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

It is impossible to understand this political extremism without first considering the cultural isolation of the Russian intelligentsia. This tiny elite was isolated from official Russia by its politics, and from peasant Russia by its education. Both chasms were unbridgeable. But, perhaps even more importantly, it was cut off from the European cultural world which it sought to emulate. The consequence, as Isaiah Berlin has so elegantly argued, was that ideas imported from the West (as nearly all ideas in Russia were) tended to become frozen into abstract dogmas once the Russian intelligentsia took them up. Whereas in Europe new ideas were forced to compete against other doctrines and attitudes, with the result that people tended towards healthy scepticism about claims to

absolute truth, and a climate of pluralism developed, in Russia there was a cultural void. The censor forbade all political expression, so that when ideas were introduced there they easily assumed the status of holy dogma, a panacea for all the world's ills, beyond questioning or indeed the need to test them in real life. One European intellectual fashion would spread through St Petersburg after another — Hegelianism in the 1840s, Darwinism in the 1860s, Marxism in the 1890s — and each was viewed in turn as a final truth.⁷ There was much that was endearing in this strangely Russian search for absolutes — such as the passion for big ideas that gave the literature of nineteenth-century Russia its unique character and power — and yet the underside of this idealism was a badgering didacticism, a moral dogmatism and intolerance, which in its own way was just as harmful as the censorship it opposed. Convinced that their own ideas were the key to the future of the world, that the fate of humanity rested on the outcome of their own doctrinal struggles, the Russian intelligentsia divided up the world into the forces of 'progress' and 'reaction', friends and enemies of the people's cause, leaving no room for doubters in between. Here were the origins of the totalitarian world-view. Although neither would have liked to admit it, there was much in common between Lenin and Tolstoy.

Guilt was the psychological inspiration of the revolution. Nearly all of these radical intellectuals were acutely conscious of their wealth and privilege. 'We have come to realise', the radical thinker Nikolai Mikhailovsky wrote, 'that our awareness of the universal truth could only have been reached at the cost of the age-old suffering of the people. We are the peoples debtors and this debt weighs down on our conscience.' As the children of noblemen brought up by serf domestics on the estate, many of them felt a special personal sense of guilt, since, as Marc Raeff has pointed out, these 'little masters' had usually been allowed to treat their serf nannies and 'uncles' (whose job it had been to play with them) with cruel contempt.* Later in life these conscience-stricken nobles would seek to repay their debt to 'the people' by serving them in the revolution. If only, they thought, they could bring about the people's liberation, then their own original sin — that of being born into privilege — would be redeemed. Nineteenth-century Russian literature was dominated by the theme of repentance for the sin of privilege. Take, for example, Prince Levin in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, who works alongside the peasants in his fields and dreams of giving them the profits of his farm so as to bring about a 'bloodless revolution': 'in place of poverty there would be wealth and happiness for all; in place of hostility, concord and a bond of common interest'.⁸

" These peasant nannies and domestic servants would not even be called by their proper names but by a pet name such as Masha or Vanka. They were thus denied the most basic recognition of a personality.

The first step towards this reconciliation was to immerse oneself in the people's daily lives. The romantic interest in folk culture which swept through Europe in the nineteenth century was felt nowhere more keenly than among the Russian intelligentsia. As Blok wrote (with just a touch of irony) in 1908:

the intelligentsia cram their bookcases with anthologies of Russian folksongs, epics, legends, incantations, dirges; they investigate Russian mythology, wedding and funeral rites; they grieve for the people; go to the people; are filled with high hopes; fall into despair; they even give up their lives, face execution or starve to death for the people's cause.