Stankevich’s patience, wide reading, and gentleness attracted widely disparate personalities, at that time all united by a fascination with German philosophy and literature. The future anarchist Michael Bakunin (1814–1876), the critic Vissarion Belinskii, and the future socialist Alexander Herzen (1812–1870) were all part of the circle. They would all in different ways form the Westernizer camp, which saw Russia’s destiny as a belated variant of European socio-political development. Also part of the circle were the future Slavophile Konstantin Aksakov and the conservative publicist M. N. Katkov. For the moment their common effort was to master Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and their idol Hegel, writing long letters to one another describing their understanding of their reading, turgid abstractions in Hegelian jargon. Yet out of the Stankevich circle came the major trends in Russian thought, ideas with echoes that have outlived the moment of their creation.
For Belinskii the problem Hegel posed was that he saw the history of the world as the development of the idea of freedom, but also identified its outcome with the existing order of Europe in his time. Thus everything in the world had a place, leading to ultimate self-knowledge of the Idea. Belinskii at first concluded, as did many of his friends, that Russian conditions were therefore justified, they were part of the development of humanity. This was a very uncomfortable conclusion, and further reflection on Hegel’s dialectic took them in another direction: Hegel was right about Europe, it was the ideal toward which humanity headed, but Russia needed to catch up. Thus Hegelian idealism provided an intellectual foundation for thinking Russia needed to imitate the West, and that imitation could take two forms. Either Russia needed to imitate the existing Western societies, which seemed to be moving toward industrial capitalism and constitutional states, or Russia needed to follow the new trend that had emerged in the West, socialism.
For Belinskii, Herzen, and Bakunin the choice of liberalism or socialism was not one that they yet had to make. Either was considered utopian by Russian standards, and it seemed more important to analyze the condition of Russia and form a theory for future action. Belinskii chose to analyze Russia on the basis of its literature, and became Russia’s most famous literary critic in the 1840s. This choice fitted well with Hegelianism, for Hegel had seen art and literature as another manifestation of the development of the Idea, whose political incarnation was the idea of freedom. Literary criticism also gave Belinskii, as a provincial doctor’s son and the most plebeian of the group, a modest means of livelihood. Herzen was a more complex story, as the illegitimate son of a Russian nobleman, part of the gentry and yet permanently an outsider. Arrested in 1834, he spent several years in exile, and back in Moscow he devoted himself to reading Hegel and writing novels. In 1847 he left Russia for Western Europe, wanting to see the society he had been so long praising. He never returned to Russia, constructing his own version of socialism in exile. Bakunin followed a similar trajectory. The son of wealthy nobles, he went directly from the Stankevich circle to the West in 1840, where he joined the left Hegelians. Bakunin moved quickly from an inchoate radicalism to anarchism, coining his famous slogan, “the passion for destruction is also a creative passion.” By 1848 he had acquired a name in European radical circles.
Other members of the Stankevich circle interpreted Hegel in a liberal light; V. P. Botkin and M. N. Katkov remained typical liberals in their views, opponents of serfdom and autocracy and advocates of a constitutional monarchy. Konstantin Aksakov was another story, for his reading of Hegel and the Germans ultimately led him to a complete rejection of it as irrelevant to Russia. In his mind, Russia was fundamentally different from the West, with a unique Slavic national culture. Thus Slavophilism was born.
The Slavophiles rejected the premise that Russia ought to follow Western models, for they believed that Russian civilization was fundamentally distinct from that of Europe. Europe was mired in egoism, whose results were evident in political strife and the impoverishment of the people in consequence of industrial capitalism. Religion offered the West no escape, for Protestantism only reinforced individualism and the Catholic Church strove mainly for political power and influence. Russia, with its traditions of the peasant community and the (supposed) harmony of noble and peasant, tsar and subject, had largely escaped from the evils that plagued the West. Peter’s westernization of Russia threatened to draw Russia into the morass, but a return to Russian values would reverse the process. Orthodoxy would continue to provide the spiritual cement, as it maintained a Christian community but refused to strive with the state for secular power. This heady mix of Orthodoxy and nationalism produced a vivid ideology but in practice was less significant, if only because it remained something of a sect. Most of the intelligentsia and the upper classes, however patriotic and sometimes even religious, remained to a greater or lesser degree Westernizers. Slavophilism was also much less conservative in practice than in theory. For all their romantic visions of the autocratic tsars of the age before Peter, the Slavophiles actually wanted autocracy tempered by a consultative legislature, as did the more moderate Westernizers. It was a different culture more than a different politics that inspired the Slavophiles.
By the 1840s these cultural impulses, Official Nationality and Slavophilism, Westernizing liberalism and radicalism had crystallized into distinct ideologies with their more or less numerous followers. Most of them were centered in Moscow, while St. Petersburg remained rather quiet politically in the wake of the Decembrist defeat. Around the middle of the decade, however, new voices appeared, also small in number but which revealed some of the outlines of the future. These voices were heard in the St. Petersburg living room of a minor government official, Mikhail Butashevich-Petrashevskii.
Petrashevskii and his followers represented a different social type and a different ideology from the Decembrists or the Stankevich circle. None of them came from the aristocracy, and some were very recently noblemen. Petrashevskii himself was the son of a military doctor born into a family of Ukrainian priests. Only his father’s military rank conferred nobility on Petrashevskii, and this background was virtually identical to that of his most famous listener, Russia’s great writer Fyodor Dostoevskii. Yet the Petrashevskii group did not include marginal outsiders. Most of the members had attended the Lycée in Tsarskoe Selo, the same institution that had earlier produced many Decembrists, Pushkin and his aristocratic friends, and a large number of aristocrats and dignitaries of the empire. In the late 1840s they were young men serving at the beginning level in government offices, but rather than climbing the career ladder they were spending their time reading economic and political tracts under Petrashevskii’s leadership. Very soon they turned to the works of the French utopian Charles Fourier, and declared themselves socialists. Fourier was not a revolutionary, as he believed that the foundation of utopian colonies without private property and based on joint labor would quickly spread to found a new social order. As many American followers proved, this idea was an illusion, but in 1845 that conclusion was still in the future. Petrashevskii’s group was convinced it would work but they realized that in Russian conditions they could not operate, and they needed first to secure legal order and political freedom. Debates and divisions over tactics soon surfaced, with some of the group favoring a concentration on propaganda while others looked to organize a revolt. The European revolutions of 1848 provided a stimulus to the idea of revolt, but also to government surveillance. The Third Section planted three spies in the group and in April 1849, they were all arrested.
The government’s treatment of the Petrashevskii group differed sharply from the general legality with which it had treated the Decembrists twenty-four years earlier. After months of interrogation, during which the accused were not informed of the charges against them until very late, they were placed before a military court though there were only a few officers among them. The court found them guilty of plotting against the life of the tsar, of organizing a secret society, and of planning a revolt. Only the last charge was substantiated in the evidence, and only for some of the accused. The point of the first charge, plotting to kill the tsar, was that it alone in Russian law carried the death penalty. Thus forty of the defendants were sentenced to death, including Petrashevskii and Dostoevskii. They were then taken to the place of execution, and the first three were tied to stakes before a firing squad. At that point, an officer appeared with the announcement that the death sentences had all been reduced to hard labor in Siberia, and the prisoners were taken on the spot to the road east. This gratuitous piece of cruelty had been part of the traditions of the monarchy – the clemency of the tsar instead of death – but by 1849 this was out of place with the culture of the times.