Contemporary Socialism

by John Rae

The revolutionary or nihilist movement in Russia has passed through several successive phases; but there is no good reason for denying its continuity, nor any impropriety, as is sometimes alleged, in the retention of the name of Nihilism, which it bore when it first engaged the attention of Western Europe, although it may be quite true that the word is more descriptive of the earlier developments of the movement than of the later. In its first stage, before the Emancipation Act, it was scarce more than an intellectual fermentation—an intellectual revolt all round, if you will—shaping more and more in its political ideas towards democratic socialism, but as yet entirely unorganized, and content to expend its force in violent opinions without recourse to action. Then, second, the Emancipation Act gave it organization, purpose, malignity, and made it, in short, the nihilism we know, converting it into the engine of the bitter discontent of the landed classes, who were seriously straitened and many of them ruined by the operation of that great reform. Third, while the impoverishment of thousands of landed families was the first result of the Emancipation Act, its slower but more serious result has been the impoverishment of the peasantry, and nihilism is now assuming a more agrarian character, and promoting the social revolution under the old Russian cry for "the black division."

For the origin of nihilism we must go back half a century to a little company of gifted young men, most of whom rose to great distinction, who used at that time to meet together at the house of a rich merchant in Moscow, for the discussion of philosophy and politics and religion. They were of the most various views. Some of them became Liberal leaders, and wanted Russia to follow the constitutional development of the Western nations; others became founders of the new Slavophil party, contending that Russia should be no imitator, but develop her own native institutions in her own way; and there were at least two among them—Alexander Herzen and Michael Bakunin—who were to be prominent exponents of revolutionary socialism. But they all owned at this period one common master—Hegel. Their host was an ardent Hegelian, and his young friends threw themselves into the study of Hegel with the greatest zeal. Herzen himself tells us in his autobiography how assiduously they read everything that came from his pen, how they devoted nights and weeks to clearing up the meaning of single passages in his writings, and how greedily they devoured every new pamphlet that issued from the German press on any part of his system. From Hegel, Herzen and Bakunin were led, exactly like Marx and the German Young Hegelians, to Feuerbach, and from Feuerbach to socialism. Bakunin, when he retired from the army, rather than be the instrument of oppressing the Poles among whom he was stationed, went for some years to Germany, where he lived among the Young Hegelians and wrote for their organ, the Hallische Jahrbücher; but before either he or Herzen ever had any personal intercommunication with the members of that school of thought, they had passed through precisely the same development. Herzen speaks of socialism almost in the very phrases of the Young Hegelians, as being the new "terrestrial religion," in which there was to be neither God nor heaven; as a new system of society which would dispense with an authoritative government, human or Divine, and which should be at once the completion of Christianity and the realization of the Revolution. "Christianity," he said, "made the slave a son of man; the Revolution has emancipated him into a citizen. Socialism would make him a man."

This tendency of thought was strongly supported in the Russian mind by Haxthausen's discovery and laudation of the rural commune of Russia. The Russian State was the most arbitrary, oppressive, and corrupt in Europe, and the Russian Church was the most ignorant and superstitious; but here at last was a Russian institution which was regarded with envy even by wise men of the west, and was really a practical anticipation of that very social system which was the last work of European philosophy. It was with no small pride, therefore, that Alexander Herzen declared that the Muscovite peasant in his dirty sheepskin had solved the social problem of the nineteenth century, and that for Russia, with this great problem already solved, the Revolution was obviously a comparatively simple operation. You had but to remove the Czardom, the services, and the priesthood, and the great mass of the people would still remain organized in fifty thousand complete little self-governing communities living on their common land and ruling their common affairs as they had been doing long before the Czardom came into being. And what, after all, was the latest dream of philosophical socialism but a world of communities like these? The new formula of civilization had merely come back to the old Russian mir.

All Russian writers draw a kindly and charming picture of the mir, the rude village council, in which the heads of families have for ages managed their common land, distributed their taxes, and settled all the burning problems of the hamlet with remarkable freedom, fairness, and mutual respect. They meet together on some open space—perhaps in front of the tavern, which is itself one of their common possessions; they beat out their question there till they are unanimous; for the mir will know nothing of decision by majorities—the will of the mir is believed to be the will of God Himself, and it must be no divided counsel. They argue sometimes long and keenly, and, as their interest waxes, they will raise many voices at once, or perhaps break up into separate groups, each discussing the subject apart; but presently, out of all the apparent disorder, the acceptable decision is somehow found, and peace reigns again in the village street. In these meetings they have the deepest feeling and habit of freedom; and even when a political question arises affecting their interests—a question of taxes or of administration—they make no scruple to speak in the plainest terms of the Government and the officials, and they are never interfered with. "Nobody but God," they say, "dare judge the mir," and the Czar, at any rate, respects the tradition. That rude assembly is the only free institution in Russia. Even revolutionary manifestoes have been publicly read at its meetings, and socialist addresses publicly delivered. And this instinctive spirit of freedom is attended there with the instinctive spirit of equality. A recent Russian writer observes that a Russian peasant would be quite unable to understand the sort of respect the English labourer shows to a gentleman. With its freedom, its equality, its strong family sentiment, its common property, its self-government, the mir is really the social democratic republic political philosophers have projected, and a Russian who dislikes the State and loves the mir is, without more ado, a social revolutionist of the anarchist type. The favourite ideal among Russian revolutionists for the last fifty years has accordingly all along been the anarchist ideal of a free federation of local industrial communities without any separate political organization; for the anarchist ideal is natural to the Russian situation.

Revolutionary opinions were very rife in Russia during the reign of Nicholas; but under his iron rule they were never suffered to be spoken above the breath. His ascension to the throne in 1825 had been greeted by a revolution—a very abortive one, it is true, but unfortunately sufficient to set every fibre of the young Czar's strong nature inflexibly against all the liberal tendencies encouraged by his father, and to stop the political development of the country for a generation. A handful of constitutional reformers—united three years before in a secret society to promote peasant emancipation, the common civil liberties, and stable instead of arbitrary law—gathered a crowd to a public place in the capital, and shouted for "the Archduke Constantine and a Constitution." Most part of the crowd had so little idea why they had come together that they thought Constitution was the name of the Archduke Constantine's wife; and the most distinguished man among the conspirators—Pestel, the poet—said, as he was going to execution, "I wished to reap the harvest before sowing the seed." He had done worse—he really kept the seed from being sown for thirty years to come. All freedom of opinion was ruthlessly suppressed; every means of influencing the public mind was stopped; there was no liberty of printing, speaking, or meeting; there was no saving grace but ignorance, for people of reading and intelligence lived under perpetual liability to most unreasonable suspicion. Alexander Herzen, for example, was banished to the Asiatic frontier while still a very young man, merely because he happened to make the casual remark in a private letter to his father, which was opened in the post, that a policeman had a few days before killed a man in the streets of St. Petersburg.

But this system of lawless and unrighteous repression nursed a deep spirit of revolt against constituted authority in the heart of the people, and among the younger minds a kind of passion for the most extreme and forbidden doctrines. All the wildest phases of nihilist opinion in the sixties were already raging in Russia in the forties. Haxthausen says he was astounded, when he visited the Russian universities and schools, to find the students at every one of them given over, as he says, to political and religious notions of the most all-destructive description. "It is a miasma," he says. And although the only political outbreak of Nicholas's reign, the Petracheffsky conspiracy of 1849, was little more than a petty street riot, a storm of serious revolt against the tyranny of the Czar was long gathering, which would have burst upon his head after the disasters to his army in the Crimea, had he survived them. He saw it thickening, however, and on his death-bed said to his son, the noble and unfortunate Alexander II., "I fear you will find the burden too heavy." The son found it eventually heavy enough, but in the meantime he wisely bent before the storm, relaxed the restraints the father had imposed, and gave pledges of the most liberal reforms in every department of State—judicial administration, local government, popular education, serf emancipation. People believed completely in the young Czar's sincerity, awaited with great expectations the measures he would propose, and meanwhile indulged to the top of their bent in the practical liberties they were already provisionally allowed to enjoy, and gave themselves up to a restless fervour for liberty and reform.

An independent press was not among the liberties conceded, but Russian opinion at this period found a most effective voice in a newspaper started in London by Alexander Herzen, called the Kolokol (Bell), which for a number of years made a great impression in Russia by the accuracy of its information on Russian affairs, by the boldness of its criticisms of the Government, and by the ease with which it got smuggled into universal circulation. When Herzen was sent to the Urals as a dangerous person, he was appointed, very anomalously—perhaps it was to keep him there—to an administrative and judicial post, in which he would have apparently to sentence others while under sentence himself; but he grew weary of his banishment, and was permitted to exchange it for the more complete, but much more agreeable, banishment from Russia altogether. After visiting Germany and France, and after witnessing, with deep interest and deeper disappointment, some of the revolutions of 1848, and writing that they had failed because their promoters were not prepared to follow them up with a positive social programme, as if, he says, the mere destruction of a Bastile were a revolution, he settled in England, and learnt there, as his son assures us, that revolution itself was but a vain expedient, and that gradual reform was the only effectual method of lasting social amelioration.

It was probably while he was learning this lesson—it was certainly entirely in this spirit—that he began his political agitation on the accession of Alexander II. The moment the new Czar ascended the throne, Herzen addressed to him a famous letter, demanding amends for the ills his father, Czar Nicholas, had done the people, a complete breach with the old system, and the introduction of thoroughgoing Liberal reforms, and more especially the emancipation of the serfs. It was in the same spirit he conducted his agitation in the Kolokol. Without neglecting to ventilate his socialist and philosophical views, he welcomed the contemplated reforms as being in themselves true remedies for popular grievances, and intended in perfect good faith by the Czar to be so; and his chief care in all his criticisms always was to secure that these reforms should be real and thorough, that the judicial body should be independent, the educational arrangements efficient; above all, that the peasants should not be deprived, in the emancipation arrangements, of a foot of the land they then possessed, or made to pay terms for their emancipation which would be too heavy for them to meet. And perhaps the most popular and stirring part of his paper was always his exposure of existing abuses, and his criticism of the conduct of officials. The journal was written with wit, vigour, and accurate knowledge; and, as it spoke what most men thought, but few would as yet venture to say, it was greedily read and distributed, and was for some years a remarkable power in the country. Herzen was the hero of the young. Herzenism, we are told, became the rage, and Herzenism appears to have meant, before all, a free handling of everything in Church or State which was previously thought too sacred to be touched. This iconoclastic spirit grew more and more characteristic of Russian society at this period, and presently, under its influence, Herzenism fell into the shade, and nihilism occupied the scene.

We possess various accounts of the meaning and nature of nihilism, and they all agree substantially in their description of it. The word was first employed by Turgenieff in his novel "Fathers and Sons," where Arcadi Petrovitch surprises his father and uncle by describing his friend Bazaroff as a nihilist.

"A nihilist," said Nicholas Petrovitch. "This word must come from the Latin nihil, nothing, as far as I can judge, and consequently it signifies a man who recognises nothing."