in the last analysis moved by moral revulsion from the sheer mass of
suffering that capitalism was destined to bring, that is to say, by a
refusal to pay so appalling a price, no matter how valuable the results.
Their successors in the twentieth century, the Socialist-Revolutionaries,
sounded the note which runs through the whole of the populist
tradition in Russia: that the purpose of social action is not the power
of the state, but the welfare of the people; that to enrich the state and
provide it with military and industrial power, while undermining the
health, the education, the morality, the general cultural level of its
citizens, was feasible but wicked. They compared the progress of the
United States, where, they maintained, the welfare of the individual
was paramount, with that of Prussia, where it was not. They committed
themselves to the view (which goes back at least to Sismondi) that the
spiritual and physical condition of the individual citizen matters more
than the power of the state, so that if, as often happened, the two stood
in inverse ratio to one another, the rights and welfare of the individual
must come first. They rejected as historically false the proposition that
only powerful states could breed good or happy citizens, and as morally
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unacceptable the proposition that to lose oneself i n the life and welfare
of one's society is the highest form of individual self-fulfilment.
Belief in the primacy of human rights over other claims is the first
principle that separates pluralist from centralised societies, and welfare
states, mixed economies, 'New Deal' policies, from one-party governments, 'closed' societies, 'five-year plans', and, in general, forms of life built to serve a single goal that transcends the varied goals of differing
groups or individuals. Chernyshevsky was more fanatical than most
of his followers in the 18705 and 8os. and believed far more strongly
in organisation, but even he neither stopped his ears to the cries for
immediate help which he heard upon all sides, nor believed in the need
to suppress the wants of individuals who were making desperate efforts
to escape destruction, in the interests of even the most sacred and overmastering purpose. There were times when he was a narrow and unimaginative pedant, but at his worst he was never impatient, or
arrogant, or inhumane, and was perpetually reminding his readers and
himself that, in their zeal to help, the educators must not end by
bullying their would-be beneficiaries; that what 'we' -the rational
intellectuals-think good for the peasants may not be what they themselves want or need, and that to ram 'our' remedies down 'their'
throats is not permitted. Neither he nor Lavrov, nor even the most
ruthlessly Jacobin among the proponents of terror and violence, ever
took cover behind the inevitable direction of history as a justification
of what would otherwise have been patently unjust or brutal. If
violence was the only means to a given end, then there might be circumstances in which it was right to employ it; but this must be justified in each case by the intrinsic moral claim of the end-an increase in
happiness, or solidarity, or justice, or peace, or some other universal
human value that outweighs the evil of the means-never by the view
that it was rational and necessary to march in step with history,
ignoring one's scruples and dismissing one's own 'subjective' moral
principles because they were necessarily provisional, on the ground
that history herself transformed all moral systems and retrospectively
justified only those principles which survived and succeeded.
The mood of the populists, particularly in the 1 87os, can fairly be
described as religious. This group of conspirators or propagandists saw
itself, and was seen by others, as constituting a dedicated order. The
first condition of membership was the sacrifice of one's entire life to
the movement, both to the particular group and party, and to the cause
of the revolution in general. But the notion of the dictatorship of the
·'
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party o r o f i ts leaders over individual lives-in particular over the
beliefs of individual revolutionaries-is not part of this doctrine, and is
indeed contrary to its entire spirit. The only censor over the individual's
acts is his individual conscience. If one has promised obedience to the
leaders of the party, such an oath is sacred, but it extends only to the
specific revolutionary objectives of the party and not beyond them,
and ends with the completion of whatever specific goals the party
exists to promote-in the last resort, the revolution. Once the revolution has been made, each individual is free to act as he thinks fit, since discipline is a temporary means and not an end. The populists did
indeed virtually invent the conception of the party as a group of
professional conspirators with no private lives, obeying a total discipline
-the core of the 'hard' professionals as against mere"sympathisers and
fellow-travellers; but this sprang from the specific situation that
obtained in tsarist Russia, and the necessity and conditions for
effective conspiracy, and not from belief in hierarchy as a fonn of
life desirable or even tolerable in itself. Nor did the conspirators justify
their acts by appealing to a cosmic process which sanctified their every
act, since they believed in freedom of human choice and not in
determinism. The later Leninist conception of the revolutionary party
and its dictatorship, although historically it owed much to these
trained martyrs of an earlier day, sprang from a very different outlook.
The young men who poured into the villages during the celebrated
summer of 1 874 only to meet with non-comprehension, suspicion,
and often outright hostility on the part of the peasants, would have
been profoundly astonished and indignant if they had been told that
they were to look upon themselves as the sacred instruments of history,
and that their acts were therefore to be judged by a moral code
different from that common to other men.
The populist movement was a failure. 'Socialism bounced off people
like peas from a wall,' wrote the celebrated terrorist Kravchinsky
to his fellow-revolutionary Vera Zasulich in 1 876, two years after
the original wave of enthusiasm had died down. 'They listen to our
people as they do to the priest' - respectfully, without understanding,
without any effect upon their actions.
There is noise in the capitals
The prophets thunder
A furious war of words is waged
But in the depths, in the heart of Russia,
There all is still, there is ancient peace.
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These lines by Nekrasov convey the mood of frustration which
followed the failure of the sporadic effons made by the revolutionary
idealists in the late 6os and early 70s, peaceful propagandists and
isolated terrorists alike-of whom Dostoevsky painted so violent a
picture in his novel The Possessed. The government caught these men,
exiled them, imprisoned them, and by its obstinate unwillingness to
promote any measures to alleviate the consequences of an · inadequate