The Thinking Reed

In that same year, 1903, when the fight against Zubatovism was being waged, on the initiative of some large-scale entrepreneurs they were working in the Ministry of Finance on the question of freedom of combination — under the peculiar conditions characteristic of Russia, of course, but all the same, with freedom to strike, in the European style. When they were regaled with such an Asiatic method of solving the labour question as a class organization of the proletariat functioning under the aegis of the police, but directed against the immediate economic interests of the capitalists, the entrepreneurs naturally groaned with dismay.6

In short, Russian Tsardom retained features of Asiatic despotism even at the beginning of the twentieth century. The autocracy was unlike any other monarchy in Europe, its rule far more all-embracing than even the Western absolutisms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But for this very reason the conflict between the state and the civil society that was coming into existence — between the government which strove to subject to itself as completely as possible all spheres of economic, political and spiritual life, and the developing intelligentsia, asserting its independence — could not be other than all-embracing, acute and chronic. In a society where the state tries to control each and every activity, any independent action, even if it has no conscious political content, turns out to be an act of rebellion. A social group which is engaged in creative activity will inevitably, from the standpoint of the authorities, behave ‘suspiciously’ or even ‘defiantly’.

Pre-Petrine Russia had a popular church-and-state culture, but it lacked a stratum of professional intellectuals. In the West, as Gramsci pointed out, the Church and its apparatus engendered such a stratum even in the Middle Ages. Russia’s priests, however, were for the most part ‘civil servants in the department of spiritual affairs’, and the Orthodox Church, unlike the Catholic Church, created no intelligentsia. Characteristic was the complete absence of even the embryo of university education. ‘In Muscovite Russia,’ wrote Nikolai Berdyaev, ‘there existed a real fear of education. Science aroused suspicion as being “latinising”.’7

The Emergence of an Intelligentsia

Towards the end of the seventeenth century, however, mastery of the basics of Western civilization became for Russia, in the words of P. Milyukov, ‘a question of self-preservation — not moral or national but simply physical’.8 The Russian intelligentsia came into being thanks to Peter’s reforms: to the partial Europeanizing of society. Having entered the European political sphere, Russia made contact with European civilization, with a certain type of culture and certain cultural tasks; an inevitable result was the appearance of a social stratum occupied with the performance of those tasks.

One must not conclude from this that the intelligentsia was an ‘alien’ phenomenon in Russia, introduced from without, and so on. Successful intellectual activity proved possible in Russia only because the cultural tasks common to Europe were coped with on our national soil, in a Russian manner. On the one hand the Russian intelligentsia faced towards the West; on the other it became firmly rooted in its native soil. Herzen’s English biographer wrote: ‘The Russian intelligentsia as a whole would draw from foreign thinkers those elements which helped them to solve their own problems. When they were enamoured of a whole body of these ideas, they interpreted them in accordance with their predilections.’9