Because they like symmetry, historians have created a foil for the Slavophiles, a party they call 'Westerners', but it is difficult to perceive among the opponents of Slavophile theories any unity except that of a negative kind. They rejected the whole vision of Russia and of the west of the Slavophiles as compounded of ignorance and utopianism. Where the Slavophiles saw depth of religious feeling, they saw superstition verging on atheism (see Belinskii's letter to Gogol, cited above, p. 160). The historians among the anti-Slavophiles had no difficulty in demolishing one by one their most cherished beliefs; they could show that the modern repartitional commune was not of ancient and spontaneous, 'folkish' origin, but an institution created by the state to ensure collection of taxes (p. 17 above); that every one of Peter's 'revolutionary' innovations had had its antecedents in Muscovite Russia; that the alleged understanding between state and society had never existed, the Russian state always crushing society under its massive weight. They did not deny that Russia was different from the west, but they explained this difference by her backwardness rather than uniqueness. They saw virtually nothing in Russia worthy of preservation; the little there was, had been created by the state, and especially Peter the Great. Apart from their rejection of Slavophile idealizations, the Westerners
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had no ideology in common. Some among them were liberal, others radical, even extremely so. But their radicalism was subject to change. Belinskii, for example, towards the very end of his life had a sudden illumination that what Russia needed was not socialism but a bourgeoisie, while Herzen, having spent his life as an eloquent advocate of drastic change, in one of his last writings ('Letter to an Old Comrade') rejected revolution. It might be better, therefore, to call the Westernizing movement the 'critical movement' because a highly critical attitude towards Russia, past and present, was its outstanding quality. Apart from history, its principal outlet was literary criticism. Belinskii, the most consistent Westerner of his generation, fashioned out of the book review and the literary essay a powerful instrument of social analysis. He used his considerable influence to expose all idealizations of Russian reality, and to promote what he considered the realistic school of literature. It was owing to him that the Russian writer first became conscious of fulfilling a social role. The reign of Alexander 11 witnessed a sharp break in Russian public opinion. The Idealist generation had still been concerned primarily with the question: who are we? The new post-1855 generation of 'Positivists' or 'Realists' raised the more pragmatic problem, first articulated by Novikov: what are we to do? In responding, the intelligentsia became polarized into conservative and radical wings, with a small body of liberal opinion uneasily wedged in between. Unlike the preceding era, when ideological opponents continued to meet socially and observe ordinary civilities, in the reign of Alexander conflicts of ideas became personalized and not infrequently led to bitter enmities.
The occasion which brought about this change was the Great Reforms inaugurated by the new monarch, most of which have been mentioned in these pages already. There was the emancipation of the serfs, followed by the introduction of zemstva and organs of urban self-government, a reform of the court system (which will be touched upon in the following chapter) and the introduction of compulsory military service. This was the most ambitious effort undertaken in the history of Russia to bring society into active participation in national life short of allowing it to share in the political process.
The reforms generated a tremendous sense of excitement in society, especially among the young who suddenly saw opportunities opening up for public service such as had never existed before. They could now enter the professions (law, medicine or journalism); they could work in zemstva and city governments; they could seek careers in the military service, whose officer ranks were opened to commoners; and, above all, they could establish contact with the emancipated peasant and help him
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to raise himself to the status of a citizen. The late fifties and early sixties were a period of rare unanimity, as left, centre and right joined forces to help the government carry out its grand reform programme.
The first breach in the united front occurred in 1861 with the publication of the terms of the Emancipation settlement. The left, led by Chernyshevskii and his Contemporary, disappointed that the peasant received only half the land he had been cultivating and had to pay even for that, declared the whole Emancipation a cruel hoax. Student unrest of the early 1860s coupled with the Polish revolt of 1863 an(l a simultaneous outbreak of mysterious arson in St Petersburg persuaded many conservatives and liberals that a conspiracy was afoot. The Russian Messenger, until then an organ of moderate opinion, now swung sharply to the right and began to attack the left from a patriotic position. There was a further split within radical ranks themselves. The Contemporary launched vicious personal attacks on the intelligentsia of the older generation, accusing it of lack of serious commitment and inertia. Herzen replied in the pages of his London-based Bell, charging the younger generation with chronic biliousness. Chicherin then attacked Herzen for his revolutionary predilections, while Chernyshevskii called Herzen 'the skeleton of a mammoth'. By 1865, Russian opinion was thoroughly splintered. Still, the basic debate as it unfolded was a dialogue between radicals and conservatives who could agree on nothing except their common loathing of the sensible, pragmatic men of the middle. The 1860s and 1870s were the Golden Age of Russian thought, when all the major themes which have occupied the intelligentsia ever since were stated and examined. The new radicalism developed on the basis of a 'scientific' or 'positivistic' philosophy which began to penetrate Russia from the west in the closing years of Nicholas' reign but fully conquered the radical left only under his successor. The spectacular achievements of chemistry and biology in the 1840s, notably the discovery of the laws of conservation of energy and the cellular structure of living organisms, led to the emergence in western Europe of an anti-Idealist movement committed to a crass form of philosophic materialism. The writings of Buchner and Moleschott, which young Russians read with a sense of revelation, told of a cosmos composed exclusively of matter in which all activity could be reduced to basic chemical or physical processes, a cosmos in which there was no room for God, soul, ideals or any other metaphysical substance. Feuerbach explained how the idea of God itself was a projection of human wishes; and his followers applied this psychological explanation to money, state and other institutions. Buckle, in the introduction to his Histoij of Civilization in England, a best seller in Russia, promised that the science of statistics would make it possible to determine in advance with mathematical precision all manifestations of social behaviour. These ideas, seemingly backed by the prestige of natural science, suggested that the key to the understanding of man and society had at long last been found. Nowhere was their impact stronger than in Russia where the absence of a tradition of humanism and lay theology made intellectuals exceedingly vulnerable to deterministic explanations.