Several policies which the government initiated at this time created favorable conditions for the growth of the intelligentsia. Censorship was eased. During the preceding reign of Nicholas I, it had attained a level of mindless severity which made it increasingly difficult to communicate by means of the printed word. Under the new reign, preliminary censorship was abolished and the rules governing publication sufficiently relaxed to permit the spread of the most radical ideas by means of a coded (“Aesopian”) language. The periodical press became the principal vehicle through which opinion-makers in Moscow and St. Petersburg influenced thinking in the provinces. The Russian press in the second half of the nineteenth century had surprising latitude to criticize the authorities: by 1900, most dailies and monthlies upheld oppositional views.
In 1863, universities received autonomy, which made their faculties self-governing. Admission to the institutions of higher learning was opened to commoners, who under Nicholas I had been virtually excluded. They quickly turned into centers of political ferment. A high proportion of the Russian intelligentsia became radicalized during their student years.
The introduction in 1864–1870 of organs of self-government—the zemstva and Municipal Councils—offered intellectuals opportunities for professional public employment. Together with rural schoolteachers, agronomists, physicians, statisticians, and other experts hired by the zemstva, known collectively as the “Third Element,” they formed an active body with a radical, if nonrevolutionary, bent which gave the tsarist bureaucracy cause for much anxiety.34 Professional revolutionaries scorned this kind of work on the grounds that it helped to solidify the existing regime. The elected zemstvo deputies, on the other hand, held liberal or liberal-conservative views.
Lastly, the growth of the Russian economy created a demand for professional specialists of all sorts: lawyers, engineers, scientists, managers. Independent of the government, these experts formed professional associations or “unions” (soiuzy), which were in varying degrees permeated with an anti-autocratic, pro-Western spirit. As we have seen, in 1900–5 these associations played a major role in unleashing revolutionary unrest.
Thus, between 1860 and 1900, one precondition for the emergence of an intelligentsia was met: opportunities emerged for economic independence from the government along with the instruments for the spread of unconventional ideas. Under these favorable conditions, an ideology binding the intelligentsia into a cohesive group was not slow to emerge.
The Russian intelligentsia was prone to the wildest excesses of thought, to bickering and theoretical hair-splitting, but these quarrels should not obscure the fact that its members held a body of philosophical ideas in common. These ideas were in no wise originaclass="underline" in nearly all cases they were adopted from the Enlightenment and brought up to date in the light of modern science. From the eighteenth-century French materialists and their nineteenth-century German followers, Russian intellectuals adopted the “monistic” conception of man as a creature made up exclusively of material substances in which there was no room for a “soul.” Ideas which failed to meet materialist criteria, beginning with God, were treated as figments of the imagination. Applying the utilitarian principle, the usual corollary of materialism, they rejected customs and institutions that did not satisfy the criterion of bringing the “greatest happiness to the greatest number.” The early exponents of this ideology in Russia were called “nihilists,” a term often misunderstood to mean that they believed in nothing; in fact, they had very strong beliefs but held nothing sacred and insisted on the universal validity of materialism and utilitarianism.
Positivism, the doctrine of August Comte, influenced Russian intellectuals in two ways. As a methodology for the study of human society (for which Comte coined the word “sociology”), it reinforced materialism and utilitarianism in that it taught that human behavior follows laws, which, if studied scientifically, make it fully predictable. Mankind can be scientifically managed with the help of the science of society, or sociology, which is to society what physics is to inert matter and energy and biology to living organisms. This proposition gained the status of an axiom in Russian intelligentsia circles from the 1860s onward. Positivism also exerted a more short-lived influence with its theory of progress as the advance of enlightenment, revealed in the gradual displacement of “theological” and “metaphysical” modes of thought by the scientific or “positivistic” one.
Materialism, utilitarianism, and positivism became the ideology of the Russian intelligentsia and the test which determined qualifications for membership. No one who believed in God and the immortality of the soul, no matter how otherwise “enlightened” and “progressive,” could lay claim to being an intelligent. Nor was there place in the intelligentsia for those who allowed accident a role in human affairs or believed either in the immutability of “human nature” or in transcendental moral values. Russian intellectual history is replete with examples of intelligenty who, having developed doubts about one or more aspects of this ideology, suffered expulsion from its ranks. The “dry terror” which Cochin found in pre-revolutionary France was much in evidence in pre-revolutionary Russia: here, too, defamation of deviants and outsiders served to preserve group cohesion. Inasmuch as the survival of the intelligentsia depended on its members adhering to an ideological consensus, the consensus was ruthlessly enforced. This made the intelligentsia incapable of adjusting to changing reality, causing Peter Struve to describe it as “perhaps the most conservative breed of human beings in the world.”35
The intelligentsia had tenuous relations with the creators of Russian culture—the novelists, poets, and artists. The latter intensely disliked attempts of political activists to impose restraints on their work. These restraints were much more onerous in their way than the government’s official censorship: for while the government exercised negative censorship, forbidding certain themes, the intelligentsia practiced it in a positive form by demanding that art and literature serve the cause of social progress, as they defined it. Relations between the two groups worsened further in the 1890s when Russia came under the influence of Modernist art and literature with their commitment to “art for art’s sake.” The control that radical intellectuals sought to exercise over culture, to have it serve utilitarian rather than aesthetic goals, had little effect on genuine talent: no Russian writer or artist of distinction submitted to this kind of tyranny. Its main effect was to cut off the intelligentsia from the most vital sources of contemporary culture. Once in a while the simmering conflict became explicit, as when Chekhov confessed to a friend in what for him was an unusual outburst of anger:
I do not believe in our intelligentsia—hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated, lazy. I do not believe in it even when it suffers and complains, because its oppressors come from its own inner depths.*
Dissent in Russia first became open and endemic at the universities. Although the 1863 statutes gave them considerable autonomy, its main beneficiaries were the faculty: the students continued to be treated as minors, subject to strict discipline. They chafed under it and from time to time gave vent to their frustration by staging protests. The pretexts were often minor and usually not political. Under a more tolerant regime they would have been allowed to dissipate. But the Russian authorities knew only one way of dealing with “insubordination” and that was by repression. Students guilty of nothing worse than rowdyism or breaches of regulations were arrested and expelled, sometimes permanently. Such severity radicalized student bodies and helped transform institutions of higher learning into centers of opposition.