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

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Andrezj Walicki

especially dangerous. The scientiﬁc socialism of Marx would be necessar-

ily bureaucratic and authoritarian; it would result in a tyranny of abstract

thought over real life, in a dictatorship of the learned over the unlearned

workers.

Bakunin’s best-known disciple was Prince P

etr Kropotkin (1842–1921),

a revolutionary populist who in 1876 managed to escape from t he Peter and

Paul Fortress in St Petersburg, settled in Switzerland and became one of the

leading theorists of European anarchism. He was less radical than Bakunin,

concentrating on the constructive tasks of communal self-government and

co-operation in social life. In his classic work Mutual Aid as a Factor of

Evolution he protested against the capitalist, competitive model of society

and against its ideological justiﬁcations in Social Darwinism. Himself a

naturalist and evolutionist, he tr ied to show that biological evolution and

social history were moved not only by the struggle for existence but also by

powerful factors of co-operation. Although suppressed by statism, mutual

aid was still the main force of ethical progress and would ﬂourish in the

communist anarchism of the future.

Bakunin (inﬂuenced in this respect by Feuerbach) and Kropotkin (a posi-

tivist) were decidedly anti-religious, seeing the idea of God as an expression

of human alienation and a corollary to the coercive power of the state.

A completely different, religious and programmatically non-revolutionary

variant of anarchism was represented by the famous writer, Count Lev

To l s t o i ( 1828–1910). Having passed through a spiritual crisis at the end of

the 1870s, he developed a doctrine of Christian anarchism, drawing mostly

from the Sermon on the Mount and preaching non-violent resistance to

evil. This doctrine, presented by the writer in his What I Believe (1884),

What Is To Be Done? (1886), The Kingdom of God is Within You (1893)and

other treatises, was a blend of utterly rationalised, non-confessional Chris-

tianity with radical social utopianism, forcefully attacking the state and law,

as institutionalised violence, condemning also the institutional churches and

the entire social order based upon inequality, competition and private prop-

erty. Some features of this powerful call to a return to evangelical simplicity

were strikingly similar to the idealisation of the village communes in the

populist utopia of Mikhailovskii.

Of course, Tolstoi treated politics with contempt and never saw himself as

a political thinker. Nevertheless, his radical delegitimisation of the existing

social order and of modern civilisation in its entirety exercised great political

inﬂuence on the Russian intelligentsia, contributing thereby to the overall

crisis of the old-regime Russian state.

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Russian political thought of the nineteenth century

5 Ideologies of reaction

Political polarisation during the period of reforms brought about the

emergence of the revolutionary organisation Land and Liberty and, conse-

quently, the consolidation of the conservative wing within the government.

Soon afterwards the Polish uprising of January 1863 united Russian liberals

and conservatives under the nationalist banner. Even many Russian radicals

proved susceptible to demagogic arguments portraying the insurrection as a

reactionary movement of the gentry, aiming at the restoration of Polish rule

over Lithuania and Ukraine. Herzen, who supported the Poles on moral

grounds – despite his serious doubts about the timing of their uprising and

the likelihood of its success – was violently attacked for his alleged betrayal

not only of Russia but also of socialism and democracy. The circulation of

his Kolokol dwindled rapidly and never again reached its previous high level.

The chief ideologist of the chauvinistic anti-Polish campaign in the

Russian press was a former liberal Mikhail Katkov (1818–87), editor of

Moskovskie Vedomosti and Russkii Vestnik. Very soon he came to be the most

inﬂuential spokesman of Russian conservative nationalism. He embraced the

idea of transforming Russia into a unitar ian national state on the French

model. He saw this task as modernisation of the state but stressed at the same

time that in order to fulﬁl its nation-building role Russian autocracy must

abandon its experiments with reforms and instead strengthen itself at the

expense of decentralising liberal forces. He did not hesitate to proclaim that

Russian politics must be based on brutal force in the service of outspoken

national egoism.

In the domain of foreign policy the main ideology of Russian nationalist

expansionism was pan-Slavism. Its pioneer was the conservative historian

Mikhail Pogodin (1800–75). His favourite dream was the creation, under

Russian hegemony, of a powerful union of Slavonic peoples, having its

capital in Constantinople and resurrecting thereby the ancient Byzantine

Empire. Nicholas I, deeply committed to the principles of dynastic legit-

imism, refused to embrace such ideas, but the Crimean War offered Pogodin

a chance to advocate pan-Slavism as a natural and permanent programme

for Russia’s foreign policy. The ideological justiﬁcation of this programme

was reduced to a self-contradictory mixture of conservatism with nation-

alism. Despite his deeply ingrained social conservatism, Pogodin supported

revolutionary nationalism among the Balkan Slavs, invoking the princi-

ple of national self-determination; on the other hand, however, he refused

the right of self-determination to the defeated Poles (even suggesting the

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Andrezj Walicki

deportation of patriotic Polish nobles to ethnic Poland, or to distant places

within the Empire). He also proclaimed the urgent need of the Russiﬁca-

tion of the Baltic peoples, including their conversion into Orthodoxy. His

pan-Slavism, therefore, had almost nothing in common with the idealistic

projects of a free federation of Slavonic peoples, which were developed by

progressive thinkers of the ﬁrst quarter of the century.

A somewhat different kind of pan-Slavism – trying to make use of the

Slavophile legacy – was represented by the inﬂuential journalist, editor of

several Slavophile newspapers, Ivan Aksakov (1823–86). He was sometimes

very critical of the government but, on the whole, advocated a conservative,

religiously oriented ethno-nationalism, extremely hostile towards the Poles

and the Jews, whom he perceived as the most dangerous national minorities

in Russia.

The chief theorist of pan-Slavism as a for m of the self-conscious Rus-

sian nationalism was Nikolai Danilevskii (1822–85). In his book Russia

and Europe (1871) he grounded his views on Russia’s historical mission

on naturalistic foundations, rejecting the Christian universalism of classical

Slavophilism and replacing it by a theory of self-contained and incommen-

surable civilisations, which he called historico-cultural types. This led him

to conclude that in politics there is no place for ethical idealism, that the

Slavs, under the Russian leadership, should think only about the interests of

their historical type, abandoning the utopian aim of universal Christianisa-

tion of life and ceasing to see themselves as serving the cause of an imaginary

Humanity. The European or Germanic-Romanic civilisation had already

entered the period of decline, but the Slavs, fortunately, did not belong to

Europe – they were destined to create, under Russian hegemony, a civili-

sation of their own, more powerful and many-sided than all previous ones.

To achieve this end Russia should capture Constantinople, liberate the Slavs

from Turkish and Austrian yoke, unite them under the wings of the Russian

eagle and thus become an invincible political power. This policy of external

expansion should be supported by strengthening the Russian state from

within, by suppressing the destructive inﬂuences of the decadent West and

limiting the effects of the newly introduced liberal reforms.

Danilevskii’s theory of the pluralism of civilisations was taken up and

developed by Konstanin Leontiev (1831–91) a romantic reactionary who

for several years had served as a Russian consul in Turkey. His philosophy of

history (presented most fully in his Byzantinism and Slavdom, 1875) set forth

a conception of the triune process of development. Each of the multiple

civilisations ascends from an initial simplicity to the stage of ﬂourishing

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Russian political thought of the nineteenth century

complexity through the individualisation of its parts and their integration

in a despotic unity of form. After this, development passes into the stage of

decay – the individualised parts become again homogeneous, the cultural

whole undergoes a destructive process of secondary simpliﬁcations and

levelling interfusion, resulting in its ﬁnal dissolution and death. The modern

capitalist West is a sad example of a dying culture; Russia can still avoid this

gloomy fate, on condition, however, that it bases itself on Byzantinism,

whose legacy has been preserved in its autocracy and in the Orthodox

Church.

Unlike Danilevskii, Leontiev was not a pan-Slavist. He saw nationalist

movements among the Balkan Slavs as purely tribal, culturally impotent,

serving in fact the cause of Westernisation and, therefore, not worthy of

Russian support. He thought that Russia should concentrate its efforts not

on external expansion but on internal regeneration, through the policy

of salutary reaction. But he shared the pan-Slavist belief that if Russia

had a historical mission, it could consist only in the future conquest of

Constantinople and restoring the ancient Byzantine Empire.

The assassination of Alexander II by the revolutionaries from People’s Will

was followed by a period of sweeping reaction, promoted and symbolised by

Konstantin Pobedonostsev (1827–1907) who (in the years 1880–1905) held

the position of Director General of the Holy Synod. He was very inﬂuential

already in the 1870s, as member of the Council of State and the private tutor

of the heir to the throne, the future Alexander III. He believed, following

the German Historical School of Law, that each nation evolves according

to laws speciﬁc to itself and rooted in the collective unconscious of the

masses, so that imitating other nations is always unnatural and injurious.

Russia’s native principle was the inviolability of Orthodoxy and autocracy.

Practical implementation of these views was seen by him as encouraging

anti-Semitism and conducting a policy of Russiﬁcation that systematically

restricted the rights of religious and national minorities in the empire.

Among Pobedonostsev’s closest friends was Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–

81). As the editor of the conservative journal Grazhdanin (Citizen) he used

to visit Pobedonostsev every Saturday for long discussions and even asked

his advice when he was writing The Brothers Karamazov. He was also an

admirer of Danilevskii and, on the whole, there is no doubt that as the

author of The Diary of a Writer he did enough to be regarded as a con-

servative nationalist, distinguished mostly by his anti-Catholic obsessions.

But, nonetheless, it is impossible to treat him as a conventional repre-

sentative of reactionary trends of his time. Even his imperial messianism,

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proclaiming that Constantinople should be Russia’s, had a profoundly

idealistic, universalistic dimension, sharply contrasting with Pobedonostsev’s

reactionary isolationism and Danilevskii’s realpolitik. As a writer of genius

he stood above the political divisions of his time. His masterful analysis of

the crisis of modern individualistic humanism, shown in his great novels as

a theomachic struggle for the achievement of Mangodhood (as opposed to

Christian Godmanhood), strongly inﬂuenced a number of highly diverse

thinkers in Russia and in the West. Its political importance increased after the

Bolshevik Revolution because it became widely recognised as a prophetic

foreboding of revolutionary totalitarianism and a profound insight into its

nature.

6 Vladimir Soloviev and Boris Chicherin

An important aspect of Dostoevsky’s justiﬁcation of imperial messianism

was his belief in the universalism of the Russian soul, requiring a truly

universal Orthodox-Christian state. Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900), who

was to become the greatest religious philosopher of Russia – and who

was very close to the author of The Brothers Karamazov in the early period

of his life – developed these ideas in the spirit of Chaadaev’s religious

Westernism, diametrically opposite to Dostoevsky’s anti-Catholic bias. His

philosophy of history deﬁned Russia’s great mission as the creation of a

universal, freely theocratic empire, uniting the Eastern Church with the

Latin Church under the authority of the pope and thus bringing about

the reconciliation between East and West (see Soloviev 1888, 1889). He

visualised this empire as a state deeply committed to the liberal ideals of the

rule of law, tolerance and equal rights for religious and national minorities.

He saw Katkov’s and Danilevskii’s nationalism as profoundly non-Christian

and incompatible with political unity of a multinational state. In a series of

articles published between 1883 and 1891 in the liberal Vestnik Europy (later

collected in two volumes under the title The Nationalities’ Problem in Russia,

1891) he attacked all forms of ethnic nationalism, as well as the Slavophile

idealisation of Or thodox Christianity, claiming that true patriotism had

nothing in common with national exclusivity and that commitment to

Christianisation of political life should not be confused with confessional

fundamentalism.

In his system of ethics entitled A Justiﬁcation of the Good (1897), together

with the small volume Law and Morality (1897), Soloviev made another con-

tribution to Russian liberal thought: his conception of law as an enforceable

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Russian political thought of the nineteenth century

minimum of morality gave law a function of ensuring for everyone a mini-

mum of positive freedom, including the minimum of welfare necessary for a

digniﬁed existence. Soloviev saw digniﬁed existence as a new right of man,

something legally claimable, and interpreted it very broadly: as including not

only rights to employment, to proper working conditions and proper earn-

ings, but also to rest and free time. He exhibited also ecological concerns,

demanding legal safeguards for the preservation of the natural environment.

In this manner classical liberalism of the free market and absolute private

property was transformed into a new social liberalism. No wonder that

Boris Chicherin, the most consistent representative of classical liberalism in

Russian thought, strongly disapproved of Soloviev’s position. In his view

Soloviev’s deﬁnition of law misinterpreted the nature of both law and

morality. Law, backed by the coercive power of the state, deﬁnes only

the limits of liberty, whereas morality deﬁnes dictates of moral duty, which

cannot be legally enforceable. Hence, if law and the state were conceived

as serving moral aims, the inevitable result would be boundless tyranny,

suppressing freedom of conscience and, therefore, recalling the practices

of theocracy. Seen from this perspective, Soloviev appeared to Chicherin

as legitimising theocratic despotism and deserving to be called a modern

Torquemada.

In his own legal theory, set forth in the two volumes of his Property and

State (1882–3), three volumes of A Course of Political Science (1894–8)and

in Philosophy of Law (1900), Chicherin combined economic liberalism with

Hegelianism. Following Hegel, he conceived of civil society as a sphere

of conﬂicting private interests, a sphere of individualism and economic

freedom, regulated by private law, seen as the purest expression of the idea

of law in general. He accused legal positivism of blurring the fundamental

difference between private and public law, at the expense of the former. He

insisted that this led to an illegitimate expansion of the legislative authority

of the state, thus paving the way for socialism (which he saw as a total

bureaucratisation of life and, therefore, a full suppression of private freedom).

As a political thinker Chicherin held the view that transition to consti-

tutionalism in Russia should be preceded by the introduction of universal

citizenship through the liquidation of the separate status of the peasantry,

that is, through the transformation of millions of peasants from the status

of wards of the state, attached to the compulsory rural communes, to the

status of individual proprietors, subjects of private law, equal before the law

with other members of civil society. He developed this view in a prog ram-

matic manuscript The Tasks of the New Reign, written in 1881 for the new

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Emperor. Alexander III, however, chose to embark on a completely differ-

ent policy. The tasks of a new agrarian reform, outlined by Chicherin, were

undertaken only by P

etr Stolypin – much too late and in very unfavourable

political conditions. At the end of his life Chicherin came to the conclusion

that the arbitrar y rule of Russian bureaucracy could not be broken under

the absolute power of the tsar. Under this conviction he published in Berlin

(1900) a brochure entitled Russia on the Eve of the XXth Century, proclaiming

the urgent need of transforming Russian absolutism into a constitutional

monarchy.

Despite all differences, Chicherin and Soloviev had something important

in common. Both of them paved the way for the anti-positivist revolt

in Russian culture, a part of which was the impressive development of

philosophical theories of law and the state. Hence they deserve to be treated

as the founding fathers of modern liberal constitutionalism in twentieth-

century Russia.

7 The controversy between populists and Marxists

The Russian revolutionary movement at the beginning of the 1880swas

marked by the emergence, in Geneva, of the Emancipation of Labour Group

(1883) – the ﬁrst Russian organisation to derive its programme from the

theoretical foundations of Marxism. Its leader and chief theorist was Georgii

Plekhanov (1857–1918), formerly the leader of the Black Repartition – a

populist organisation which opposed the terrorist activities of People’s Will.

In fact the populist reception of Marxism did not begin with Plekhanov.

Marx’s Capital, which appeared in Russian translation in 1872, was widely

read by all populists: Marx’s description of the atrocities of the capital-

ist development in England horriﬁed them and endorsed their belief that

everything should be done to avoid capitalism in Russia. Plekhanov, how-

ever, was the ﬁrst revolutionary theorist who discovered in Marxism the old

Hegelian idea of objective historical necessity and used it against populist

subjectivism. He emphatically rejected the favourable populist idea (formu-

lated already by Herzen and Chernyshevskii) of skipping the capitalist phase

and moving directly to socialism (although he knew, from Marx’s letter to

Vera Zasulich of 8 March 1881, that Marx himself was inclined to share this

populist hope). This meant in practice that Russian socialists should accept,

as historical inevitability, all the cruelties of capitalist development, includ-

ing the destruction of the rural communes and painful proletarianisation of

the peasantry.

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Russian political thought of the nineteenth century

In its application to the problems of Russian revolutionary movement the

objectivist theory of history meant that the revolutionaries should postpone

their struggle for socialism to an indeﬁnite future, concentrating instead

on the struggle for political freedom, that is, on the tasks of a bourgeois-

democratic revolution. In his ﬁrst Marxist books – Socialism and Political

Struggle (1883)andOur Differences (1885) – Plekhanov linked this conception

to programmatic Westernism, seeing the Western type of social development

as the universal norm and endowing Russian Marxists with the mission to

complete the work of Peter the Great. True socialism, Plekhanov argued,

was impossible without a high level of economic development; hence a

successful Westernisation of Russia was a necessary precondition of the

victory of socialist ideals in the future. The Blanquist idea of the seizure of

political power, in order to impose socialism on a backward country from

above, could result only in disastrous deviations from the normal historical

evolution.

In his philosophical book entitled On the Question of the Development of

the Monist View of History (1895) Plekhanov claimed to be the most consis-

tent and vigorous Marxist. In reality, he offered a one-sidedly deterministic

interpretation of historical materialism, coupled with an attempt to for-

mulate, in a dogmatic manner, the main tenets of dialectical materialism,

deriving the necessities of history from the dialectical laws of the universe.

In the milieu of People’s Will Plekhanov’s position was seen as tanta-

mount to a betrayal of socialism. More important, perhaps, was the fact that

his populist antagonists could borrow arguments not only from subjective

sociology but also from a theory which claimed to be entirely objective

and even offered its own interpretation of Marxism. This was the theory

of Vasilii Vorontsov (1847–1918), the leading representative of legal, non-

revolutionary populism, set forth in his book The Fate of Capitalism in Russia

(1882).

Capitalism in Russia, argued Vorontsov, was an artiﬁcial phenomenon,

depending entirely on government subsidies. It could not successfully com-

pete with the capital of the more advanced industrialised countries: for-

eign markets were already divided up, while the home market could not

be extended because of the growing poverty of the masses, which was

unavoidable in the early stage of capitalist development. In the West capital-

ism had performed a great progressive mission; in Russia, however, and in

all other backward countries, it was merely a form of the exploitation of the

masses for the beneﬁt of a small, parasitic group of the population. Hence

a successful industrialisation of Russia could be achieved only by means

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Andrezj Walicki

of socialist planning through the agencies of the government. Vorontsov

expected, of course, that this socialist industrialisation would be less painful,

more humane than the capitalist variety.

Vorontsov’s ideas were developed and modiﬁed by another legal populist,

Nikolai Danielson (1844–1918). He was the Russian translator of the ﬁrst

volume of Capital and considered himself to be a Marxist; his main book –

Outline of Our Social Economy after the Enfranchisement of the Peasants (1893)–

was written at the suggestion of Marx himself. He tried to apply the Marx-

ian method to the speciﬁc problems of a backward country, formulating his

task as follows: how to raise Russian industry to the high level of Western

industry, increasing the welfare of the people, without falling into economic

dependence on the more civilised countries. He differed from Vorontsov in

advocating more radical means: he was sceptical about such half-measures

as cheap credit for the peasants and co-operatives for artisans, putting more

emphasis on large-scale moder n industry, created and managed by the

state.

From Plekhanov’s point of view, Vorontsov and Danielson implied accep-

tance of the existing authoritarian state and, for this reason, deserved to be

called police socialists. The populists, in their turn, treated Russian Marxists

as disguised apologists of capitalism. The controversy between the two cur-

rents reached its climax in the 1890s, with the emergence of the so-called

Legal Marxists. The leading ﬁgure among them was P

etr Struve (1870–

1944) whose Critical Notes on the Economic Development of Russia (1894)

contained the famous sentence ‘We must concede that we lack culture and

go to the school of capitalism.’ After Struve’s book, Legal Marxists became

inﬂuential allies of Sergei Witte’s programme of capitalist industrialisation

of Russia, having its own periodicals and representatives in universities and

other institutions of higher education.

For the average Russian intelligent at the turn of the century Marxism in

Russia began not with Plekhanov, but with Struve. At the ﬁrst congress of

Russian Social Democrats in Minsk in 1898, it was Struve who was invited

to write the party’s Manifesto. Nevertheless, it is difﬁcult to deny that the

Legal Marxists (as Struve himself later admitted) were essentially liberals,

interested above all in economic growth and constitutional freedom. Even

in their theoretical constructions they were, from the very beginnings, very

unorthodox. Struve anticipated in his Critical Notes some of the crucial

ideas of Bernstein’s revisionism and openly stated that Marxism lacked as

yet a proper philosophical foundation. At the end of the 1890s he took an

active part in the German revisionist movement. In his study Die Marxische

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Russian political thought of the nineteenth century

Theorie der Sozialen Entwicklung (1899)heaccusedMarxofutopianismand

described social revolution as an essentially evolutionary process.

Around 1900 the majority of former Legal Marxists broke their associa-

tion with Russian social democracy and joined the ranks of the emerging

liberal movement. Some of them, under Struve’s leadership, organised in

Switzerland the Union of Liberation which was to become the nucleus of

the Constitutional Democratic Party.

In addition to the Emancipation of Labour Group and the Legal Marxists

there also existed in the 1890s a third variant of Russian Marxism: revolu-

tionary Marxism, developing in the provinces, especially in the Volga area,

and continuing in many respects the revolutionary tradition of the People’s

Will. In the 1880s a typical representative of this transitional, semi-Marxist,

semi-populist intellectual formation was Alexander Ulianov (1866–87), exe-

cuted in 1887 for an abortive attempt on the life of the emperor.

His younger brother, Vladimir Ulianov – the future Lenin – soon became

a fully-ﬂedged Marxist. His Marxism, however, differed in many respects

from Plekhanov’s orthodoxy. These differences were very visible in his

polemic treatise The Economic Content of Populism and its Criticism in Mr.

Struve’s Book (1895). Unlike Plekhanov, the young Lenin from the very

beginning suspected Str uve of being a bourgeois liberal and accused him

of putting too much stress on winning the support of the bourgeoisie

while completely disregarding the need of a revolutionary alliance with

the peasantry. He cut himself off from Struve’s objectivism, setting against

it the spirit of the party commitment (partiinost’). In accordance with the

populist legacy, he vindicated the g reat role of subjective factors – revolu-

tionary consciousness and organised will – in historical processes. Finally –

in contradistinction to both Struve and Plekhanov – he treated Russian

capitalism not as the social order of the future, which could fully develop

only in conditions of political freedom, but as a structure deﬁnitely estab-

lished under autocracy and sufﬁciently ripe to justify a relentless class war

against it.

At the threshold of the twentieth century all participants of the great

debate of the 1890s were ideologically prepared to organise their own polit-

ical parties, actively engaged in the struggle against autocracy. The views of

Vorontsov and Danielson, modiﬁed to suit revolutionary aims, became the

ideological foundation of the neo-populist party of the Socialist Revolution-

aries, established in 1901 and headed by Victor Chernov. Legal Marxists,

as already mentioned, underwent an evolution towards liberalism (com-

bined, as a rule, with transition to philosophical neo-idealism) and provided

833