Some among them asked whether this training of revolutionary
groups might not create an arrogant elite of seekers of power and
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autocracy, men who would, at best, believe i t their duty to give the
peasants not what the peasants asked for but what they-their selfappointed mentors-thought good for them, namely, that which the masses ought to ask for, whether they in fact did so or not. They
· pushed the question farther, and asked whether this would not, in due
course, breed fanatical men who would pay too little heed to the
actual wants of the vast majority of the Russian population, intent on
forcing upon them only what they-the dedicated order of professional
revolutionaries, cut off from the life of the masses by their own special
training and conspiratorial lives-had chosen for them, ignoring the
hopes and protests of the people itself. Was there not a terrible danger
here of the substitution of a new yoke for the old, of a despotic
oligarchy of intellectuals in the place of the nobility and the bureaucracy and the tsar? What reason was there for thinking that the new masters would prove less oppressive than the old?
This was argued by some among the terrorists of the 6os- lshutin
and Karakozov, for example-and even more forcibly by the majority
of the idealistic young men, who 'went among the people' in the 70s
and later, with the aim not so much of teaching others as of themselves learning how to live, in a state of mind inspired by Rousseau (and perhaps by Nekrasov or Tolstoy) at least as much as by the more
tough-minded social theorists. These young men, the so-called
'repentant gentry', believed themselves to have been corrupted not
merely by an evil social system but by the very process of liberal
education which makes for deep inequalities and inevitably lifts
scientists, writers, professors, experts, civilised men in general, too
high above the heads of the masses, and so itself becomes the richest
breeding-ground of injustice and class oppression; everything that
obstructs understanding between individuals or groups or nations, that
creates and keeps in being obstacles to human solidarity and fraternity
is to ipso evil; specialisation and university education build walls
between men, prevent individuals and groups from 'connecting', kill
love and friendship, and are among the major causes responsible for
what, after Hegel and his followers, came to be called the 'alienation'
of entire orders or classes or cultures.
Some among the populists contrived to ignore or evade this r-roblem.
Bakunin, for example, who, if not a populist himself, influenced
populism profoundly, denounced faith in intellectuals and experts as
liable to lead to the most ignoble of tyrannies-the rule of scientists
and pedants-but would not face the problem of whether the revolu-
2.1 5
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
tionaries had come to teach o r to learn. I t was left uiWlswered by
the terrorists of the 'People's Will' and their sympathisers. More
sensitive and morally scrupulous thinkers- Chernyshevsky and
Kropotkin, for example-felt the oppressive weight of the question,
and did not attempt to conceal it from themselves; yet whenever they
asked themselves by what right they proposed to impose this or that
system of social organisation on the mass of peasants who had grown
up in a wholly different way of life, and one that might embody far
profounder values of its own, they gave no clear reply. The question
became even more acute when it was asked (as it increasingly came
to be in the 6os) what was to be done if the peasants actually resisted
the revolutionaries' plans for their liberation? Must the masses be
deceived, or, worse still, coerced? No one denied that in the end it
was the people and not the revolutionary elite that must govern, but
in the meanwhile how far was one allowed to go in ignoring the
majority's wishes, or in forcing them into courses which they plainly
loathed?
This was by no means a merely academic problem. The first
enthusiastic adherents of radical populism-the missionaries who went
'to the people' in the famous summer of I 874-were met by mounting
indifference, suspicion, resentment, and sometimes active hatred and
resistance, on the part of their would-be beneficiaries, who, as often
as not, handed them over to the police. The populists were thus
forced to define their attitude explicitly, since they believed passionately in the need to justify their activities by rational argument. Their answers, when they came, were far from unanimous. The activists,
men like Tkachev, Nechaev, and, in a less political sense, Pisarev,
whose admirers came to be known as 'nihilists', anticipated Lenin in
their contempt for democratic methods. Since the days of Plato it has
been argued that the spirit is superior to the flesh, and that those who
know must govern those who do not. The educated cannot listen to
the uneducated and ignorant masses. The masses must be rescued by
whatever means were available, if necessary against their own foolish
wishes, by guile or fraud, or violence if need be. But it was only a
minority in the movement who accepted this division and the authoritarianism that it entailed. The majority were horrified by the open advocacy of such Machiavellian tactics, and thought that no end,
however good, could fail to be destroyed by the adoption of monstrous
means.
A similar conflict broke out over the attitude to the state. All
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R U S S IAN POPU L I S M
Russian populists were agreed that the state was the embodiment of
a system of coercion and inequality, and therefore intrinsically evil;
neither justice nor happiness was possible until it was eliminated.
But in the meanwhile what was to be the immediate aim of the
revolution? Tkachev is quite clear that until the capitalist enemy had
been finally destroyed, the weapon of coercion-the pistol torn from
his hand by the revolutionaries-must on no account be thrown away,
but must itself be turned against him. In other words the machinery
of the state must not be destroyed, but must be used against the
inevitable counter-revolution; it cannot be dispensed with until the
last enemy has been-in Proudhon's immortal phrase-successfully
liquidated, and mankind consequently has no further need of any
instrument of coercion. In this doctrine he was followed by Lenin
more faithfully than mere adherence to the ambivalent Marxist
formula about the dictatorship of the proletariat seemed to require.
Lavrov, who represents the central stream of populism, and reRects
all its vacillations and confusions, characteristically advocated not
indeed the immediate or total elimination of the state but its systematic
reduction to something vaguely described as the minimum. Chernyshevsky, who is the least anarchistic of the populists, conceives of the state as the organiser and protector of the free associations of peasants