who craved social solidarity and communal life; individualism was
always a luxury, the ideal of the socially established. The new class
of technical specialists-the modern, enlightened, energetic men celebrated by liberals like Kavelin and Turgenev, and at times even by the radical individualist Pisarev-were for the Jacobin Tkachev 'worse
than cholera or typhus', for by applying scientific methods to social
life they were playing into the hands of the new, rising capitalist
oligarchs and thereby obstructing the path to freedom. Palliatives were
fatal when only an operation could save the patient : they merely prolonged his disease and weakened him so much that in the end not even an operation could save him. One must strike before these new, potentially conformist, intellectuals had grown too numerous and too comfortable and had obtained too much power, for otherwise it would
be too late: a Saint-Simonian elite of highly-paid managers would
preside over a new feudal order-an economically efficient but socially
immoral society, inasmuch as it was based on permanent inequality. ·
The greatest of all evils was inequality. Whenever any other ideal
came into conflict with equality, the Russian Jacobins always called
for its sacrifice or modification; the first principle upon which all
justice rested was that of equality; no society was equitable in which
there was not a maximum degree of equality between men. If the
revolution was to succeed, three major fallacies had to be fought and
rooted out. The first was that men of culture alone created progress.
This was not true, and had the bad consequence of inducing faith in
�lites. The second was the opposite illusion-that everything must be
learnt from the common people. This was equally false. Rousseau's
Arcadian peasants were so many idyllic figments. The masses were
ignorant, brutal, reactionary, and did not understand their own needs
or good. If the revolution depended upon their maturity, or capacity
for political judgment or organisation, it would certainly fail. The last
fallacy was that only a proletarian majority could successfully make a
revolution. No doubt a proletarian majority might do that, but if
Russia was to wait until it possessed one, the opportunity of destroying
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a corrupt and detested government would pass, and capitalism would
be found to be too firmly in the saddle.
What, then, must be done? Men must be trained to make the
revolution and destroy the present system and all obstacles to social
equality and democratic self-government. When this was achieved, a
democratic assembly was to be convened, and if those who made the
revolution took care to explain the reasons for it, and the social and
economic situation that made it necessary, then the masses, benighted
though they might be today, would assuredly, in the view of the
Jacobins, grasp their condition sufficiently to allow themselves to beindeed to welcome the opportunity of being-organised into the new free federation of productive associations.
But supposing they were still, on the morrow of a successful coup
d'etat, not mature enough to see this? Herzen did indeed ask this
awkward question again and again in his writings in the late 1 86os.
The majority of the populists were deeply troubled by it. But the
activist wing had · no doubt of the answer: strike the chains from the
captive hero, and he will stretch himself to his full height and live in
freedom and happiness for ever after. The views of these men were
astonishingly simple. They believed in terrorism and more terrorism
to achieve complete, anarchist liberty. The purpose of the revolution,
for them, was to establish absolute equality, not only economic and
social, but 'physical and physiological': they saw no discrepancy
between this bed of Procrustes and absolute freedom. This order
would be imposed in the beginning by the power and authority of
the state, after which, the state, having fulfilled its purpose, would
swiftly 'liquidate' itself.
Against this, the spokesmen of the main body of the populists
argued that J acobin means tended to bring about J acobin consequences:
if the purpose of the revolution was to liberate, it must not use the
weapons of despotism that were bound to enslave those whom they
were designed to liberate: the remedy must not prove more destructive
than the disease. To use the state to break the power of the exploiters
and to impose a specific form of life upon a people, the majority of
whom had not been educated to understand the need for it, was to
exchange the tsarist yoke for a flew, not necessarily less crushing
one-that of the revolutionary minority. The majority of the populists
were deeply democratic; they believed that all power tended to corrupt,
that all concentration of authority tended to perpetuate itself, that all
centralisation was coercive and evil, and, therefore, the sole hope of a
..
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just and free society lay in the peaceful conversion o f men by rational
argument to the truths of social and economic justice and democratic
freedom. In order to obtain the opportunity of converting men to this
vision, it might indeed be necessary to break the existing obstacles to
free and rational intercourse-the police state, the power of capitalists
or of landowners-and to use force in the process, whether mass
mutiny or individual terrorism. But this concept of temporary
measures presented itself to them as something wholly different from
leaving .absolute power in the hands of any party or group, however
virtuous, once the power of the enemy had been broken. Their case
is the classical case, during the last two centuries, of every libertarian
and federalist against Jacobins and centralisers; it is Voltaire's case
against both Helvetius and Rousseau; that of the left wing of the
Gironde against the Mountain; Herzen used these arguments against
doctrinaire communists of the immediately preceding period-Cabet
and the disciples of Babeuf; Bakunin denounced the Marxist demand
for the dictatorship of the proletariat as something that would merely
transfer power from one set of oppressors to another; the populists of
the 8os and 90s urged this against all those whom they suspected of
conspiring (whether they realised it or not) to destroy individual
spontaneity and freedom, whether they were laisuz-faire liberals who
allowed factory owners to enslave the masses, or radical collectivists
who were ready to do so themselves; whether they were capitalist
entrepreneurs (as Mikhailovsky wrote to Dostoevsky in his celebrated
criticism of his novel The Posse sud) or Marxist advocates of centralised
authority; he looked upon both as far more dangerous than the
pathological fanatics pilloried by Dostoevsky-as brutal, amoral social
Darwinists, profoundly hostile to variety and individual freedom and
character.
This, again, was the main political issue which, at the turn of the
century, divided the Russian Socialist-Revolutionaries from the Social
Democrats; and over which, a few years later, both Plekhanov and