sacrifice. They believed that it was possible to improve life by scientific techniques without necessarily destroying the 'natural' life of the peasant village, or creating a vast, pauperised, faceless city proletariat.
Capitalism seemed irresistible only because it had not been sufficiently
resisted. However it might be in the west, in Russia 'the curse of
bigness' could still be successfully fought, and federations of small
self-governing units of producers, as Fourier and Proudhon had
advocated, could be fostered, and indeed created, by deliberate action.
Like their French masters, the Russian disciples held the institution
of the state in particular hatred, since to them it was at once the
symbol, the result and the main source of injustice and inequalitya weapon wielded by the governing class to defend its own privilegesand one that, in the face of increasing resistance from its victims, grew progressively more brutal and blindly destructive.
The defeat of liberal and radical movements in the west in I 848-9
confirmed them in their conviction that salvation did not lie in politics
or political parties: it seemed clear to them that liberal parties and their
leaders had neither understood nor made a serious effort to forward
the fundamental interests of the oppressed populations of their
countries. What the vast majority of peasants in Russia (or workers
in Europe) needed was to be fed and clothed, to be given physical
security, to be rescued from disease, ignorance, poverty, and humiliating inequalities. As for political rights, votes, parliaments, republican forms, these were meaningless and useless to ignorant, barbarous, halfnaked and starving men; such programmes merely mocked their misery. The populists shared with the nationalistic Russian Slavophils
(with whose political ideas they had otherwise little in common) a
2 1 2
R U S S IAN POP U L I S M
loathing of the rigidly class-conscious social pyramid of the west that
was complacently accepted, or fervently believed in, by the conformist
bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy to whom this bourgeoisie looked up.
The satirist Saltykov, in his famous dialogue between a German
and a Russian boy, immortalised this attitude when he declared his
faith in the Russian boy, hungry and in rags, stumbling in the mud
and squalor of the accursed, slave-owning tsarist regime, because he
had not, like the neat, docile, smug, well-fed, well-dressed German
bOy, bartered away his soul for the few pence that the Prussian official
had offered him, and was consequently capable, if only he was allowed
to do so (as the Gennan boy no longer was), of rising one day to his
full human height. Russia was in darkness and in chains, but her
spirit was not captive; her past was black, but her future promised
more than the death in life of the civilised middle classes in Germany
or France or England, who had long ago sold themselves for material
security and had become so apathetic in their shameful, self-imposed
servitude that they no longer knew how to want to be free.
The populists, unlike the Slavophils, did not believe in the unique
character or destiny of the Russian people. They were not mystical
nationalists. They believed only that Russia was a backward nation
which had not reached the stage of social and economic development
at which the western nations (whether or not they could have avoided
this) had entered upon the path of unrestrained industrialism. They
were not, for the most part, historical determinists; consequently they
believed that it was possible for a nation in such a predicament to
avoid this fate by the exercise of intelligence and will. They saw no
reason why Russia could not benefit by western science and western
technology without paying the appalling price paid by the west. They
argued that it was possible to avoid the despotism of a centralised
economy or a centralised government by adopting a loose, federal
structure composed of self-governing, socialised units both of producers
and of consumers. They held that it was desirable to organise, but not
to lose sight of other values in the pursuit of organisation as an end
in itself; to be governed primarily by ethical and humanitarian and
not solely by economic and technological-'ant-hill'-considerations.
They declared that to protect human individuals against exploitation
by turning them into an industrial army of collectivised robots was
self-stultifying and suicidal. The ideas of the populists wer:e often
unclear, and there were sharp differences among them, but there was
an area of agreement wide enough to constitute a genuine movement.
,,
2 1 3
R U SSIAN TH INKERS
Thus they accepted, in broad outline, the educational and moral
lessons, but not the state worship, of Rousseau. Some of them-indeed
perhaps the majority-shared Rousseau's belief in the goodness of
simple men, his conviction that the cause of corruption is the crippling
effect of bad institutions, his acute distrust of all forms of cleverness,
of intellectuals and specialists, of all self-isolating coteries and factions.
They accepted the anti-political ideas, but not the technocratic
centralism, of Saint-Simon. They shared the belief in conspiracy and
violent action preached by Babeuf and his disciple Buonarotti, but not
their Jacobin authoritarianism. They stood with Sismondi and
Proudhon and Lamennais and the other originators of the notion of
the welfare state, against, on the one hand, laissn-fairt, and, on the
other, central authority, whether nationalist or socialist, whether
temporary or permanent, whether preached by List, or Mazzini, or
Lassalle, or Marx. They came close at times to the positions of
western Christian socialists, without, however, any religious faith,
since, like the French Encyclopedists of the previous century, they
believed in 'natural' morality and scientific truth. These were some
of the beliefs that held them together. But they were divided by
differences no less profound.
The first and greatest of their problems was their attitude towards
the peasants in whose name all that they did was done. Who was to
show the peasants the true path to justice and equality? Individual
liberty is not, indeed, condemned by the populists, but it tends to be
regarded as a liberal catchword, liable to distract attention from
immediate social and economic tasks. Should one train experts to
teach the ignorant younger brothers-the tillers of the soil, and, if
need be, stimulate them to resist authority, to revolt and destroy the
old order before the rebels had themselves fully grasped the need or
meaning of such acts? That is the view of such dissimilar figures as
Bakunin and Speshnev in the 1 84os; it was preached by Chernyshevsky in the 50s, and was passionately advocated by Zaichnevsky and the Jacobins of 'Young Russia' in the 6os; it was preached by
Lavrov in the 70s and 8os, and equally by his rivals and opponentsthe believers in disciplined professional terrorism-Nechaev and Tkachev, and their followers who include-for this purpose alonenot only the Socialist-Revolutionaries but also some of the most fanatical Russian Marxists, in particular Lenin and Trotsky.