Cadets and the Octobrists played the leading role in forming the remarkable ; "village city" (zemgor) committees which helped finance the Russian war effort in 1915. The very divisions within the liberal camp in the early years of the twentieth century indicated, moreover, a certain vigor. Men of differing philosophic and economic outlooks sought to ally themselves with the traditions of constitutional democracy. Although the Cadets were unable to make their party the forum for all this diversified liberal sentiment, they were not nearly as timid and confused in the face of mounting chaos during the war as many other elements in Russian society. The Cadets were, indeed, the only major political group with a counter-program to that of the Bolsheviks in the critical years of revolution and civil war. The Cadets were both determined reformers and clear foes of totalitarian elements within the reforming camp.
In his elaborate post-mortems on the Revolution, Miliukov suggested that the abstract utopianism of the intelligentsia was a contributory factor to the success of Bolshevism. Criticism of the intelligentsia had been a constant theme in the writings of the ill-fated constitutional liberals of imperial Russia. In contrast to populists on the left and Pan-Slavs on the right, liberals stressed the importance of learning from the West and recognizing the rights and sanctity of the individual. But they generally favored a creative adaptation of Western liberal values to Russian conditions, not merely a slavish imitation. Kavelin, one* of the original Westernizers of the forties and an articulate aristocratic liberal throughout the rest of the century, was typical in his insistence that Russians avoid taking over "outmoded forms in which Europe itself no longer believes."28 He was as prophetically perceptive as Dostoevsky in his memorandum of 1866, depicting the revolutionary paths into which the intelligentsia was drifting; yet he also had the courage to challenge the confusion between universal values and Russian national characteristics in Dostoevsky's Pushkin speech of 1880.
One of the many neglected liberal critics of the intelligentsia in the nineteenth century was Eugene Markov, the widely traveled editor of the journal Russian Speech. He accused Russian intellectuals of being responsible for a new fanaticism that was the very antithesis of the pragmatism and empiricism of the positivists whom they were forever quoting.
The "intellectual layer" of Russia has withdrawn from participation in the activity of this essentially "practical" century. It has plunged Russia into a needless "turmoil of thought" (smuta umov) that is far more dangerous than the turmoil (smuta) of the seventeenth century, because the intelligentsia bears within itself the "sickness of narrow party-mindedness" (bolezn' parteinosti).2S Russia needs responsible citizens not "ideologues," deep criticism not "talmudism in journalism" and "judgment by shriek-
ing."30 He rejects the "Muscovite school in literature" for its "zoological" chauvinism. In an article of the late seventies called "Books and Life," Markov relates the revolutionary crisis in Russia not just to the worsening of material conditions but to the continuing refusal of the intellectuals to apply anything but "bookish theories" to Russian problems. In a perceptive passage that applies to the seventeenth as well as the nineteenth century, Markov notes:
Books, in the general course of Russian spiritual growth, have played a remarkably unimportant role, in any case considerably less than in other European countries. But, in Russia, books have produced something which they have not produced anywhere else-they have produced schism (raskol).31
The greatest need in Russia is to overcome schism, the separation between books and life. The future for Russia is almost unlimited, if its writers can "open for Russian thought the broad path to practical activity."82
Russian intellectuals are "good-for-nothings" (nikchemnye), "hypochondriacs," who prefer to be "ideologues rather than citizens or even people." His model for imitation is English political life, which teaches one "how to live, struggle, and accomplish things."33 Everyone, Markov insists, has spiritual doubts and problems; but only the English have learned to separate these concerns from political life. Unfortunately in Russia
none of us know or want to know anything about local interests or local facts. Every schoolboy seeks first of all final ends, first causes, the fate of governments, questions of the world and all humanity.34
Markov issues an almost plaintive plea for an experimental approach to Russian problems and an end to sectarian intolerance:
Let us recognize honorably and clearly the existing world . . . cease the despotic system of proscriptions and intolerance. . . . Let us be, in a word, men, enlightened citizens of Russia and not of a party or a journal. Let us be grown men of experience and strength, and not children all excited about some little book.35
His hero is Alexander II. As Markov wrote immediately after the Tsar's assassination (and shortly before his own journal was shut down by Pobe-donostsev):
This Tsar-liberator suffered like Christ at Golgotha for the sins of others. May his sufferings, like those of Christ, point the way to salvation for his true people.30
But the path of liberalization was not the way taken by Russia. The sufferings of Alexander II were commemorated not by continuing his work of reform but by building on the spot where he died a large brick church in the artificially revived Muscovite style of the late imperial period. The intrusion of this pseudo-Muscovite style into the classical architectural milieu of St. Petersburg was a kind of symbol of the return to reactionary nationalism under Alexander III and Nicholas II. Constitutional democracy was given only a brief and troubled moment on the stage of history. Its temperate ideology was lost between the frozen Russia of Pobedonostsev and the flaming Russia of social revolution. However telling the critiques advanced by Markov, Miliukov, and other liberals, the more extreme traditions of the intelligentsia prevailed over the forces calling for more moderate and experimental approaches. Two new philosophies of the late imperial period-dialectical materialism and transcendental idealism-encouraged the very tendency toward doctrinal and metaphysical thought which the liberals had tried to challenge.
Dialectical Materialism
Of the two new philosophic currents that emerged in the silver age, dialectical materialism and transcendental idealism, one was more radical and one more conservative than constitutional liberalism. Unlike liberalism, these two traditions shared a common resolve to build on the previous experience of the intelligentsia. Each of them sought to fortify Russia through ideology rather than reform it with a political program. Each sought to answer the philosophic concerns of the intelligentsia rather than challenge the relevance of these concerns to Russian problems. Whereas the constitutional liberals tended to be sharp critics of the abstract traditions of the radical intelligentsia, both the new materialists and the new idealists were solidly rooted in these traditions. The materialists claimed to be the heirs to the traditions of the iconoclastic sixties; the idealists claimed to be developing the traditions of Dostoevsky's aesthetic and religious reaction to iconoclasm.
A major reason for the simultaneous appeal of these two ideologies in the nineties was the exasperation of a new student generation with the subjectivism, pessimism, and introspection of the age of small deeds. This new generation no longer hoped to find a positive message among the oppressed Slavs of the Ottoman Empire or the oppressed peasants of the Russian Empire. The new generation felt the need to check the preoccupa-
tion with personal salvation and the self-defeating drift toward an anarchistic rejection of all authority that was characteristic of reformers of the seventies and eighties. Evolutionary populists, such as Mikhailovsky, spoke of history as a "struggle for individuality" against all forms of collective authority and all "books of fate, however learned." Revolutionary populists drifted into the indiscriminate terrorism of the People's Will and its anarchistic "disorganization section."
The passionately anti-authoritarian and semi-anarchistic Proudhon was the most important single teacher of Russian radicals during the populist age. The violent anarchism of Bakunin, the non-violent moralistic anarc
hism of Tolstoy, and the optimistic evolutionary anarchism of Kropotkin -all represented creative developments of Proudhon's widely studied social teachings.37 Tolstoy probably took the title War and Peace from Proudhon's tract of the same name. The tradition of courtroom oratory by radicals tried under the new jury system first caught the public eye in 1866, with Nicholas Sokolov's impassioned defense of Proudhon's anarchistic socialism as the true Christian answer to the problems of society. Sokolov had talked with Proudhon in Brussels in i860 and, in his book The Heretics, designated Proudhon as "the model heretic" and last in a long line of "true Christian" revolutionaries. Proudhon's insistence on a Christianity of ethics rather than metaphysics and his opposition to all forms of political authority (including that which is "made respectable by having it proceed from the •people") made him the leading prophet of the moralistic anarchism which dominated much of the thinking of the populist era.38 Following Proudhon, Russian populism was a highly emotional and moralistic doctrine that appealed to men through idealistic exhortations, which are difficult to sustain in the face of prolonged adversity. Its passionate plea for simplicity and morality in human relationships seemed inadequate to a generation that was entering the more complex world of industrialized modernity; its philosophic thinness and frequent anti-intellectualism made it repellant to the better-educated and more widely read student generation of the nineties.
Thus, the spirit of protest led the new radicals of both right and left to seek some new philosophic bedrock on which to stand. The lonely anarchistic dreamer was beginning to feel out of place in the busy society of the nineties. The subjective depression, the disjointed memoirs and sketches of the era of small deeds began to give way to the ideologies of two new prophetic figures: the Marxist George Plekhanov and the idealist Vladimir Solov'ev. Subjectivity and a sense of isolation were challenged by these two influential prophets of objective truth. Plekhanov and Solov'ev were both real philosophers rather than publicists or journalists. Each had been active in the agitation of the populist age; each went abroad in the
eighties to discover a new faith for the Russian intelligentsia. Each looked to the West-but to different Wests. Solov'ev, the partial model for Alyosha Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, was interested in religious and philosophic ideas. He went to the Catholic West in search of spiritual union and the regeneration of society through a new mystical and aesthetic attitude toward life. Plekhanov, who had led the first major demonstration of revolutionary populism in front of the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg in 1878, was interested in economic and social problems. He went to the West of the international working class movement and became the father of Russian Marxism.
Prior to Plekhanov's conversion Russians had known and venerated Marx, but had either neglected or misunderstood the main tenets of Marxism. Engels' Situation of the Working Class in England and Marx's Critique of Political Economy and Capital had been widely studied in Russia during the populist era. But populists tended to view Marx's works as.an eloquent argument for bypassing capitalism altogether. The populists insisted that the way to socialism in Russia lay in preventing rather than undergoing a capitalist stage of development; in relying on the moral idealism of the educated classes rather than the material forces of historical inevitability. Russian radicals remained close to Proudhon-Marx's original ideological foe in the European socialist movement-in their suspicion of the centralized state and of all dogma, and in their ideal of peasant simplicity and a "conservative revolution." Russian revolutionaries abroad sympathized almost to a man with the revolutionary anarchist Bakunin in his struggles with Marx in the First Socialist International (1864-76). Populist writers inside Russia looked on Marx's philosophy as a complicated Germanic theory with little application to Russian reality.
Marx himself disliked most Russians that he met, generally favored the extension of German over Russian influence in Europe, and consistently viewed Russian developments as a minor sideshow in a historical drama centered on the industrialized West. Nonetheless, he was flattered by the attention his writings received in Russia. Particularly after the failure of the French Commune in 1871, he became interested in the possibility that unrest in Russia might serve as a catalyst for a new wave of revolutionary risings in the West. He also began to study the economic development of Russia, suggesting that many Russian peasants would have to become urban workers but that the economic analysis of "capital is neither for nor against the peasant commune," which might well serve as a "point of support for social regeneration."39 Marx died in 1883 without leaving any clear analysis of Russian developments and possibilities. Engels, who was less interested in Russia than Marx, never took the time to make any detailed study of
Russian developments prior to his death in 1895; but he recognized that populism was related to the idealistic forms of socialism which he and Marx had long opposed within the international socialist movement. Shortly before bis death he wrote one of his Russian correspondents that "it is necessary to fight populism everywhere-be it German, French, English, or Russian."40
It fell on the shoulders of PlekhanoyJo conduct the Russian phase of the international struggle between authoritarian and libertarian socialism. It is curious that Marxism, which theoretically down-graded the role of the individual in history, was in practice extraordinarily dependent on the leadership of individuals. Plekhanov almost single-handedly introduced Marx-i ism into Russia as a serious alternative to the populist ideology; just as thei "three who made a revolution"-Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin-were responsible for enthroning it as a new state ideology after the unrest of 1917-21.
The essence of Plekhanov's Marxist position is contained in "Socialism and the Political Straggle" of 1883, his first major work published after his flight abroad in 1880. Plekhanov had strongly opposed the political terrorism of the People's Will while in Russia, forming his own splinter group, Black Redistribution, which attached priority to redistributing land among the dispossessed "black" elements of the population. After the failure of terrorism to produce anything but a swing to reaction, Plekhanov was in a position to claim vindication. Instead, he sought to conciliate the rival camp, to discard his own previous ultra-populist attachment to peasant ways and to federal dilution of power, and to provide a new outlook altogether for Russian radicalism.
Plekhanov begins his pamphlet of 1883 by praising the populist tradition for its "practical" orientation in going "among the people" and leading them into a "conscious political struggle."41 However, he insists that such a struggle will fail unless based on "scientific socialism" and above all on the repudiation of the anarchistic romanticism and abstract moralism of Proudhon, "the French Kant."42 A rational understanding of economic development is indispensable for those who seek revolutionary political-change. He returns regularly to this theme, most effectively in his long essay "Socialism and Anarchism," where he challenges the implicit populist idea that these two social philosophies are in some sense complementary. Socialism is the necessary form which social life must take in a modern society where the means of production have been socialized. Anarchism is an irrational form of protest against these processes. Plekhanov and his "liberation of labor" organization were the first important group of Russians to become familiar with the German Social Democratic tradition, with its emphasis on ordered progress; and they shared some of the German con-
tempt for anarchism, which was at best a "bourgeois sport" and at worst an invitation to irrationalism of all kinds:
In the name of revolution anarchists serve the cause of reaction; in the name of morality they encourage the most immoral actions; in the name of individual freedom they trample underfoot the rights of their neighbors.43
Marxism provides the theoretical basis for the revolutionary movement in Russia as elsewhere by providing an objective science of society and history. In contrast to the dualism of the populists, which was unable to "build a bridge across this seemingly bottomless abyss"44 between noble ideals and harsh realities, Plekhanov's p
hilosophy is totally monistic. The material world alone is real, he proclaims repeatedly in a series of studies on materialism that was climaxed by his most influential book (and the only one published in Russia prior to the revolution), On the Question of the Development of the Monistic View of History: In Defence of Materialism. Absolute objectivity is possible, because "the criterion of truth lies not in me, but in the relations which exist outside of me."43
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