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_p Thus, the Russian people is fortunate above all in having remained outside European civilisation and outside all political movements. This is the good fortune of stagnation, the same good fortune that I. Aksakov later termed: "salutary immobility”. But immobility is not movement towards an ideal. From the fact that the Russian people has remained immobile for whole centuries it hy no means follows that it is more capable than the peoples of Western Europe of moving towards socialism. And the commune is not yet socialism; at best it is only the possibility of socialism. Where is the force under the operation of which this possibility will become reality? That is the question.

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p In Chapter 30 of My Past and Thoughts Plerzen replies to it as follows:

p “These foundations of our life are not reminiscences; they are living elements which exist not in chronicles, but in the present; but they have only survived under the difficult historical formation of state unity and only been preserved under state oppression, but have not developed. I even doubt whether any internal forces for their development would have been found without the Petrine period, without the period of European education.

p “Immediate foundations of life are not enough. In India there has existed since time immemorial a village commune very similar to ours and based on the partitioning of fields; yet the Indians have not gone very far with it."  [518•* 

p This is absolutely right. But if it is right, I would ask once again where is the force that will lead Russia further than the Indians have gone? Herzen replies to this question by pointing to the powerful thought of the West.

p “Only the powerful thought of the West, with which its whole long history is associated, is able to fertilise the seeds slumbering in patriarchal Slavonic life. The artel and the village commune, the division of profits and the partitioning of fields, the assembly of the mir and the joining of villages into volosts which are selfgoverning,—all these are corner-stones on which the edifice of our future free and communal life will be erected. But these •corner-stones are just stones nevertheless ... and without Western thought our future cathedral will remain with nothing but a foundation."  [518•** 

p Splendid. However, thought becomes an historical motive force only when it enters the heads of a significant number of people. Have we any grounds for thinking that the powerful thought of the West is beginning to penetrate into peasant heads? No. Herzen sees no such grounds.  [518•***  And if the powerful thought of the West does not influence the peasants whom does it influence? It influences “us”, people who have assimilated Western socialist ideals. Everything depends on “us”; for “we” are the means thanks to which the Russian people’s transition to socialism will turn from a possibility into a reality. In the pamphlet Du Dcueloppement des idees revnlutwnnaires en Russie Herzen speaks of an alliance of philosophy with socialism (p. 156) and defines (p. 143) the task of those who comprise the country’s intelligentsia.

519

p Two additions must be made to this. Firstly. Ilerzen calls the intelligentsia of his day an intelligentsia primarily of the nobility.  [519•*  Secondly, to make quite sure Herzen is prepared to appeal to the government as well. In February 1857 he wrote (in the article "Yel Another Variation of an Old Theme”):

p “There are few feelings that are more painful, more oppressive to a man than the realisation that he can now, at this moment rush forward, that everything is at hand and that the only thing lacking is understanding and courage on the part of his leaders. The engine is stoked up, ready, burning fuel in vain, losing strength in vain, and all because there is no bold hand to turn the key without fearing an explosion.

p “Let our conductors know that the peoples forgive a great deal ... if they sense strength and vigour of thought. But misunderstanding, insipid vacillation, the inability to take advantage of the circumstances, to seize them once you have unlimited power,—neither the people nor history ever forgives that, however kind-hearted it may be."  [519•** 

p Herzen did not place his hopes on the “conduclors” for long, however. More long-lived and firm was his conviction that Russia could expect nothing good from the “conductors” and "that Peter the Great is now in us”, i.e., in the intelligentsia.  [519•*** 

p But historical science now leaves us in no doubt at all that Peter’s reforms were prepared and produced by the development of Muscovite Russia. Therefore, if “we” wish to play the part of Peter the Great, “wo” must prove that the ground for “our” socialist activity is being prepared by the inner development of the commune. In another passage Herzen himself asks: "Where is the need for the future to enact a programme that has been thought up by us?" But his own reasoning on the possible success of “our” socialist activity does not point to such a need at all. It would therefore be natural to expect him to see how unconvincing these arguments of his are. But the point is that this reasoning came into his head as the final consolation for a man who was disillusioned with the future of Western civilisation and prepared to grasp at the first straw he found to avoid drowning in a gulf of despair. A drowning man never adopts a critical attitude towards the straw at which he is grasping. We have seen in the first half of this article that in speaking of Western Europe Herzen adhered more or less firmly to tlie viewpoint that the course of the develop- 520 ment of ideas is determined by the course of development of life, that social consciousness is determined by social being. But because, in adhering to this viewpoint, lie arrived at some most cheerless conclusions concerning the future destiny of the West, he turned to Russia and fairly soon adopted the opposite point of view without noticing it himself: the further development of our social being was to be determined, according to his opinion now, by consciousness, by “our” activity, the activity of people "who are the country’s intelligentsia, those organs of the people by means of which it strives to understand its own position".  [520•*  The future being of peasant Russia is to be determined by the consciousness of its intelligentsia primarily of the nobility.  Hero one sees the influence in paradoxical form of the distinguishing feature of Herzen’sutopianism, which, incidentally, although in a different form, is the distinguishing feature of utopianism in general. 1 quoted earlier Marx’s words to the effect that Utopians always regard themselves as being superior to “society”. “We”, to whose lot the part of Peter the Great has fallen, must necessarily be superior to peasant Russia, to the "wild commune" (as Ilerzen himself puts it) which “we” are to lead to the socialist ideal elaborated by the development of the West. And note this: in speaking of the course of development of West European society, lierzen adheres to the conviction that "we have no orthopaedic possibilities of correcting" this course in keeping with our ideals. And with regard to Russia, for our activity to be successful we would definitely need to provide ourselves with a whole range of "orthopaedic possibilities”; otherwise the "wild commune" would run the risk of remaining “wild” for a long time, if not forever, and continuing to serve as the basis for the state edifice which was erected during the Muscovite and Petersburg periods of our history, in a word, Herzen here repealed the very mistake which he regarded as the Slavophils’ gravest error. As he remarks so aptly, the Slavophils’ gravest error was that they thought it possible to resurrect the Russian people’s past, separating the good from the bad in this past and eliminating the bad in the interests of the good.  [520•**  Ilerzen declared this separation and elimination to be absolutely impossible. Yet he should have acknowledged them not only as possible, but as downright necessary for the carrying out of his own programme. Mr. Ivanov-Razumnik does not, of course, notice this error which is common to Ilerzen and the Slavophils. What is more, he sees in this error the advantage of Narodisra over Slavophilism.  [520•*** 

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p It is quite unnecessary to show that this error is no advantage whatsoever. But it is perfectly true that it runs like a thread through all the Narodniks’ ideas on the future development of our people. We can see now that this thread is actually a Utopian blunder, but it was woven into the Narodniks’ ideas not so much by Ilerzen as by Bakunin. Bakunin counted six main features in the Russian popular ideal: three bad and three good ones.  [521•*  The activity of the intelligentsia was to destroy the bad aspects and strengthen the good ones.

p This reminds one of the well-known anecdote, also quoted by Mr. Ivanov-Razumnik, about the man who wanted to obtain carbon from chlorine. The formula for chlorine is Cl; if you heat chlorine the 1 will evaporate leaving C, and C is the formula for the sought-after carbon. All Utopians without exception, not only here in Russia but all over the world, were like this chemist. If Mr. Ivanov-Razumnik, who talks so much about critical philosophy, possessed a mind that was in the slightest degree critical, this mistake of the Utopians would not have escaped his attention, of course. But the whole trouble is that his criticism is nothing but empty “verbiage”. Instead of criticising the Utopians, our author trudges along behind them helplessly, using the weak points of their views to substantiate his own, truly philistine world outlook. We already know what for his part he regards as Herzen’s mistake: "Herzen’s mistake was that he sought antiphilislinism in a class and estate group, whereas the estate and the class is always the crowd, the grey masses with middling ideals, aspirations and views; isolated, more or less brightly painted individuals from all the classes and estates make up the non-class and non-estate group of the intelligentsia, the main characteristic of which is precisely anti-philistinism."  [521•** 

p In other words, Herzen’s mistake, in the opinion of our " brightly painted" author, was that he was a socialist. And hence it follows inevitably that our author is "brightly painted" in the bourgeois hue.

And this selfsame person, so brightly painted in the bourgeois hue, is defending "Russian socialists" by contrasting their supposedly broad views with the supposedly narrow views of " orthodox" Marxists. Oh, ironic, salute ironic, viens, que je t’adore!