Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

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Andrezj Walicki

The political ideology of the Decembrists had two main variants. The

most important document of the Northern Society of the conspirators was

the draft constitution prepared by Nikita Muraviev. It visualised the future

Russia as a decentralised constitutional monarchy, which restricted popular

sovereignty by property qualiﬁcations giving peasants personal freedom but

retaining for a transitional period their labour obligations to the landlords.

The leader of the Southern Society, Colonel Pavel Pestel, was much more

radical: his constitutional project entitled Russian Justice described the post-

revolutionary Russia as a centralised egalitarian republic of the Jacobin

type. A peculiarly Russian element in it was the proposal to divide land into

two equal parts: one held as alienable private property, the other reserved

for communal ownership, modelled on the existing village communes in

Russia.

Even more radical were the leaders of the Society of United Slavs – the

Borisov brothers (Andrej and P

etr) and a Pole, Julian Lubliski, who wanted

to create a democratic Slavonic federation, uniting Russia with the peoples

of East Central Europe. Unlike the Decembrists, they were in favour of a

popular revolution of the masses rather than a military revolt.

As beﬁtted revolutionists of the gentry, the Decembrists tried to link

their political ideas with the past, presenting their aim as the restoration

of the ancient Russian liberty. Typical in this respect was the poet Kon-

stantin Ryleev who, in opposition to Karamzin’s historical views, sided

with the Muscovite boyars in their struggle against the emerging autocracy

and praised the ancient liberties of the Cossacks.

2 The Nicholaevan Russia

The Decembrist uprising had a fatal inﬂuence on the new emperor.

Nicholas I decided to eradicate the revolutionary infection from Russian

life by isolating Russia from the West and, at the same time, actively sup-

porting the most conservative forces in Europe. The ofﬁcial ideology of the

new reign was summarised in three principles, proclaimed in 1833 by the

minister of education, Sergei Uvarov: orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality.

For the emerging Russian intelligentsia this victory of reaction was a

terrible blow, undermining their belief in Russia’s European identity and its

praiseworthy historical mission. The most extreme expression of these pes-

simistic moods was the Philosophical Letter of P

etr Chaadaev (1794–1856),

published in 1836. It described Russia as a country forgotten by Provi-

dence, a country without past and without future, a strange nation lacking

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Russian political thought of the nineteenth century

the supra-individual continuity of tradition, isolated from humankind and

playing no part in universal history.

The ultimate cause of this predicament was the religious schism which

separated Russia from the universal Church. Following the French tra-

ditionalists (Maistre, Bonald and Lamennais of the Atheocratic period),

Chaadaev saw the Roman Church as the purest expression of Christian

universalism. Hence the lack of the Catholic past amounted in his eyes to

non-participation in universal history.

No wonder that the Philosophical Letter aroused extreme indignation in

ofﬁcial circles and among nationalist Russians. Chaadaev was declared mad

and put under medical surveillance. In the next year, however, he modiﬁed

his views, making them more palatable for Russian patriots. In his Apology

of a Madman (1837) he recognised that the lack of history might be a kind of

privilege: without the burden of the past Russia would meet no obstacles in

learning from Europe and building its future on purely rational foundations.

An elaborated answer to Chaadaev pessimism about Russia was provided

by the so-called Slavophiles. This term, originally a nickname, designated

a group of educated landowners who criticised the Westernisation process

and preached a return to the truly Christian and Slavonic principles of

pre-Petrine Russian life. The main representatives of this current were:

Ivan Kireevskii (1806–56), a philosopher, who developed a sophisticated

Russian version of conservative romanticism; Aleksei Khomiakov (1804–

60), a lay theologian, who elaborated the concept of sobornost’, i.e. free

unity and conciliarity (from the Russian words sobor – council,andsobirat’–

bring together, unite), deﬁned by him as the inner essence of the Orthodox

Church; Konstantin Aksakov (1817–60), an extreme romantic anti-legalist,

treating law and state as alienated, artiﬁcial for ms of social life, acceptable

only as a necessary evil; and Iurii Samarin (1819–76), best known for his

political activity in prepar ing the land reform of 1861.

The Slavophile contribution to political thought consisted in providing

elaborate arguments for reversing the Westernisation of Russia, returning

to the native roots, and replacing the Eurocentric model of development –

accused of bringing about destructive rationalisation and atomisation of

life – by the Russian way, based upon the communitarian values of

Orthodox Christianity and the peasant commune. Challeng ing Chaadaev,

the Slavophiles stressed that the true guardian of Christian universalism was

the Eastern Church, and not the Church of Rome. This enabled them to

claim that the Russian values had universal signiﬁcance, representing the

truly Christian spirit in its struggle with the pagan rationalism of the West.

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The opponents of Slavophilism, called Westernisers, set against

Slavophilism the ideal of the free, autonomous personality, seen as the ﬁnal

product and central value of European progress. The main ﬁgure among

them was the famous literary critic Vissarion Belinskii (1811–48). In the

1830s he was a Right Hegelian, trying to reconcile himself with the Rus-

sian reality, as a necessary phase in the unfolding of the objective Reason

of History. At the beginning of the 1840s he rebelled against this historio-

sophical theodicy, vindicating the value of individual freedom and the role

of negation in historical processes. The logic of his philosophical position

led him to open conﬂict with Slavophile romantic conservatism. In con-

trast to the Slavophile concept of an integral, pre-individualised person, he

conceived personality as a radical negation of unreﬂective faith and tradi-

tion, saw the essence of history in the growing individualisation of people

and rationalisation of society, accepting – although not uncritically – the

bourgeois progress as a means to the further Westernisation of Russia. The

reforms of Peter the Great were for him not a national apostasy but a turning

point in the transformation of the patriarchal Russian people (narod)into

the modern Russian nation (natsiia).

Similar ideas were championed by the liberal historian, Professor of Euro-

pean History at the University of Moscow, Timofei Granovskii (1813–55),

who saw history as a process of the individualisation of the masses by means

of thought. Granovskii’s disciple, Konstantin Kavelin (1818–85), applied this

conception to Russian history, arguing in his ‘Survey of Juridical Relations

in Ancient Russia’ (published in the journal Sovremennik, 1847) that the

Russian historical process consisted in the gradual dissolution of patriarchal

bonds and their replacement by the juridical order of the centralised state,

which made more room for individual freedom. Seen from this per spective,

Peter the Great appeared as the ﬁrst completely emancipated individual in

Russian history.

Another current of Westernism was represented by the Petersburg cir-

cle of Mikhail Butashevich-Petrashevskii, active from 1845 to 1849.Its

members combined the socialist utopianism of Charles Fourier with the

anthropological materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach: in both doctrines they

found the idea of a rehabilitation of matter and of an imminent regener-

ation of humanity (Fourier’s Harmony, Feuerbach’s idea of the disalien-

ated God-like man of the future). Unlike Fourier, who showed no inter-

est in political forms, they tried to link their socialism to constitutional

and republican tendencies. From the point of view of the tsarist govern-

ment – especially in view of the revolutionary events in the West – this

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Russian political thought of the nineteenth century

combination of ideas seemed to be extremely dangerous. The main mem-

bers of the circle – among them the young writer Fyodor Dostoevsky –

were arrested and (in December 1849) sentenced to death. Only in the last

minute before the execution was this hor rible verdict commuted to hard

labour in Siberia.

The greatest thinker of the Nicholaevan epoch was certainly Alexander

Herzen (1812–70). In the 1840s he was a Westerniser and a Left Hegelian,

trying to transform Hegelianism into a philosophy of action, centred around

the concept of a free, conscious activity, changing the world in the desired

direction. However, his travel to the West in 1847, especially his negative

impressions of France under Louis-Philippe, undermined his Westernism

and Hegelian optimism. The culmination of this disappointment in the West

was the victory of the bourgeoisie in the Revolution of 1848. This was for

him a violent shock, more than sufﬁcient to destroy his f aith in an inevitable,

teleologically conceived progress. In the book From the Other Shore (1850)

he proclaimed his ﬁnal break with Hegelian belief in the rational laws of

history. He developed in it the view of history as an eternal improvisation

which never repeats itself; as a process guided not by reason but by chance

and blind forces. The belief in progress, seen in this light, turned out to be a

dangerous idolatry, demanding human sacriﬁces in the name of ideological

ﬁctions.

Having arrived at the conclusion that socialism had no chance in Europe,

since Europe had already found its equilibrium in the bourgeois system,

Herzen set forth a doctrine of Russian socialism, developed mainly in his

works Du D

eveloppement des Id

ees R

evolutionnaires en Russie (1850), Le Peuple

Russe et le Socialisme (an open letter to J. Michelet, 1851), and La Russie et le

Vieux Monde (letters to W. Linton, 1854). We ﬁnd here some characteristic

ideas of Chaadaev, of the Slavophiles, and of the liberal and democratic

Westernisers of the 1840s. Like Chaadaev, the creator of Russian socialism

asserted that Russia was a country without history, a country where no

burden of the past would hinder the introduction of a new and better social

organisation. Like the Slavophiles, he saw the immense superiority of Russia

over the West in the peasant commune and in the lack of a ﬁrm juridical

tradition of individual property. At the same time he remained faithful

to the values of the Westernisers, epitomised in the word ‘personality’. He

believed that the idea of personality, which had developed in the West at the

expense of the communal principles, was ﬁrmly rooted in Russia among

the intelligentsia of the gentry. The task of Russian socialism was thus

to reconcile the values of the Westernised Russian intelligentsia with the

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instinctive communism of the Russian peasantry: to preserve the commune

and to render the individual free.

In spite of his disillusion with the West, Herzen chose to emigrate, settled

in London and organised, with the help of Polish emigr

e democrats, the

Free Russian Press. From 1856 he was aided in this undertaking by his

closest friend, Nicholai Ogarev (1813–77). In the ﬁrst years of the reign of

Alexander II his publications – especially his journal Kolokol (The Bell) –

exerted a strong inﬂuence on public opinion in Russia. It was carefully read

even at the Imperial court.

3 Liberals and radicals of the period of reforms

Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Crimean War, together with the unex-

pected death of Nicholas I, created a situation in which important social

and political reforms – above all the emancipation of the peasantry – could

no longer be delayed. Hence the ﬁrst years of the reign of the new emperor,

Alexander II, inaugurated the period of the so-called Great Reforms. These

reforms were prepared in the atmosphere of a political thaw, which per-

mitted the rise of a relatively strong public opinion with clear-cut political

divisions.

A free forum for independent political opinion was provided by Herzen’s

publication Voices from Russia. In its ﬁrst issue (1855)anopenlettersigned

‘Russian Liberal’ appeared. It was written jointly by two liberal historians,

disciples of Granovskii, representing the

Etatist School in Russian historiog-

raphy: Konstantin Kavelin and Boris Chicherin (1828–1904). They declared

their full support for liberal reforms from above, in accordance with the

main thesis of the

Etatist School, which claimed that in Russia the state had

always been the leading organiser of society and the most important agent

of progress.

Soon afterwards, however, the two liberals parted company. Chicherin

thought that the government should be allowed to implement reforms

without the constant pressure from the left; in particular, he became very

critical of Herzen’s radicalism, accusing him (in an open letter published in

Kolokol in December 1858) of revolutionary impatience and of relying on

poetic caprices of history. Herzen reacted to this by describing Chicherin as

an old-style Hegelian, worshipping the state and believing in an inﬂex-

ible historical necessity. Kavelin sided with Herzen seeing Chicherin’s

Open Letter as a betrayal of political opposition and support of the

government.

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Russian political thought of the nineteenth century

The emancipation of the peasantry, announced on 3 March 1861

(19 February, Old Style), put on the agenda the problem of political

changes. Some wealthy nobles, grouped around Senator Nikolai Bezobra-

zov, demanded an oligarchic constitution, which would compensate them

for the loss of control over the peasantry and for the increased inﬂuence

of bureaucracy. In the broadly conceived liberal camp the constitutional

issue proved to be deeply divisive. The provincial assembly of the Tver’

gentry, led by Alexis Unkovskii, surprised the government by renounc-

ing the class privileges of the gentry and demanding a convocation of a

popularly elected constitutional assembly. An even more radical position

was taken by the emigr

e aristocrat, Prince P

etr Dolgorukov who (in his

pamphlet O Peremene Braza Pravleniia v Rossii,Leipzig,1862) demanded

the immediate transformation of Russian autocracy into a constitutional

monarchy with representative government. Kavelin, however – this time

in full agreement with Chicherin – strongly opposed such views. In his

brochure Dvorianstvo i Osvobozhdenie Krestian (Berlin, 1862) he argued that

the necessary prerequisite of political liberty must be a strong middle class

and a good, well-entrenched system of civil law.

A similar differentiation of opinion existed among the Slavophiles.

Alexander Koshel

ev, invoking the precedent of seventeenth-century Land

Assemblies in Russia, advocated the convocation of a national Land Duma

which would act as an advisory body and counterbalance St Petersburg

ofﬁcialdom. Samarin criticised this proposal as serving the particularistic

interests of the nobility and set against it the ideal of a centralised and

bureaucratic social monarchy.

However, the most important political force of the period of reforms

was the newly emerged democratic radicalism. It expressed the ideas and

attitudes of the nonconformist elements among the raznochintsy, i.e. the

intelligentsia of non-gentry social background, the educated commoners.

The chief organ of these radicals was Nikolai Nekrasov’s journal Sovremen-

nik, and its ideolog ical leaders were both sons of provincial priests: Niko-

lai Chernyshevskii (1828–89), a journalist with a scholarly, encyclopaedic

mind, and his disciple, the literary critic Nikolai Dobroliubov (1836–61). In

their philosophical views they represented materialistic scientism and criti-

cal rationalism. The concepts of reason and nature served them as powerful

means in the struggle against the institutions, traditions and prejudices of a

semi-feudal society, a struggle similar to that once waged by the thinkers

of the French Enlightenment; for that reason they were given the name of

Russian Enlighteners.

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The most sophisticated version of this materialistic outlook were the

views of Chernyshevskii, who considered himself a disciple of Feuerbach;

his Anthropological Principle in Philosophy (1860) was an attempt to combine

naturalism with some elements of Hegelian dialectical historicism. The

crudest version was the militant utilitarianism of Dmitrii Pisarev (1840–

68), publicist of the journal Russkoe Slovo. In his articles he advocated the

attitude of thinking realists whose literary prototype he saw in Bazarov,

the nihilistic hero of Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons; in deﬁance to the

generation of the fathers, i.e. the generation of Belinskii and Herzen, he

called himself a nihilist – in the sense of a radical rejection of everything

that could not be justiﬁed from a realistic, utilitarian standpoint. He was

especially obsessed with a struggle against aesthetics; that is, the creation and

consumption of non-utilitarian, merely artistic products. He went so far as

to proclaim that Pushkin was not worth reading and Raphael was not worth

a brass farthing. This aggressive iconoclasm in the domain of art was a sort

of compensation for the moderation of his social programme, which was

reduced to organic work for material and intellectual progress. But, obvi-

ously, it was very easy to transform his nihilism into a tool of revolutionary

destruction.

Chernyshevskii’s importance for Russian political thought lay mostly in

his critique of liberalism and in his conception of a speciﬁc privilege of

backwardness which (in his view) enabled Russia, and the backward coun-

tries in general, to skip the capitalist phase of development. In his critique

of liberalism, developed mostly in his essays on French political history,

Chernyshevskii distinguished sharply between liberals and democrats. The

ﬁrst, he maintained, were concerned with political liberty, which could ben-

eﬁt only privileged classes, whereas the latter saw forms of government as

unimportant, because what really mattered were the relations between social

classes and the material welfare of the people. This conception of democracy

exerted a profound inﬂuence on Russian populist thought, but, ironically, it

was not Chernyshevskii’s ﬁnal word. In his Letters without Addressees (1862),

addressed in fact to the emperor, he described political freedom as a nec-

essary condition of Russian progress and supported constitutional demands

of the gentry liberals of Tver’.

In his articles on political economy (which were known to Marx and

highly appreciated by him) Chernyshevskii set against bourgeois liberalism

a conception of the political economy of the working people. He recog-

nised the progressiveness of capitalist development in the West but wanted

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Russian political thought of the nineteenth century

for his country a more humane, non-capitalist progress, based upon com-

munal property relations. In his Criticism of Philosophical Prejudices against

the Peasant Commune (1859) he argued that Russia, like other latecomers

to the arena of history, could beneﬁt from the accumulated experience

and scientiﬁc achievement of the West in order to skip the intermediate

phases of development or at least greatly reduce their length. His argu-

ment for the Russian peasant commune was based on a dialectical view of

progress. He claimed that the ﬁrst stage of any development is similar in

form to the third; thus primitive communal collectivism is similar to the

developed collectivism of a socialist society and enables a direct transition

to it.

The evolution of Chernyshevskii’s thought was interrupted by his arrest

(1862), followed by trial and deportation to Siberia for his alleged revo-

lutionary activities. In prison, awaiting trial, he wrote the novel What is

to be Done?, describing the new people of Russia, fully emancipated and

wholeheartedly devoted to the cause of progress. Owing to the oversight

of a censor, the novel was printed in Sovremennik and became a source of

inspiration for several generations of Russian progressive youth.

4 Populism and anarchism

The end of the 1860s was marked in Russia by the emergence of a speciﬁ-

cally populist revolutionary movement. The word ‘populism’ (narodnichestvo)

referred originally to revolutionaries who wanted to work in the villages in

the name of the authentic ideals of the peasantry (as opposed to the abstract

notions of socialism, imported from the West). This tendency culminated

in the great upsurge in the people’s movement of 1874 and in the activities

of the revolutionary organisation Land and Liberty in the second half of the

1870s. In broader, contemporary usage the term ‘populism’ is the common

name for all currents of Russian agrarian socialism, aiming at Russia’s direct

transition to socialism on the basis of the peasant commune. The ﬁrst fully

articulated expressions of populist ideology were P

etr Lavrov’s (1823–1900)

Historical Letters and Nikolai Mikhailovskii’s (1842–1904) What is Progress? –

both published in 1869.

Lavrov, a philosopher and sociologist who in 1870 settled in the West and

became one of the recognised leaders of the Russian revolutionary move-

ment, wrote in his Historical Letters about the price of progress and the debt

to the people. The luxury of talking about progress, he reasoned, had been

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Andrezj Walicki

purchased by the hard labour and terrible sufferings of many generations of

heavily exploited masses. The intelligentsia, i.e. the critically thinking part

of the privileged minority, should make every effor t to discharge this debt

through revolutionary activity. Its members should be guided by the ethical

ideal of the development of the individual and the gradual embodiment of

truth and justice in social institutions. Hence they should reject all theo-

ries which claimed that progress was objective, inevitable and automatic. In

Russian conditions such theories were just a convenient tool for apologists

of capitalist development, who sanctioned and justiﬁed the sufferings of the

people by referring to the objective laws of history. Against such objectivism

Lavrov set his vindication of a self-conscious subjectivism. He meant by this

a principled defence of ethicism in social theory, coupled with the belief

in the great, sometimes decisive, role of the subjective factor in historical

processes.

It is understandable that Lavrov’s ideas had enormous appeal to the young

idealistic intelligentsia, tormented by the feeling of social guilt, dreaming

about heroic self-sacriﬁce and believing in the greatness of its progressive

mission.

Mikhailovskii, an inﬂuential literary critic and the main representative

of the populist subjective sociology, supplemented Lavrov’s ideas with a

theory of progress as a gradual approach to the integral, all-round person-

ality. Opposing Herbert Spencer, and referring positively to the critique of

capitalism in Marx’s Capital, Mikhailovskii sharply contrasted true progress

with capitalist development. All-round individuals, he claimed, were possi-

ble only in conditions of the least possible division of social labour; hence the

natural economy of peasant communes represented a higher type (although

not a higher level) of social development than the capitalist industry, max-

imising the division of labour in the interest of productivity and thus mer-

cilessly transforming individuals into mere organs of the social whole. This

was a skilful argument against the liberal view that capitalism had liber-

ated the individual. It appeared in this light that the village commune was

worthy of defence not only as a safeguard of egalitarianism but also, and

above all, for the sake of the many-sided, all-round development of human

personality, utterly impossible in the capitalist system.

Yet another variant of populism was presented in the seventies by P

etr

Tkachev (1844–86) – the leading theorist of the Jacobin, or Blanquist,

current in the Russian revolutionary movement. In his social views he

was a belated disciple of the primitive communism of Babeuf, vehemently

rejecting bourgeois individualism. He attacked from this viewpoint Lavrov’s

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Russian political thought of the nineteenth century

principle of individuality, seeing it as a dangerous concession to the ene-

mies of the people. In his programmatic article ‘What is the Party of

Progress?’ (1870), he demanded the greatest possible levelling of individual-

ities, the physiological, intellectual and moral equality of individuals, as the

precondition of social happiness. This extreme egalitarianism was bound

up in his ideology with an equally extreme revolutionary elitism. His ideal

of communism was to be implemented by a vanguard party of professional

revolutionaries who, having seized state power, would organise a paternalis-

tic dictatorship, concentrating all efforts on creating a completely new type

of human being.

Within the populist revolutionary movement Tkachev’s position was

seen, above all, as a decisive break with the view that socialists should

carefully distinguish between social and political tasks, concentrating on

the ﬁrst and leaving political struggle to bourgeois radicals. Under the

inﬂuence of Tkachev’s Jacobinism, the revolutionary party People’s Will

declared a war against government and organised a series of terrorist attacks

on its representatives. The culmination of this terrorist activity was the

assassination of the emperor, accomplished on 1 March 1881.

Besides populism, another characteristic current of Russian socialist

thought of the second half of the nineteenth century was anarchism. It

differed from populism in seeing the source of all evil and, therefore, its

enemy number one in the state.

The father of Russian anarchism was Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76). He

began his revolutionary career as a Left Hegelian, during the Springtime of

the Peoples represented revolutionary pan-Slavism, and at the end of his life

became the recognised leader of the European anarchist movement, the chief

antagonist of Marx in the First International. His main theoretical works –

The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution (1871)andStatism

and Anarchy (1873) – were passionate polemics against Marx, whom he

accused of German statism and Jewish intellectualism, and whom he fought

on behalf of the revolutionary spontaneity, inherent, he believed, in the

character of the Latin and Slavonic peoples.

Bakunin’s anarchism was not individualist, but collectivist. It was based

upon a sharp distinction between society and state: the ﬁrst is a natural

milieu of people while the second is always an alienated power, bound

up with legal compulsion and the institution of private property which

destroys the innate social instincts in people’s hearts. Society can perfectly

dispense with the state and with all forms of inter vention from without.

The ambitions of intellectuals to subject social life to scientiﬁc control are

823