in their own country when the manner in which the peasants had
been emancipated in Russia seemed to them to be a cynical travesty of
all their plans and hopes. Such men as these found the plodding genius
of Chernyshevsky-his attempts to work out sped fie solutions to specific
problems in terms of concrete statistical data; his constant appeals to
facts; his patient efforts to indicate attainable, practical, immediate
ends rather than desirable states of affairs to which there was no
visible road; his flat, dry, pedestrian style, his very dullness and lack
of inspiration-more serious and ultimately more inspiring than the
noble flights of the romantic idealists of the 1 84os. His relatively low
social origin (he was the son of a parish priest) gave him a natural
affinity with the humble folk whose condition he was seeking to
analyse, and an abiding distrust, later to turn into fanatical hatred, of
all liberal theorists, whether in Russia or the west. These qualities
made Chernyshevsky a natural leader of a disenchanted generation of
socially mingled origins, no longer dominated by good birth, embittered
by the failure of their own early ideals, by government repression, by
the humiliation of Russia in the Crimean war, by the weakness,
heartlessness, hypocrisy, and chaotic incompetence of the ruling class.
To these tough-minded, socially insecure, angry, suspicious young
radicals, contemptuous of the slightest trace of eloquence or 'literature',
Chernyshevsky was a father and a confessor as neither the aristocratic
and ironical Herzen nor the wayward and ultimately frivolous
Bakunin could ever become.
Like all populists, Chernyshevsky believed in the need to preserve
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R U SS IAN T H I N K E R S
the peasant commune and to spread its principles to industrial production. He believed that Russia could profit directly by learning from the scientific advances of the west, without going through the agonies of
an industrial revolution. 'Human development is a form of chronological unfairness,' Herzen had once characteristically observed, 'since lat�mers are able to profit by the labours of their predecessors
without paying the same price.' 'History is fond of her grandchildren,'
Chernyshevsky repeated after him, 'for it offers them the marrow of
the bones, which the previous generation had hurt its hands in
breaking.' For Chernyshevsky history moved along a spiral, in
Hegelian triads, since every generation tends to repeat the experience
not of its parents, but of its grandparents, and repeats it at a 'higher
level'.
But it is not this historicist element in his doctrine that bound its
spell upon the populists. They were most of all influenced by his
acute distrust of reforms from above, by his belief that the essence of
history was a struggle between the classes, above all by his conviction
(which derives nothing, so far as we know, from Marx, but draws upon
socialist sources common to both) that the state is always the instrument
of the dominant class, and cannot, whether it consciously desires this
or not, embark on those necessary reforms, the success of which would
end its own domination. No order can be persuaded to undertake its
own dissolution. Hence all attempts to convert the tsar, all attempts
to evade the horrors of revolution, must (he concluded in the early 6os)
remain necessarily vain. There was a moment in the 'late sos when,
like Herzen, he had hoped for reforms from above. The final form of
the Emancipation, and the concessions which the government had
made to the landowners, cured him of this illusion. He pointed out
with a good deal of historical justification that liberals, who hoped to
influence the government by Fabian tactics, had thus far merely
succeeded in betraying both the peasants and themselves: first they
compromised themselves with the peasants by their relations with their
masters; after that, the governing class found little difficulty whenever
this suited their convenience in representing them as false friends to
the peasants, and turning the latter against them. This had occurred
in both France and Germany in 1 849. Even if the moderates withdrew
in time, and advocated violent measures, their ignorance of conditions
and blindness to the peasants' and workers' actual needs usually led
them to advocate Utopian schemes which in the end cost their
followers a terrible price.
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R U S S IAN P O P U L I S M
Chemyshevsky had evolved a simple form of historical materialism,
according to which social factors determined political ones, and not
vice versa. Consequently, he held with Fourier and Proudhon that
liberal and parliamentary ideals merely evaded the central issues: the
peasants and the workers needed food, shelter, boots; as for the right
to vote, or to be governed by liberal constitutions, or to obtain
guarantees of personal liberty, these meant little to hungry and halfnaked men. The social revolution must come first: appropriate political reforms would follow of themselves. For Chernyshevsky the principal
lesson of 1 848 was that the western liberals, the brave no less than the
cowardly, had demonstrated their political and moral bankruptcy, and
with it that of their Russian disciples- Herzen, Kavelin, Granovsky
and the rest. Russia must pursue her own path. Unlike the Slavophils,
and like the Russian Marxists of the next generation, he maintained
with a wealth of economic evidence that the historical development
of Russia, and in particular the peasant mir, were in no sense unique,
but followed the social and economic laws that governed all human
societies. Like the Marxists (and the Comtian positivists), he believed
that such laws could be discovered and stated; but unlike the Marxists,
he was convinced that by adopting western techniques, and educating
a body of men of trained and resolute wills and rational outlook,
Russia could 'leap over' the capitalist stage of social development, and
transform her village communes and free cooperative groups of craftsmen into agricultural and industrial associations of producers who would constitute the embryo of the new socialist society. Technological progress did not, in his view, automatically break up the peasant commune: 'savages can be taught to use Latin script and
safety-matches'; factories can be grafted on to workers' arttls without
destroying them; large-scale organisation could eliminate exploitation,
and yet preserve the predominantly agricultural nature of the Russian
economy.1
1 In II pDpulismo russo - translated into English as Roots of Rtr10/utiD11
(London, 1 960)- Franco Venturi very aptly quotes populist statistics (which
seem plausible enough) according to which the proportion of peasants to
that of landowners in the 1 86os was of the order of 3.f.I:I, while the land
owned by them stood to that of their masters in the ratio of I: 1 1 :, and their
incomes were :·s=97"S; as for industry, the proportion of city workers to
peasants was 1 :100. Given these ligures, it is perhaps not surprising that
Man: should have declared that his prognosis applied to the western economies,