The most complete expression of the values of the new generation came in Chernyshevsky’s novel, What is to be Done?, written in the prison of the fortress of St. Peter and Paul after his arrest in 1862. The novel managed to be published legally through an error of the censor, even though it presented a case for the complete reorganization of society and a plan of the future. The idea was to construct a series of communal production workshops and living arrangements that would liberate the individual from the constraints of poverty and the traditional family. Chernyshevsky’s novel was as much a feminist as a socialist tract. The emancipation of women, even from the upper classes, was a central part of his platform, for Chernyshevsky saw himself as the advocate of individual liberation to a society of “rational egoism” as much as the advocate of peasant and worker emancipation. The book became the Bible of a whole generation and its characters, the devoted revolutionary, the emancipated husband, the new woman – all these provided the youth of the time not only with ideals but also specific models of behavior, which many followed to the letter. Long hair for men and short for women, contempt for upper class manners and dress to the point of rudeness and general sloppiness became the fashion among students and gave the tone to a whole generation. Chernyshevsky’s arrest and exile deprived the radicals of a public voice, and also led to the emergence of a whole underground and émigré literature that circulated among students and youth throughout the empire.
The radicals would soon capture the center stage of Russian life and culture and even provoke a series of “anti-nihilist” novels designed to demonstrate their limitations and errors. The post-Crimean decade, however, was also the period of formation of Russian liberalism, which had much greater support than the radicals among the intelligentsia: the professors, doctors, and teachers who made up its core. The liberal generation was also deeply affected by the new scientism of the era, which seemed to find a European model in Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and French positivism. The first and primary leader of the liberals, however, remained true to the older Hegelianism of his youth, albeit in the liberal rather than radical interpretation. This was Boris Chicherin, a professor of law whose conception of Russian history neatly fit his political ideas and legal training. His idea was simply that early Russian history to Peter the Great, had been the history of the development of statehood. Autocracy was a primitive survival from the later phases of this era, necessary in its time but now becoming outdated. Peter’s reign had signaled the beginning of the development of legality within the autocratic structure, a development that was reaching its maturity in his own times with the great reforms. The task of the reform generation was to move this process forward, so that the further development of society would raise Russia to the level of civilization suitable for a constitution. The constitution was for the future, the task of the present was to move along the process of reforming the state, not to blow it up.
Chicherin’s ideas or some variant of them were easy to fit with the general fascination with progress in nineteenth-century Europe, and the liberals felt they were part of a worldwide process that sooner or later would triumph in Russia too. These ideas were the inspiration of the zemstvo activists, as well as the journalists and writers who gathered around the new newspapers and the more intellectual “thick journals.” The latter were ideally suited for the age, as the censorship was much more interested in daily newspapers and popular literature than the thick journals. Long learned discussions of local government in England or economic problems of the Russian countryside were much easier to get through censorship (thus Karl Marx’s Capital was legally published in Russia). The most popular of the thick journals was the Messenger of Europe (Vestnik Evropy), founded in 1866. Every month its subscribers received three or four hundred pages of high-level journalism and even scholarly articles on current topics, novels, and verse that included the future classics of Russian literature and usually a novel translated from some Western language. The journal was full of useful information, long articles in which the authors discussed not only the alleged subject at hand but also many excursions into various types of useful knowledge – scientific, social, economic, even medical. In the drawing rooms of the provincial gentry and the libraries of gymnasium teachers throughout the Empire, journals of this sort were a lifeline, a connecting link with the larger world in Russia and beyond, and an inspiration for dogged persistence in zemstvo work and other humble attempts to make a modern society of Russia.
Conservative thought, as well, radically changed after Crimea. Unlike the liberals – numerous and in general agreement with one another – the conservatives remained a series of small mutually hostile groups alongside several idiosyncratic thinkers who lacked a following. The most important group was still the Slavophiles, who found a constituency among the bankers and textile millionaires of Moscow. The millionaires subsidized their journals and allowed them to keep their ideas before the public even if their circulation never reached the same volume as the liberal publications. The Slavophiles were generally supportive of the reform process, but they thought that too much of it was the result of mechanical adoption of Western models. Nationalism was increasingly the dominant feature of Slavophile ideology. They also feared farther moves in certain areas, especially any liberal (government or outside) measures that might weaken the peasant community, for them the basis of Russia’s unique harmony in a world of political and social strife. Their general support of the autocracy and its policy was by no means uncritical, and earned them considerable official suspicion and hostility.
A more powerful advocate of conservative ideas was Mikhail Katkov, who until the Polish revolt was a liberal spokesman. In the wake of the revolt Katkov and his Moscow News (Moskovskie Vedomosti), subsidized by the Russian government in spite of occasional clashes, became the principal public voice of Russian nationalism and the idea of autocracy. Katkov advocated a sort of “westernizing” conservatism, one where Russian would acquire an industrial social order but retain the authoritarian form of government of the past, modernized by modern administrative methods. In many ways Katkov admired Bismarck’s Germany and hoped that Russia would imitate it, not least in its strident nationalism. Katkov’s nationalism was nastier than the vague “nationality” principle of Uvarov and Nicholas I. Katkov was relentlessly anti-Polish and anti-Semitic, and for all of his admiration of Germany, he was relentlessly hostile to the Baltic German aristocracy still so prominent in Russia’s government and army, as well as at court. He also favored an aggressive foreign policy and came to advocate a strongly anti-German policy. The government was not always happy with Katkov (the Baltic German issue was a constant irritant) as it did not admit the propriety of even friendly criticism, but it could not do without him. For the conservative gentry and officialdom, Katkov was an oracle. None of the other conservative voices, even Dostoevsky’s, had his following.