A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

Justifying violence in the name of revolution was not exclusive to the revolutionaries. Among the educated elite there was a general cult of revolutionism. The Russian 'intelligentsia' (a Russian word by derivation) was less a class than a state of mind: it meant by definition a stance of radical and uncompromising opposition to the tsarist regime, and a willingness to take part in the struggle for its overthrow. The history of the revolutionary movement is the history of the intelligentsia. Most of the revolutionary leaders were first and foremost intellectuals. Their heads were full of European literature and history, especially the history of the French Revolutions of 1789 and 1848. 'I think', recalled Lydia Dan, a Menshevik, 'that as people we were much more out of books than out of real life.'⁴ No other single group of intellectuals has had such a huge impact on the twentieth-century world.

Those who thought of themselves as intelligenty (students, writers, professionals, etc.) had a special set of ethics, and shared codes of dress and language, notions of honour and comradeship, not to mention salons and coffeehouses, clubs and social circles, newspapers and journals, which set them apart as a sort of sub-culture from the rest of the privileged society from which most of them had sprung. Many of them even shared a distinct 'look' — unkempt, long-haired, bearded and bespectacled — which became the hallmark of left-wingers and revolutionaries across the world.* The philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev once compared the Russian intelligentsia to a 'monastic order' or 'religious sect'; and there was much in their mentality akin to Christianity. Take, for example, their rejection of the existing order as sinful and corrupt; or their self-image as the righteous champions of the 'people's cause'; or indeed their almost mystical belief in the existence of absolute truth. The radical intelligentsia had a religious veneration for the revolutionary literary canon. Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams recalls, for example, how in the 1880s her teenage sister 'used to smuggle a volume of revolutionary verses into Church during afternoon prayers and, while

* Lydia Dan's father had a nice way of poking fun at these self-conscious radicals. Boys, he said, did not cut their hair on the grounds that they did not have time; but women cut their hair short also to save time. Women went to university on the grounds that this was a mark of progress; but men dropped out of the education system on the grounds that this was also progressive.

the others read from the Bible, she would recite their summons to revolt and terror'.⁵

This self-conscious tradition stemmed from the Decembrists. Their execution in 1826 produced the first martyrs of 'the movement'. Younger generations took romantic inspiration from the self-sacrifice of these noble Jacobins. From that point on — and here was born the cult of opposition — it became the fashion for the sons of noblemen to shun careers in the Civil Service 'out of principle'. It was seen as a moral betrayal to let oneself be used, as Chicherin put it, 'as a direct tool of a government which was repressing mercilessly every thought and all enlightenment'. Bloody-minded opposition to the tsarist state and all its officials, however petty, was a matter of honour. Consider the story of Anatolii Dubois, a student of the University of St Petersburg in 1902, who refused ('on principle') to shake the hand of a police sergeant who, whilst registering his new address, had engaged him in a friendly conversation and had offered to shake hands as a parting gesture. A police report was made to the rector of the university and Dubois was expelled — only to join the revolutionary movement and get himself arrested in 1903. It was a typical example of the tsarist police state, by a stupid act of repression, forcing a middle-class dissident into the revolutionary underground out of which the terrorist tradition developed (Lenin's own story was very similar). The radical intelligentsia contemptuously rejected any act of compromise with 'the regime': only violent struggle could bring about its end. Liberalism was denounced as a weak half-measure. The law was despised as a tool of the state: it was said to be morally inferior to the peasants' ancient customs and to the interests of social justice — which justified breaking the law. This was the shaky moral foundation of the revolutionary sentiment that gripped the minds of the educated middle classes during the later nineteenth century. Vera Figner, who was herself a terrorist, spoke of a 'cult of the bomb and the gun' in which 'murder and the scaffold took on a magnetic charm'. Within the intelligentsia's circles it was deemed a matter of 'good taste' to sympathize with the terrorists and many wealthy citizens donated large sums of money to them.⁶