In the zemstvos and the new courts some part of the public finally had a sphere of activity, even if it was not political activity. Even this modest public sphere could not function easily without the press. In April 1865, the government finally promulgated permanent censorship laws. The statute itself was an amalgam of two contradictory principles, both Western in origin. The new laws abolished prior censorship that had been largely rendered unworkable by high-speed presses and the new political situation, but retained penalties for undermining respect for the state, the family, and religion. How were these to be enforced? The statute provided for settling the main issues in the new courts, which meant that the state would have to bring a case to a trial open to the public. The attempts to control critical journalists by this method were a failure and soon abandoned, for the courts either found the defendants innocent or if guilty, imposed largely symbolic punishments. The state had recourse to other methods, however, for the statute had taken censorship from the Ministry of Education and placed it under the Ministry of the Interior, the principal body in charge of preserving public order. The statute had also borrowed from French legislation a whole series of administrative measures including fines and warnings to editors that allowed the authorities to bypass the court system. After the initial failures in the court, these administrative sanctions triumphed, including eventually the prohibition of specific works of radical literature. The new censorship rules suppressed much public debate, but were never intended to eliminate it entirely.
Perhaps the most complicated reform issue after the emancipation of the serfs was that of the army. Minister of War Dmitrii Miliutin made his first proposal in 1862, and though it was approved by the tsar, it took until 1874 to be fully implemented. The core of the proposal was the replacement of the twenty-five-year service of the soldiers with a reserve system based on a limited term that was ultimately determined at six years. The conservatives wanted to keep the army a caste, in which peasants were made into soldiers commanded by nobles, while Miliutin saw such an army as reactionary and slated to repeat the defeats of Crimea. He saw no reason why free peasants could not serve and then return to their villages to resume farming. It was his powerful will, and the tsar’s determination to maintain an effective army, that kept the military reform on track through many political vicissitudes.
Vicissitudes there were. Almost immediately with the appearance of public discussion of reform in 1858–59 the debate went beyond the parameters of government-sponsored liberal reform and conservative resistance. Both liberals outside the bureaucracy and young radicals began to present ideas that went far beyond what the ministers pondered behind the closed doors of government committees. Much of the reason for the challenge lay in the transformation of educated society, the formation of an intelligentsia defined by education and profession – often of plebeian origin and unconnected to the nobility. The core of the intelligentsia were the professionals – teachers, doctors, scientists, and engineers – but the term came to include anyone with some sort of education beyond the basic level, and of course it included students. Young men and (for the first time) women, mostly in and around the universities rejected not only state leadership but were also part of a new culture, for this was the generation that abandoned the interest in German idealist philosophy that had inspired Herzen and Bakunin as well as many liberals, and turned instead to the natural sciences. Turgenev’s 1862 novel Fathers and Sons gave the term “nihilists” to this new generation for their rejection of the pieties of the past. The accusation was that they believed in nothing (in Latin “nihil”). Ferment began among the university students who had been granted a great deal of freedom in the post-Crimean era. In the autumn of 1861 a number of rather minor disturbances at St. Petersburg University led the authorities to close the university and begin to look for radical activity there and at other universities and academies. Small groups of radicals, no more than a few dozen individuals, also began to spread revolutionary manifestoes, convincing the government that vast plots were afoot. In most Russian university cities communes of students with more or less radical ideas came into existence in these years, partly for purely economic reasons but also from conviction that a simple communal life was the path to the future. The students knew about Herzen and read widely in Western liberal and radical literature, but their hero was Nikolai Chernyshevsky, whose ideas continued to inspire radicals long after he was lost to Siberian exile.
From the time of his emergence as a leading journalist in 1853, in the pages of the Contemporary, still one of the leading journals, Chernyshevsky had become the dominant intellectual and cultural figure of the radical intelligentsia and remained so for nearly a generation. The son of a priest and the graduate of a seminary rather than a secular high school, Chernyshevsky managed to enter St. Petersburg University, and ultimately acquired a master’s degree in literature. In the pages of the Contemporary, however, his writing covered far more than literature. He wrote on philosophy, economics, and politics when he could, especially West European politics, on which it was easier to publish than on Russian politics. He also devoted a great deal of space to the peasant question, the economic, administrative, and social issues involved in the emancipation. Contrary to the views of liberal economists in the government and in educated society, Chernyshevsky advocated the preservation of the Russian peasant community with its communal landownership and agriculture and village-level decision making. Chernyshevsky, in this respect close to Herzen, believed that Russia could construct a kind of agrarian socialism built around the village community and thus avoid the horrors of industrialization familiar from Victorian England and continental societies. Chernyshevsky was also a revolutionary, though he never created an actual revolutionary organization, but he did look forward to the overthrow of the tsarist regime and sympathized with those who tried to take an active role in the process.
Chernyshevsky’s most powerful contributions to the emerging revolutionary movement were his articles in the Contemporary. The radicals around the journal were convinced that the natural sciences were the key to all knowledge, that the social sciences were simply a backward area that would soon catch up to biology and chemistry. Their view of man was ruthlessly biologicaclass="underline" there were no spiritual entities, and indeed their objection to religion seems to have been founded more on disbelief in the soul than in God. Chernyshevsky and his colleagues also held an essentially utilitarian view of art, the task of which was to transform the consciousness of the readers with its arguments and its presentation of the images of reality as it actually was. By 1862 the government had become aware that he was the most important figure among the radicals, and decided to put an end to his activity. The Third Section had him arrested on suspicion of relations with Herzen and of agitating to arouse the people against the government, but they could find very little against him. Relations with Herzen could not be proven and Chernyshevsky’s articles were not in themselves criminal. After some months they found a police agent among the radicals, already arrested on another charge, who claimed to have letters from Chernyshevsky’s hand and a manifesto calling on the peasants to rise. Using these documents as evidence, the Third Section brought up a new charge, and Chernyshevsky was convicted of trying to inspire rebellion. The sentence was fourteen years labor in the mines (a sentence that was later commuted) and perpetual exile in Siberia. Chernyshevsky was allowed to leave Siberia only in 1883, six years before his death.