Different thinkers evaluated differently their isolation from the people. On the one hand, as V. Polonsky noted, ‘its isolation in battle positions’ gave the intelligentsia grounds for
feeling that it was the sole bearer of advanced, progressive missions for the nation, the defender of the interests of the oppressed people, and their leader. The very deep conviction of the Russian intelligentsia that its destiny was to be the teacher and guide of the masses was given brilliant expression in Russian literature.36
We can find this idea in many thinkers, starting with Herzen, but it was expressed with special clarity by the young Lenin when he wrote in his book What Is To Be Done? that the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat can be elaborated only by the intelligentsia and then ‘brought to them from without’.37 At that time Lenin said that ‘the intelligentsia are so called just because they most consciously, most resolutely and most accurately reflect and express the development of class interests and political groupings in society as a whole.’38 Plekhanov even blamed Lenin for such statements, saying that for him ‘the masses are merely inanimate raw material, upon which the intelligentsia, signed with the seal of the sacrament of the Holy Ghost, carries out its operations.’39
On the other hand, it may be that awareness of the isolation of the intelligentsia and its separation from the people was one of the causes of the Slavophil reaction. It is important to understand that Slavophil thought appeared in Russia considerably later than Westernist thought. A contemporary scholar, A. Yanov, has tried to prove that Slavophilism existed from Peter I’s time, albeit in unrealized form, as a sort of ‘ideology in itself and that its proponents were the Streltsy who revolted against Peter’s reforms.40 This view completely fails to stand up to criticism. It is a curious fact that many who have written about the Slavophils forget that this trend was not only a reaction against the Europeanization of Russia but also a product of that process. Many of the Slavophils were men with a European education, and — most importantly — their ideology was formed under the explicit influence of German Romanticism and German classical philosophy. ‘The Slavophils’, wrote Berdyaev, ‘absorbed the Hegelian idea of the vocation of peoples, and what Hegel applied to the German people they applied to the Russian. They applied the principles of Hegelian philosophy to Russian history.’41 The wave of revival of national cultures which swept over all Europe in the age of Romanticism gave rise, when it reached Russia, to the Slavophil movement. Furthermore, the initial aims of both Westernists and Slavophils were the same — progress and the emancipation of the people. Slavophilism in its original form was a sort of liberal opposition to the Petersburg government: often, it was not so much against Western culture as for what was distinctively Russian. For that very reason Herzen, the spiritual leader of Russia’s Left, was ready to offer his hand to the champions of Russian ‘originality’. The first Slavophils, Berdyaev points out, were ‘opposed to the state. There was even a strong element of anarchism in them. They considered the state an evil and government a sin.’42 But they drew their own conclusion from the isolation of the Westernist intelligentsia. They endeavoured to return to the nation’s roots, to ‘the sources’, to the true Russia, to the pre-Petrine tradition. In addition, they shut their eyes to Western humanism and turned their faces to the past, away from future prospects. Berdyaev wrote that ‘the freedom-loving Slavophils’ idealized, through misunderstanding, the Moscow period, which was ‘the worst in Russian history, the most stifling, of a particularly Asiatic and Tatar type’.43
The Slavophils’ road was a dead end. They did not find a way to the masses: they were, after all, not representatives of traditional popular culture, but only ‘repentant Europeanists’. At the same time, they broke with the intelligentsia. Slavophilism, Herzen considered, ‘did not set free, it bound, did not move forward, it pushed back.’44 This was why Russian nationalism, in its ever-sharper conflict with Westernism, became an anti-democratic, anti-humanist ideology, increasingly supported by the authorities and with decreasing influence on Russia’s intelligentsia. As a whole, the intelligentsia rejected Slavophilism completely. Closeness to the masses would have to be attained, sooner or later, as civilization developed in Russia: as the masses themselves became Europeanized and intellectualized. But this was a very slow process, and in the meantime the intelligenty remained in isolation. Thanks to the influence of German philosophy, British liberalism and French democratism, revolutionary ideas took shape in Russia earlier than revolutionary class forces, and for a long time the intelligentsia remained the country’s sole bearer of the democratic principle. Russia’s regime, wrote Gredeskul,
stifled thought and speech above all, that is, the very ‘essence’ of the intelligentsia, and the intelligentsia had to wage a desperate struggle for the people’s rights while the people itself stayed right outside that struggle, quite failing to understand why it was being waged.45
Everyone knows Lenin’s famous statement in his article ‘From the History of the Workers’ Press in Russia’:
The emancipation movement in Russia has passed through three main stages, corresponding to the three main classes of Russian society, which have left their impress on the movement: (1) the period of the nobility, roughly from 1825 to 1861; (2) the raznochintsi or bourgeois-democratic period, approximately from 1861 to 1895; and (3) the proletarian period, from 1895 to the present time.46
Schoolchildren have to learn that quotation by heart, but all the same, one should take a closer look at it. Lenin indicated the three periods quite correctly, but his linking of them with three classes of Russian society must raise doubts. Most of the nobles and bourgeois in the years 1825 to 1895 were quite alien — even hostile — to the freedom movement. The Decembrists expressed whatever other interests you care to mention, but not the interests of the landlord class. The Narodniks, being socialists, were pretty remote from the bourgeoisie, even from its democratic wing.
But if we compare the periods in the development of the freedom movement with the periods in the development of Russian literature, then with a few corrections — Lenin’s precise dates need not be taken too seriously — we observe a remarkable coincidence. The first period is the period of Pushkin, Lermontov, Belinsky and Gogol. The second is the period of Turgenev, Chernyshevsky and Dostoevsky. To the third period — let us describe it for the time being by the conventional expression ‘the age of Lenin and Chekhov’ — we shall return later.
Thus in the famous quotation we see listed three periods in the development of the Russian intelligentsia and Russian culture. Undoubtedly the social composition of the intelligentsia changed during that time. The intelligentsia of the first period was predominantly of noble origin; that of the second was petty-bourgeois. Consequently the intelligentsia’s ideas changed, and also its relation to other classes of society. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that the bearer of the revolutionary principle in Russia, right to the end of the nineteenth century, was not any definite class, still less the weak Russian bourgeoisie, but the intelligentsia. It was that very intelligentsia whose entire conditions of existence impelled it to struggle against despotism: it simply could not become reconciled to the rulers of Russia without ceasing to be an intelligentsia. The fight against the government went on, even though the ideals of the intelligentsia changed.