The Russian Revolution полностью

It is always dangerous to seek in historical analogies explanations for historical events: the model of the French Revolution employed by Russian radicals brought no end of grief to them and many others. However, in at least one respect the example of eighteenth-century France is applicable to twentieth-century Russia—namely, in the realm of ideas, which are less affected by concrete historic circumstances than are political and social conditions. The intellectual atmosphere of late Imperial Russia closely resembled that of ancien regime France on the eve of the Revolution, and the circles of philosophes anticipated those of the Russian intelligentsia. The analogy emphasizes to what extent intellectual trends can be self-generated: it reinforces the impression that the behavior of the Russian intelligentsia was influenced less by Russian reality than by preconceived ideas.

A brilliant if little-known French historian, Augustin Cochin, first showed the peculiarly destructive intellectual atmosphere that had prevailed in France in the decades immediately preceding the Revolution. He began his inquiries with a study of Jacobinism.* Seeking its antecedents, he was led to the social and cultural circles formed in France in the 1760s and 1770s to promote “advanced” ideas. These circles, which he called sociétés de pensée, were made up of literary associations, Masonic lodges, academies, as well as various “patriotic” and cultural clubs. According to Cochin, the sociétés de pensée insinuated themselves into a society in which the traditional estates were in the process of disintegration. To join them required severing connections with one’s social group and dissolving one’s class (estate) identity in a community bound exclusively by a commitment to common ideas. Jacobinism was a natural product of this phenomenon: in France, unlike England, the movement for change emanated not from parliamentary institutions but from literary and philosophical clubs.

These circles, in which the historian of Russia recognizes many of the features of the Russian intelligentsia of a century later, had as their main mission the forging of a consensus: they achieved cohesion not through shared interests but through shared ideas, ruthlessly imposed on their members and accompanied by vicious attacks on all who thought differently:

Prior to the bloody terror of ’93, there existed, between 1765 and 1780, a dry terror in the republic of letters, of which the Encyclopedia was the Committee of Public Safety and d’Alembert was Robespierre. It mowed down reputations as the other did heads: its guillotine was defamation …¹⁷

For intellectuals of this kind, the criterion of truth was not life: they created their own reality, or rather, sur-reality, subject to verification only with reference to opinions of which they approved. Contradictory evidence was ignored: anyone inclined to heed such evidence was ruthlessly cast out.

This kind of thinking led to a progressive estrangement from life. Cochin’s description of the atmosphere in the French sociétés de pensée of the late eighteenth century perfectly fits that prevailing in intelligentsia circles in Russia a century later:

Whereas in the real world the arbiter of all thought is proof and its issue is the effect, in this world the arbiter is the opinion of others, and the aim their approbation.… All thought, all intellectual effort here exists only by way of concurrence. It is opinion that makes for existence. That is real which others see, that true which they say, that good of which they approve. Thus the natural order is reversed: opinion here is the cause, and not, as in real life, the effect. Appearance takes the place of being, speaking, doing.… And the goal … of that passive work is destruction. It consists, in sum, of eliminating, of reducing. Thought which submits to this initially loses the concern for the real, and then, little by little, the sense of the real. And it is precisely to this deprivation that it owes its freedom. It does not gain in freedom, orderliness, clarity except to the extent that it sheds its real content, its hold on that which exists.¹⁸