The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

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  In the words of Joseph Schumpeter, social discontent is not enough to produce a revolution:

  Neither the opportunity to attack nor real or fancied grievances are in themselves sufficient to produce, however strongly they may favor, the emergence of active hostility against a social order. For such an atmosphere to develop it is necessary that there be groups to whose interest it is to work up and organize resentment, to nurse it, to voice it and to lead it.

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  These groups, these “managers,” are the intelligentsia, who may be defined as intellectuals craving for political power.

  Nothing in early-twentieth-century Russia inexorably pushed the country toward revolution, except the presence of an unusually large and fanatical body of professional revolutionaries. It is they who with their well-organized agitational campaigns in 1917 transformed a local fire, the mutiny of Petrograd’s military garrison, into a nationwide conflagration. A class in permanent opposition, hostile to all reforms and compromises, convinced that for anything to change everything had to change, it was the catalytic agent that precipitated the Russian Revolution.

  For an intelligentsia to emerge two conditions are required:

  1. An ideology based on the conviction that man is not a unique creature endowed with an immortal soul, but a material compound shaped entirely by his environment: from which premise it follows that by reordering man’s social, economic, and political environment in accord with “rational” precepts, it is possible to turn out a new race of perfectly rational human beings. This belief elevates intellectuals, as bearers of rationality, to the status of social engineers and justifies their ambition to displace the ruling elite.

  2. Opportunities for intellectuals to gain social and occupational status to advance their group interests—that is, the dissolution of estates and castes and the emergence of free professions which make them independent of the Establishment: law, journalism, secular institutions of higher learning, an industrial economy in need of experts, an educated reading public. These opportunities, accompanied by freedom of speech and of association, make it possible for intellectuals to secure a hold on public opinion.

  The word “intelligentsia” entered the English vocabulary in the 1920s from the Russian. The Russians, in turn, adopted it from France and Germany, where “intelligence” and “Intelligenz” had gained currency in the 1830s and 1840s to designate educated and “progressive” citizens.* It soon went out of fashion in the West, but in Russia it acquired great popularity in the second half of the nineteenth century to describe not so much the educated elite as those who spoke and acted on behalf of the country’s silent majority—a counterpart of the patrimonial establishment (bureaucracy, police, the military, the gentry, and the clergy). In a country in which “society” was given no political outlets, the emergence of such a group was inevitable. The term was never precisely defined, and pre-revolutionary literature is filled with disputes over what it meant and to whom it applied. Although in fact most of those regarded as intelligenty had a superior education, education in itself was not a criterion: thus, a businessman or a bureaucrat with a university degree did not qualify as a member of the intelligentsia, the former because he worked for his own profit, the latter because he worked for the profit of the Tsar. Only those qualified who committed themselves to the public good, even if they were semi-literate workers or peasants. In practice, this meant men of letters—journalists, academics, writers—and professional revolutionaries. To belong, one also had to subscribe to certain philosophical assumptions about man and society derived from the doctrines of materialism, utilitarianism, and positivism. The popularity of the word derived from the fact that it made it possible to distinguish social “activists” from passive “intellectuals.” However, we shall use the two terms interchangeably since in Western languages the distinction has not been established.

  As a self-appointed spokesman for all those not members of the establishment—that is, more than nine-tenths of the population—the Russian intelligentsia saw itself and was seen by its rivals as the principal threat to the status quo. The battle lines in the last decades of Imperial Russia were drawn between official Russia and the intelligentsia, and it was eminently clear that the victory of the latter would result in the destruction of the former. The conflict grew so bitter that anyone advocating conciliation and compromise was liable to find himself caught in a deadly cross fire. While the establishment counted mainly on its repressive apparatus to keep the intelligentsia at bay, the latter used, as a lever, popular discontent, which it aggravated with all the means at its disposal, mostly by persistent discrediting of tsarism and its supporters.

  Although circumstances caused the intelligentsia to be especially important in Russia, it was, of course, not unique to that country. Tönnies, in his seminal distinction between “communities” and “societies,” allowed that in addition to communities linked by territorial proximity and ties of blood there existed “communities of mind” whose bond was ideas.3 Pareto identified a “non-governing elite” which closely resembles the Russian intelligentsia.4 Because these groups are international, it is necessary at this point to engage in a digression from Russian history: neither the emergence of the Russian intelligentsia nor the impact of the Russian Revolution on the rest of the world can be properly appreciated without an understanding of the intellectual underpinnings of modern radicalism.

  Intellectuals first appeared in Europe as a distinct group in the sixteenth century in connection with the emergence of secular society and the concurrent advances of science. They were lay thinkers, often men of independent means, who approached the traditional questions of philosophy outside the framework of theology and the clerical establishment, which had previously enjoyed a monopoly on such speculation. Montaigne was a classic representative of the type which at the beginning of the seventeenth century came to be referred to as “intellectualist.” He reflected on life and human nature without giving any thought to the possibility that either could be changed. To humanists like him, man and the world in which he lived were givens. The task of philosophy was to help man acquire wisdom by coming to terms with that changeless reality. The supreme wisdom was to be true to one’s nature and so restrain one’s desires as to gain immunity to adversity, especially the inevitable prospect of death: in the words of Seneca, “to have the weaknesses of a man and the serenity of a god” (“habere imbecillitatem hominis, securitatem dei”). The task of philosophy, as stated in the title of the book by the sixth-century writer Boethius, was “consolation.” In its more extreme forms, such as Chinese Taoism, philosophy counseled complete inactivity: “Do nothing and everything will be done.” Until the seventeenth century, the immutability of man’s “being” was an unquestioned postulate of all philosophic thought, both in the West and in the East. It was considered a mark of folly to believe otherwise.

  It was in the early seventeenth century that a contrary trend emerged in European thought. Its stimulus came from the dramatic findings of astronomy and the other sciences. The discovery that it was possible to uncover nature’s secrets, and to use this knowledge to harness nature in the service of man, inevitably affected the way man came to view himself. The Copernican revolution displaced him and his world from the center of the universe. In one respect, this was a blow to man’s self-esteem; in another, it greatly enhanced it. By laying bare the laws governing the motions of celestial bodies, science elevated man to the status of a creature capable of penetrating the deepest mysteries of nature: the very same scientific knowledge which toppled him from the center of the universe gave him the power to become nature’s master. Francis Bacon was the earliest intellectual to grasp these implications of the scientific method and to treat knowledge—knowledge acquired through scientific observation and induction—as a means not only of gaining an understanding of the world but also of acting upon it. In his Novum Organum he asserted that the principles of physical science were applicable to human affairs.
By establishing the methods through which true knowledge was acquired—that is, by rejecting classical and scholastic models in favor of the empirical and inductive methodology employed in the natural sciences—Bacon believed himself to be laying the foundations of man’s mastery over both nature and himself: he is said to have “epitomize[d] the boundless ambition to dominate and to exploit the material resources of nature placed by God at the disposal of man.”5 That he was aware of the implications of the theory he advanced is indicated by the subtitle of his treatise on scientific methodology: De Regno Hominis (Of Man’s Dominion).

  Although scientific methodology progressively came to dominate Western thought, it took some time for man to view himself as an object of scientific inquiry. Seventeenth-century thought continued to adhere to the view inherited from antiquity and the Middle Ages, that man was composed of two discrete parts, body (soma) and soul (psyche), the one material and perishable, the other metaphysical and immortal and hence beyond the reach of empirical investigation. This conception, expressed by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo to explain his equanimity in the face of impending death, entered the mainstream of Western thought through the writings of St. Augustine. Related was a theory of knowledge based on the concept of “innate ideas,” that is, ideas believed to have been implanted in the soul at birth, including the notions of God, good and evil, the sense of time and space, and the principles of logic. The theory of innate ideas dominated European thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.6 The political implications of this theory were distinctly conservative: the immutability of human nature posited the immutability of man’s behavior and the permanence of his political and social institutions.

  Bacon already had expressed doubts about innate ideas, since they did not fit his empirical methodology, and hinted that knowledge derived from the senses. But the principal assault on the theory of innate ideas was undertaken by John Locke in 1690 in his Essay on Human Understanding. Locke dismissed the whole concept and argued that all ideas without exception derived from sensory experience. The human mind was like a “dark room” into which the sensations of sight, smell, touch, and hearing threw the only shafts of light. By reflecting on these sensations, the mind formed ideas. According to Locke, thinking was an entirely involuntary process: man could no more reject or change the ideas which the senses generated in his mind than a mirror can “refuse, alter, or obliterate the images or ideas which objects set before it do therein produce.” The denial of free will, which followed from Locke’s theory of cognition, was to be a major factor in its popularity, since it is only by eliminating free will that man could be made the subject of scientific inquiry.

  For several decades after its appearance, the influence of Locke’s Essay was confined to academic circles. It was the French philosophe Claude Helvétius who, in his anonymously published De l’Esprit (1758), first drew political consequences from Locke’s theory of knowledge, with results that have never been adequately recognized.

  It is known that Helvétius studied intensely the philosophical writings of Locke and was deeply affected by them.7 He accepted as proven Locke’s contention that all ideas were the product of sensations and all knowledge the result of man’s ability, through reflection on sensory data, to grasp the differences and similarities that are the basis of thought. He denied as categorically as did Locke man’s ability to direct thinking or the actions resulting from it: for Helvétius, his biographer says, “a philosophical treatise on liberty [was] a treatise on effects without a cause.”8 Moral notions derived exclusively from man’s experience with the sensations of pain and pleasure. People thus were neither “good” nor “bad”: they merely acted, involuntarily and mechanically, in their self-interest, which dictated the avoidance of pain and the enhancement of pleasure.

  Up to this point Helvétius said nothing that had not been said previously by Locke and his French followers. But then he made a startling leap from philosophy into politics. From the premise that all knowledge and all values were by-products of sensory experience he drew the inference that by controlling the data that the senses fed to the mind—that is, by appropriately shaping man’s environment—it was possible to determine what he thought and how he behaved. Since, according to Locke, the formulation of ideas was wholly involuntary and entirely shaped by physical sensations, it followed that if man were subjected to impressions that made for virtue, he could be made virtuous through no act of his own will.9

  This idea provides the key to the creation of perfectly virtuous human beings—required are only appropriate external influences. Helvétius called the process of molding men “education,” by which he meant much more than formal schooling. When he wrote “l’éducation peut tout”—“education can do anything”—he meant by education everything that surrounds man and affects his thinking, everything which furnishes his mind with sensations and generates ideas. First and foremost, it meant legislation: “It is … only by good laws that we can form virtuous men.”10 From which it followed that morality and legislation were “one and the same science.”11 In the concluding chapter of L’Esprit, Helvétius spoke of the desirability of reforming society through legislation for the purpose of making men “virtuous.”*

  This is one of the most revolutionary ideas in the history of political thought: by extrapolation from an esoteric theory of knowledge, a new political theory is born with the most momentous practical implications. Its central thesis holds that the task of politics is to make man “virtuous,” and that the means to that end is the manipulation of man’s social and political environment, to be accomplished mainly by means of legislation, that is, by the state. Helvétius elevates the legislator to the status of the supreme moralist. He must have been aware of the implications of his theory for he spoke of the “art of forming man” as intimately connected with the “form of government.” Man no longer is God’s creation: he is his own product. Society, too, is a “product” rather than a given or “datum.”12 Good government not only ensures “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” (a formula which Helvétius seems to have devised), but it literally refashions man. The logic of Helvétius’s ideas inexorably leads to the conclusion that in the course of learning about human nature man “acquires an unlimited power of transforming and reshaping man.”13 This unprecedented proposition constitutes the premise of both liberal and radical ideologies of modern times. It provides the theoretical justification for using politics to create a “new order.”

  Such ideas, whether in their pure or diluted version, hold an irresistible attraction for intellectuals. If, indeed, human existence in all its manifestations obeys mechanical laws that reason can lay bare and direct into desirable channels, then it follows that intellectuals, as the custodians of rational knowledge, are man’s natural leaders. Progress consists of either the instantaneous or the gradual subordination of life to “reason,” or, as it used to be said in Russia, the replacement of “spontaneity” by “consciousness.” “Spontaneous” existence, as shaped by millennia of experience and embodied in tradition, custom, and historic institutions, is, in this conception, “irrational.”

  A life ruled by “reason” is a life ruled by intellectuals: it is not surprising, therefore, that intellectuals want to change the world in accord with the requirements of “rationality.”* A market economy, with its wasteful competition and swings between overproduction and shortages, is not “rational” and hence it does not find favor with intellectuals. They prefer socialism, which is another word for the rationalization of economic activity. Democracy is, of course, mandatory, but preferably interpreted to mean the “rational” rather than the actual will of the people: Rousseau’s “general will” instead of the will made manifest through elections or referenda.

  The theories of Locke and Helvétius permit intellectuals to claim status as mankind’s “educators” in the broadest sense of that word. They are the repository of reason, which they believe to be always superior to experience. While mankind gropes
in darkness, they, the “illuminati,” know the path to virtue and, through virtue, to happiness. This whole conception puts intellectuals at odds with the rest of humanity. Ordinary people, in pursuit of their livelihood, acquire specific knowledge relevant to their particular occupation under the specific conditions in which they have to practice it. Their intelligence (reasoning) expresses itself in the ability to cope with such problems as they happen personally to confront: in the words of William James, in attaining “some particular conclusion or … gratifying] some special curiosity … which it is the reasoner’s temporary interest to attain.” The farmer understands the climatic and other requirements for his crops: knowledge that may be of little use in another place and useless in another occupation. The real estate agent knows the value of properties in his area. The politician has a sense of the aspirations and worries of his constituents. Societies function thanks to the immense variety of the concrete kinds of knowledge accumulated from experience by the individuals and groups that constitute them.

  Intellectuals and intellectuals alone claim to know things “in general.” By creating “sciences” of human affairs—economic science, political science, sociology—they establish principles said to be validated by the very “nature” of things. This claim entitles them to demand that existing practices be abandoned and existing institutions destroyed. It was the genius of Burke to grasp the premises and consequences of this kind of thinking, as expressed in the slogans and actions of the French Revolution, and to insist, in response to this experience, that where human affairs are concerned, things never exist in “general” but only in particular (“Nothing is good, but in proportion, and with Reference”14), and abstract thinking is the worst possible guide to conduct.