In the polemic which developed between utilitarians and the exponents of'art for art's sake', the central figure of contention was Pushkin. Until the 1860s his place in Russian culture had been unchallenged. He was revered not only as Russia's greatest poet and the founder of her literature, but as a new national type. 'Pushkin is the Russian man as he is in the course of becoming,' Gogol wrote, 'such as he may appear, perhaps, in two hundred years hence.'23 But Pushkin was known to have detested all who wished to make art serve some ulterior purpose. For him, 'the aim of poetry was poetry', and 'poetry stood above morality'.24 It is because of these sentiments that the radical critics chose him as their target, seeing in him the central bastion of that Idealism which they were determined to bring down. To Ghernyshevskii, the idea of art serving itself was callous to the point of treason. For him 'the useless had no right to exist.'25 He attacked Pushkin on numerous occasions not only as an irresponsible and useless human being but as a second-rate poet, a mere imitator of Byron. Pisarev, the enfant terrible of his generation, called Pushkin a 'lofty cretin'.28 Relentless campaigns of this sort not only sent Pushkin's reputation into temporary eclipse, but had a profoundly discouraging influence on all but the very greatest literary and artistic talents.
The great ones fought back. They refused to serve as propagandists, convinced that their social role, such as it was, was best fulfilled by
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holding up a clear mirror to life. To a friend who complained that Chekhov in his stories showed no moral preferences, the writer replied:
Your criticize me for objectivity, calling it indifference to good and evil, lack of ideals, and so on. You desire me, in depicting horse thieves to say: horse-stealing is an evil. But this has been known for a long time without me. Let juries judge horse thieves. My job it is only to show what kind of people they are. I write: you deal with horse thieves then know that these are not poor people but well-fed ones, that they are members of a cult and that for them stealing horses is not theft but a passion. Of course, it would be nice to combine art with preaching, but for me it is extremely difficult to do so and indeed for technical reasons virtually impossible.2' And Tolstoy put the matter succinctly in a letter to a fellow-writer:
The aims of the artist are incommensurable (as mathematicians might say) with social goals. The goal of the artist lies not in solving a question in an indisputable manner, but in making people love life in its infinite, eternally inexhaustible manifestations.28
The quarrel had far greater import than might appear from its literary context. It was not over aesthetics but over the freedom of the creative artist - and, ultimately, that of every human being - to be himself. The radical intelligentsia, in struggling against a regime which had traditionally upheld the principle of compulsory state service, began to develop a service mentality of its own. The belief that literature and art, and to a somewhat lesser extent scholarship and science, had a primary responsibility to society became axiomatic in Russian left-wing circles. Social Democrats of both Bolshevik and Menshevik persuasion held on to it through thick and thin; and hence it was not surprising that when they came to power and got hold of the apparatus of repression which allowed them to put their theories into practice, the Communists soon deprived Russian culture of that freedom of expression which it had managed to win for itself under the imperial regime. Thus the intelligentsia turned on itself, and in the name of justice for society throttled society's voice.
CHAPTER 11 TOWARDS THE POLICE STATE
Although Russia lacks a tradition of vigorous self-government, it does not necessarily follow that it has one of bureaucratic centralism. Before the coming to power of the communist regime, Russia's officialdom was relatively small and not very effective. The obstacles to bureaucratization were formidable: the size of the country, the thin distribution of the population, difficulties of communication, and, perhaps most of all, lack of money. Russian governments were always short of cash, and that which they had they preferred to spend on the military. Under Peter the Great, the administration of Russia - already then the largest state in the world - absorbed 135,000-140,000 rubles annually, or an equivalent of between 3 and 4 per cent of the national budget.1 How paltry this sum was may be judged from the following example. Impressed by the order prevailing in Livonia, which he had recently conquered from the Swedes, Peter ordered in 1718 an inquiry into administrative practices there. The investigation revealed that the Swedish government had allotted as much money for governing this one province, measuring perhaps 50,000 square kilometres, as the Russian government was spending on the administration of the whole empire, measuring over 15 million.2 Rather than attempt the impossible and copy Swedish methods, Peter dismantled the administration of Livonia.
The Russian bureaucratic establishment loomed small not only in the country's budget; it was also insignificant in relation to the number of inhabitants. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Russia had between 11 and 13 civil servants for 10,000 people. This ratio was three to four times below that prevailing at the same time in western Europe.3 Muscovite and imperial Russias, whose bureaucracies enjoyed very wide latitude and behaved in a notoriously arbitrary fashion, were certainly administratively understaffed. The obstacles standing in the way of full-scale bureaucratization were removed only in October 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power. By that time the means of transport and communication had been modernized to the point where neither distance nor climate prevented the centre from exercising close control over the
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far-flung provinces. Nor was money any longer a problem; the expropriation in the name of socialism of the country's productive wealth assured the new government of all the resources it needed for administrative purposes, while at the same time providing it with a legitimate excuse for the building up of an immense bureaucratic apparatus on which to spend them.