The Thinking Reed

On the other hand, it may be that awareness of the isolation of the intelligentsia and its separation from the people was one of the causes of the Slavophil reaction. It is important to understand that Slavophil thought appeared in Russia considerably later than Westernist thought. A contemporary scholar, A. Yanov, has tried to prove that Slavophilism existed from Peter I’s time, albeit in unrealized form, as a sort of ‘ideology in itself and that its proponents were the Streltsy who revolted against Peter’s reforms.40 This view completely fails to stand up to criticism. It is a curious fact that many who have written about the Slavophils forget that this trend was not only a reaction against the Europeanization of Russia but also a product of that process. Many of the Slavophils were men with a European education, and — most importantly — their ideology was formed under the explicit influence of German Romanticism and German classical philosophy. ‘The Slavophils’, wrote Berdyaev, ‘absorbed the Hegelian idea of the vocation of peoples, and what Hegel applied to the German people they applied to the Russian. They applied the principles of Hegelian philosophy to Russian history.’41 The wave of revival of national cultures which swept over all Europe in the age of Romanticism gave rise, when it reached Russia, to the Slavophil movement. Furthermore, the initial aims of both Westernists and Slavophils were the same — progress and the emancipation of the people. Slavophilism in its original form was a sort of liberal opposition to the Petersburg government: often, it was not so much against Western culture as for what was distinctively Russian. For that very reason Herzen, the spiritual leader of Russia’s Left, was ready to offer his hand to the champions of Russian ‘originality’. The first Slavophils, Berdyaev points out, were ‘opposed to the state. There was even a strong element of anarchism in them. They considered the state an evil and government a sin.’42 But they drew their own conclusion from the isolation of the Westernist intelligentsia. They endeavoured to return to the nation’s roots, to ‘the sources’, to the true Russia, to the pre-Petrine tradition. In addition, they shut their eyes to Western humanism and turned their faces to the past, away from future prospects. Berdyaev wrote that ‘the freedom-loving Slavophils’ idealized, through misunderstanding, the Moscow period, which was ‘the worst in Russian history, the most stifling, of a particularly Asiatic and Tatar type’.43

The Slavophils’ road was a dead end. They did not find a way to the masses: they were, after all, not representatives of traditional popular culture, but only ‘repentant Europeanists’. At the same time, they broke with the intelligentsia. Slavophilism, Herzen considered, ‘did not set free, it bound, did not move forward, it pushed back.’44 This was why Russian nationalism, in its ever-sharper conflict with Westernism, became an anti-democratic, anti-humanist ideology, increasingly supported by the authorities and with decreasing influence on Russia’s intelligentsia. As a whole, the intelligentsia rejected Slavophilism completely. Closeness to the masses would have to be attained, sooner or later, as civilization developed in Russia: as the masses themselves became Europeanized and intellectualized. But this was a very slow process, and in the meantime the intelligenty remained in isolation. Thanks to the influence of German philosophy, British liberalism and French democratism, revolutionary ideas took shape in Russia earlier than revolutionary class forces, and for a long time the intelligentsia remained the country’s sole bearer of the democratic principle. Russia’s regime, wrote Gredeskul,

stifled thought and speech above all, that is, the very ‘essence’ of the intelligentsia, and the intelligentsia had to wage a desperate struggle for the people’s rights while the people itself stayed right outside that struggle, quite failing to understand why it was being waged.45

The Revolutionary Tradition

Everyone knows Lenin’s famous statement in his article ‘From the History of the Workers’ Press in Russia’: