The Russian Revolution полностью

The Russian intelligentsia made its appearance in the 1860s in connection with the Great Reforms of Alexander II. After its humiliating defeat in the Crimean War, the tsarist government decided it had to activate Russian society and involve it more in public life. But society proved difficult to stir: “The country, patiently trained to inertia, lost all power of initiative and when … informed that it was expected to act for itself, to settle its own local affairs, scarcely knew how to respond to the invitation, having lost the habit of action, lost interest in public life, especially in the provinces.”³³ This inertia gave Russian intellectuals the opportunity to step forward as spokesmen for society, which in any event had no opportunities to express itself through elections.

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 original: 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.