The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  Plekhanov thus offered to a new generation of radical thinkers a monistic, objective philosophy that would liberate them from schism and subjectivity. As distinct from classical materialism of France in the eighteenth century (and Russia in the 1860's), Plekhanov's materialism contained a built-in guarantee of revolutionary change, for it is "historical" or "dialectic" materialism. Following Marx, it contends that the material world is in a state of motion and conflict and that the liberation of all humanity will inevitably come out of the clash of opposing forces in the material world. The driving forces in human society are social classes; and the social class to whom the future ultimately belongs is the proletariat.

  As early as his 1884 pamphlet, "Our Differences," Plekhanov bluntly insisted that Russia was already in a capitalist stage of development. It was irrelevant to him whether private or state capitalism was controlling the economy; the practical result was that a new urban proletariat was coming into being. This class-rather than the demagogic and self-important intelligentsia or the confused and primitive peasantry-was the true bearer of progress in Russia. The proletariat had a practical familiarity with the tools of material progress and would not be so easily misled by demagogic talk of a "people's will." The growth of a proletariat was historically inevitable, and the old communal forms of organization no longer had any realistic potential for serving as socialist alternatives to the pattern of economic development which Marx had outlined in Capital. In his consistent attempt to "appeal to reason, not feelings," Plekhanov insisted that the

  Russian revolutionary movement must effect an "unconditional break with its present theories" by accepting "a revolutionary theory" rather than "theories of revolutionaries."48 The program of the Liberation of Labor group urges not the dissolution of other radical groups but rather that the revolutionary struggle be fortified by a group recognizing the importance of "organizing a Russian workers' socialist party" and acknowledging the "international character of the present-day working-class movement."47

  Plekhanov brought into the light of day many of the inconsistencies and presumptions of populist thought: the romantic attachment to the idea of a special path for Russia, the exaggerated belief in the ability of individuals to change the course of history, and the palpably unscientific theories of history and "formulas of progress" advanced by populist writers. The rational cosmopolitanism of Plekhanov's Marxism had a particular appeal to leaders of some of the minority cultures within the Russian empire, whose peoples were subjected to new indignities by the Russification campaigns of the late imperial period. Even before the first Marxist circle was formed inside Russia proper in 1885, a Marxist circle and journal had appeared in Russian-occupied Latvia; and the rapidly growing Social Democratic movement of the nineties had particular strength among the more advanced and Westernized peoples of the Russian empire: Poles, Finns, and Georgians. Plekhanov's chief lieutenant, Paul Axelrod, was a Jew, and the Jewish Bund was one of the most important catalysts in bringing together the Social Democrats of the Russian Empire for their first national congress in 1898.

  Plekhanov's Marxism also.had a more general appeal for the increasing number of thinking Russians who were becoming preoccupied with problems of material growth and economic analysis. Economic analysis became in the last two decades of the century a major subject of intellectual interest in Russia. There were sophisticated populist economists like Nicholas Dan-ielson (Marx's most regular Russian correspondent), liberal economists like Alexander Chuprov (a lecturer on political economy at the University of Moscow and a regular economic analyst for the daily newspaper Russkie Vedomosti-Russian Reports), and an increasing number of professional economists in the service of the central government and local zemstvos. The predominant influence on Witte and most government economists was Friedrich List's national system urging protective tariffs and state investment in order to develop a balanced and self-sufficient national economy.48 Also influenced by List was the great chemist Dmitry Mendeleev, who devoted much of his energy to devising the regional and industrial patterns and the necessary tariff structure for the development of a Russian national economy. He visited and admired America, but not the "politic-mongering"

  (politikanstvo) of democratic politicians. As early as 1882 he advocated separating the ministry of industry from that of finance in order to stimulate economic growth; and he was active in the agitation that led to the founding in 1903 at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute of the first separate faculty of economics in a Russian institution of higher learning.49

  Amidst all this interest in economic problems, Marxism with its unique and unequivocal insistence on the primacy of the economic factor to all of life and history was bound to have a strong intellectual appeal. So great was the infatuation with Marxist ideas in Russian intellectual circles of the nineties that Marxism rapidly became caught up in the factional debates that were simultaneously raging in the liberal camp. Some Russian Marxists, the so-called economists, accepted a Marxist analysis of economic development but wished to concentrate on improving the economic lot of the workers rather than working for a political revolution. Somewhat more radical were the "legal" Marxists, who built on Marxist economic analysis and accepted the need for a political struggle against autocracy but favored a merging of the socialist and liberal causes in a common struggle for the democratic liberties that were prerequisite for social democracy.50

  The leading spokesman for the "legal" or "revisionist" Marxists was Peter Struve, one of the most ranging minds of the late imperial period, who also participated in the new currents of liberalism and idealism. Grandson of the Danish-German first director of the Pulkovo Observatory, Struve spent much of his early life in Stuttgart, and brought to the study of Russian reality a deep grounding in the philosophical and economic thinking of the German universities and the German Social Democratic movement. His Critical Comments on the Economic Development of Russia, written in 1894 at the age of twenty-four, was the first full-length original Marxist work to be published in Russia, and it provided the guidelines for the general assault of economists in the late nineties on the populist contention that the capitalist phase of development might be avoided or bypassed in Russia. He also wrote a seminal philosophic critique of the shallow pro-gressivist ideology of Mikhailovsky and other populists in his long introduction, in 1901, to Nicholas Berdiaev's first book, Subjectivism and Individualism in Social Philosophy. This work also reflected his critical attitude toward rigid philosophical orthodoxy and revolutionary "Jacobinism" within Russian Marxism. His Marxist Theory of Social Evolution of 1899 had denied that there was a fundamental, dialectical opposition between capitalism and socialism, and foresaw a natural, continuing progression toward socialism along lines proclaimed in Eduard Bernstein's famous work of the same year, Evolutionary Socialism.51

  All three of the new perspectives of the late imperial period came to

  play a role in Struve's protean intellectual development. Although retaining an essentially Marxist approach to social and economic analysis, Struve became an active leader in the movement for constitutional liberalism, beginning with his founding of the semi-monthly journal Liberation in Stuttgart in June, 1902. His continuing interest in the Russian cultural and intellectual tradition brought him into increasingly sympathetic contact with philosophic idealists and neo-Orthodox thinkers. In his incisive contribution to their famous symposium, Landmarks, Strove blamed Bakunin and the modern tradition of "irreligious alienation from government" for the lack of constructive evolution in contemporary Russian social and political life.52

  Plekhanov resented Struve's blurring of the revolutionary element in Marxism, and insisted on fidelity to the ideology of dialectical materialism and on the development of a working-class movement distinct from those of bourgeois liberals. The main body of Russian Social Democrats (who became known as Mensheviks after the split with Lenin's Bolsheviks at the Second Congress of the Social Democrats in 1903) remained faithful to Plekhanov's doctrine, looking to
him for intellectual guidance and a continuing link with the Second Socialist International, which had come into being in 1889.

  Plekhanov and the Mensheviks represented the rationalistic middle way in Russian Marxism. They rejected any accommodation with political liberalism or philosophic idealism. But at the same time they rejected as a reversion to the discredited tactics of earlier Russian Jacobins Lenin's call for a professional revolutionary elite in his What Is To Be Done? of 1902 and his speculations on the possibility of a proletarian alliance with the revolutionary peasantry in his Two Tactics of 1906. Only amidst the turmoil of the revolutionary period would these Bolshevik ideas gain widespread popularity in Russia-along with the even more un-Marxist idea advanced during the Revolution of 1905 by Trotsky that the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions might be compressed into one uninterrupted revolutionary transformation.

  Plekhanov was unable to return to Russia until the collapse of tsardom in 1917, at which time he urged continuing the war and avoiding any premature proletarian bids for power. Ill and increasingly unnoticed amidst the rushing tide of events in the late summer of 1917, the father of Russian Marxism went, together with Vera Zasulich, his old friend and associate through the long years of emigration, on one last nostalgic climb up the Sparrow Hills, which were shortly to be renamed for Lenin. It was a melancholy reprise of the excited youthful climb of Herzen and Ogarev more than a century before, when they had sworn their oath to avenge the fallen Decembrists on the same spot. After the October Revolution, his house was

  ransacked by the victorious Bolsheviks, and he was deliberately called "citizen" rather than "comrade" in view of his "pedantic" insistence that a ‹ democratic revolution must precede a proletarian one. An old and lonely man now in disgrace with left and right alike, Plekhanov left Russia shortly thereafter for newly independent Finland, where he died of tuberculosis early in 1918.53 With him perished Marxism as an extension of Western radical humanism into Russia and a rational doctrine of economic progress and cultural enrichment. Plekhanov had hoped to overcome the conspiratorial attitudes and peasant-bred, Utopian fanaticism of the Russian revolutionary tradition on which Lenin with his greater opportunism-and perhaps deeper roots in Russian popular thinking-was building.

  Plekhanov dying in Finland while Russia was in flames in 1918 resembled in many ways Miliukov dying in France while Russia was again in flames in 1943. Both men were intellectuals, men of European culture who were at the same time profound analysts of Russian thought. Both wished to correct the errors and irrationalities of past Russian traditions by introducing rational methods of analysis and encouraging greater familiarity with the reformist traditions of the West. Both maintained concern for their native country even in defeat and oblivion, Plekhanov calling for resistance to White as well as Red terror in his last lonely days, just as Miliukov called for support of Russia against Hitler's invasion.

  Both were rejected in the early twentieth century partly because of the primitiveness of Russian' thought and the unfamiliarity and complexity of their proposals. Even more decisive, however, in the defeat of both liberal and social democracy was the failure of the West either to prevent the great war which crushed and disintegrated Russian society, or to support fully in the aftermath of that war those forces that still clamored for a chance to relate Russian development to the patterns of Western democracy.

  Mystical Idealism

  If dialectical materialism provided a method for a new generation of radicals to rise above the isolation and pessimism of the age of small deeds, mystical idealism provided the way out of subjectivism for more conservative thinkers. If Plekhanov, the prophet of Marxism, was a critic of populist particularism, Solov'ev, the spokesman for the new mysticism, was a trenchant critic of Pan-Slav and Orthodox parochialism. No less than Miliukov and Plekhanov, Solov'ev was a man of broad European interests who was steeped in Comtian philosophy and widely traveled in the West.

  But his preoccupations were religious and aesthetic rather than political. He was concerned for spiritual rather than political reasons with the fate of the Poles and the Jews within the Russian empire, and was anxious to affect a rapprochement with Roman Catholicism in the interests of a reunited and totally renovated "universal church": a "free theocracy" that would include Jews as well as Christians and would harmonize science and religion with a "free and scientific theosophy."

  Like Plekhanov and Miliukov, Solov'ev was born in the fifties and deeply affected by the ideological trends of the sixties. He was the second son and fourth child of Sergius Solov'ev, author of a history of Russia which has never been equaled either in size or in encyclopedic command of sources. From his early years young Vladimir seems to have dreamed of accomplishing something equally remarkable. As a boy, however, he was less close to his stern, humorless father than to his part-Polish mother and his grandfather, who was a priest. His youth was enlivened by a vivid imagination and a Schilleresque love of play. Known as "the pecheneg" (the most feared and adventuresome of the early steppe people), he was fascinated by tales of Spanish knights in his youth. At the age of nine he had the first of his visions of the divine feminine principle which would inspire both his poetry and his social theories. The image of the divine woman, whom he later called sophia, came to him holding a flower in the midst of shining light and is typical of the occult mystical tradition which he did much to revive and make respectable in Russia. A second vision of sophia came to him in the British Museum, where on a traveling scholarship in the mid-seventies he was studying Gnostic philosophy. He set off immediately for Egypt, where he had a third vision of sophia, before returning to Russia to present his new theories to a large and excited audience. The major philosophic rival in late Imperial Russia to the materialistic doctrine which Marx had drawn up from the economic treatises and revolutionary reflections in the British Museum proved to be the new idealism that Solov'ev conceived from religious writings and mystical visions in another part of the same great library.

  Solov'ev's conception of renovation was, in many respects, even more revolutionary and Utopian than that of the Marxists. No less than the materialist Plekhanov, the idealist Solov'ev offered an absolute, monistic philosophy to the new generation. "Not only do I believe in everything supernatural," he wrote, "but strictly speaking I believe in nothing else."54 The material world was "a kind of nightmare of sleeping humanity."55 But just as Plekhanov's materialism appealed to the younger generation because it was a dynamic, historical form of materialism, so does Solov'ev's idealistic supernaturalism have a dynamic, historical cast. It is based on the

  belief that all things in the world are in search of a unity that is bound to be realized in the concrete world through sophia. The sophia of his visions is the feminine principle of Jacob Boehme's theosophy as well as the "divine wisdom" of the Greek East. In seeking a kind of mystical erotic union with sophia, man puts himself in communion with the ideal "all-unity" (vseedinstvo) which pervades God's cosmos. Solov'ev does not, however, advocate a contemplative retreat from the world. On the contrary, the striving for "all-unity" impels one into the world of the concrete. God himself seeks "all-unity" through his creation, which is an intimate form of God's own self-expression. Man must seek this same unity and self-expression through art, personal relations, and all other areas of creative experience. Solov'ev's bete noire in the Russian intelligentsia is Tolstoy, whose later philosophy sought to deny man's sensual and creative nature. Like Dostoevsky, Solov'ev was haunted by the problems of division and separation; but the Tolstoyan idea that human striving was itself the cause of evil was deeply repellent. Whereas Tolstoy, the exuberant lover of family life, ended up denying the validity of sexual desire, Solov'ev, the lonely bachelor, saw in it one of the positive impulses through which the sense of division in humanity was overcome. Tolstoy's morality is shallow because it seeks to repress rather than engage the passions of men; because it is general and abstract rather than concrete and specific. Solov'ev pointedly entitled his long philosoph
ic treatise of 1880 A Criticism of Abstract Principles. Abstraction followed from the separation from God, which had produced "The Crisis of Western Philosophy" (the title of his first major philosophic treatise of 1874).

  A new integral philosophy was still possible in the East, Solov'ev felt, if Russia were willing to be "the East of Christ" rather than "the East of Xerxes." God demonstrated His own approval of the urge toward the concrete and sensual by taking on human form through Christ; and this act was only the first in the divinization of the world and the transfiguration of the cosmos. His famous lectures on God-manhood, which were delivered in the first half of 1878, affirm bluntly that "Christianity has a content of its own, and that content is solely and exclusively Christ."50 The important thing is not Christ's teachings-as Tolstoy might have said-for these, Solov'ev agrees, are all contained in the higher ethical pronouncements of other great religious teachers. The important thing about Christ was the concrete, integral fact of his life and mission in overcoming the separation between man and God. Men are drawn to Christ-and thus to the possibility of overcoming their own separation from God-not by the abstract thought that He is the word (logos) incarnate but by concrete attraction to the goodness and beauty of Christ's life. Man is attracted thus to the quality