Martov broke with Lenin: indeed the great quarrel between the
Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks (whatever its ostensible cause) turned
upon it. In due course Lenin himself, two or three years after the
October Revolution, while he never abandoned the central Marxist
doctrine, expressed his bitter disappointment with those very consequences of it which his opponents had predicted-bureaucracy and the arbitrary despotism of the party officials; and Trotsky accused Stalin
of this same crime. The dilemma of means and ends is the deepest
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and most agonising problem that torments the revolutionary movements of our own day in all the continents of the world, not least in Asia and Africa. That this debate took so clear and articulate a form
within the populist movement makes its development exceptionaJly
relevant to our own predicament.
All these differences occurred within the framework of a common
revolutionary outlook, for, whatever their disagreements, all populists
were united by an unshakeable faith in the revolution. This faith
derived from many sources. It sprang from the needs and outlook of a
society still overwhelmingly pre-industrial, which gave the craving for
simplicity and fraternity, and the agrarian idealism which derives
ultimately from Rousseau, a reality which can still be seen in India
and Africa today, and which necessarily looks Utopian to the eyes of
social historians born in the industrialised west. It was a consequence
of the disillusionment with parliamentary democracy, liberal convictions, and the good faith of bourgeois intellectuals that resulted from the fiasco of the European revolutions of 1 848-9, and from the
particular conclusion drawn by Herzen that Russia, which had not
suffered this revolution, might find her salvation in the undestroyed
natural socialism of the peasant mir. It was deeply influenced by
Bakunin's violent diatribes against all forms of central authority, and
in particular the state; and by his vision of men as being by nature
peaceful and productive, and rendered violent only when they are
perverted from their proper ends, and forced to be either gaolers or
convicts. But it was also fed by the streams that flowed in a contrary
direction: by Tkachev's faith in a Jacobin �lite of professional revolutionaries as the only force capable of destroying the advance of capitalism, helped on its fatal path by innocent reformists and humanitarians and careerist intellectuals, and concealed behind the repulsive sham of parliamentary democracy; even more by the passionate
utilitarianism of Pisarev, and his brilliant polemics against all forms
of idealism and amateurishness, and, in particular, the sentimental
idealisation of the simplicity and beauty of peasants in general, and of
Russian peasants in particular, as beings touched by grace, remote from
the corrupting influences of the decaying west. It was supported by the
appeal which these 'critical realists' made to their compatriots to save
themselves by self-help and hard-headed energy-a kind of nee
Encyclopedist campaign in favour of natural science, skill, and
professionalism, directed against the humanities, classical learning,
history, and other forms of 'sybaritic' self-indulgence. Above all, it
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contrasted 'realism' with the literary culture which had lulled the best
men in Russia into a condition where corrupt bureaucrats, stupid and
brutal landowners, and an obscurantist Church could exploit them or
let them rot, while aesthetes and liberals looked the other way.
But the deepest strain of all, the very centre of the populist outlook,
was the individualism and rationalism of Lavrov and Mikhailovsky.
With Herzen they believed that history followed no predetermined
pattern, that it possessed 'no libretto', that neither the violent conflicts
between cultures, nations, classes (which for Hegelians constituted
the essence of human progress), nor the struggles for power by one
class over another (represented by Marxists as being the motive force
of history) were inevitable. Faith in human freedom was the cornerstone of populist humanism: the populists never tired of repeating that ends were chosen by men, not imposed upon them, and that men's
wills alone could construct a happy and honourable life-a life in
which the interests of intellectuals, peasants, manual workers and the
liberal professions could be reconciled; not indeed made wholly to
coincide, for that was an unattainable ideal; but adjusted in an unstable
equilibrium, which human reason and constant human care could
adjust to the largely unpredictable consequences of the interaction of
men with each other and with nature. It may be tltat the tradition
of the Orthodox Church with its conciliar and communal principles
and deep antagonism both to the authoritarian hierarchy of the Roman
Church, and the individualism of the Protestants, also exercised its
share of influence. These doctrines and these prophets and their
western masters- French radicals before and after the French revolution, as well as Fichte and Buonarotti, Fourier and Hegel, Mill and Proudhon, Owen and Marx-played their part. But the largest figure
in the populist movement, the man whose temperament, ideas and
activities dominated it from beginning to end, is undoubtedly Nikolay
Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky. The influence of his life and teachings,
despite a multitude of monographs, still awaits its interpreter.
Nikolay Chernyshevsky was not a man of original ideas. He did
not possess the depth, the imagination, or the brilliant intellect and
literary talent of Herzen; nor the eloquence, the boldness, the temperament or the reasoning power of Bakunin, nor the moral genius and unique social insight of Belinsky. But he was a man of unswerving
integrity, immense industry, and a capacity rare among Russians for
concentration upon concrete detail. His deep, steady, lifelong hatred
of slavery, injustice and irrationality did not express itself in large
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theoretical generalisations, or the creation of a sociological or metaphysical system, or violent action against authority. It took the form of slow, uninspired, patient accumulation of facts and ideas-a crude,
dull, but powerful intellectual structure on which one might found a
detailed policy of practical action appropriate to the specific Russian
environment which he desired to alter. Chernyshevsky was in greater
sympathy with the concrete, carefully elaborated socialist plans, however mistaken they might be, of the Petrashevsky group (to which Dostoevsky had belonged in his youth), crushed by the government in
I 849, than with the great imaginative constructions of Herzen,
Bakunin and their followers.
A new generation had grown up during the dead years after 1 849.
These young men had witnessed vacillation and outright betrayals on
the part of liberals, which had led to the victories of the reactionary
parties in 1 849. Twelve years later they saw the same phenomenon