or workers, and contrives to see it at once as centralised and decentralised, a guarantee of order and efficiency, and of equality and individual liberty too.
All these thinkers share one vast apocalyptic assumption: that once
the reign of evil-autocracy, exploitation, inequality-is consumed in the
fire of the revolution, there will arise naturally and spontaneously out
of its ashes a natural, harmonious, just order, needing only the gentle
guidance of the enlightened revolutionaries to attain its proper perfection. This great Utopian dream, based on simple faith in regenerated human nature, was a vision which the populists shared with Godwin
and Bakunin, Marx and Lenin. Its heart is the pattern of sin and
death and resurrection-of the road to the earthly paradise, the gates
of which will only open if men find the one true way and follow it.
Its roots lie deep in the religious imagination of mankind; and there is
therefore nothing surprising in the fact that this secular version of it
had strong affinities with the faith of the Russian Old Believers-the
dissenting sects-for whom, since the great religious schism of the
seventeenth century, the Russian state and its rulers, particularly
Peter the Great, represented the rule of Satan upon earth; this
2 1 7
RU SSIAN T H I N K E R S
persecuted religious underground provided a good many potential
allies whom the populists made efforts to mobilise.
There were deep divisions among the populists; they differed about
the future role of the intellectuals, as compared with that of the
peasants; they differed about the historical importance of the rising
class of capitalists, gradualism versus conspiracy, education and propaganda versus terrorism and preparation for immediate risings. All these questions were interrelated and they demanded immediate solutions.
But the deepest rift among the populists arose over the urgent question
of whether a truly democratic revolution could �ibly occur before
a sufficient number of the oppressed had become fully conscious-that
is, capable of understanding and analysing the causes of their intolerable condition. The moderates argued that no revolution could justly be called democratic unless it sprang from the rule of the revolutionary
majority. But in that event, there was perhaps no alternative to
waiting until education and propaganda had created this majority-a
course that was being advocated by almost all western socialists
Marxist and non-Marxist alike-in the second half of the nineteenth
century.
Against this the Russian Jacobins argued that to wait, and in the
meanwhile to condemn all forms of revolt organised by resolute
minorities as irresponsible terrorism or, worse still, as the replacement
of one despotism by another, would lead to catastrophic results: while
the revolutionaries procrastinated, capitalism would develop rapidly;
the breathing space would enable the ruling class to develop a social
and economic base incomparably stronger than that which it possessed
at present; the growth of a prosperous and energetic capitalism would
create opportunities of employment for the radical intellectuals themselves: doctors, engineers, educators, economists, technicians, and experts of all types would be assigned profitable tasks and positions;
their new bourgeois masters (unlike the existing regime) would be
intelligent enough not to force them into any kind of political conformity; the intelligentsia would obtain special privileges, status, and wide opportunities for self-expression-harmless radicalism would be
tolerated, a good deal of personal liberty permitted-and in this way
the revolutionary cause would lose its more valuable recruits. Once
those whom insecurity and discontent had driven into making common
cause with the oppressed had been partially satisfied, the incentive to
revolutionary activity would be weakened, and the prospects of a
radical transformation of society would become exceedingly dim. The
2 1 8
R U S S IAN P O P U L I S M
radical wing of the revolutionaries argued with great force that the
advance of capitalism, whatever Marx might say, was not inevitable;
it might be so in western Europe, but in Russia it could still be arrested
by a revolutionary coup, destroyed in the root before it had had time
to grow too strong. If recognition of the need to awaken the 'political
consciousness' of the majority of the workers and peasants (which by
this time, and partly as a result of the failure of the intellectuals in
I 848, had been pronounced absolutely indispensable to the revolution
both by Marxists and by the majority of the populist leaders) was
tantamount to the adoption of a gradualist programme, the moment
for action would surely be missed; and i n place of the populist or
socialist revolution would there not arise a vigorous, imaginative,
predatory, successful capitalist regime which would succeed Russian
semi-feudalism as surely as it had replaced the feudal order in western
Europe? And then who could tell how many decades or centuries
might elapse before the arrival, at long last, of the revolution? When
it did arrive, who could tell what kind of order it would, by that time,
install-resting upon what social basis?
All populists were agreed that the village commune was the ideal
embryo of those socialist groups on which the future society was to be
based. But would the development of capitalism not automatically
destroy the commune? And if it was maintained (although perhaps
this was not explicitly asserted before the I 88os) that capitalism was
already destroying the mir, that the class struggle, as analysed by Marx,
was dividing the villages as surely as the cities, then the plan of action
was clear: rather than sit with folded hands and watch this disintegration fatalistically, resolute men could and must arrest this process, and save the village commune. Socialism, so the Jacobins argued, could be
introduced by the capture of power to which all the energies of the
revolutionaries must be bent, even at the price of postponing the task
of educating the peasants in moral, social, and political realities; indeed,
such education could surely be promoted more rapidly and efficiently
after the revolution had broken the resistance of the old regime.
This line of thought, which bears an extraordinary resemblance, if
not to tl1e actual words, then to the policies pursued by Lenin in
191 7, was basically very different from the older Marxist determinism.
Its perpetual refrain was that there was no time to lose. Kulaks were
devouring the poorer peasants in the country, capitalists were breeding
fast in the towns. If the government possessed even a spark of intelligence, it would make concessions and promote reforms, and by this
,,
219
R U S S IAN T H IN K E R S
m eans divert educated men whose will and brain were needed for the
revolution into the peaceful paths of the service of the reactionary
state; propped up by such liberal measures, the unjust order would
continue and be strengthened. The activists argued that there was
nothing inevitable about revolutions: they were the fruit of human
will and human reason. If there were not enough of these, the
revolution might never take place at all. It was only the insecure