to its total destruction. Their general
ideas were not original. They shared the democratic ideals of the
European radicals of their day, and in addition believed that the
struggle between social and economic classes was the determining
factor in politics; they held this theory not in its Marxist form (which
did not effectively reach Russia until the 1 87os) but in the form in
which it was taught by Proudhon and Herzen, and before them by
Saint-Simon, Fourier and other French socialists and radicals whose
writings had entered Russia, legally and illegally, in a thin but steady
stream for several decades.
The theory of social history as dominated by the class war-the
heart of which is the notion of the coercion of the 'have-nots' by the
'haves'-was born in the course of the Industrial Revolution in the
west; and its most characteristic concepts belong to the capitalist
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RU S S IAN P O P U L I S M
phase of economic development. Economic classes, capitalism, cutthroat competition, proletarians and their exploiters, the evil power of unproductive finance, the inevitability of increasing centralisation
and standardisation of all human activities, the transformation of men
into commodities and the consequent 'alienation' of individuals and
groups and degradation of human lives-these notions are fully
intelligible only in the context of expanding industrialism. Russia,
even as late as the I 8 50s, was one of the least industrialised states in
Europe. Nevertheless, exploitation and misery had long been amongst
the most familiar and universally recognised characteristics of its social
life, the principal victims of the system being the peasants, both serfs
and free, who formed over nine-tenths of its population. An industrial
proletariat had indeed come into being, but by mid-century did not
exceed two or three per cent of the population of the Empire. Hence
the cause of the oppressed was still at that date overwhelmingly that
of the agricultural workers, who formed the lowest stratum of the
population, the vast majority being serfs in state or private possession.
The populists looked upon them as martyrs whose grievances they
were determined to avenge and remedy, and as embodiments of
simple uncorrupted virtue, whose social organisation (which they
largely idealised) was the natural foundation on which the future of
Russian society must be rebuilt.
The central populist goals were social justice and social equality.
Most of them were convinced, following Herzen, whose revolutionary
propaganda in the I 8 50s influenced them more than any other single
set of ideas, that the essence of a just and equal society existed already
in the Russian peasant commune-the ohshchina organised in the form
of a collective unit called the mir. The mir was a free association of
peasants which periodically redistributed the agricultural land to be
tilled; its decisions bound all its members, and constituted the cornerstone on which, so the populists maintained, a federation of socialised, self-governing units, conceived along lines popularised by the French
socialist Proudhon, could be erected. The populist leaders believed
that this form of cooperation offered the possibility of a free and
democratic social system in Russia, originating as it did in the deepest
moral instincts and traditional values of Russian, and indeed all human,
society, and they believed that the workers (by which they meant all
productive human beings), whether in town or country, could bring
this system into being with a far smaller degree of violence or coercion
than had occurred in the industrial west. This system, since it alone
..
2.I I
R U S S IAN TH INKERS
sprang naturally from fundamental human needs and a sense of the
right and the good that existed in all men, would ensure justice,
equality, and the widest opportunity for the full development of
human faculties. As a corollary of this, the populists believed that the
development of large-scale centralised industry was not 'natural', and
therefore led inexorably to the degradation and dehumanisation of all
those who were caught in its tentacles: capitalism was an appalling
evil, destructi�e of body and soul; but it was not inescapable. They
denied that social or economic progress was necessarily bound up with
the Industrial Revolution. They maintained that the application of
scientific truths and methods to social and individual problems (in
which they passionately believed), although it might, and often did,
lead to the growth of capitalism, could be realised without this fatal