Herzen spoke of Europe at large consisting of a ‘passive mass, an obedient herd’, and made his own prophecy of the last men: ‘Bourgeois Europe will live out her miserable days in the twilight of imbecility, in sluggish feelings without convictions.’ Bakunin, too, found extensive evidence of a spiritual rot: ‘Wherever one turns in Western Europe one sees decadence, unbelief and corruption, a corruption which has its roots in unbelief. From the uppermost social level down, no person, no privileged class, has the faith in its calling.’
Both Herzen and Bakunin flirted with the idea that there was a special Russian Sonderweg (special path) to modernity – one that was shorter than all other paths. In their idealized vision, the Russian peasant was already socialist; all that was needed was the people’s wrath to sweep away the autocracy and dispossess the parasitical gentry. Russia could thus bypass the degrading and corrupting bourgeois phase suffered by Europe; the peasant commune, self-sufficient and moral, could even show the world the correct path to a free and equal society. Like Marx and Engels, and many thinkers, past and present, Herzen and Bakunin managed to discover in their own country a promise of universal redemption. They also found, as befitting impatient people from a belated nation, short cuts to its fulfilment.
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Marx, scientifically defining the many stages to revolution in industrializing Western Europe, mocked the notion of peasant socialism for much of his life, and belittled Russians in particular as a barbarous people. He developed, in his later years, a bitter suspicion of Herzen and a virulent dislike of Bakunin (who, no slouch at anti-Semitism, called Marx the ‘Teutonic-Judaic worshipper of state power’). But Russia’s politically hopeless situation, which engendered such dreams as peasant socialism, had a deeper and wider significance and broader appeal than Marx realized.
Political stagnation, as we saw, had driven many Germans to develop new forms of inwardness. German Idealism went on to inspire many frustrated intellectuals in the East, including in Japan and Russia. But, as the nineteenth century advanced, many of them felt, long before they had heard of Marx, that ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’
The Russians were at the forefront of this new and intensely political Sturm und Drang. Energetic, intelligent men like Bakunin grew into a class of professional revolutionists because their repressive states left no place for constructive action at home while the world seemed to change speedily around them. They could find fulfilment only in borderless intrigue, a politics of the rejection of politics, and a Romantic myth of the rebel-hero, if not violence.
They had much baggage from the past to abandon. As Herzen wrote to his son, ‘We do not build, we destroy; we do not proclaim a new revelation, we eliminate the old lie.’ He wrote again and again of his vision of an uprising of unspoilt, virile barbarians who would destroy a decrepit Europe and Russia – the corrupt Rome of the nineteenth century. In 1863, Dostoyevsky, attending a conference of exiled radicals in Geneva where Bakunin was present, described how:
They began with the fact that in order to achieve peace on earth the Christian faith has to be exterminated; large states destroyed and turned into small ones; all capital be done away with, so that everything be in common, by order, and so on … And most importantly, fire and sword – and after everything has been annihilated, then, in their opinion, there will in fact be peace.
Bakunin was typical of his age in fully imbibing the militantly atheistic mood of the 1840s – the view of God as a human creation – and also incorporating recognizably Christian elements in his messianic faith in the freedom of the spirit. As he wrote:
I had only one confederate: Faith! I told myself that faith moves mountains, overcomes obstacles, defeats the invincible and makes possible the impossible; faith alone is one half of victory, one half of success; complemented by powerful will it creates circumstances, makes men ripe, collects and unites them.
By the end of the century, faith complemented by acts of powerful will would lead to a continuously escalating campaign of violence and terror across modernizing Europe and America. Bakunin, moving beyond peasant socialism in Russia, came to have significant disciples and colleagues in Europe, such as Malatesta, the Italian anarchist, and élisée Reclus, the French geographer, who played an important role in the Paris Commune.
But Bakunin’s spiritual influence over generations of anarchists and nihilists was even greater. He bequeathed to them his conviction that heroic acts of freedom could transform the world from an authoritarian cage into an arcadia of human freedom. Those who followed Bakunin were liberated from not only belief in God but also the shibboleths of German Idealism. Man’s freedom did not have to be the result of a long dialectical process; it could be created ex nihilo. It may not be clear where humanity would go next. But imagining the new world was less important than abolishing the old one. As Herzen wrote, inadvertently echoing Baudelaire’s Dandy and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, ‘the future does not exist’ and the ‘truly free man creates his own morality’.
Visions from the Underground
The young Russians who came after 1848 possessed in even greater quantity this spirit of contradiction and negation, and the urgency to remake history. Turgenev captured the garish negativism of these ‘nihilists’ through his portrait of Bazarov in Fathers and Sons (1862). A medical student of humble origins, Bazarov scornfully dismisses morality and art as superfluous, and praises the utility of mathematics and science, much to the chagrin of the liberal landed gentry. A character in the novel defines a nihilist as ‘a person who does not bow down before authorities of any kind, who does not accept a single principle on faith, however much respect surrounds such a principle’.