The change in political principles took place, of course, not only through the appearance of new, predominantly petty-bourgeois young people, the raznochintsy, but also through meditation on past experience and the latest ideas from the West. What continued unchanged was the tradition of opposition, social criticism, radical-democratic endeavour. Even though the gap between the intelligenty and the ‘lower orders’ persisted, there was every reason to hope that it would be overcome. ‘Although they belong by origin to the modernized minority of the society, they identify with the oppressed majority,’ writes Robert C. Tucker of intelligenty ‘of the Russian type’. ‘And despite the fact that it is only a minority of a minority in terms of numbers, the intelligentsia has — as it had in Russia — a potentially very large revolutionary constituency among the masses of the population.’47
The intelligentsia itself became more numerous, and members of the working classes joined its ranks. Some intermediate ‘semi-intelligentsia’ strata began to emerge. Although education, as always, lagged behind modernization, it did at any rate accompany the process. Impatient desire to speed up this process gave rise to the Narodniks’ propaganda, to the ‘going to the people’ and, in the last analysis, even to terrorist acts which were intended by their organizers to advance the political enlightenment of the masses. Revolutionary socialist parties were formed — ‘Land and Liberty’, then ‘The People’s Will’ and ‘Black Redistribution’. A psychological type of Russian intelligent came into being, and has remained the model even for many dissidents under the Soviet regime. ‘The fate of all educated people in Russia’, writes the Leningrad socialist M. Bodkhovsky in his samizdat essay on Plekhanov,
was in a certain sense predestined by the fate of this, the most politically active group. And it is extremely important to understand the path it took, the height of its ascent and the depth of its fall, so that, in our own day, we may correctly estimate the prospects before our country’s development.48
The preparation and realization of the Reform of 1861, which emancipated the peasantry, helped public opinion to take shape in Russia — especially because the government, which feared opposition from its traditional backers, began to flirt with liberalism. When, however, it became clear that the authorities would not proceed beyond half-measures, conflict arose between the reform-minded intelligentsia, who had been roused by the promises recently given by the rulers, and the actual policy that the latter pursued. This clash was, as we have seen, typical of Russian history down to our own time. Paradoxically, a reforming government always finds itself up against a stronger left-wing opposition than a conservative government because, to its misfortune, through its reforms it awakens hopes in society which it is incapable of satisfying. Belief is engendered that something can change in our country, in a general way, and not after five hundred years but ‘here and now’ (we shall find a similar situation when we come to look at the ‘Khrushchev era’). In attempting to cope with social discontent and put an end to the hopes which official policy had just aroused, the government resorted to repressive measures which led to the development of an underground press and clandestine organizations. The logic of the struggle carried the intelligentsia further and further to the left. Europeanism was at first understood in a liberal spirit, then in a democratic spirit, and from the middle of the nineteenth century in a socialist spirit. Later, in 1910, Tugan-Baranovsky wrote: ‘The socialist sympathies of the Russian intelligentsia constitute one of its most characteristic distinguishing features.’49 Moreover,
a Russian intelligent, if he is interested at all in social problems, is usually more or less inclined towards, and sometimes is even fanatically committed to socialism. This is so plain to see that it hardly calls for proof.50
On this basis Pipes considered that in general, acceptance of socialism ‘in some one of its several forms’ was a necessary feature of all Russian intelligenty.51 In my view it would be more correct to say that for the Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth century, socialism became the embodiment of the humanist ideals of the Westernist tendency.
Marxists were later to abuse the Narodniks, the first Russian socialists, for their insufficiently ‘European’ views (especially their idea that Russia’s road to socialism lay not through up-to-date industry but through the village commune). Then, still later, the Mensheviks among the Marxists were to attack the Bolsheviks for returning to Narodism (with their idea of a socialist revolution in backward Russia, their preference, in practice, for centralized organizations of intellectuals rather than the spontaneous movement of the workers, their conspiratorial methods, and so on).52 In both cases such criticism was probably correct, but somewhat exaggerated. For example, the Bolsheviks saw the Russian road to socialism differently from the Narodniks; according to the statements of Trotsky and Lenin, it proceeded by way of what Trotsky and Parvus called the European ‘permanent’ revolution.53 On the other hand, the Narodniks’ views were more complex than is indicated in present-day official history books. It is to their credit that they were the first to formulate the problem of non-capitalist development Furthermore, their approach can be regarded as the more fruitful in that they alone linked this path of development with democracy and political freedoms. It is this, I think, that explains why Marx, unlike the Russian Marxists, treated the theoretical views of the Russian Narodniks quite seriously, as an interesting hypothesis, refusing either to endorse them or to reject them ‘out of hand’.
Although their subsequent transition from Narodism to Marxism was very painful for many intelligenty, it was a perfectly logical and natural continuation of the evolution of Russian Westernism. The common feature of both these socialist theories was, as Lenin observed, ‘their defence of democracy by appealing to the masses’.54 Marxism, however, was a more consistent variety of Westernism. ‘The first Russian Marxists’, Berdyaev notes, ‘were more European, more Western folk than the Narodniks.’55
The success of Marxism was bound up with the fact that this more finished theory provided answers to the problems Narodism was trying to solve. Marxism took a step towards liberalism in so far as it recognized bourgeois democracy as a necessary transitional stage towards socialism — a stage which might, in Russia as in other countries, occupy an entire epoch of history.56 At the same time, Marxism became in Russia precisely what Narodism had tried to be — the ideology of modernization.57 Many people both then and later saw the victory of Marxism over Narodism as the final victory of Westernism over what remained of Slavophil ideas in the thinking of the intelligentsia. ‘It was necessary’, Trotsky wrote a quarter of a century later, ‘to overcome the homegrown revolutionary prejudices of the Russian intelligentsia, in which the arrogance of backwardness found its expression.’58