Granovskii, Kavelin and Solov'ev followed Belinsky in admiring Peter the Great and in regarding the Petrine reforms as a moment of convergence between Russia and Europe. All predicted that, in the future, the enlightenment of the heretofore-benighted Russian people would enable individuals to join the educated classes and to enjoy the prospect of intellectual self- determination. Granovskii called this process ofeducation the 'decomposition of the masses' into free, conscious individuals. Kavelin's long essay, 'Vzgliad na iuridicheskii byt drevnei Rossii' (Analysis of Juridical Life in Ancient Russia, I847) argued that Russia had moved from a society based on varying degrees of blood ties (the tribe, clan or family) into a society organised on abstract legal principles (duty to the state, citizenship, status defined by law). The end of the process, in Russia as in Europe, would be the complete development of individuality (lichnost'). Kavelin implied that the abolition of serfdom and the establishment of representative government in Russia were inevitable. In his multi-volume Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen (History of Russia from Ancient Times, 1851-79) Solov'ev argued that Russia had evolved from a loose association of tribes into a modern state, based on shared religious and civic values and ruled by an enlightened government. Since Peter's reign, he contended, Russia had moved rapidly toward the same historical goals as Western Europeans. He did not subscribe to Belinskii's opinion that violence in the name of social progress was morally justified, rather he treated Russia's transformation as a case study in gradual evolution.
Herzen and Bakunin constituted the radical wing of the Westerniser movement. Herzen's essays, 'Diletantizm v nauke' (Dilettantism in Scholarship, 1843) and 'Pis'ma ob izuchenii prirody' (Letters on the Study of Nature, 1845) made the case that modern society stood on the verge of a new epoch in which the tyranny of abstractions that had characterised the Christian era would be displaced by a new philosophical synthesis between philosophical idealism and materialism: idealism would protect human beings against the demoralising impact of soulless science, and materialism would save individuals from slavery to monstrous dogmas. In his Pis'ma iz Frantsii i Italii (Letters from France and Italy, 1847-52) Herzen asserted that the new era could not begin until all Europe had been plunged into revolutionary destruction. He wrote: 'the contemporary political order along with its civilisation will perish; they will be liquidated'.[110] In the book O razvitii revoliutsionnykh idei v Rossii (On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia, 1851) he noted that Europeans, being wealthy, feared revolution, whereas Russians were 'freer of the past, because our own past is empty, poor and limited. Things like Muscovite tsarism or the Petersburg emperorship it is impossible to love.'[111] He argued that Russians, with their love for bold experiments, might well lead the world toward socialism.
Bakunin's article, 'Die Reaktion in Deutschland' (The Reaction in Germany, 1842), claimed that the age of unfreedom would soon come to an end when the 'eternal spirit' of history finally destroyed the old European order. He rejected traditional Christianity in the name of a new 'religion of humanity', which, by expressing justice and love through liberty, would fulfill the highest commandment of Christ. Bakunin's pamphlet, Vozzvanie k slavianam (Appeal to the Slavs, 1848) demanded the Central European Slavs seek their independence from the Austrian empire. To liberate themselves from the German yoke, the Slavs would have either to wring concessions from the erstwhile masters or annihilate them as oppressors. In 1848-9 he began to suggest that the Russian people themselves lived under a 'German' yoke in the form of the Romanov dynasty. He forecast in Russia a popular revolution patterned on the Pugachev rebellion that would sweep away the 'German monarchy'. In Ispoved' (Confession, 1851), written in prison to Tsar Nicholas I, Bakunin admitted that he hoped to provoke 'A Slav war, a war of free, united Slavs against the Russian Emperor.'[112] The simultaneous emancipation of Slavs everywhere in Europe would make possible a Slavic confederation consisting of Russia, Poland, South Slavs and West Slavs.
In retrospect, the Westernisers shared love of liberty, but they did not define it in the same way. The moderates associated liberty with representative government and with virtually unfettered self-determination in the private sphere, while the radicals thought it the absence of all oppression - a definition that logically entailed the disappearance of government itself.
National identity, representative government and the market
The Great Reforms so altered Russian social and civil life as to radically affect subsequent political debates. As the long-standing discussion over ancient and modern Russia soon lost much of its salience, other questions quickly became urgent: whether the edifice of the Great Reforms would be 'crowned' by the addition of a European-style representative government at the imperial level; whether Russia's economic transformation from serfdom to a market economy should be hastened by the abolition of the peasant commune and the creation of an urban working class on the English model; and whether in the political and economic realms the Russian ethnos should be privileged over non-Russian elements or whether the empire should be rebuilt on an egalitarian, multinational footing.
In the reform period Russian thinkers developed a range of political ideas that, at least superficially, resembled the right-to-left spectrum existing in continental Western European countries. Conservative thought built on Uvarov's formula - Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality - but, under the threat of social instability, became more aggressive in its attitude toward non-Russian nationalities. Russian liberalism was, generally speaking, closer in spirit to European social liberalism than to classical liberalism, so most Russian liberals identified with the left rather than the centre or right. On the left populists, anarchists and social democrats vied for ascendancy.
The leading conservative thinkers of the post-reform period were the jurist Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev (1827-1907), the journalist Mikhail Nikiforovich Katkov (1818-87), the Pan-Slav theoretician Nikolai Iakovlevich Danilevskii (1822-85), the diplomat Konstantin Nikolaevich Leont'ev (1831-91) and the novelist Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-81).
Among Russian officials the most assertive conservative was Pobedonostsev, who tutored the last two Romanov tsars and served as procurator of the Holy Synod from 1880 to 1905. He was a critic of Western representative government and the Enlightenment whose antidote to those evils was strong central government and an assertive established Church. In an anthology entitled Moskovskii sbornik (Moscow Anthology) (1896), he described Rousseau's notion ofpopular sovereignty as 'the falsest of political principles'.[113] In practice, he contended, parliamentary institutions constituted the 'triumph of egoism': they were bodies that promised to represent the will of the people but which actually did the bidding of a handful of wilful leaders and served as pliant instruments of political factions. Western public opinion was ruled not by reason but by lying journalists who manipulated an idle public characterised 'by base and despicable hankering for idle amusement'.[114]
110
A. I. Gertsen, 'Pis'ma iz Italii i Frantsii', in
111
A. I. Gertsen,
112
113
K. P. Pobedonostsev,