The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  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.

  A coherent RussianJiberid tradition began not with aristocratic plans for constitutional rule under Alexander II or arguments advanced for laissez {aire under Alexander II, but with the social and economic changes ! of the 1890's: the beginning of the Trans-Siberian railway in 1891; the i famine and accelerated flight to the cities of 1891-2; the expansion of mining and industry in the Donets Basin; the growth of the Baku oil complex into the largest in the world; and the tremendous general expansion of transportation and communication facilities under the ministry of Count Witte from 1892 to 1903.23

  The logic of modernization created the need for uniform laws, of j greater rights for suppressed minorities and nationalities-particularly those with badly needed technical and administrative skills, such as Finns, Baltic Germans, and Jews. Efficiency in economic development required that large I

  numbers of people be consulted before embarking on any course of action; and some form of consultative if not legislative body seemed clearly desirable.

  Arguments for rational laws and increased popular participation in government were advanced mainly by twjo__rery^different groups in late-nineteenth-century Russia. The first group were those connected with the r£oymda] zemsfvos, the qrgans_of local administtafon^that"Alexander!II had created in 1864" without ever clearly defining their purpose and authority. Through their involvement in such problems as the supervision of local road-building and conservation projects, the zgmstvos^ almost immediately became involved in broad matters of public policy. Already in the sixties, the aristocratic leaders of several of the zemstvos in relatively Westernized regions like Tver and Chernigov sought to convert the zemstvos into organs of self-government as a kind of federative counter to the authoritarianism and bureaucratic^slotii ofjhe^central government. The Jjsar placed new restrictions and checks on the zemstvos during the generafreac- I tion of the late sixties, but called them back to life in the seventies to help in the mobilization of local resources and opinion first against the Turks and then against terrorism and revolution.

  The zemstvos aided the central government in both enterprises but ' sought to exact a price for their aid in the form of a constitution that would protect them from "terrorism from above" as well as "terrorism from; below." Many joined the informal organization of zemstvo constitutionalists organized by Ivan Petrunkevich in 1878-9 and seconded his call for a constitutional assembly. When the new Tsar once more restricted zemstvo activities during the reaction of the early eighties, zemstvo liberals acquired a voice abroad in the journal Free Word, published by the "Society of Zemstvo Union and Self-Government." Although this society proved shortlived and nationwide political agitation by the zemstvos was drastically curtailed after the assassination of Alexander II, the zemstvos continued to! grow in importance because of the great increase in their non-aristocraticj) professional staffs (the so-called third element, after the government-appointed and locally elected elements). There were nearly 70,000 zemstvo employees by the late nineties. The zemstvo ceased being an exclusively aristocratic preserve, and the two key organizations of constitutional liberalism at the turn of the century each included professional along with aristocratic "elements": the Moscow discussion group, "the S
ymposium," and the emigre journal Liberation.

  The new generation of educated professional men in the cities provided the real cement for the emerging liberal movement. The growth of professional competence in an increasingly educated and diversified society created

  a growing fund of exasperation with what seemed to them an outmoded and irrational legal system. Prophet of this new no-nonsense professionalism / was Vladimir Bezobrazov, an imaginative followerjof gaint-^?? who organized a series-of "economic dinners" to discuss various hypothetical patterns of future development for Russia. Following his French teacher, he urged the replacement of the old aristocracy of privilege by a new aristocracy of talent. He believed that the hope for Russia lay in the development of a practical, professional attitude toward the solution of its economic problems and attached particular importance to his own Saint-Simonian plan for a network of canals inside Russia. As early as 1867 he argued that the zemstvos were the natural organ for developing in Russia this thirst for "practical results" {prakticheskie rezul'taty), and that the growing professionalism of the zemstvos must be protected both from the traditionalism of the local aristocracy and the "bureaucratism" of the central government.2,1

  Increased confidence in the "practical results" being achieved by the [ various professions in Russia led to an increased desire for political and. social recognition. The static political and social system of Imperial Russia offered little place for the new professional groups that formed in the late nineteenth century: sJaadefltjmiojisJ_c^fflmjjl±ees on illiteracy, doctors and lawyers associations, and so on. These associations tended to be second only to the zemstvos as a recruiting ground for the future Constitutional Democratic Party.

  Russian liberalism was-more than any other current of ideas in f nineteenth-century Russia-the work of college professors. The most in- * fluential university professors tended to sympathize with liberalism from the time when Professor Granovskyfirst tried to present some of its salient ideas in his lectures at Moscow University in the 1840's. Granovsky, the1; spiritual father of the original Westernizers, was the first to lecture in detail to Russians on the historical development of laws and liberties in the democratic West.25 He suggested that this pattern of development was preferable to that of Russia-without raising Utopian hopes that it could be duplicated overnight on Russian soil. Although the radicals of the sixties soon overshadowed and disregarded their more moderate liberal professors, the latter were largely responsible for some of the most important liberalizing reforms of the sixties: the introduction of trial by jury and the extension of higher educational rights to women (well before such rights were recognized in the liberal democratic United States).

  Chicherin, who became mayor of Moscow and outlived his friend Granovsky by* nearly half a century, was the prototype of the moderate Rechtsstaat liberal.20 In his lectures as professor of law at Moscow, he

  stressed the importance of rational laws rather than of parliamentary bodies I as an effective limitation on arbitrary autocratic power.

  By the 1890's, however, a new generation of reform-minded intel- j lectuals was once more viewing Chicherin as a timid conservative* just as | Herzen had forty years earlier. The major spokesman for this new, more radical liberalism was another professor, Paul_Mjliukov, the learned and encyclopedic historian of Russian thought and culture. Miliukov's interpretation of Russian culture generally followed the line sketched out by Alexander Pypin, an Anglophile and positivist whose learned articles in The Herald of Europe had really begun the dispassionate, analytical study of the development of Russian thought. In the unfriendly atmosphere of the populist age, he took refuge in exhaustive studies of Russian thought and culture-a path which Miliukov was to follow on several occasions. Though a cousin of Chernyshevsky, Pypin opposed all extremism and sought to continue the tradition of the liberal Westernizers of the forties.

  Miliukov translated this wish into practical political activity at the turn? of the century. He fortified his liberal, constitutional convictions with extensive travel in France, England, and America and was influential in steering the amorphous liberal movement into a clear-cut program for "the political liberation of Russia." The older aristocratic idea of increased local autonomy and personal liberty was subordinated in the program of the Union of Liberation to the abolition of autocracy. Miliukov urged the ¦ 'immediate convention of a legislative assembly during the war and upheaval of 1904-5; and the_Cadft patty^of which he was a leading spokesman, consistently sought to extend the authority of the consultative dumas which technically acquired legislative rights in August of 1905.

  By identifying themselves psychologically with a still distant and idealized America even more than with England and France, the new Rus4 sian liberals were able to think of themselves as apostles of progress rather than apologists for bourgeois self-interest. Miliukov was only the first of a series of Russians to lecture widely in America and write for American journals; and the writings of Woodrow Wilson were known in Russia even before he entered the political arena in the United States. The introduction to a 1905 Russian translation of Wilson's The State, by Maxim Kov-alevsky, a long-time government official from one of Russia's most learned families, is as urbanely insistent on the rational rule of law (whether through constitutional monarchy or representative republicanism) as any contemporary Western essay. Two years earlier, Paul Vinogradoff, an emigre Russian veteran of the zemstvo constitutional movement, had climaxed his career as an authority on English constitutional law by his appointment to the Corpus chair of Jurisprudence at Oxford. Miliukov,

  however, went beyond their moderate demand for a state of laws rather ' than men, insisting that the constitution of 1905 did not go far enough. In addition to demanding popular sovereignty as the prerequisite for any reform, the Miliukov brand of liberals also contended that social reform and partial agrarian redistribution were necessary concomitants of political reform. The radicalism of the Cadet party led in 1906 to the introduction of new restrictions on the activities of the second duma: the most representative national political forum that had existed in Russia since the zemsky sobers of the early seventeenth century. The Cadets had dominated the first duma, seeking in effect to turn it into a legislative body. They protested its dissolution and stated their program in even more radical terms in the Vyborg manifesto of 1906. These radical liberals continued to try to bring Russian political practices into line with those of the Western democracies with which Russia was now allied diplomatically through the triple entente. Miliukov, because of his extensive knowledge of Western practice as well as Russian history, became an increasingly important spokesman for the tradition of constitutional democracy. He was one of the few to accept-indeed claim-the title of liberal; and he was the leading figure in the agitation of the so-called progressive bloc in the last duma of 1915-16: the eleventh-hour effort of liberal reformism to seize the reins of power from the corrupt and inefficient monarchy of the last Romanov.27 The fact that the constitutional liberals were inundated by the revolutionary upheaval of March, 1917, and outlawed by the Bolshevik coup of November should not be taken as indication of any inherent Russian antipathy to liberalism. These events occurred during a war which Russia was technically ill-equipped to continue. Considering the obstacles under which liberals had been laboring in Russia, their progress had been rapid and their programs intelligently conceived. Indeed, the Bolsheviks were in many ways more fearful of the liberals than of any other group during their initial efforts to seize and consolidate power. The Cadets were among the first to be imprisoned; and the appeal of the liberal democratic idea of a constituent assembly had become so great even among the revolutionaries that the Bolsheviks were forced to permit the elections for it to take place in November, 1917. Thirty-six million Russians cast ballots; and when only one fourth voted for the Bolsheviks, the dissolution of the assembly became almost a foregone conclusion. The liberal tradition had come to Russia with too little too late. It was denounced by Lenin as "parliamentary cretini
sm." Miliukov and other Cadet leaders had sought to overcome the uncertainty and political inexperience of Russian liberals. But it is doubtful if even a more confident and experienced liberal party could have established constitutional

  and parliamentary frameworks for evolutionary change amidst conditions of war, revolution, and social disintegration.

  Through the more radical program of Miliukov, the constitutional democrats had succeeded in gaining new appeal among the intellectuals and in overcoming the indifference to political reform that had been characteristic of the populists. The liberals were aided in this task by chastened, non-revolutionary elements in the populist camp. Mikhailovsky pointed the way for this more moderate populism. After refusing to collaborate with the zemstvo constitutionalists in 1878, he began to argue-on the very pages of the People's Will journal of the late seventies-that socialists should reconsider their traditional hostility toward Russian liberals. His "Political Letters of a Socialist" recognized that political reforms and constitutional liberties might facilitate the non-violent transformation of society envisaged by the evolutionary populists. A number of influential populists also assigned increased priority to political reform in the emigre journal of the late eighties, Self-Government. The "People's Justice" organization of 1893-4 committed Mikhailovsky and some three thousand other populist sympathizers inside Russia to the proposition that abolition of autocratic government in Russia was-in the words of one of their pamphlets-"the pressing question" of present-day Russian life. The liberal movement adopted many of the folk rites of populism in order to broaden their intellectual appeal. Banquets, circle discussion meetings, commemorative gatherings, and illegal publications abroad were all utilized by the new generation of liberals as they had been by earlier radicals. Many populists and Marxists, who sought to advance their socialist objectives through practical political activity rather than illegal revolutionary agitation, formed tactical alliances with the constitutional liberals in the late imperial period. Nevertheless, the constitutional democratic cause in Russia was handicapped by the split among non-revolutionary reformers between radical and conservative impulses. In order to gain the support of many intellectuals, minority groups, and populist sympathizers it was necessary to combine socialist and egalitarian proposals with constitutional reforms. Such proposals, however, alienated many provincial aristocrats and entrepreneurs. Many of those who had originally joined in the cry for constitutional reform and representative government at the turn of the century were willing to settle for the extension of civil liberties, the approval of a consultative national duma and the constitution of October, 1905. These "Octobrists" dominated the third and fourth dumas with an essentially conservative emphasis on historical continuity and the danger of revolution. Even this cautious group showed signs of vitality, however. Octobrists, aristocratic zemstvo elements, and members of various splinter groups between the