various groups of populists to one another, and leaves moral and
political speculation to others. His work is not an apologia either for
populism or its opponents. He does not praise or condemn, and seeks
only to understand. Success in this task plainly needs no further reward.
And yet one may, at moments, wonder whether populism should be
dismissed quite as easily as it still is today, both by communist and
1 op. cit. (p. 227, note 1 above).
..
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R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
bourgeois historians. Were the populists so hopelessly in error? Were
Chernyshevsky and Lavrov-and Marx who listened to them-totally
deluded?
Was capitalism, in fact, inevitable in Russia? The consequences of
accelerated industrialisation prophesied by the neo-populist economists
in the 1 88os, namely a degree of social and economic misery as great
as any undergone in the west during the Industrial Revolution, did
occur, both before, and, at an increasing tempo, after the October
revolution. Were they avoidable? Some writers on history consider
this type of question to be absurd as such. What happened, happened.
We are told that if we are not to deny causality in human affairs, we
must suppose that what took place can only have done so precisely as it
did ; to ask what might have happened if the situation had been
different is the idle play of the imagination, not worthy of serious
historians. Yet this academic question is not without acute contemporary relevance. Some countries, such as, for example, Turkey, India, and some states in the Middle East and Latin America, have adopted a
slower tempo of industrialisation and one less likely to bring immediate
ruin to backward areas before they can be rehabilitated, and have done
so in conscious preference to the forced marches of collectivisation
upon which, in our day, the Russians, and after them the Chinese,
have embarked. Are these non-Marxist governments inescapably set
upon a path to ruin ? For it is populist ideas which lie at the base of
much of the socialist economic policy pursued by these and other
countries today.
When Lenin organised the Bolshevik revolution in 1 9 1 7, the
technique that he adopted, prima facie at least, resembled those commended by the Russian Jacobins, Tkachev and his followers, who had learnt them from Blanqui or Buonarroti, more than any to be found
in the writings of Marx or Engels, at any rate after 1 8 5 1 . It was not,
after all, full-grown capitalism that was enthroned in Russia in 1 9 1 7.
Russian capitalism was a still growing force, not yet in power, struggling
against the fetters imposed upon it by the monarchy and the bureaucracy, as it had done in eighteenth-century France. But Lenin acted as if the bankers and industrialists were already in control. He acted
and spoke as if this w::os so, but his revolution succeeded not so much
by taking over the centres of finance and industry (which history
should already have undermined) but by a seizure of strictly political
power on the part of a determined and trained group of professional
revolutionaries, precisely as had been advocated by Tkachev. If
2J6
R U S S IAN POPU L I S M
Russian capitalism had reached the stage which, according to Marxist
historical theory, it had to reach before a proletarian revolution could
be successful, the seizure of power by a determined minority, and a
very small one at that-a mere Putsch-could not, ex hypothesi, have
retained it long. And this, indeed, is what Plekhanov said over and
over again in his bitter denunciations of Lenin in I 9 I 7 : ignoring his
argument that much may be permitted in a backward country provided
that the results were duly saved by orthodox Marxist revolutions successfully carried out soon after in the industrially more advanced west.
These conditions were not fulfilled; Lenin's hypothesis proved
historically irrelevant; yet the Bolshevik revolution did not collapse.
Could it be .that the Marxist theory of history was mistaken? Or had
the Mensheviks misunderstood it, and concealed from themselves the
anti-democratic tendencies which had always been implicit in it? In
which case were their charges against Mikhailovsky and his friends
wholly just? By I 9 I 7 their own fears of the Bolshevik dictatorship
rested upon the same basis. Moreover, the results of the October
revolution turned out to be oddly similar to those which Tkachev's
opponents had prophesied that his methods must inevitably produce:
the emergence of an elite, wielding dictatorial power, designed in
theory to wither away once the need for it had gone; but, as the
populist democrats had said over and over again, in practice more
likely to grow in aggressiveness and strength, with a tendency towards
self-perpetuation which no dictatorship seems able to resist.
The populists were convinced that the death of the peasant commune would mean death, or at any rate a vast setback, to freedom and equality in Russia; the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who were
their direct descendants, transformed this into a demand for a form of
decentralised, democratic self-government among the peasants, which
Lenin adopted when he concluded his temporary alliance with them
in October I 9 I 7. In due course the Bolsheviks repudiated this
programme, and transformed the cells of dedicated revolutionariesperhaps the most original contribution of populism to revolutionary practice-into the hierarchy of centralised political power, which the
populists had steadily and fiercely denounced until they were themselves finally, in the form of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, proscribed and annihilated. Communist practice owed much, as Lenin was always ready to admit, to the populist movement; for it borrowed
the technique of its rival and adapted it with conspicuous success to
serve the precise purpose which it had been invented to resist.
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237
Tolstoy and Enlightenment
'Two T H I N GS are always said about Count Tolstoy,' wrote the
celebrated Russian critic Mikhailovsky in a forgotten essay published
in the mid-1 87os, 'that he is an outstandingly good writer of fiction
and a bad thinker. This . . . has become a sort of axiom needing no
demonstration.' This almost universal verdict has reigned, virtually
unchallenged, for something like a hundred years; and Mikhailovsky's
attempt to question it remained relatively isolated. Tolstoy dismissed
his left-wing ally as a routine liberal hack, and expressed surprise that
anyone should take an interest in him. This was characteristic, but
unjust. The essay which its author called The Right Hand and the
Left Hand of Leo Tolstoy is a brilliant and convincing defence of
Tolstoy on both intellectual and moral grounds, directed mainly
against the liberals and socialists who saw in the novelist's ethical
doctrines, and in particular in his glorification of the peasants and
natural instinct, and his constant disparagement of scientific culture,
a perverse and sophisticated obscurantism which discredited the liberal
cause, and played into the hands of priests and reactionaries. Mikhailovsky rejected this view, and in the course of his long and careful attempt to sift the enlightened grain from the reactionary chaff in Tolstoy's