The Russian Terrorist-Revolutionary Movement, 1845 – 1866: The Formation of the Intelligentsia

Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Chernyshevsky

Previous articles have covered the ideology of the Russian intelligentsia, the seedbed of the terrorist-revolutionaries, and the 1825 Decembrist Revolt, the starting point of the revolutionary movement in Russia. This article will trace the formation of the Russian intelligentsia in the 1840s and its development into the 1860s. The next article in the series will examine the revolutionaries’ turn to terrorism in the 1860s and the culmination of that phase in the assassination of the Tsar in 1881. The final article will look at the State’s reaction, how Marxism came to Russia, and the course of the revolutionary movement up to its triumph in 1917.

THE FIRST SPARK OF REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA

The arrival of revolution in Russia can be dated fairly precisely to the Decembrist Revolt in 1825, where the elite of the elite, educationally and in terms of aristocratic status, inspired by the Enlightenment and its French Revolution, had thrown themselves into a hopeless attempt, using their supporters in the military, to prevent Nicholas I (r. 1825-55) ascending to the throne. The Decembrists planned to slaughter the Emperor and anybody who defended him, and plant a Jacobin-style republican despotism amid the rubble of the old order.¹

The cannon fire that put down the mutiny on Senate Square in Saint Petersburg,² the execution of the leading surviving seditionists, and the founding of Russia’s first modern political police, the Third Section and its Gendarmes, sent shockwaves through the elite that paralysed revolutionary activity for two decades afterwards. And it was the elite that mattered, since the Decembrist revolutionaries—like all that followed—spoke in the name of “the people”, while having no connection to them. The rank-and-file soldiers on the Square were deceived by their republican officers into believing they were carrying the banner for Nicholas’ brother, Konstantin, the “rightful Tsar”. They were told the slogan the Decembrists had them chant—“Long Live the Constitution!”—referred to Konstantin’s wife. Thus did the Decembrists, the most modern and European-influenced people in Russia, fall back on the most ancient Russian tradition of false pretenders to autocratic legitimacy.³

The success of Nicholas I, a man as ascetic and dedicated to his own position as the revolutionaries were to theirs, in stamping out the embers of revolution in the Empire meant there was no temporal link between the Decembrists and the revolutionary intelligentsia that emerged in the 1840s.⁴ What existed was a felt “line of descent and sense of continuity” between the intelligentsia and the Decembrists,⁵ and in a movement that always privileged ideas over reality, this was all that mattered. A century later, Lenin spoke of the Bolsheviks as the fourth generation of revolutionaries, trying to finish what had been started by the first generation: the Decembrists.⁶

The memory—more precisely, the myth—of the Decembrists was the ideological scaffolding that propped up the Russian revolutionaries, the bridge between the old world of the unwieldy peasant bunt and the palace coup aimed at removing specific rulers, and the new world where a movement hell-bent on demolishing the fundamentals of the State and society was endemic to Russia. The execution of just five Decembrist leaders for the gravest crimes of all—high treason, attempted regicide, the murder of senior government officials—was absurdly if predictably presented by the Russian revolutionaries as unjustly harsh. More amazing was that this view was widespread in the West, setting a pattern of overwrought opprobrium directed at the Tsardom that lasts to the present day. This “martyrdom” was the great contribution of the Decembrists to the Russian revolutionary tradition, reflected in the reckless, self-sacrificing conduct of the later terrorists, who looked back to the foundational moment of revolution in Russia, where, as they saw it, men who had it all selflessly gave it up for the promise of utopia.⁷

In 1833, Education Minister Sergey Uvarov, gave to Russia for the first time an official ideology: “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and National Character”.⁸ At this time, Nicholas I was at the height of his power, more dominant in Europe than even the Soviets were after 1945 and with Russia more stable and cohesive than ever before, bound together not only by coercion but “skilful appeals to national feeling and the traditional ‘Russia idea’.”⁹ The political realm might have been sewn up, but this official doctrine was contested in journals and novels. It is one of the abiding ironies that the greatest flourishing of Russian literature was under Nicholas I, whose censors were, despite their reputation, both bumbling and permissive: they did not even aspire to the level of control later achieved by the Soviet regime.¹⁰

THE FORMATION OF THE RUSSIAN INTELLIGENTSIA

It is important to flag up at the outset that Western connotations with the word “intelligentsia” do not apply in the Russian context. The Russian intelligentsia was not an intellectual community, nor is the term a broader synonym for the educated middle-classes. The Russian intelligentsia was a subculture or state of mind, entirely defined by the adoption of a set of ideas, values, and attitudes, principally a totalising hostility to the State and the society that depended on it. While members of the intelligentsia often had some education, it tended to be partial—university drop-outs and autodidacts were mainstays of the milieu. Better educated Russians of all backgrounds could get on in the professions—as civil servants, businessmen, doctors, lawyers—but engagement with the system and any attempt to lead a normal life disqualified them from the intelligentsia. Alienation from the mainstream was the outcome of joining the revolutionary trend, not the cause.

By about 1845, writes Tibor Szamuely in his magisterial book The Russian Tradition, after a decade or so of theoretical and ideological wrangling, inspired by the German philosophers Friedrich Schelling and Georg Hegel, the oppositionist intelligentsia—the Men of the Forties—had emerged into two broad camps. First, there were the Slavophiles, looking to the past, to a vision of pre-Petrine Russian autocracy with its subsidiary representative institutions. Their vision was of a communal, classless, and organic society, uncontaminated by the Western political precepts—indeed, largely free of politics altogether, seeing Russians as “unpolitical”. The Slavophiles wanted the Westernised Russian elite swept away, and were deeply hostile to materialism, but they were most invested in “restoring” the inner spiritual life of the people under pure Christian Orthodoxy. This tendency was both more cohesive within itself and more brief, essentially dying out by the end of the 1870s. The second camp, the Westernisers, advocated for a complete break with Russia’s past and reforms along what they believed to be Western lines. It was from the “Westernisers” that the terrorist-revolutionaries would emerge.¹¹

The paradoxes within this matrix were manifold. The Slavophiles glorified Russia’s uniqueness, while their ideas derived largely from German and to a lesser extent French Romanticism. The Westerners held up Latin Europe as their model, while having little idea what it was actually like and they despised the elements they knew anything about, specifically and especially capitalism. When examined closely, the vision of the two factions was not as far apart as it might seem: their utopias were both autocratic, whether built around one man or a small elite, and, for all the Westernisers’ rhetoric, both factions agreed—as did essentially all subsequent revolutionaries—that Russia’s destiny was unique. The major distinction was over the place of religion: for Slavophiles it was central and for the Westernisers it was the root of all evil. This spilled over into their approaches to materialism, Science, and rationalism, which turned significantly on the historical debate over Pyotr I or “Peter the Great” (r. 1682-1725), a demonic figure to the Slavophiles and the archetype of what the Westernisers had in mind for Russia’s future.¹²

The trendsetter for the Russian intelligentsia’s weltanschauung was Vissarion Belinsky, the founder of Russian literary criticism and the first Russian socialist. It did not matter that Belinsky was a rather shallow ideologist, drawing mostly on pieces of French utopianism rather than Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (whom he does not seem to have known about), nor was there anything special in Belinsky’s style or charisma. The socialism elevated him: it was a theology that arrived in Russia in the 1840s as “a revelation, a solution, a signpost to the future”, which ever-after dominated the outlook of Russian revolutionaries, writes Szamuely.¹³

It was from Belinsky that the intelligentsia got the idea literature was primarily an instrument for fighting the autocracy, hence so many of them being literary critics, and his own liberalism quickly morphed into the total rejection of the Russian order, where modernity and social justice could only be achieved by revolutionary violence from above. Belinsky envisioned a superman with untrammelled power implementing this program, necessary to ensure it could be enforced against the majority view of the people if necessary. Initially, Belinsky had in mind a new Pyotr I—a man he directly once called a “new Joshua”—before becoming a convinced republican, not that it changed much in practical terms. This was a perspective that set the pattern for the next eighty years of Russian revolutionaries,¹⁴ and the fact Belinsky’s ideas—particularly around the need for an all-powerful superman—would show up in Nazi doctrine is not wholly coincidental: the Bolshevik one-party system, the culmination of what Belinsky started, served as a model for Hitler.¹⁵

Nicholas I’s regime had taken a relaxed view of this literary and political ferment until the arrest in 1849 of Mikhail Petrashevsky and his circle, the first Russian socialist group, which included, interestingly, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, later the most perceptive and thoroughgoing foe of the revolutionaries. Yet even the reappearance of subversive secret societies a quarter century after the Decembrists’ defeat did not fully get the Tsardom’s attention, as can be seen in the commutation of their death sentences. In fairness, the Petrashevskists themselves were no serious threat to the government: they made the Decembrist conspirators look positively well-organised. But they were a harbinger. Petrashevsky was crucial in popularising socialism, and furthering the spread of European socialists’ works in Russia. Within the Petrashevskists, too, there the “ideological seeds of most of the future revolutionary movements … [and] many of the men who were to play leading parts in them”, Szamuely documents. The most high-profile of these was Nikolai Speshnev, the first Russian Communist, as Soviet historiography (for once accurately) presented him, a man who advocated for a Central Committee to play the vanguard role in leading a peasant uprising to establish a revolutionary dictatorship and the reorganisation of Russian agriculture into collectivised farms.¹⁶

THE FOUNDING “FATHER”

Bringing all these strands together was Alexander Herzen, the leading figure among the Men of the Forties or the “Generation of the Fathers”. Herzen’s philosophy of Narodnichestvo formed the ideological core of the seventy-year revolutionary movement in Russia. Narodnichestvo or Narodism is usually translated as “Populism”, which is literally correct, but it has no relation to the Western meaning of that term. The root word “narod” means “people” in the sense of “volk” in German, and Narodism refers to an agrarian, revolutionary creed that one might well call national socialist.

In Herzen’s telling, he committed himself to revolution, and a willingness to die for it, in 1827, after ruminating on the Decembrists’ example. Having been a devoted Westerniser, Herzen did an about-face after emigrating to the West, to Paris, in 1847. It is tempting to compare Herzen’s reaction to that of Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb visiting the United States a century later, and there was certainly some of that, especially his dislike of the vulgar materialism amid industrialisation. But a more exact parallel is probably with the Marquis de Custine, a Frenchman who travelled in the opposite direction to Herzen in 1839. Custine’s revulsion at the Revolution and the Terror led him to an anti-democratic Catholicism—and to constructing Russia in his mind as the ideal of Christian Kingship. Reality was always destined to disappoint Custine and Herzen, and the effect on their politics was marked.

Hope briefly rekindled in Herzen when the 1848 Revolutions erupted, but those events were to be the last hurrah of his youthful Westernism. Herzen could not get over the way large sections of the bourgeoisie and even the working class rallied around their governments and openly supported the harsh reprisals against the revolutionaries who had taken to the streets in the name of “the people”. What Herzen realised was that capitalism created a middle class that was the bastion of conservatism and, so far from this stoking (only) resentment among the poor, it also incentivised them to try to enter the middle class, or at least to ensure their children did; it left little market share (even in France!) for those who wanted to destroy the system entirely. Unlike Marx, who welcomed capitalist industrialisation as Progress toward socialism, Herzen turned ferociously against the Western bourgeois path of development and essentially fell back on the Slavophile idea of Russia’s unique, messianic role. After Belinsky’s death in 1848, Herzen picked up Belinsky’s anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist ideas and took them to a much larger audience. Most importantly, Herzen reformulated his ideas to argue that backward Russia was more ripe for socialist revolution than the developed West.¹⁷

Herzen’s basic thesis was that Russia’s very lack of development—the fact it was a recent creation, born fighting for its life on all sides, without the chance to accrue settled laws and established traditions beyond a ruler with limitless, arbitrary authority—made it much easier to impose socialism on this blank slate, as opposed to Latin Europe, where the dead weight of tradition, institutions, and property-ownership created barriers to revolution, and provided power-centres that would blunt the revolutionary program even if a revolution succeeded. Latin Europe was old, capitalistic, and racked by class divisions, some of which were represented by the State, while Russia was a young, proletarian mass confronting a State without deep roots in the population, Herzen argued. Amusingly, given where Marx ended up, Marx poured scorn on Herzen’s ideas as anti-scientific and anti-universalist nationalist superstitions.¹⁸ This was a serious charge, since the Russian revolutionaries had made a cult around Science, a notable part of their worldview that has become a societal orthodoxy in the West. But Herzen was soon able to claim that Science was on his side.

In 1847, just in time for Herzen’s disillusionment, the first volume of Baron August von Haxthausen’s study of Russia’s agricultural situation, carried out at the behest of Nicholas I, was published. Sometimes called “Russia’s Columbus”, Haxthausen had used the most modern social science techniques to taxonomize Russia’s rural landscape “with true German pedantry and scrupulous scholarly precision”, as Szamuely puts it. The upshot was that the Russian village community—the obshchina or mir—was now declared, on the authority of a foreigner, always most important for Russian educated society, the central organisational feature of Russian peasant life stretching back into the distant past, a distinct organisational entity, unaffected by the feudalism and capitalism of Latin Europe, run on communal and redistributive lines by its inhabitants. Here, for Herzen, was scientific proof that “the people” in Russia were nature’s socialists, a proletarian mass just waiting to be led against their Westernised oppressors. Those who knew the Russian peasantry tried to tell Herzen—who had never met a Russian peasant and never would; he never returned to Russia before his death in 1870—that he was radically mistaken, but it made no difference. The obshchina and “peasant socialism” entered the canon of Narodism and stayed there.¹⁹

The Narodism that Herzen began proselytising for in the 1850s “combined the Westernisers’ belief in the inevitability of change and modernization with the Slavophiles’ faith in Russia’s superior virtues—and his own commitment to socialism”, writes Szamuely.²⁰ Herzen was as contemptuous in his writing of legality and practical politics as those who followed in his wake, but his intuition about what that meant was entirely different from his revolutionary successors. Herzen was an educated and aristocratic figure who had travelled in Europe and spoke its languages. When Herzen spoke of a “just” and “free” socialist society, he used those terms in ways recognisable to a Western liberal: his was an anti-statist libertarianism, bordering on anarchism, seeing individual liberty and local self-government as valuable things. The Jacobinism, centralised dictatorship, and revolutionary Terror that infatuated the revolutionaries after Herzen were cautionary tales to him, and Herzen’s generally positive view of Pyotr I came with the caveat that Herzen did not much like his methods.²¹

The difference above all between Herzen and the revolutionaries who came after him was that Herzen did not view revolution as an end in itself. Herzen did assume a revolution would be necessary to bring about socialism, but he envisioned it coming from above, and his view of the Russian masses as natural socialists led to him believing the transition—and avoiding the hated Western capitalist road—would be relatively easy. Herzen was also not doctrinaire on the point: if his brand of peasant communal socialism was available another way, he would take it—unlike his successors, who believed a violent apocalypse was an inherent part of getting to socialism.²²

Herzen acquired an influence in Russia without precedent by the 1850s. In 1853, Herzen set up the “Free Russian Press” in London and its journal, Kolokol (“The Bell”), became one of the most extraordinary phenomena in the history of journalism, essentially universally read among educated and politicised Russians for about six years, with a circulation that would have been high for a legal publication.²³ The exposure of the weakness underlying the shining edifice Nicholas I had built by the Crimean War (1853-56) and the Emperor’s death in 1855 seemed to signal all was possible. Nicholas’ son, Alexander II (r. 1855-81), was set on the abolition of serfdom. Herzen welcomed this in the pages of Kolokol, embracing the new Tsar and writing editorials of kindly advice. (It is said Alexander II had new copies of Kolokol delivered to him, learning in its pages of abuses in the Empire he then rectified.) Herzen saw the reform as a steppingstone to socialism and was quite content for it to be delivered from the hand of the Emperor. This pragmatism was to prove part of Herzen’s undoing with the “Sons” he had nurtured.²⁴

THE PROPHET OF THE SECOND GENERATION: NIKOLAI CHERNYSHEVSKY

Nikolai Chernyshevsky would become the leading figure in the second generation of the intelligentsia, the Men of the Sixties or “Generation of the Sons”, and the true founder of the Russian terrorist-revolutionaries. In almost every way, Chernyshevsky was Herzen’s opposite. Born in 1828, sixteen years after Herzen, of humble origins, the son of a clergyman’s family, Chernyshevsky was perennially poor, hardly ever travelled outside Russia, wrote in turgid and verbose prose, had an intolerant and extremist personal disposition, and spent more than twenty-five years, between his arrest in July 1862 and his death in October 1889, in penal servitude and then in exile deep in Siberia. For all Herzen’s influence in the 1850s, it was Chernyshevsky who made Narodism into the phenomenon it became, the font of sixty years of revolutionary militancy. The source of Chernyshevsky’s influence was his 1863 novel, What is to Be Done?²⁵ This influence meant that when Chernyshevsky was invited to join the staff of a monthly magazine called Sovremennik (“The Contemporary”)—Chernyshevsky was a literary critic, of course—in 1854, Chernyshevsky quickly came to dominate it, assisted by his friend, Nikolai Dobrolyubov, notably another clergyman’s son, who was only eighteen-years-old at the time and died young, aged-25, from tuberculosis, in 1861.²⁶

Chernyshevsky had no sense of what made good literature—and he did not care, which makes his novel’s success, on a scale never before seen in Russia, all the more striking. Faced with Russia’s literary flowering, Chernyshevsky denigrated her greatest novelists; he had no time for art and beauty, seeing literature only as a means of furthering the “common cause”, as he termed revolution out of sensitivity to the censors. Sovremennik’s editor, the radical poet Nikolai Nekrasov, could do nothing to rein Chernyshevsky in, even when it meant Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy severing their connections with his magazine. How could this be, when, as Szamuely notes, Chernyshevsky’s is one of the most abysmal novels published in any language? Why did even the usually discerning Georgi Plekhanov, the founder of orthodox Russian Marxism in the 1880s, praise Chernyshevsky’s dreary tome?

The key Szamuely identifies is that Chernyshevsky spoke to the radical intelligentsia in a language it wanted to hear, at the exact right moment for it. Where Herzen was largely addressing the Westernised elite, Chernyshevsky had a much better feel for the raznochintsy, the educated layer from the towns, and Chernyshevsky’s program was distinctly Russian in a way his revolutionary predecessors had not been, whether it was the Decembrists’ self-evidently imported Western ideology or Herzen spending half his life abroad. A further implication of Chernyshevsky’s deep patriotism—anomalous as it was among the Men of the Sixties and those after, his desire for socialism to better his people—was his antagonism to the nihilists, an irony since the nihilists thought, with good reason, they were simply acting on the logic of Chernyshevsky’s creed.²⁷

The most intoxicating aspect of Chernyshevsky’s novel, according to Szamuely, which does not travel outside the Russian context or even language despite the Soviets’ promotion of the book, was his presentation of the revolutionary “New Man”, the selfless, ascetic, and disciplined vanguard cadre—entirely uniform in its thoughts and actions—that set aside all concern for personal comfort and conventional rules to dedicate itself tirelessly to working on behalf of mankind.²⁸ Chernyshevsky’s description of what a revolutionary should be like and the methods he should use became canonical.

Chernyshevsky’s Narodism annexed Herzen’s ideas that Western capitalism was a greater evil than conditions under the Tsardom and that Russia was pregnant with revolution—well-placed to skip ahead to socialism faster than the West because of the obshchina—but Chernyshevsky’s parting of the ways with Herzen was Chernyshevsky’s insistence that socialism could only be accomplished by a cataclysmically violent revolution from below led by a professional elite. This was a “startling innovation in Russian political thought”, says Szamuely. The prior revolutionaries had all accepted that a peaceful revolution from above would be a decent outcome, even the anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin, whose advocacy of a mass-popular rebellion had him regarded by his contemporaries as a “wild man”. The cost in suffering and chaos that a revolution imposes had made the Men of the Forties wary. It was not regarded as a problem by Chernyshevsky: the means justified the ends.²⁹

Though Chernyshevsky labelled himself a “revolutionary democrat”, Chernyshevsky’s vision of democracy was Jacobin, not parliamentary. Equality was the ideal. “Liberty” for Chernyshevsky meant preventing one class oppressing another, not individual freedom. Chernyshevsky had no trust whatsoever in the population to understand what was best for them: the mass of the people was useful only as “raw material for … political experiments. Whoever rules it tells it what to do, and it obeys.” The revolution was for the people, but it would never be by the people. And even after the upheaval, if power was given to “the people” they would slip back into the old ways. They would need Robespierre’s “despotism of liberty” for an indeterminate period, until they had been remoulded: once there was no distinction between the revolutionaries and “the people”, democracy in the sense of majority rule could begin. Thus, Chernyshevsky saw no contradiction in the revolutionary Übermenschen holding power after the revolution as an expression of the “General Will”, with a mandate to enforce the “Common Good”. Naturally, this lent itself to an intense admiration for the “crowned revolutionary” Pyotr I.³⁰

This outlook meant Chernyshevsky’s most brutal literary attacks were on liberal reformists and any who dared to suggest ways of ameliorating Russia’s conditions through compromise or charity. Those who would improve the conditions of actual human beings in the here-and-now were, for Chernyshevsky, a more insidious enemy than the Tsar: they were lessening the momentum towards a revolution that would bring about universal happiness and seeking to put a pretty constitutional face on exploitation. The intelligentsia was small enough in the late 1850s and early 1860s that Chernyshevsky could get through to most of them—in his articles, debates, and conspiratorial meetings with students. This core of devotees indoctrinated the others and their descendants, and Chernyshevsky’s memory became the saintly parable ensuring there could be no revisions. The fact the novel was written from behind bars and Chernyshevsky’s expired in Siberia heightened his mystique, making his utterances sacrosanct.³¹

In life, Chernyshevsky had done much to coarsen the discourse of the intelligentsia—to portray any moderate sentiment as “objectively” taking the side of his Tsarist jailers—and in death his example would set the seal on this dynamic. The moderates in the intelligentsia soon internalised this view, hence their capitulation to the extremists at every moment over the decades afterwards and their persistent defence of everything and everyone who called themselves an enemy of the Tsardom.³²

LAYING THE GROUNDWORK FOR THE REVOLUTIONARIES’ TURN TO TERRORISM

Alexander II emancipated the serfs in February 1861 and gave them the greater part of the lands they worked on.³³ Some liberals and all of the revolutionary intelligentsia criticised the “repayments” mechanism to landlords as too onerous, but this is unfair and—more importantly—was seen as unfair by the freed serfs, who recognised that State power had been used to strip assets from the nobility and redistribute them to the peasantry.³⁴ “Tsar-Liberator” the peasants called Alexander II, and this truly was a new era in all of Russian history. Alexander’s “Great Reforms” over the next decade included: establishing zemstvos (elected local governing councils), restructuring the judiciary in line with Western Europe to provide inter alia for jury trials, replacing selective conscription with universal service, abolishing corporal punishment, granting some autonomy to universities, and easing censorship. Most importantly, Alexander began Russia’s industrial and capitalist development.³⁵

Where the infusion of European technology and administrative efficiency during the Petrine Reforms had largely accentuated the features of the Tsarist structure, Alexander II was changing the fabric of society. The revolutionary movement reacted with utmost alarm and hostility. The revolutionaries had not wanted emancipation to happen at all, and as a fallback hoped that if it did happen it would be without land so that serfs would be left destitute and deprived of old securities like food and shelter. The Tsar’s progressive reforms were the trigger for Narodism taking off and turning to terrorism to hasten the revolution. Szamuely describes the last half-century of the Tsardom as a race against time, perceived on both sides. Emancipation had been so long hoped for that many liberals came to see it as a panacea; there was inevitable disillusionment when all problems were not solved overnight. The crucial fact is that this was not the revolutionaries’ perspective: the revolutionaries did not reject the reforms because they were insufficient or too slow; the reforms were rejected because they were seen to be working.³⁶

From the 1860s, the intelligentsia’s primary argument for immediate, violent revolution was to prevent the capitalist and constitutionalist evolution of Russia. This argument, shockingly novel at the time, was first made in September 1861, amid the student protests in Saint Petersburg, another entirely novel development in Russia. “To the Young Generation”, a proclamation by a young poet, Mikhail Mikhailov, an associate of Chernyshevsky’s, was printed at Herzen’s “Free Russian Press” in London. Mikhailov said the Tsar’s reforms were “to turn Russia into an England”, and this was unacceptable: Russia’s backwardness is “our salvation”, without the weight of tradition Russia’s “virgin soil” was fertile ground for introducing “a new principle into history” courtesy of a revolution, and to “have to kill a hundred thousand landowners” to get there would be no bad thing. The Narodniki (Narodists or Narodniks) were generally vague about what the new regime would be like. Mikhailov, while hardly detailed, had built on Herzen’s ideas to give some pointers.³⁷

In May 1862, a more detailed post-revolutionary program was set out, and Mikhailov’s radicalism superseded, with the publication of “Young Russia”, which in simple terms laid out a plan for a small and disciplined revolutionary group to seize power, massacre its actual and potential opponents, and establish a socialist dictatorship that restructured Russia’s social and economic system. Direct advocacy for a revolutionary minority to rule was new, as was spelling out so openly the grisly methods needed to achieve this “bloody and merciless revolution”, including a call to “exterminate” the Imperial Family and anybody else who tried to defend the monarchy. Setting down patterns that would become familiar, the manifesto attacked liberals and Herzen as traitors to the revolution, demanded State centralisation, and supported “justified mystification”, i.e. Decembrist-style deceit (the manifesto itself was an example: the “Young Russia” group in whose name it was issued did not exist).³⁸

The sensation “Young Russia” caused was heightened by the fact the police never discovered who wrote it. The manifesto’s author, Pyotr Zaichnevsky, was a nineteen-year-old student, not a well-established oppositionist. Zaichnevsky was in a Moscow prison at a time when prisoners were allowed to go for walks in town, with guards who were easily bribed to allow him to transfer the manifesto to friends, who just as easily found a private printing press willing to print it. Here was the formal entry of Russian Jacobinism into the revolutionary milieu. Zaichnevsky lived until 1896: when the Bolshevik Party was founded in 1903, some of his followers logically joined it, and the Bolsheviks were generous in their acknowledgement of Zaichnevsky, whose program they followed rather closely.³⁹

“The appearance of Zaichnevsky’s and Mikhailov’s manifestos marked the transformation of Populism [or Narodism] from a set of theoretical doctrines into an active revolutionary movement”, writes Szamuely. Some historians have tried to draw a clear distinction between the earlier (and later) intelligentsia—the students, novelists, literary critics—and the terrorists, but this is apologetics not history, says Szamuely:

[T]o detach the minority of Populist activists from that broad natural environment of the Populist intelligentsia which engendered it, supported it, replenished its ranks, admired it, and often followed its lead, is to confuse the issue. Perhaps the closest analogy to the relationship between the revolutionary conspirator and the Populist intelligent is provided by the communion between clergy and believers within the Christian church. … [L]ike the early Christians, the first generation of the Populist intelligentsia constituted a tiny subversive cell within the body politic, determined to overthrow the mighty Empire and to establish the Kingdom of Heaven upon its ruins.⁴⁰

The continuity between the theoretical phase with Chernyshevsky and the active phase with Zaichnevsky is crystal clear. Zaichnevsky provided a practical blueprint to achieve Chernyshevsky’s vision, and it was the structure of “cumulative radicalisation” that Chernyshevsky had implanted within the intelligentsia—the dynamic that ensured Chernyshevsky eclipsed Herzen—which ensured Zaichnevsky triumphed over Mikhailov. The 1917 Provisional Government would meet its downfall at the hands of the Bolsheviks on exactly these terms, and the Leftist tendency to believe in “pas d’ennemis à gauche” ([there are] no [true] enemies to the Left) is with us still.

NIHILISM

After the student disturbances in late 1861 reacting in large measure to the serfs’ emancipation and then a series of mysterious fires in Saint Petersburg in May 1862, the government decided to bring the agitation to an end through the tried and tested method of rounding up the organisers. Hundreds of students and other raznochintsy, Chernyshevsky among them, were arrested in the summer of 1862, seeming to pacify the situation. However, for the first time in its history, the political police had misjudged the situation. There was a Narodnik secret society caught in the dragnet, Zemlya i Volya (Land and Liberty), formed in late 1861, led by Nikolai Serno-Solovyevich, a “close collaborator” of Chernyshevsky’s. But it was rather nebulous; the name would signal more important developments in the future. What the political police took a long time to understand, Szamuely writes, was that the source of the unrest was, rather than a conspiratorial group like the Decembrists or Petrashevskists, a “clearly defined social class standing in outright opposition to the regime, dedicated to its downfall, and providing a permanent breeding ground and sympathetic milieu for a succession of ever … more widespread revolutionary movements”.⁴¹

By this point, the oppositional intelligentsia had acquired the name “Nihilists” in the West. It was a name they adopted for themselves, ironically taking it from the self-proclaimed nihilist character “Bazarov” in Turgenev’s novel, Fathers and Sons, published in February 1862. Turgenev had set out to satirise Chernyshevsky’s “New Men” and modelled the unpleasant Bazarov on Dobrolyubov, whom he despised. It is a testament to Turgenev’s skill in understanding the radical intelligentsia on its own terms that people could read his book and come away inspired by Bazarov—not unlike what happened with Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), an anti-Communist which presented Communist ideals so rigorously that it converted some to Communism. The crucial thing is that the miscue over Turgenev’s novel showed “the complete breakdown of communications between the generations”.⁴²

To the extent Nihilism had a body of doctrine, it was developed by Dmitry Pisarev, the son of landowning nobility, who was a month away from his twenty-first birthday when the 1861 student strike broke out in Petersburg. Taken into custody as a member of Zemlya i Volya in the summer of 1862, Pisarev wrote most of his work over the next four-and-a-half years in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Pisarev’s main contribution to the revolutionary tradition was fostering a new morality based on an uncompromising utilitarianism, the belief that all mental energies not devoted to bettering mankind—i.e., igniting revolution—were wasted. Pisarev took Belinsky’s and Chernyshevsky’s view that art and literature were useful only as anti-regime propaganda to a stark new extreme.⁴³

Poetry and Pushkin, in particular, were attacked by Pisarev as frivolous. Materialism and Science were the sacred engines of Progress, and this was heavily influenced by Darwinism. On the Origin of Species had been published in 1859 and the popular, Social Darwinist understanding of it had burst onto the Russian scene around the time of the student troubles. Pisarev took from this a justification for a better-educated, “self-aware” elite to determine the future of Russia and built his “theory of the economy of intellectual force” around the idea that life was a ceaseless struggle for existence; diverting resources to abstract art could only induce weakness and lead to annihilation. (These ideas would later show up almost wholesale in Nazism.) This joyless, fanatical ascetism must have been a struggle for Pisarev personally, Szamuely says, because, unlike Chernyshevsky, Pisarev was a skilled writer who understood beauty and form. Lenin directly acknowledged Pisarev’s influence on him and the Soviet Union hailed Pisarev as a forefather of socialist aesthetics.⁴⁴

Pisarev died young—drowning in an accident in Latvia in July 1868, two years after his release from prison—but his ideas had already been absorbed and popularised by Varfolomey Zaytsev, a far cruder and more simplistic writer, though, as Szamuely notes, Zaytsev’s success was hardly accidental: most of the intelligentsia lacked Pisarev’s sophistication, too. In the hands of Zaytsev, Pisarev’s Nihilism was boiled down to an intellectual justification for increasing the young revolutionary fanatics’ self-confidence in rejecting everything that had come before, values and people, including the revolutionary Men of the Forties. If Zaytsev had an innovation, it was to write more bluntly than anyone before him about the intelligentsia’s utter contempt for the common people. Dismissing the “democratic nonsense”, Zaytsev argued for keeping the revolution in the hands of a dedicated elite because to hand over to “the people” would be to allow the nobles to be “succeeded by beasts in human form”. (Dostoyevsky used Zaytsev as the model for “Shigalev” in Demons.)⁴⁵

The word “nihilist” rapidly fell into disuse in Russia, and a little later in the West, “but the ideas [and] the way of life associated with it exerted a potent influence upon every generation of Russia intelligentsia” thereafter, Szamuely explains.⁴⁶

THE SONS BREAK WITH THE FATHERS: HERZEN’S FALL

The Russian landscape was changed forever on 4 April 1866 when Dmitry Karakozov carried out the first assassination attempt against a Russian Tsar, firing a shot at Alexander II as he was leaving the Summer Garden in Saint Petersburg after a walk. Karakozov’s shot missed because Ossip Komissarov, a local man of peasant origins, saw what was happening and knocked Karakozov’s hand upwards. There were to be many consequences from this, three of them immediate.

One: this was perhaps the first time the revolutionary movement was made to realise how far removed it was from “the people” in whose name it operated. The reaction in Russia was electric. The revolutionaries and most of the intelligentsia might have concluded that Alexander II deserved to die for having impeded the revolution by emancipating the serfs, but the freed serfs themselves and every other class in the country rallied—literally, as well as in sentiment—around their Emperor. This had been an attempt by the former slaveholders to avenge their losses at the hands of the Tsar-Liberator, so the former serfs believed, and it was the will of God that a simple peasant had saved the Sovereign. Komissarov became a national hero.⁴⁷

Two: the era of the Great Reforms was over. Analogous to the reign of his uncle, Alexander I (r. 1801-25), Alexander II saw liberalisation as having opened space for radicals with whom no accommodation was possible and moved to tighten things up. Censorship was brought back in. Sovremennik was finally closed. Karakozov was swiftly sent to the gallows, on 3 September, and nineteen co-conspirators were imprisoned. The revolutionaries would accuse the government of torturing these people. As with same accusation in the case of the Decembrists, it was a lie. The accused had been well-treated in custody, and given fair and public trials—not that reality had any impact on the intelligentsia. Predictably, the crackdown fell heaviest on the education sphere, now to be overseen by Count Dmitry Tolstoy, an archconservative who was also Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod. Hundreds of students were arrested and/or expelled and campus organisations disbanded. Sharing the revolutionaries’ belief that the natural sciences were incubators of sedition, these subjects were downgraded, while teaching of Greek and Latin were increased, confirming to the revolutionaries that the humanities were reactionary. While hardly the “White Terror” the revolutionaries would later claim, it did change the atmosphere and hinder their operations.⁴⁸

Three: Herzen, already on thin ice with “Generation of the Sons”, was finally excommunicated by the youthful intelligentsia.

Herzen’s initial welcome of Alexander II’s reformist reign was held against him by the younger revolutionaries. Herzen’s popularity was dealt a severe blow by his support for the Polish uprising against Russian rule in 1863, when almost the entirety of the revolutionary milieu took a nationalist line—not as a tactical matter and not for the last time. Herzen’s increasingly public unease with the nihilistic drift of the young intelligentsia, and their support for conspiratorial and terrorist tactics, had frayed relations further, notwithstanding Herzen’s personal generosity with money to many young Nihilists. Herzen’s public condemnation of the attempt to murder the Tsar was the final straw, despite it not being unique at that moment.

In early 1867, Alexander Serno-Solovyevich, the brother of Chernyshevsky’s intimate disciple who founded Zemlya i Volya and was at this time in prison, issued the anathematisation in the language of personal abuse that had become standard in Russian revolutionary circles. The liberalism inherent in Herzen’s worldview was viciously attacked, as was his wealth: What right, Serno-Solovyevich asked, has this nobleman living in comfortable exile on the proceeds acquired off the back of serfs to lecture the men in the trenches against the autocracy? Did Herzen think he had influence over the intelligentsia? Serno-Solovyevich was enraged—on behalf of his generation—that Herzen drew attention to his relationship with Chernyshevsky, the martyr and messiah the Men of the Sixties claimed as their own. “You are two opposite elements”, Serno-Solovyevich fumed.⁴⁹

Grant Herzen this much: shocked as he was—at the ideas and the tone in which they were expressed—he stood his ground, unlike those following after him in the intelligentsia, all of whom would, upon finding themselves cast as “moderates”, pathetically capitulate and repent. Then Herzen did the rarest thing of all in the Russian intelligentsia: introspected. Instead of “catching up” with the new extreme consensus, Herzen, understanding his responsibility for creating the monstrosity that had now turned on him, went back and effectively repudiated the greater part of his own theoretical work on revolution.

In 1869, months before Herzen died, he wrote an open letter, “To An Old Friend” (Bakunin). “The popular masses”, Herzen wrote, “are suspicious” of this “aristocracy of Science” that idolises ideology and claims to act for the people; “these preachers”, these “old students”, do not come from the people and “have moved further apart from the people than [the government]”. The “rampant spirit of extermination” among the young revolutionaries may be capable of destroying everything that civilisation has built over centuries, Herzen went on, but this “historical terrain … represents the very foundation of the people’s life”: they are “conservative by instinct” and must be worked with to progress towards socialism. The use of violence to destroy, Herzen wrote, even if it could bring about tabula rasa, would result at best in “prison equality”. “I do not believe in the previous revolutionary solutions”, Herzen startlingly announced. Russia was not a blank slate without tradition uniquely poised for socialism, Herzen now declared, and the transition would not be made easier by the Russian peasantry being natural socialists because, in fact, they were conservatives at heart. Socialism would have to grow organically out of Russia’s existing institutions, Herzen concluded.⁵⁰

Herzen could at least claim some common with those who followed him in developing misgivings about the revolutionary movement: he had realised too late—and was completely ignored.

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REFERENCES

1. The operational and ideological leader of the Decembrist milieu was Colonel Pavel Pestel, whose “Russian Truth” (Russkaya Pravda) set out in some detail the murderous methods the revolution would pursue and the totalitarian regime it would institute afterwards. Pestel, like many of the Decembrist conspirators a veteran of the war against Napoleon who had experienced Revolutionary France, channelled Jacobinism essentially directly.

2. There was a secondary Decembrist military rebellion, down in Ukraine, which has always gotten much less attention in the historiography. There are some defensible reasons for this, primary among them that the events in Ukraine just did not matter that much: the verdict on the Revolt was rendered in the capital by the suppression of the Decembrists’ Northern Society two weeks before the troops mutinied in Ukraine. For historians trying to tell the Decembrist story in a compressed and compelling way, the set-piece on Senate Square has an inherent comprehensibility and drama that the confused events in the south—with mutineers wandering from town to town, trying to pick up local support and arguing about where to go next—does not.

However, there are also ideological reasons why the Southern Society gets airbrushed out. For the Soviets, the squalid behaviour of the Southern Decembrists—the looting and the attacks on Jews—made the lie of noble intent much more difficult to sustain, and equally awkward was the Southerners’ deceptive use of Orthodox Christianity to motivate the rank-and-file. Bolshevik prejudices and perspectives on Russia’s history in general have exerted a powerful influence over Western academia, and the transmission of the “Decembrist myth” is a particularly acute case. It only really works, though, if the focus is kept on the Northerners—and even that requires some massaging of the record, usually involving omission of the Northern plans to murder the Emperor and the fact they did murder the emissaries sent to negotiate a peaceful end to the stand-off in the Square. If the South is taken into account, chroniclers have to confront the figure of Pavel Pestel, an overt Jacobin, whose despotic and murderous program could not have been more clearly spelled out, and Pestel’s domination of the whole Decembrist milieu dissolves all pretences about a “moderate” Northern Society.

3. Tibor Szamuely (1974), The Russian Tradition, pp. 180-85.

4. Decembrist-style republican military conspiracies created turmoil across Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, notably in Portugal with the “liberal wars”, but there would be no repeat in Russia. Nicholas was secure enough that when mayhem broke upon the Continent in 1848, he could act as the “Gendarme of Europe”, leading external campaigns of counter-revolution to stabilise Romania and Hungary.

5. The Russian Tradition, p. 180.

6. “The Decembrists awakened Herzen. Herzen began the work of revolutionary agitation. This was taken up, extended, strengthened, and tempered by the revolutionary raznochintsy—from Chernyshevsky to the heroes of Narodnaya Volya.” Lenin situated the Bolsheviks as the heirs of these three generations, building on the foundations they had laid. See: ‘In Memory of Herzen’, 8 May 1912, Sotsial-Demokrat, collected in Volume 18 of Lenin’s Sochineniya, p. 31, available here.

7. The Russian Tradition, pp. 185-87.

8. The Russian phrase is, “Правосла́вие, самодержа́вие, наро́дность” (Pravoslavie, Samoderzhavie, Narodnost), sometimes more loosely translated as: “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality”.

9. The Russian Tradition, p. 188.

10. The Russian Tradition, pp. 187-88.

11. The Russian Tradition, pp. 188-91.

12. The Russian Tradition, p. 191.

13. The Russian Tradition, p. 194.

14. The Russian Tradition, pp. 191-93.

15. Richard Pipes (1990), The Russian Revolution, p. 399.

16. The Russian Tradition, p. 194.

17. The Russian Tradition, pp. 196-202.

18. The Russian Tradition, p. 202.

19. The Russian Tradition, pp. 200-03.

20. The Russian Tradition, p. 201.

21. The Russian Tradition, pp. 208-09.

22. The Russian Tradition, pp. 206-09.

23. That Kolokol was banned in Russia and produced abroad only underlines what an astonishing phenomenon it was.

24. The Russian Tradition, pp. 206-09.

25. Some revisionist historians of the First World War argue for reducing Germany’s responsibility by pointing to relations between the Serbian-controlled terrorists who murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo and the Okhranka, the Russian political police. The evidence for this is speculative. What there is firm evidence for is the influence of the Russian revolutionaries, including Bakunin and Pyotr Kropotkin, and above all Chernyshevsky and his What is to Be Done?, over the conspirators in Bosnia. See also: Alfred Rieber (2014), The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War, p. 441.

26. The Russian Tradition, pp. 210-12.

27. The Russian Tradition, pp. 212-14, 222.

28. The Russian Tradition, p. 215.

29. The Russian Tradition, pp. 218-19.

30. The Russian Tradition, pp. 215-22.

31. The Russian Tradition, pp. 219-22.

32. The Russian Tradition, p. 222.

33. There were twenty-three million serfs in 1861, about one-third of Russia’s population of seventy-four million.

34. Russia’s peaceful abolition of slavery and land-grants to those manumitted contrasts rather sharply with America, which was plunged into civil war on the point two months later and never delivered on the promised reparations. (This was over a much smaller absolute and relative slave population: four million out of 35.5 million Americans, just over ten percent.) The U.S. also saw a social and legal counter-revolution—with the collapse of Reconstruction and the Supreme Court decisions in the 1890s—that left freed slaves in some ways, especially in terms of personal security, worse off at the dawn of the twentieth century than they had been previously. Russia had nothing of this kind.

35. The Russian Tradition, pp. 225-26.

36. The Russian Tradition, pp. 226-30.

37. The Russian Tradition, pp. 228-30.

38. The Russian Tradition, pp. 230-34.

39. The Russian Tradition, pp. 234-36.

40. The Russian Tradition, p. 236.

41. The Russian Tradition, pp. 238-39.

42. The Russian Tradition, p. 239.

43. The Russian Tradition, pp. 239-41.

44. The Russian Tradition, pp. 241-42.

45. The Russian Tradition, pp. 241-43.

46. The Russian Tradition, p. 242.

47. The Russian Tradition, pp. 248-49.

48. The Russian Tradition, pp. 249-50.

49. The Russian Tradition, pp. 243-49.

50. The Russian Tradition, pp. 245-46.