Yet it would be unjust to link the protean Tolstoy with the narrow Pobedonostsev. Tolstoy was, in many ways, the last true giant of the reformist aristocratic intelligentsia. He sought to find both their lost links with the soil and, at the same time, the answers to "the cursed questions" about the meaning of art, history, and life itself. The greatest novelist of his age, Tolstoy died wandering far from home muttering the words: "Truth . .. I love much . . . how they."16
Here, truly, was a case of Gulliver held down by the Lilliputians: that fallen giant in one of Goya's last drawings over whose body an antlike army of little people swarms, planting their banner atop his sleeping head. Yet
Tolstoy, like so much of the aristocratic intelligentsia, volunteered for his bondage to the people. Indeed, he identified the people with Gulliver in a characteristic entry in the diary of his later years:
I went through the village and looked into windows. Poverty and ignorance were everywhere, and I reflected on the slavery of earlier days. Formely, the cause was visible, and the chain which bound the peasants easily perceived. Now there is no chain. In Europe there are threads -as many as bound Gulliver. With us one can still see ropes, or at least strings; there, threads-but they all still hold down that giant, the people, so firmly that it cannot move. There is only one salvation: not to lie down, not to fall asleep.17
This restless ethical passion was to dominate the new and sleepless century. Indeed, the new bondage of the Soviet era was to be built in part out of attitudes of humorless puritanism and ethical fanaticism that the later Tolstoy shared with the revolutionary tradition. Tolstoy, however, rejected revolution,18 and died like a lonely sectarian pilgrim in search of truth. The admonition "life is not a joke"19 in his last letter to his wife is strikingly similar to the last entry in Ivanov's notebooks: "It is not permissible to joke with God."20 The icon for his peculiar faith was the famous canvas "What Is Truth?" in which his friend Nicholas Ge portrayed a harried Christ before an imposing and imperious Pilate. The paintings and drawings by Ilya Repin of the aging Tolstoy in peasant garb on his estate served as the last icons of a dying faith that inspired awe but not imitation. There was no desire to be "very like" the late Tolstoy. His links were with the past, and his ideas developed in a world largely out of touch with the urban and industrial Russia that was coming into being.
During Tolstoy's last years, which were the early years of Nicholas II's reign, a number of fresh ideas took root among the more cosmopolitan and better-educated populace.21 The 1890's began the richly creative final period of imperial culture known variously as "the Russian Renaissance" and "the silver age." There was a kind of renaissance quality to the variety and virtuosity of new accomplishment. If silver is less precious than gold, it nonetheless enjoys wider circulation. Never before had the high culture of art and theater, of politics and ideology, involved so many people.
Reduced to its essence, the silver age may be said to have presented Russia of the 1890's with three new and very different perspectives: constitutional liberalism, dialectical materialism, and transcendental idealism. Each of these schools of thought sought to relieve the general air of Chekhovian despondency that was settling over much of Russia; each sought to break sharply with the confining reactionary rule of Pobedonostsev and the atmosphere of Russian particularism that had been characteristic of
populist and Pan-Slav alike. Each school of thought benefited from renewed cultural and diplomatic contact with Western Europe and related its ideas to those of Europe as a whole. The leading figure in each new movement of ideas-the liberal Miliukov, the Marxist Plekhanov, and the idealist Solov'ev-was born in the fifties and nurtured on the optimistic Comtian view of history. Each had participated in the radical unrest of the populist era, but had found the populist ideology inadequate and sought to provide a new antidote for the confusion and pessimism of the late imperial period.
Constitutional Liberalism
The first broadly based liberal movement in Russia dates from the'j
1890's. Only then did proponents of moderate reform, constitutional rule,
and increased civil liberties acquire a nationwide platform and an intellectual
respectability comparable to that which had long been enjoyed by more
extreme positions to the right and left. Suddenly in the new atmosphere of
the late 1890's a number of forces rapidly came together and coalesced
under the banners of "liberation" and "zemstvo constitutionalism" into a f
nationwide political movement that found expression in the formation of I
the Constitutional rJemocraJic (Cadet) party in 1905.'
The interesting question for those brought up in the liberal democratic tradition of the West is: Why was constitutional liberalism so late in coming to Russia? Basically, of course, the reason lies in the different pattern followed in Russian social and economic development. Russia remained I until the very end of the nineteenth century a relatively backward society \ still dominated by religious habit and a traditional agricultural economy. J The intelligentsia had fused elements of religious utopianism and of aristocratic snobbery into an attitude of contempt for such partial measures as constitutional reform and representative government. The very term "liberal-1 ism" was in disrepute throughout the nineteenth century; and the genuinely I liberal movement of the late century carefully avoided using the label "liberal" in its official titles.
The Russian bourgeoisie had not developed the same interest in political and civil liberties as the bourgeoisie of Western Europe. As late as 1895, the liberal Herald of Europe explained the absence of bourgeois liberalism in Russia by the lack of "a bourgeoisie in the West European sense of the word." Much of the native Russian business class was more interested f in commerce than manufacture, and thus was attached to an essentially \ conservative, agrarian way of life. Russian entrepreneurs seemed generally
more anxious to gain government support for their developmental projects than to limit governmental interference. The involvement of Jews, Germans, 1 and Armenians in Russian trade and the growing influx of foreign capital made laissez-faire liberalism seem synonymous with turning Russia over to foreign masters. Finally-and in many ways most important-there was an' enduring contempt for the bourgeoisie within the intellectual community. Rooted in the traditional distaste of the intelligentsia for meshchanstvo and nourished by aristocratic aestheticism, this prejudice against the bourgeois form of life was confirmed in the late nineteenth century by a tendency to equate the bleak world of Ibsen's plays with bourgeois society as a whole.22
Despite these practical and psychological difficulties, liberalism (both political and economic) had attracted articulate and at times influential spokesmen inside Russia throughout the nineteenth century. Liberalism in the sense of a constitutional rule of law rather than of men dates back to the time of Catherine. The Decembrists had sought constitutional rule, as had many influential advisers to both Alexander I and Alexander II. The idea of a national assembly on the model of the old zemsky sobors had found many advocates, including Herzen and numerous Slavophiles. Liberalism in ' the Manchesterian sense of freeing the economy from government interference and restraint had also found advocates-particularly in the Free! Economic Society which had been founded by Catherine the Great. Adam Smith was known and studied earlier in Russia than in many other countries; a period of almost complete economic laissez faire was enjoyed during the finance ministry of Count Reutern in the early 1860's; and Manchesterian liberalism gained the support of an influential journal, The Herald of Europe, and an articulate pressure group, The Society for the Promotion of Trade with the Fatherland.