The Thinking Reed

The fact that a European-type intelligentsia developed in the setting of an Asiatic state had enormous importance for Russia’s history. The basic features of European culture can be defined in a few words: it is secular, humanist and universalist, and therefore democratic. The Asiatic state in Russia, for its part, was closely linked with the Church; its ideology was religious, nationally narrow, anti-humanist and, naturally, authoritarian. On the one hand, Tsardom needed a certain level of European enlightenment, without which it could not function as a world-class power. On the other, it needed European enlightenment without European culture, and especially without ‘Western’ ideas. ‘This is the dilemma’, writes the American historian Marshall Shatz, ‘that has confronted every Russian government from the eighteenth century down to the present.’10 He makes an exception for Peter I alone, calling him ‘the first Russian intelligent’.11 This description is not, however, correct. Peter was the first — and perhaps, up to now, the only — Russian technocrat in power who saw in the West ‘civilization, but not culture’. Precisely for this reason the Europeanized Petersburg monarchy of the Romanovs was never able to find a common language with the intelligentsia it had engendered. ‘We shall see’, wrote Berdyaev, ‘that the intelligentsia which took shape as the result of Peter’s work was to adopt his universalism and his looking to the West, and to overthrow the empire.’12

The new intelligentsia of Petersburg Russia — European in its occupations, its views and its way of thinking — came into conflict with the Asiatic autocracy, even though the latter had in its time engendered this intelligentsia through its reforms. In Milyukov’s words, the Russian intelligentsia ‘was almost from its beginning anti-government and counterposed to the historical state the concept of law’.13 To the political reality of Russia it opposed the political ideal of Europe.14 Criticism of the established order became the principal content of Russian art; the whole of spiritual culture (in the persons of its most outstanding representatives, of course, not in those of hired hacks like Bulgarin) came to be politicized and orientated towards revolution. Even those writers who (like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy) argued against the revolutionaries were obliged to concern themselves with the problems of revolution. For this reason Herzen, having undertaken to compose a history of revolutionary ideas in Russia, wrote what was essentially a history of literature.

The first revolutionary revolt in Russia — 14 December 1825 — was exclusively the affair of an intellectual minority. The intelligentsia from the nobility who came out on to Senate Square were not at all motivated by their own social interests. Their protest was of an exclusively ideological and, in its own way, cultural character. Men who had received a Western education could not refrain from opposing their country’s own ‘native’ tyranny. It was a movement inspired by philosophical ideas, not by class interests. This revolt was a turning point in the history of the Russian intelligentsia despite the fact that it ended in utter defeat, both politically and militarily. It is with the Decembrists that the Russian tradition of revolutionary struggle begins. The old Russian state had, of course, had its ‘dissidents’ already, centuries before them. Historians can argue as to who was the first Russian dissident — Prince Kurbsky, who fled to the West from the tyranny (a real totalitarian hell) of Ivan the Terrible, or Radishchev and Novikov, who criticized Catherine II. There were always people in Russia who opposed their humanistic ideals to Asiatic despotism, but the Decembrists were something different. This was the first attempt to go over, in Marx’s phrase, ‘from the weapon of criticism to criticism with weapons’ — or, more precisely, not merely to condemn the system but also to try to change it. These men were no longer dissidents, they were revolutionaries. ‘The Decembrists were much more effective as martyrs than as insurrectionaries. Thus, their historical contribution is ambiguous,’ writes the American historian Philip Pomper. ‘The direct and overt effect of their activity was reaction and repression. The other momentous consequence was the birth of a revolutionary tradition that survived for a century.’15

It must be acknowledged that the cultural-ideological results of 14 December 1825 were more important than the political results. This cultural tradition has remained in our memory to the present day. ‘With the Decembrists’, writes Shatz, ‘the Russian intelligentsia finally crystallized, and the movement of political and social dissent associated with it would now become a permanent feature of imperial Russian history.’16 The history of the Russian intelligentsia begins in 1825, for before that one can speak only of its prehistory.