The Thinking Reed

The emancipation movement in Russia has passed through three main stages, corresponding to the three main classes of Russian society, which have left their impress on the movement: (1) the period of the nobility, roughly from 1825 to 1861; (2) the raznochintsi or bourgeois-democratic period, approximately from 1861 to 1895; and (3) the proletarian period, from 1895 to the present time.46

Schoolchildren have to learn that quotation by heart, but all the same, one should take a closer look at it. Lenin indicated the three periods quite correctly, but his linking of them with three classes of Russian society must raise doubts. Most of the nobles and bourgeois in the years 1825 to 1895 were quite alien — even hostile — to the freedom movement. The Decembrists expressed whatever other interests you care to mention, but not the interests of the landlord class. The Narodniks, being socialists, were pretty remote from the bourgeoisie, even from its democratic wing.

But if we compare the periods in the development of the freedom movement with the periods in the development of Russian literature, then with a few corrections — Lenin’s precise dates need not be taken too seriously — we observe a remarkable coincidence. The first period is the period of Pushkin, Lermontov, Belinsky and Gogol. The second is the period of Turgenev, Chernyshevsky and Dostoevsky. To the third period — let us describe it for the time being by the conventional expression ‘the age of Lenin and Chekhov’ — we shall return later.

Thus in the famous quotation we see listed three periods in the development of the Russian intelligentsia and Russian culture. Undoubtedly the social composition of the intelligentsia changed during that time. The intelligentsia of the first period was predominantly of noble origin; that of the second was petty-bourgeois. Consequently the intelligentsia’s ideas changed, and also its relation to other classes of society. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that the bearer of the revolutionary principle in Russia, right to the end of the nineteenth century, was not any definite class, still less the weak Russian bourgeoisie, but the intelligentsia. It was that very intelligentsia whose entire conditions of existence impelled it to struggle against despotism: it simply could not become reconciled to the rulers of Russia without ceasing to be an intelligentsia. The fight against the government went on, even though the ideals of the intelligentsia changed.

The change in political principles took place, of course, not only through the appearance of new, predominantly petty-bourgeois young people, the raznochintsy, but also through meditation on past experience and the latest ideas from the West. What continued unchanged was the tradition of opposition, social criticism, radical-democratic endeavour. Even though the gap between the intelligenty and the ‘lower orders’ persisted, there was every reason to hope that it would be overcome. ‘Although they belong by origin to the modernized minority of the society, they identify with the oppressed majority,’ writes Robert C. Tucker of intelligenty ‘of the Russian type’. ‘And despite the fact that it is only a minority of a minority in terms of numbers, the intelligentsia has — as it had in Russia — a potentially very large revolutionary constituency among the masses of the population.’47

The intelligentsia itself became more numerous, and members of the working classes joined its ranks. Some intermediate ‘semi-intelligentsia’ strata began to emerge. Although education, as always, lagged behind modernization, it did at any rate accompany the process. Impatient desire to speed up this process gave rise to the Narodniks’ propaganda, to the ‘going to the people’ and, in the last analysis, even to terrorist acts which were intended by their organizers to advance the political enlightenment of the masses. Revolutionary socialist parties were formed — ‘Land and Liberty’, then ‘The People’s Will’ and ‘Black Redistribution’. A psychological type of Russian intelligent came into being, and has remained the model even for many dissidents under the Soviet regime. ‘The fate of all educated people in Russia’, writes the Leningrad socialist M. Bodkhovsky in his samizdat essay on Plekhanov,