The Thinking Reed

Although their subsequent transition from Narodism to Marxism was very painful for many intelligenty, it was a perfectly logical and natural continuation of the evolution of Russian Westernism. The common feature of both these socialist theories was, as Lenin observed, ‘their defence of democracy by appealing to the masses’.54 Marxism, however, was a more consistent variety of Westernism. ‘The first Russian Marxists’, Berdyaev notes, ‘were more European, more Western folk than the Narodniks.’55

The success of Marxism was bound up with the fact that this more finished theory provided answers to the problems Narodism was trying to solve. Marxism took a step towards liberalism in so far as it recognized bourgeois democracy as a necessary transitional stage towards socialism — a stage which might, in Russia as in other countries, occupy an entire epoch of history.56 At the same time, Marxism became in Russia precisely what Narodism had tried to be — the ideology of modernization.57 Many people both then and later saw the victory of Marxism over Narodism as the final victory of Westernism over what remained of Slavophil ideas in the thinking of the intelligentsia. ‘It was necessary’, Trotsky wrote a quarter of a century later, ‘to overcome the homegrown revolutionary prejudices of the Russian intelligentsia, in which the arrogance of backwardness found its expression.’58

Through Marxism Russian social thought entered the mainstream of all-European social thought, as many people quite remote from Marxism recognized at the time. Lenin wrote:

in Russia the theoretical doctrine of Social Democracy arose altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the working-class movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of thought among the revolutionary-socialist intelligentsia.59

Thus the victory of Marxism over Narodism meant, in the first place, the beginning of a new stage in the evolution of Westernist ideology.

Important also was the change in the situation in the country at the turn of the century. Even the half-hearted reform of 1861 had given a considerable stimulus to industrialization and modernization. Its consequences began to make themselves felt especially in the 1890s. By the beginning of the twentieth century about a third of the inhabitants of the Russian Empire were literate. A militant working class was rapidly increasing: their hard living conditions not only stirred the compassion of the intelligentsia but also angered the proletarians themselves, who until recently had been easily reconciled to their lot. The intelligentsia itself grew to massive proportions; in the countryside, for example, there were now, besides landlords and peasants, what was called ‘the third element’ — doctors, teachers and so on. But most importantly the intelligentsia now had an extensive audience: educated strata had emerged in the towns who could serve as intermediaries between the Europeanized democratic elite and the masses. ‘There arose and in our day became especially large a semi-intelligentsia milieu which could no longer be left out of account’, wrote Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky.60 The situation had changed.

In the article by Lenin we considered earlier we find the following facts: in the years 1827 to 1846, 76 per cent of the political prisoners were intellectuals of the noble class. In the second period ‘intellectuals accounted for the overwhelming majority (73.2 per cent) of participants in the democratic movement.’61 As we can see, the percentage proportion remains almost the same. But then in 1901-03 workers already made up 46.1 per cent of the prisoners and intelligenty 36.7 per cent — by 1905-08 no more than 28.4 per cent. The percentage is still, as before, very large when one considers that the entire intelligentsia made up only 2.2 per cent of the population62 — which means that the political activity of the intelligentsia ‘exceeded’ its social mass by more than a factor of 12, whereas the corresponding figure for the working class, which was also active out of proportion to its small numbers, was only 4. But already the working class was playing the decisive role.