Petr Kropotkin (1842–1921), although born into the privileged Russian aristocracy, was a champion of the exploited peasantry and a revolutionary best known for his theoretical writings on anarchism. As a young man he volunteered for military service in Siberia—when he could have remained instead in the capital. Once, when languishing in a French jail for his revolutionary activities, he refused to accept an offer of bail from friends. William H. Blanchard, in a very interesting study on revolutionary morality, is explicit about Kropotkin’s moral masochism: “Kropotkin is difficult to understand without the assumption of some motive of moral masochism, a feeling of guilt that requires some compensatory behavior.”133 According to Blanchard, Kropotkin illustrates a thesis that may be made about revolutionaries generally: “Revolutionaries must be prepared to suffer if they are to advance their causes. They must show the government they cannot be broken, even by imprisonment. Perhaps the only people suited for such long ordeals of suffering are those who derive some satisfaction from the experience of suffering itself.”134
The intelligentsia’s will to self-sacrifice found its first full-scale outlet in the so-called “going to the people” (“khozhdenie v narod”) movement which took place starting in the mid-1870s. This was a joint effort primarily by upper-class young people to serve their social inferiors, the Russian peasant folk (“narod”). Some of these populists (sometimes called “narodniki”—although this term is somewhat vague and has a convoluted history)135 wanted simply to help the peasants by educating them and their children, giving them medical treatment, and so on, while others (especially followers of the sadistic Bakunin) wanted to foment anti-tsarist revolution. As it turned out, most of the peasants themselves were not interested in achieving the social progress intended for them. In some cases they even turned over the agitators to the police. There were mass trials. The populist movement, initially at least, was a gross failure.
Perhaps this failure was not itself an unconsciously intended self-punishment, but the original goal of political action by the Russian intelligentsia did involve a form of self-sacrifice, even self-punishment. Billington says these activists—especially during the so-called “mad summer” of 1874—were “swept away by a spirit of self-renunciation.”136 Fedotov sees “something irrational” in the movement, adding that “sometimes the motive of sacrifice was everything and the positive work had but a secondary importance.”137 Tibor Szamuely says: “Atonement for serfdom became the collective mission of the intelligentsia.” Szamuely speaks of “the overpowering guilt-complex of the Russian intelligentsia, its obsession with the ideas of collective sin and social redemption.”138
Nadejda Gorodetzky translates from the memoirs of a “man of the seventies,” M. Frolenko:
Youth brought up on the ideas of the ‘sixties was imbued by the idea of serving the people and sacrificing personal career or goods. Many had, in their childhood, sincere [religious] belief. The teaching of Christ: to lay down one’s soul, to give away one’s possessions, to suffer for one’s faith and ideal, to leave father and mother for their sake, to give oneself wholly for the service of others, was a testament of God. It was not difficult with such a background to take in the teaching of the ‘sixties about one’s debt to the people and the necessity to pay back for all the privileges received in their childhood.139
The reasoning here is not at all unlike that of guilt-ridden individuals who entered monasteries. To the extent that some narodniki, in addition to dressing as peasants, actually managed to share the unaccustomed miserable life of the peasant—to work long hours, eat poorly, live among vermin, and so forth—they paradoxically achieved for themselves the very humiliation which they longed to liberate the peasant from. According to Gorodetzky, the “desire for self-abasement” extended to the realm of education, for many of the narodniki felt that they did not deserve to become educated off the backs of the starving peasants: “If we wait and finish our studies, we may become bourgeois-minded and no longer wish to go down among the people.”140
Although some of the narodniki admired Christ, Gorodetzky does have difficulty fitting them to the procrustean bed of Christianity. The psychoanalytic category of masochism is more appropriate as an explanatory, or at least just a descriptive category. Similarly, Fedotov has a hard time determining “what kind of Christianity… dominated the subconscious mind of the Narodniks.”141 Christianity is not an inherent property of the “subconscious mind,” however. Again, masochism is.
One does not have to be a Christian to be a moral masochist. One can be an atheistic Russian intelligent, for example. It is simply false to attribute covert Christianity to a declared atheist. Scholars would not be so astonished that the narodniki resemble Christian monks if they were willing to admit masochism as a legitimate tertium comparationis.
It goes without saying that the narodniki were doing many other things besides being masochistic: they were reacting to odious tsarist authoritarianism; they were providing some education at least to peasants; they were identifying with the peasants; they were escaping from their parents; they were preparing the way for large-scale revolutions in Russia, and so on. The identification with the peasantry is of particular psychoanalytic interest, and is closely associated with masochism. This identification has often been expressed in Russian as “soedinenie” (union) or “sliianie” (merging). Richard Wortman (without mentioning psychoanalysis) speaks of an “identification with the peasant” among the intelligentsia of the fifties and sixties.142 Paraphrasing the “anthropological principle” of Chernyshevsky, Wortman explains: “To understand the peasant, one had only to understand oneself.”143 Wortman also points to Aleksandr Engel’gardt’s advice to fellow narodniki to acquire peasant humility (for then one is more likely to succeed in living and working with the peasants).144
Not all the Russian intelligentsia went as far as the narodniki in the masochistic direction (and even fewer went as far as the terrorists among them in the sadistic direction, e.g., those who assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881).145 But the self-destructive or humiliating idea surfaces again and again in the literature about the intelligentsia. Berdiaev, in his contribution to the controversial Vekhi (Signposts) symposium of 1909, states paradoxically: “The best of the intelligentsia was fanatically ready for self-sacrifice [samopozhertvovanie]—and no less fanatically preached a materialism which negated all self-sacrifice.” G. P. Fedotov says of the intelligentsia that “heroic death [was] more important than a life full of labor.” Joanna Hubbs believes that “the intelligentsia assumed the role of the ‘Humiliated Christ,’ sacrificing their personal ambitions for the salvation of their motherland.”146
Particularly eloquent on the subject of the intelligentsia’s masochism is Tibor Szamuely in his book The Russian Tradition. Following in the footsteps of Dostoevsky, Sergei Bulgakov, and others, Szamuely sees the Russian intelligentsia as a kind of loosely organized religion:
The intelligentsia… represented something in the nature of a revolutionary priesthood, a subversive monastic order. Its way of life was founded on a genuine asceticism, an aversion to worldly riches, a scorn for the ordinary “bourgeois” creature comforts. Self-abnegation became second nature; the Russian intelligent was easily recognizable by his utter and unselfconscious disregard for material considerations, his fecklessness and impracticality, his indifference to appearances and cheerfully disorganized existence.