Another interpretation may be closer to the mark. For one thing, the wall was a lot more solid-looking than anything written on it in the last year of Stalin's reign. For another, 'not necessarily doomed' may not be a diagnosis of terminal illness but it's not a certification of good health either. And finally, most pertinently, Berlin did not believe in certainty - especially, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, about the future.
I interviewed Berlin in the summer of 1968, just after Soviet tanks overran Czechoslovakia and crushed the Prague Spring. He talked, at breakneck speed and in a baroque, erudite manner, but with great clarity, about how the invasion proved the weakness of a regime that relied so utterly on brute strength, and how it revealed the 'decrepitude' of the Soviet system and of its ideology.
Yet he - like myself and virtually everyone else I knew - still expected that system to hang on for a long time to come. In the mid-1980s, Margaret Thatcher chided Berlin for being a pessimist when he suggested that it would take a war to bring about what now would be called 'regime change' in Moscow.
Even in the Year of Miracles, 1989 - when the wall (literally and figuratively) came tumbling down - while others saw the end of history, Berlin was not ready to pronounce the end of anything. In 'The Survival of the Russian Intelligentsia' he hails the Russians for their part in the peaceful revolution that was spreading throughout the Soviet bloc. They are, he wrote, 'a great people, their creative powers are immense, and once they are set free there is no telling what they may give to the world'.
But even amidst what he calls his 'astonishment, exhilaration, happiness' about what was happening in Central Europe, he recalls Madame Bonaparte's comment when congratulated on being the mother to an emperor, three kings and a queen: 'Oui, pourvu que ga dure.' There's an echo of that caution at the end of the essay - which concludes: 'A new barbarism is always possible, but I see little prospect of it at present. That evils can, after all, be conquered, that the end of enslavement is in progress, are things of which men can be reasonably proud.'
He believed that history, including the history of ideas, is always 'in progress'. At moments when the direction seems positive, progress can be acknowledged, even celebrated - but without excessive zeal, or certainty.
This much can be said with total certainty: to be associated with the publication of this book is a cause for all of us to be more than reasonably proud.
This book, like much that bears the Brookings imprint, is the result of collaboration. Along with Bob Faherty, the director of the Brookings Press, I wish to express our gratitude to Henry Hardy of Wolfson College, Oxford, who edited these essays, lectures and other writings by Isaiah Berlin. Henry accomplished that task with the same skill and care that he has brought to fourteen earlier collections of Berlin's work, including five since Berlin's death in 1997. There are more to come, beginning with the first volume (1928-46) of Berlin's letters, published in the same season as this book.
I join Henry in expressing appreciation to Aline Berlin for supporting this project, and for contributing, along with Peter Halban, to a roundtable discussion of the manuscript, convened on 7 July 2003 under the auspices of St Antony's College - an event made possible by the kindness of the Warden, Sir Marrack Goulding, and Polly Friedhoff, the College's Public Relations and Development Officer. That session brought together scholars, colleagues and friends of Berlin's who shared with us their reminiscences of him and their knowledge of his work. The other participants were: Sir Rodric Braithwaite, Professor Archie Brown, Professor Cao Yiqiang, Larissa Haskell, Camilla Hornby, Professor Peter Oppenheimer, Dr Alex Pravda, Helen Rappaport, Professor Robert Service, Brooke Shearer, Dr Harry Shukman and Pat Utechin.
PREFACE
Henry Hardy
he possesed a clever but also cruel look and all his countenence bore an expression of a phanatic he signed death verdicts, without moving his eyebrow. his leading motto in life was "The purpose justifies the ways" he did not stop before anything for bringing out his plans.
Isaiah Berlin, 'The Purpose Justifies the Ways' (1921)[4]
I have long known that this book ought to exist. Isaiah Berlin's scattered writings on the Soviet era of Russian politics and culture are substantial both in quality and in quantity, as well as being unlike those from any other hand.
In 1991, after the successful publication of The Crooked Timber of Humanity, and in response to the collapse of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, I suggested to Berlin that a collection of his pieces on the Soviet Union might be especially timely, but he demurred, saying that most of the items in question were occasional, lightweight and somewhat obsolete. I returned to the fray, setting out the arguments in favour of the proposal. He replied as follows:
No good. I realise that all you say is perfectly sensible, but this is the wrong time, even if these things are to be published. [. . .] I think at the moment, when the Soviet Union has gone under, to add to works which dance upon its grave would be inopportune - there is far too much of this going on already - the various ways of showing the inadequacies of Marxism, Communism, Soviet organisation, the causes of the latest putsch, revolution etc. And I think these essays, if they are of any worth, which, as you know, I permanently doubt, had much better be published in ten or fifteen years' time, perhaps after my death - as interesting reflections, at best, of what things looked like to observers like myself in the '50s, '60s, '70s etc. Believe me, I am right.
More than a decade later, and some six years after Berlin's death, it seems right to put these hesitations aside, especially since developments in the former Soviet Union have not followed the swift path towards Western liberal democracy that so many (not including Berlin himself) rashly predicted; it is a commonplace that much of the Soviet mentality has survived the regime that spawned it. As for Berlin's doubts about the value - especially the permanent value - of his work, I am used to discounting these with a clear conscience, and his phrase 'observers like myself' splendidly understates the uniqueness of his own vision.
What has brought the project to fruition at this particular juncture is the welcome proposal by my friend Strobe Talbott that the pieces in question be made the subject of a seminar on Berlin's contribution to Soviet studies and published by the Brookings Institution Press. Strobe's foreword expertly places the contents of the book in the context of Berlin's oeuvre as a whole.
All the footnotes to the essays are editorial except those to which 'I.B.' is appended. A few supplementary remarks now follow on the circumstances in which the essays I have included came to be written.
The Arts in Russia under Stalin
In the autumn of 1945 Berlin, then an official of the British Foreign Office, visited the Soviet Union for the first time since he had left it in 1920, aged eleven. It was during this visit that his famous meetings with Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak took place. He did not record his memories of these encounters until thirty-five years later.1
1A shortened version of his account appears in this volume.
But he also wrote two official reports at the time. At the end of his period of duty he compiled a remarkable long memorandum on the general condition of Russian culture, giving it the characteristically unassuming title 'A Note on Literature and the Arts in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic in the Closing Months of 1945'.