Outside the government the dominant conservative of the early reform era was Katkov whose journals Russkii vestnik (Russian Courier), Sovremmennaia letopis' (Contemporary Chronicle) andMoskovskievedomosti (Moscow Courier) strongly influenced state policy. Katkov made his reputation as patriot during the Polish uprising of 1863-4, when he demanded the military suppression of the Poles on the ground that 'any retreat . . . would be a death certificate for the Russian people'.[115] He described the political monopoly of Russians within the empire 'not as coercion . . . but a law of life and logic'.[116] In 1867, he called for the introduction of Russian language into schools in Estonia and for the elimination of traditional Baltic German privileges in the area - a harbinger of the Russification policies pursued by Alexander III after 1881. In foreign policy Katkov was a Realpolitiker, who sometimes raised the banner of Pan-Slavism against Germany and Austria, but who always made it clear that Russian interests took priority over those of other Slavic peoples.
In Rossiia i Evropa (Russia and Europe, 1869) Danilevskii elaborated a theory ofhistorical types claiming that ten distinctive civilisations had appeared in the past. He considered the European or 'Germano-Romanic' civilisation as the latest to reach world dominance, but he regarded the industrial stage into which that civilisation had evolved as proof of its decline. He predicted that Slavdom would constitute the eleventh great civilisation in world history. The Slavic peoples would be brought together by Russia, through the conquest of Istanbul and the destruction of Austro-German power in Europe. To achieve these objectives, Russians would have to subordinate themselves to the centralised state, for only by the merciless execution of the state's divine mission would the past bloodshed of Russian history be redeemed.
In a remarkable book, Vizantizm i slavianstvo (Byzantinism and Slavdom, 1873), Leont'ev defined the earmarks of Byzantinism as: autocracy, Orthodoxy, a disinclination to overvalue the individual, an inclination to disparage the ideal of earthly happiness, rejection of the notion that human beings can achieve moral perfection on earth, and rejection of the hope that the universal welfare of all peoples can be attained. He argued that the historic vitality of Russia was directly related to Russians' loyalty to autocracy, faith in Orthodoxy, and acceptance of earthly inequality - all 'Byzantine' traits. He celebrated Peter the Great and Catherine the Great precisely because their reforms increased social inequality, thereby making possible the flowering of a creative, 'aristocratic' culture among the nobility. He warned that modern-day Russians faced a crucial choice: either to maintain their distinctive, hierarchically based national culture; or to 'subordinate themselves to Europe in the pursuit of [material] progress'. To follow the second option would be disastrous, for it would risk Russia's survival for the false religion of human felicity on earth. Although Leont'ev recognised the tribal connections between Russians and other Slavs, he did not think common blood or similarity of languages to be adequate foundations for Slavic political unity. In view of his scepticism toward the other Slavs, Leont'ev cannot be regarded as a Pan-Slav of the Danilevskii type.
Dostoevsky's conservatism was predicated on opposition to Western liberalism and socialism, on hostility to individualism and capitalism, on rejection of Catholicism and religious authoritarianism in any form, on opposition to movements inimical to Russia - nihilism, Polish nationalism, Jewish separatism and feminist radicalism. In his fiction he balanced his many antipathies by applauding the religiosity of common Russian people, the wisdom of saintly monastic elders and the fabled capacity of Russians from every social stratum to embrace suffering. Although Dostoevsky the novelist was self-evidently an anti-nihilist, a conservative nationalist, a partisan of Orthodoxy and the Great Russian ethnos, his fictional politics were less programmatic than the positions taken by his publishers, Katkov and the gentry reactionary Prince Vladimir Petrovich Meshcherskii (1839-1914). However, Dostoevsky's journalistic writing, particularly his Dnevnik pisatelia (Diary of a Writer, 1873-81), was lamentably clear. In March 1877, for example, he predicted: 'Sooner or later Constantinople will be ours.'[117] That same month, in a series of articles on the Jewish question, he accused the Jews of material greed, of hostility toward Russians, of constituting themselves a 'state within a state'. Later, in his June 1880 speech at the Pushkin monument in Moscow, he issued a call for 'universal human brotherhood' based on Russians' disposition to 'bring about universal unity with all tribes of the great Aryan race'.[118] Although his auditors received the speech well, sober readers found his messianic nationalism and religious exclusivism disturbing.
Among Russian liberals the four most interesting thinkers were the classical liberal Boris Nikolaevich Chicherin (1828-1904), the philosopher Vladimir Sergeevich Solov'ev (1853-1900), the social liberal Pavel Nikolaevich Miliukov (i859-i943) and the right liberal Petr Berngardovich Struve (i870-i944).
Chicherin began his intellectual career as a moderate Westerniser. In his earliest political writing, the article 'Sovremmennye zadachi russkoi zhizni' (Contemporary Tasks of Russian Life, 1856), he championed the abolition of serfdom and the introduction of civil liberties (freedoms of conscience, of speech andpress, academic freedom, publicjudicialproceedings, publicity of all governmental activities) in Russia. In his book, O narodnompredstavitel'stve (On Popular Representation, 1866), however, he explained why he thought Russia was yet unprepared for constitutional government. Pointing to the practical flaws of representative institutions and the falsity of Rousseau's theory of popular sovereignty, he argued that representative governments are workable only in 'healthy' societies with some experience of civil liberties, and only when the voting franchise is limited to educated property owners. This sharp distinction between civil and political liberties was a hallmark of Chicherin's thinking.
In the late 1870s Chicherin undertook a systematic study of German socialism. His trenchant critique of Marx's Das Kapital was a cardinal contribution to Russian social thought, a rare defence of free markets against their increasingly vociferous enemies. His book, Sobstvennost' i gosudarstvo (Property and the State, 1882-3), was nineteenth-century Russia's most erudite attempt to identify entrepreneurial freedom as an essential civil liberty. In the book Chicherin pointed to the incommensurability of individual liberty with social equality. He warned contemporaries against the danger of 'a new monster', - namely, intrusive society, which threatened to 'swallow both the state and the private sphere'.[119] His book, Filosofiia prava (Philosophy of Law, 1900), criticised legal theories that, in the name of morality or utility, would take away individual rights for some appealing social end. Chicherin's philosophical legacy was his conception of individual freedom from constraint by others, in so far as that liberty is compatible with others' freedom, as the sole and original right that belongs to every human being by virtue of his or her humanity. His political legacy can be found in the anonymous pamphlet, Rossiia nakanune dvadtsatogo stoletiia (Russia on the Eve of the Twentieth Century, 1900), in which he predicted the imminent end of Russian absolutism and demanded the addition of elected delegates to the imperial State Council. Miliukov called Chicherin's proposal 'the minimum demand of Russian liberalism'.
115
Quoted in K. Durman,
117
F. M. Dostoevskii, 'Eshche raz o tom, chto Konstantinopol', rano li, pozdno li, adolzhen byt' nash',