Zhelyabov died smiling1, while Rysakov, who had betrayed his comrades under interrogation, was dragged struggling to the scaffold, mad with fear. On the gallows Sofia Petrovskaya kissed Zhelyabov and the two other condemned men, but turned away from Rysakov who died alone, damned by the new revolutionary religion … They had killed for the sake of ideas … so death in the midst of their comrades was the justification they needed … To die cancels out both guilt and the crime itself … it was the culmination of nihilism, at the very foot of the gallows.
Albert Camus’s description of the execution of the revolutionaries who murdered Tsar Alexander II in 1881 is laced with moral ambiguity. His philosophical essay The Rebel (1951) hints that he both understands and condemns the act of political murder. It is both necessary and impermissible.
Prison photographs of Nikolai Rysakov, the blond-haired 19-year-old who threw the first bomb but betrayed his friends under interrogation, are full of the same ambiguity. He stares at the camera with fear in his eyes. And the transcripts of his confession are painful to read, so desperate are his pleas for mercy, for ‘just another year of life2’.
But, like all the others, Rysakov had been a willing assassin, fired by what he saw as the moral imperative of the political cause. In the 1860s and 1870s they carried out scores of bombings, killing and maiming bystanders and sacrificing their own lives with abandon. Their remarkable political anthem, the ‘Hymn of the Revolutionary’ (1865) sums up the fanatical absolutism of the Narodnaya Volya activists:
Don’t cry over the corpses3 of your comrades,
Who fell with a gun in their hand …
Just walk without fear through their bodies,
And carry the standard aloft!
We must struggle;
We must fight the deadly battle
To the bitterest of ends …
The blinkered intensity of it all is astonishing – the closest parallel is probably the fanaticism of today’s Islamic suicide bombers. This was to be a merciless, bloody war to the death.
To understand the source of the ferocity, we need to look back at the roots of violent opposition in Russia’s long history. In earlier times, disgruntled nobles plotted against Ivan the Terrible, pretenders to the throne caused civil war in the Time of Troubles, and military coups and murders raised up and brought down monarchs as late as the nineteenth century (see pp. 00). But these were essentially power struggles within the autocracy, not a challenge to Tsarism itself. The challenge came ‘from above’, from within the ruling caste, not from the ordinary people ‘below’. The first tentative instance of that came with the reformers Alexander Radishchev and Nikolai Novikov, who attacked the social policies of Catherine the Great, agitated for measures to close the gap between the autocrat and the people, including the abolition of serfdom, and were promptly jailed for their trouble.
The Decembrist coup plotters of 1825 fired the starting gun on a century of revolutionary opposition backed by the use of force (see here). Over the following decades a new, archetypally Russian class of disgruntled young men and women began to emerge as its ideological cheerleaders. The intelligentsia were drawn from students, clerks, writers and teachers – all given a relatively liberal education by the state, but repelled by the nature of that state and angry at the yawning gap between rulers and ruled. They were raznochintsy, literally ‘people of different social grades’. In the 1830s, the writer Pyotr Chaadayev attacked the institution of autocracy in Russia in language so furious that his ‘Philosophical Letters’ (1831) were denounced and banned, circulating only clandestinely as manuscripts passed from hand to hand – an early form of samizdat.
Our history began in4 barbarity and backwardness, followed by brutal, humiliating foreign oppression whose values were imbibed by our own rulers. Cut off by our extraordinary destiny from the rest of humanity, we failed to acquire the universal values of duty, justice and the rule of law. When we finally threw off the [Mongol] yoke, the new ideas that had blossomed in Western Europe did not penetrate our state of oppression and slavery because we were isolated from the human race. We fell into a condition of ever deeper servitude. While the whole world was being rebuilt and renewed, nothing was built in Russia. Nothing of what was happening in Europe got as far as us. We have remained cowed and cowering in our miserable hovels … Perhaps you find me bitter in speaking thus of our country; but I have spoken only a small part of the whole unpalatable truth.
Chaadayev was declared mad by the regime and sent into exile. His riposte, both ironic and furious, was ‘The Vindication of a Madman’ (1837).
Chaadayev’s diagnosis sparked a fierce ideological debate. He argued for a decisive turn towards Western values – European-style constitutionalism and social justice. It was a view that found plenty of support among the intelligentsia and coalesced into a powerful school of so-called Westernisers.
But an equally vigorous movement emerged, in stark disagreement with Chaadayev’s solution and proposing instead a return to the ‘basic Russian values’ of Orthodoxy, peasant collectivism and national culture. These were the so-called Slavophiles, who saw Russia’s strength in its sense of history and shared purpose. In their eyes, communal institutions like the traditional peasant councils, the mir, gave Russia an advantage over the individualistic West: Europeans thought of themselves first, but Russians thought in terms of common effort and the common good. The Slavophiles were conservatives who supported tsarism. They too were aware of the growing gap between the monarch and his subjects and they proposed consultative councils to bring the two back into harmony. The Slavophile Konstantin Aksakov defined the essence of Slavophilism as sobornost’ (togetherness):
All classes and groups5 of the population are imbued with a single spirit, a single faith, identical convictions, uniform concepts and the same devotion to the common weal; … Russia is a sort of moral choir, in which the individual voice is not drowned out but is heard in all its glory as part of the collective harmony of all voices singing together.
Striking a similar note, Dostoevsky wrote in his ‘Writer’s Diary’ in the 1870s:
Our land may be destitute6 and chaotic … but it stands as one man. All 80 million of its inhabitants share a spiritual unity that does not, and cannot, exist anywhere in Europe.
The Slavophiles promoted an inspiring, if heavily romanticised view of Russia’s past. They were anti-Western in the sense that they rejected European social values and lamented Peter the Great’s attempts to introduce them. Alien Western ideas, they believed, were the cause of the fatal estrangement between the monarch and the people; the old social model of an autocratic, Orthodox society in which everyone knew his or her place was a better recipe for social stability. The Slavophiles disagreed profoundly with Chaadayev’s criticisms and proclaimed Russia’s moral superiority over the West, reviving the old myths of ‘Holy Rus’ with its divine mission to save the world. ‘Suffering land of the Russian people7!’ writes the poet Fedor Tyutchev. ‘The foreigner’s glance will never understand you … But the King of Heaven, weighed down by the burden of the cross, in the garments of a slave, has walked upon your soil and He has blessed you.’ Tyutchev at his best is one of Russia’s great lyric poets. He was also a xenophobic nationalist and imperialist whose political writings sound like Rudyard Kipling on amphetamines. His mystical-religious representation of Russia, similar in many respects to that of Dostoevsky, reflects the Slavophiles’ vision of a downtrodden nation ennobled by a native faith that will change the world.
With the mind alone8,
Russia cannot be understood.
No ordinary measure spans her greatness.
She stands alone, unique;
In Russia you simply must have faith.
The belief that Russia’s destiny was to teach humanity how to live would characterise Slavophile teachings in the nineteenth century and surface again in a new guise after 1917. But the Slavophile–Westerniser debate stemmed from a dichotomy that had haunted Russians from the earliest times: the values of Eastern despotism, the legacy of the Mongol yoke, versus the Western model of participatory government and social guarantees. By the 1840s, both Westernisers and Slavophiles agreed change was needed.
On the whole, the generation of the 1840s were political thinkers and theorists, generally unwilling to resort to violence as a political weapon. Writers such as Alexander Herzen and Vissarion Belinsky denounced autocracy, serfdom and the tsarist police state. They advocated European liberal values, but their very Russian form of socialism borrowed from the Slavophile ideal of the peasant commune. Herzen famously predicted that Russia would provide the most fertile ground for socialist revolution:
A storm is approaching9; make no mistake about it. Revolutionaries and reactionaries are at one about that. All men’s heads are in a spin; a weighty question, a question of life and death, lies heavy on all our chests … The word ‘socialism’ is unknown to the Russian people, but its meaning is close to their hearts because they have lived for generations in village communes … The peasants have been the guardians of our national character, which is based on the ethos of Communism – the division of the land according to the number of workers, and the absence of private ownership … By good fortune, the life of the commune has survived into the period of the rise of socialism in Europe … making our soil the most suited to the germination of those seeds brought from the West.
Herzen became known as ‘the Father of Russian Socialism’; he coined the formula ‘land and freedom’, which would become the slogan of the populist movement. But faced with demands to take the revolution onto the streets he drew back, vainly hoping to the very last that the tsarist system would reform itself. Disappointed and increasingly marginalised, he ended his life in exile, living in London – in Paddington and Putney – vainly trying to influence Russian politics through his writings in émigré journals.
Herzen’s generation was well intentioned, committed to the peaceful introduction of socialism and horrified by political coercion. They opposed dictatorships of any kind, tsarist or revolutionary, and believed in genuine liberty and choice.fn1
But the Men of the Forties had missed their chance. In a few turbulent years, their brand of idealistic liberalism was swept away by a new generation of angry radicals. The Men of the Sixties were much less squeamish, much readier to use violence to impose their views.
Turgenev captures the moment in his iconic novel of the times, Fathers and Children (1862), painting a pained, rueful portrait of the new breed of revolutionary nihilists. The novel’s hero, or anti-hero, Bazarov is determined to do away with the old order, vehemently opposed to the gradualism of the previous generation. He fails because his revolutionary zealotry is undermined by the very human emotions of love and affection.
But it was another book, written a year later and now largely unread, that helped to determine the future of the revolutionary movement. Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? seems today like a clumsy, humourless pot-boiler, but in 1863 it captured the imagination of an entire generation. Composed in prison and disguised as a sentimental romance, the plot glorifies the ‘new men’, disgusted by tsarist society and selflessly dedicated to socialist ideals. The love affair of the two main characters climaxes not in bed, but in the founding of a women’s cooperative!
‘I shall speak frankly with you10,’ Vera said. ‘Good and intelligent people have written many books concerning the way we should live in order to create universal happiness. And the principal means they recommend … is the organisation of workshops on a new basis! I have established a workshop in order that all the profits may go to you, the workers … this is my passion.’ How much joy and happiness the idea brought her! What better thing could happen? It was Vera Pavlovna’s most passionate dream!
What Is to Be Done? is a dreadful read. It spawned a whole genre of ‘come with me to the salt mines’ romances. But its message of social liberation, female emancipation and heroic commitment to the political struggle struck a chord. It became an overnight sensation and a revolutionary classic. Its glorification of ‘cold-blooded practicality and calculating activity’ set the tone for the violence of the coming years, and Lenin himself regarded it as a pivotal precursor of Bolshevism.
Dostoevsky, who had flirted with socialism in his youth and served time in exile for it, took a very different view. The extremism of the ‘new men’ of the 1860s had turned him against the revolutionary movement. In his novel Crime and Punishment (1866), he lambasts their moral bankruptcy in the figure of Raskolnikov, whose creed of amoral pragmatism – anything is permitted as long as it contributes to the triumph of the ‘great idea’ – is shown to be an untenable sham. In The Devils (1872), Dostoevsky uses the dying words of an old socialist, a well-intentioned Man of the Forties, to excoriate the new revolutionary ‘swine’ who have taken the previous generation’s ideas and perverted them with cynicism and indiscriminate violence:
All the sores and foul contagions11, all the impurities, all the devils great and small have multiplied in that great invalid which is our beloved Russia. What we need is a great idea, a great will to cast them out – just like the lunatic possessed of devils … Then all those demons will come forth, all the impurity, all the rottenness that was putrefying on the surface … and we shall cast ourselves down, possessed and raving, from the rocks into the sea, and we shall all be drowned – and a good thing too, for that is all we are fit for.
Dostoevsky based the central character of The Devils on the notorious terrorist Sergei Nechaev, whose Catechism of a Revolutionist (1869) is a chilling expression of absolutist immorality, in which the end justifies any means:
The revolutionist … has broken all the bonds that tie him to the civilised world with its laws, moralities and customs. He is their implacable enemy… He knows only the science of destruction. His object is always the same: the surest and quickest way of destroying the whole filthy order. He despises and hates the existing social morality. For him, morality is everything that contributes to the triumph of the revolution. Anything that stands in its way is immoral and criminal.
To demonstrate his contempt for conventional morality, Nechaev – like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment – set out to commit a deliberately gratuitous, immoral act, persuading his fellow revolutionaries to murder an innocent comrade. For Dostoevsky, ‘Nechaevism’ summed up the sinister cynicism and evil that had come to characterise the Men of the Sixties. His portrayal of Nechaev in the character of Pyotr Verkhovensky in The Devils is a powerful denunciation of the whole revolutionary milieu.
It is clear, though, that the radical extremists of Narodnaya Volya, men and women like those who murdered Tsar Alexander II, enjoyed a good deal of popular support. In 1878, one of their members12, a 28-year-old woman named Vera Zasulich, carried out a plot to murder the governor of St Petersburg, Fyodor Trepov. She later explained that she was motivated by a desire for revenge because Trepov had ordered the beating of a young prisoner who refused to remove his cap in his presence. In an astonishing show of sangfroid, Zasulich bluffed her way into the governor’s mansion and pulled a revolver on him.
Despite being shot at point-blank range, Governor Trepov survived. Zasulich was arrested on the spot. It seemed an open and shut case of attempted murder, and the government ordered a public trial with a jury. But if their aim was to highlight the inhumanity of the revolutionaries, they would be sadly disappointed. With the help of a skilled lawyer, Zasulich based her defence on the ‘political necessity’ of her act. She used her time in court to fulminate against the iniquities of the regime and argued that the only rational response to a repressive state was righteous political violence. The trial became a widely publicised indictment of the government itself and, despite the overwhelming weight of the evidence against her, Zasulich was acquitted by a jury of ordinary Russians. Public opinion evidently sympathised with the revolutionaries. The tsar ordered a retrial, but Zasulich’s supporters spirited her out of Russia and she lived abroad until the 1905 revolution allowed her to return home.
Less lucky was Alexander Ulyanov, a young man from the southern Russian town of Simbirsk. When Ulyanov was hanged for taking part in a Narodnaya Volya plot in 1887, it would leave a legacy of bitterness in his younger brother, Vladimir. He in turn would later take out his anger and resentment … under the name of Vladimir Lenin.
fn1 I remember the great social philosopher Isaiah Berlin – himself born in St Petersburg less than 40 years after Herzen’s death and already in his seventies when I met him as a first-year undergraduate – telling me that the men of the 1840s were like very intelligent chihuahuas compared to the ferocious rottweilers who came a generation later. Berlin had no time for the new breed of revolutionary terrorists. I remember him asking me rather disconcertingly, ‘You are not, I hope, a revolutionary with a perfumed beard, are you?’ But then he added, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘Mind you, we shouldn’t forget that Herzen was in favour of socialist free love, until his wife decided she would give it a try – and then he changed his mind …’