"Periphery", state, and revolution, or Russia's morphology of "backwardness"

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University of Manchester

“Periphery”, state, and revolution, or Russia's morphology of “backwardness”

(PART 2)

T. Shanin

Oxford Rd., Manchester, M13 9PL, UK

With this paper, we continue a series of publications on the theoretical aspects of Teodor Shanin's conception of Russia as a `developing society' first published in 1986 in the book Russia as a `Developing Society '. The Roots of Otherness: Russia's Turn of Century. Vol. 1. In this part, the author considers the characterization of Russia as a “developing society” at the turn of the XX century, which cannot be understood outside the context of capitalism both internationally and intra-nationally. At the same time the unique/specific features that most profoundly characterized the Russian social scene at the turn of the century and made its mark as its past within its present were represented particularly by the state, ethnos and peasantry. The power of the Russian state apparatus, its share of resources, its control over the population and its legal claims exceeded those elsewhere where capitalism was on the march. Massive processes of consolidation and `extended reproduction' of cultural patterns, language usage, fundamental symbols of identification and self-identification, as well as of related political loyalties, wielded together massive populations of different origins. Finally, during two centuries only, the Russian peasants moved all the way from the payment of tribute to unheard-of levels of exploitation and cattle-like enslavement of more than nine-tenths of the Russians; however, within another century came the emancipation from serfdom which made peasantry not only `free' but landowning. The Russian dependent development of that time found its expression not only at the general level of the economic flows malfunctions and transformations but also at the distinct dimension of class generation and conflict. Parallel to the general crisis of the Russian political economy and the growing and increasingly explicit conflict between major social groups was an ideological/moral crisis expressed in perceptions, concepts and values (thus, the Russian intelligentsia confronted directly the state apparatus). The author concludes with the types of dissent initiated by men of knowledge, of ideas and of moral values, which was represented in different populist theorists including revolutionary populism and subjective sociology.

Key words: developing society; capitalism; Russia; the state; peasantry; populist theories and movements; class conflicts; intelligentsia; periphery; revolution

«Периферия», государство и революция, или морфология российской отсталости

(ЧАСТЬ 2)

Т. Шанин

Университет Манчестера

Оксфорд Роуд, Манчестер, M13 9PL, Великобритания

Данной статьей мы продолжаем серию публикаций, посвященных теоретическим аспектам концепции Теодора Шанина, впервые обнародованной в 1986 г. в книге «Россия как развивающееся общество. Истоки инаковости: Россия в начале ХХ века. Т. 1». В статье рассмотрена оформившаяся в начале ХХ в. характеристика России как «развивающегося общества», которая имеет смысл лишь в контексте капиталистического строительства как внутри страны, так и в глобальных масштабах. В то же время уникальными/специфическими чертами российской социальной сцены на тот исторический момент, которые были обусловлены прошлым страны, отразившимся в ее настоящем, стали своеобразный государственный аппарат, этногенез и крестьянство. Власть государственного чиновничества, его контроль над национальными ресурсами и населением страны, а также юридически гарантированные претензии многократно превышали аналогичные показатели в тех странах, что уже ощутили поступь капитализма. Что касается населения, то процессы консолидации и «расширенного воспроизводства» культурных норм, языкового использования, фундаментальных символов идентичности, связанных с политической лояльностью, сплели воедино судьбы множества людей самого разного происхождения. И, наконец, за два столетия российское крестьянство прошло весь путь от уплаты дани до невиданной прежде эксплуатации и тотального закрепощения, а уже в следующем столетии получило свободу от крепостного права и земельную собственность. Российский тип зависимого догоняющего развития в тот период получил свое выражение не только в общих экономических дисфункциях и трансформациях, но и в специфике формирования классов и их конфликтных взаимоотношений. Наряду с общим кризисом российской политэкономии и разрастающимся конфликтом между основными социальными группами страну охватил идеологический/моральный кризис, детерминированный различиями в ценностях и интерпретациях (например, русская интеллигенция открыто противостояла государственному аппарату). Статью завершает оценка разных типов расколов, за которыми стояли люди идей и знаний, придерживающиеся разных народнических теорий, включая революционное народничество и субъективную социологию.

Key words: развивающееся общество; капитализм; Россия; государство; крестьянство; народнические теории и движения; классовые конфликты; интеллигенция; периферия; революция

The question “Was the Russian case one of “capitalism” or of “feudalism”, an “oriental despotism”, a “developing society”, a “de facto colonialism” or something else?”' is badly put in one fundamental sense. As an approximation or intellectual shorthand it may suffice, but it is epistemologically naive to mix two levels and languages of discourse: that of social reality and its theoretical models [39]. It goes without saying that these relate and it is within the process of relating them (“double fitting” [3. P. 294--295]), that a systematic knowledge of society is bom. There is, however, no logical way to reduce those languages one into another. Theoretical models do not reflect reality directly, simply, or fUlly, but are meaningfully selective representations of some of its properties, in the light of a general theory assumed. Models focus on some aspects of reality, thereby necessarily caricaturing it. It is for this reason that “the price of employment of models is eternal vigilance” [13. P. 93].

That is also why the query “Is this society capitalist or feudal, etc.?” must be ever followed by two mental sub-clauses: “If so, in what sense?” and “What precisely do we learn and/or subtract from our perception by the use of this concept?”. Social reality does not conform fully into any logical mould. Models of social structure do not exhaust it and therefore do not exclude all other models. The validity of alternative models may coincide and their illuminations may cumulate.

The characterization of Russia as a “developing society” should be supplemented first by the answer to the questions of its additional characteristics of parallel significance. A way to begin is to categorize the characteristics of our case, that is, a society, a period and an international context, into the general, the typical and the unique. Put succinctly and limited to the most significant features only, those would be: for the general -- capitalism, for the typical -- a developing (or peripheral) society, for the unique (or specific) -- the Russian state history, ethno-history and some of the characteristics of rural (i.e. the mass of the population) Russia. russia capitalism internationally

The Russia of that day cannot be understood outside the context of capitalism and its “laws of motion” operating both internationally and intra-nationally. The most dynamic, richest in investment and most productive branches of Russian economy as well as of the international political economy, into which Russia linked as a junior partner, were capitalist in the sense attached to that term by the classical economists and by Marx. The major dynamics and axis of advancing social division of labor were bound to mechanization and to economic mechanisms of exploitation of wage labor. Within it the maximization of profits and accumulation of capital operated as a structurally overriding determination. The concept of extended reproduction by a capitalist mode of production caught such processes well, as long as one remembers the concept's limitations and that not only economic but also social meanings are involved. While reproducing itself, the capitalist system invaded and transformed not only social structures of production but also those of class generation, ethnic consolidation, urbanization, changes in collective consciousness, etc. It operated not as an itinerary of those factors but as a powerful system, linked by the logic of institutional interdependence and aggressive capacity to spread.

There are two reminders that must be attached to this “drawing with a thick brush” of capitalist determinants in Russia. The impact of the state in societies where industrial capitalism had been advancing with particular speed since the middle of the nineteenth century was more noticeable than at the point of its inception. Simultaneously, the international characteristics of political economy advanced and deepened, to be recognized as a necessary aspect of capitalism. In consequence, the notion of capitalism came to differ substantially from its early formulations. Second, an admission of the speed and drive of capitalist advance does not equal the acceptance of a totally integrated model and functionalist interpretations of it, that is, of its ability to transform everything after its own image, or to adjust it totally to its needs. The direction of social change cannot simply be deduced or extrapolated from it, nor is the logic of capitalism the only one available or operating. A “finger of Midas” principle by which everything capitalism touches turns capitalist, in actuality as well as in theory is unrealistic and misleading. So is the image of capitalism simply devouring past forms at its pleasure.

The unique/specific that most profoundly characterized the Russian social scene at the turn of the century and made its mark as its past within its present was represented particularly by the Russian state, ethnos and peasantry. The past can be understood here only in its linkage and response to the more contemporary social forms, the ability to readjust and to hold on. That being granted, past is indeed “tenacious ...never fully lost” [16; 35. P. 1221]. The power of the Russian state apparatus, its share of resources, its control over the population and its legal claims exceeded those elsewhere where capitalism was on the march. To categorize it as an intermediate form between European Absolutism and Asian Despotism offered an image of some descriptive strength, but little else. The term an “over-developed state” fits the case better but in a way that differs significantly from the original usage [2]. The Russian state was not initially the creation of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century colonizers; the significance of it becomes clear if we remember some of the shared characteristics of the two most significant revolutions of the twentieth century, the Russian and the Chinese. Those characteristics were an extensive size, massive peasantry and Western penetration but also a long history of a sovereign state apparatus now facing multiple imperialisms. Such coincidences are not usually accidental. The tsardom's historical roots, international context and its militarypolitical and economic organization made for its consistency and effectiveness. The European absolutism was reflected in it, as were the `Oriental' vestiges and forms (especially if we do not discard the Golden Horde and consider Byzantium Oriental). But Russian tsardom was, to a degree that is usually understated, a sovereign Russian invention, building from the available institutional bricks new structures of control responding to specific conditions [16]. It was the socially constituted decline in these inventive and regenerative capacities that formed a major aspect of Russia's political crisis.

Closely linked to the inception of the Muscovite State was the ethnogenesis of the Russians. Massive processes of consolidation and `extended reproduction' of cultural patterns, language usage, fundamental symbols of identification and self-identification, as well as of related political loyalties, wielded together massive populations of Slav, Finnish and Turkish origins. The Orthodox church played a major role in the construction and the delimitation of the Russian ethnos. This homogeneity, once established, achieved a momentum of its own, to become of major significance for the history of mankind. It was central to the Russian state's ability to rule not only by force but also through the mute consensus of the majority of the population and to tap and use its loyalties in times of crisis. The leading role of recent Soviet scholarship in attempting to unravel ethnic history as a particular dimension of social reality is not accidental: the relevance of this `problematique' is deeply rooted in history as well as in the daily political experience of Russia/USSR.

Finally, during two centuries only, the Russian peasants moved all the way from the payment of tribute (legitimated by the need to fight off or to keep peace with the southern nomads and softened by high territorial mobility and strong communal organizations) to unheard-of levels of exploitation and cattle-like enslavement of more than nine-tenths of the Russians. Within another century came the emancipation from serfdom which made peasantry not only `free' but landowning. The state played a decisive and explicit role in this and made the transformation rapid. As against all these fundamental changes, the centuries-old Russian communal structures were transfigured but survived. It was explained by the fact that the commune kept its major functions, inclusive of the only shield of popular liberty of the past. Other characteristics of peasanthood held also, especially the operation of the family production units and the numerical pre-eminence of peasants in Russia. A massive majority of Russians lived within the peasant communes, which differed significantly from the rural communities typical of Russia's neighbors, as well as its own Polish, Baltic, Caucasian and Central Asian internal peripheries.

It is only while stipulating the general and the unique tenets of the structure of Russian society that its categorization as a developing society' and/or a political economy definable as a case of dependent development can be considered for the discrete insights it offers. The fundamental significance of classifying the Russia of the period in that way lies in the type of social tension, crises, subsequent dynamism and prospects such an approach indicates and the analytical categories it offers. Central to it are the typical contradictions of such countries' political economy, the distinctive collective conflicts and the particular ideological/moral crisis linked to revolutionary agencies of change. It helps to map out and specify the context and the nub of the main forces and impacts that challenged the tsardom `from inside' in 1900--1907 and were to play out the final power-game of the tsardom's destruction in 1917.

The `Witte System' [44] was intimately linked with a Witte-type crisis, which directly represented the characteristics of dependent development and closely paralleled much of what we encounter in Latin America, South Asia and Africa. The growing international debt and linked financial and technological dependence endangered long-term growth and made the whole national economy vulnerable and volatile, especially when facing international economic downturns or a war effort. State-supported industrialization facilitated severe crises of agriculture and of rural society, increasingly treated as a milking cow and a dumping place of modernization and growth focused elsewhere. Agriculture represented a large majority of the Russian labor force using archaic means of production, and locked within an economy where much of the potential investment fund was being removed by the squires, merchants and state. The need for broader internal markets to steady the local manufacturing clashed head-on with the short-term needs of taxation and the profit maximization by the most powerful capitalist interests. Frequent substitution of private entrepreneurs by state capitalism and by foreign banks led to the severe impediments. Between 1863 and 1914, the population doubled and so did the rates of natural growth, putting increasing pressure on the available resources. The super-exploitation of the mass of the producers linked economic growth to the polarization of the population, the poorer part of which showed an absolute or relative decline of economic well-being. Urbanization, treated by the majority of Russian leaders and scholars as the long-term resolution of the problem of rural over-population, was inadequate for that as long as the growth of extra-agricultural employment was outrun by population growth. Spontaneous `vicious circles' and `bottle necks' within the Russian economy combined with the impacts of the state-and-foreign-capital strategies adopted and forcefully promoted by the government to produce a permanent economic and social crisis.

General crisis of economy and society does not translate directly into an actual social confrontation but those correspond closely and causally. At the highest levels of income there was in Russia what Thomas More has described in another time and age as `a certain conspiracy of rich men', determined to become richer. Where the poor were concerned, Russian political economy was productive of overcrowded city slums where life was cheap, day-to-day survival harsh, and frustrations extreme. It was also productive of the growing hopelessness of villagers in the most populous part of rural Russia. These were reservoirs of poverty and class hatred ever arrayed against the manor houses and the nice quarters of well-being and respectability, behind the protective walls of the forces of order. Economic growth meant different things to Russia's different sectors. In class terms, the old well-established wealth and the newly made fortunes were matched by the persistent poverty of the workers' compounds, peasant villages and artisan teams. Some of the regions, especially the spoils of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conquest, operated as internal colonies of the realm. The gaps were increasingly evident; a Russian would use for them the term kolol glaza -- `it stabbed the eye'. This increasingly bred revolt also in the nice quarters.

The dependent development found its expression therefore not only at the general level of the economic flows malfunctions and transformations but also at the distinct dimension of class generation and conflict. The grand approximation of class analysis has been for a century the main method for the mapping out of fundamental social conflicts, mostly to make sense of the political life of the parliamentary democracies of Western Europe. The theory of political elites, be it Mosca or Pareto, run a clear second to them [12; 29; 30; 34]. A social class was defined as the major sub-group of the formally equal contemporary society. Common and discrete positions and basic interests within the system of political economy delimited it and made for distinctive consciousness, identity and self-identification shaped further by the conflicting relations with other classes. Social classes represented therefore objective as well as intersubjective phenomena, not only a set of determinants rooted in political economy (and resulting in typical tendencies of behaviour by individuals) but also as actual collectivities recognizing themselves as such and with different degrees of `classness' [5; 32; 37].

The class map of the societies caught within dependent development differs from that of mid-nineteenth-century Western and Central Europe, where class analysis was born. That is why, when transplanted directly from one to another, it often tends not only to approximate but to mislead. As for Russia in the 1890s to 1917, the disarticulated system of political economy meant different processes of class structuring operating side by side. There were the main pre-capitalist social classes which, while changing in a number of ways, retained cohesion, many specific characteristics, and substantial numbers: the squires and the peasants. There were the capitalist classes with particular extra coloring: the entrepreneurs with a strong mercantile rather than industrialist flavor, and the industrial wage laborers, with strong peasant connections. There were important inter-category groups, for example, peasants who were part-time construction workers or some large landlords carrying pre-capitalist titles in service of capitalist enterprises. There were finally the classes specific to the societies discussed, or, at least, firstly recognized within them.

Some of the historians of Russia have resolved this complexity by a neat model of four social classes representing the semi-feudal/semi-capitalist nature of society, that is, the squires and the peasants surviving from feudalism and rubbing shoulders with the capitalists and wage workers of the brave new world [33]. This extended the two- class societal models in a way which was relevant but insufficient. To improve on it one must consider in which way such classes differ within the dependent development context, to extend further their list and to review the parallel and different social conflicts of major significance. Here is the typical historical curve of working-class militancy: from the relative conservatism of the days of the manufacture, via a peak in the early stage of industrialization and towards decline as industrialization diversifies it and the service industries grow [41; 49]. Somewhat later Wolf discussed the second wave of peasant militancy stimulated by early confrontation with capitalism [17. P. 221--228; 27; 28. P. 201--205] (another way to approach the issues of the extent of classness is to accept a one-class system as widely spread for reasons, and in the terminological context [16; 47. P. 354--357]. The point is that these two radical potentials tend often to meet for a time within the context of dependent development. On the other hand, a new hierarchy is established within the `plebeian camp', limiting its ability to act collectively. Workers of the large-scale industries are usually capable of self-organization but they do not represent the `lowest of the low'. As against the peasants and the unskilled half-employed and marginal workers, the skilled and semi-skilled industrial working class is a relatively privileged minority. Below them stand men without a steady job and income. Beneath these are the racial minorities, women and youngsters. Outside the industrial centers are the villages from which a steady stream of unskilled labor proceeds to come into towns to join the unskilled labor and the slums or poor quarters.

The exceptional power of the state, the extensive nature of its economic grip as owner, producer, employer and controller of resources, combined with the peculiarities of modern (i.e. Western-style educational and bureaucratic) structures to produce two more types of class-like entities whose interdependence and modus operandum lie not in political economy as classically defined (or, at least, not only in it). That is particularly important if we keep in focus not only the general consideration of social conflict and class relations but also the social actors, practical knowledge of society and conscious intentionality of action. The social structuring of the top ranks of the state hierarchy was determined by interests and logic of operation defined differently that of profit-maximization and production, but establishing all the same consistent group interests, structural conflicts of interest with major social classes, typical patterns of cognition and specific ideologies expressed as the sectional interests of the state functionaries but, more often, through the concept of national interest.

The link between the Russian bureaucrats with the squires was significant but decreasing. For the Russia of the period, the university diploma or its equivalents were becoming the necessary passport into the middle and top ranks of the state bureaucracy and into the army officer corps. In this way the personnel of the state apparatus overlapped increasingly with that of the educated stratum, a social characteristic it has shared, paradoxically, with Russia's most ferocious critics of its social order -- the intelligentsia. However, origins cannot substitute for the main determinants of any class analysis worth its name, that is, for the study of prevailing economic group-interest, typical ways of personal enhancement, and the consequent political and ideological expression. In all these, clear particularities were displayed by the officialdom of Russia.

In its classical form, class analysis had adopted the view that while other types of social conflicts exist they are inferior to and/or utilized by class conflict in determining social relations, in the construction of the collective consciousness and in the establishing of political camps or alliances. This was often enough but not always so. In particular, the ethnic divisions have often proven in Russia as significant as class conflict, or more so, in the defining of political camps. On the other hand, when ethnic patterns have corresponded with occupational divisions, this has resulted in ethno-classes of particularly mobilizing and defining force (e.g. the Polish nobles, the Russian bureaucrats, the Belarus peasants and the Jewish craftsmen in the north-west of European Russia).

Parallel to the general crisis of the Russian political economy and the growing and increasingly explicit conflict between major social groups was an ideological/moral crisis expressed in perceptions, concepts and values. At least to begin with, it found its main carrier and form of expression in the assault on the tsarist state by the Russian intelligentsia which judged it inadequate by the standards of progress, justice and national interest. The creation of a Western-educated elite was the result of diffusion of what was defined as science, knowledge and modern education. One cannot treat it simply as an educational phenomenon, for it related knowledge and assumptions drawn from industrial societies to the peculiarities of the social structure of a developing society. The cultural heritage and the intellectual training made the Western-educated elite into a group of outsiders in their own country, divided both from the plebeian mass of the population and the traditional power holders in it.

Inter-Russia processes added to this group particularization. Commitment to `rationality' and `modernity' defined in the light of the experience of Western Europe (of which they were acutely if often inaccurately aware) put educated Russians at odds with their direct environment. On the personal level, there were several possible ways for resolving the consequent conflict. The acceptance of reality, that is, a job in the administration or else in the free professions, was one. Emigration was another. The withdrawal to one's `Cherry Orchard' estate was a time-honored way for an alienated squire. All these solutions were both objectively and subjectively limited in the context of Russia. In the middle of nineteenth century, a growing number of Western-educated Russians had found themselves within a particular marginal position. Theirs was the world of writings, read and produced, a territory-less purer part of Russia, a `republic of letters'. They were emerging as a social grouping, self-recognized and recognizable as such. Their ranks were increasingly swelled by sons of social classes/estates different to that of nobility, that is, children of clergy, urbanites from a mixed background, the carrierseeking members of ethnic minorities (often restricted in the choice of the official occupation, e.g. Jews, Poles and later the Baltic Germans), even a few peasants -- a mixed group that came to be referred to as raznochintsy, i.e. “men of different ranks”.

Characteristically the word “intelligentsia” was introduced via Russian into other languages [8; 19; 22; 27]. Formal definitions have related it mostly to mental labor and university training. Its nature and functions can be understood only while related to the broader social context, that is, in our case that of dependent development and of the highly repressive state. Conscious self-identification and positioning vis a vis different social forces were particularly significant here. Despite their university training and characteristically `mental' labor, the managers of the Russian state and much of its economy were excluded, and excluded themselves, from Russian intelligentsia. The same was true for most of the army officers and the mass of the Russian clergy (which received its education in the religious seminaries and academies). On the other hand, most of the Russian liberal professions and many of its best engineers or agronomists would see themselves definitely as part of it. So did the majority of Russian revolutionaries in the nineteenth century. At the core of this group and most influential within it were the Russian men of letters, its writers, poets, dramatists and `publicists' (i.e. the more thoughtful journalists). The nature and the prevailing mood of the intelligentsia was dramatically yet accurately described by I. Berlin: “it did not mean simply educated persons. It certainly did not mean intellectuals as such ... the Russian intelligentsia, because it was small and consumed by a sense of responsibility for their brothers who lived in darkness, grew to be a dedicated order, bound by a sense of solidarity and kinship. Isolated and divided by the tangled forest of a society impenetrable to rational organization, they called out to each other, in order to preserve contact. They were citizens of a state within a state, soldiers in an army dedicated to progress, surrounded on all sides by reaction. ...In the land in which the intelligentsia was born, it was founded, broadly speaking, on the idea of permanent rational opposition to the status quo, which was regarded as in constant danger of becoming ossified, a block to human thought and human progress [6].

Two more short citations from the tsardom's top dignitary and Russia's foremost writer can supplement that picture. From the memoirs of Witte: “The tsar [gosudaf] has once remarked at the dinner table .. .that one should order the Academy of Sciences to remove this word [intelligentsia] from the Russian dictionary”. From Bulgakov's The White Guard: “You are a socialist, are you not? Like all intelligent people” [48. P. 328]. The particular `marching army' of this group were the university students, inclusive of the permanent ones (i.e. those who were unable to finish their education but held on to the university environment and formed a community around it). The universities and the colleges for advanced training (i.e. Forestry, Engineering, etc.) provided a natural base for organization. In a condition involving the illegality of any opposition and with every social club or organization supervised by the authorities, a base where young intelligentsia could organize itself and `talk things out' was increasingly important and their conflict with both state and university authorities endemic. They were linked closely with young intellectuals engaged in the occupations of `service to the people', especially teachers, medics, zemstvo agronomists, etc.

The Russian intelligentsia confronted directly the state apparatus. Its top bureaucrats have seen themselves as acting to enhance Russia's international standing, promote its economy and secure the eternal promise of the Russian autocracy. That had to be done by controlling and containing the two explicit challenges of capitalism and of intelligentsia with a third threat, one of popular revolt, looming in the background. The growth of capitalism disrupted the familiar ways of ruling and administrating. The initial policy of simple incorporation of new technologies, stripped of their disagreeable social and political characteristics (i.e. `Western' weapons but no `Western' constitutional rule), was increasingly difficult to execute. Not only education but the co-operation of the educated was needed. Yet a major sector of the Russian educated stratum was locked in growing conflict with the tsardom and its officials.

This was well expressed in the very transformation of the term `intelligentsia' from a value-neutral description of individual capacity or intellectual attainment, into the synonym of bitter social criticism and moral condemnation of the state and its dignitaries. Any outward sign of comfort given or co-operation with the state bureaucracy was treated as treason or corruption. The counter-culture of the intelligentsia took particular pride in refusing to serve the state or capitalist entrepreneurs in any capacity and especially in major issues of social hegemony and ideological control. (As for the bourgeoisie, N. Mikhailovskii had declared in the 1880s to universal acclaim that “the Russian intelligentsia would and should be ashamed of marching in step with it” [28. P. 205]). Apart from a few exceptional periods (when these attitudes shifted under the impact of a nationalist wave triggered off by war or by the Polish `mutinies') (for example, the patriotic frenzy led by people like the ex-liberal M. Katkov that swept the Russian society during the Polish uprising of 1863 and led to the collapse of the influence of Hertzen's joumal-from-abroad which refused to submit to it) the Russian intelligentsia faced all brands of the Russian establishment as a hostile force. What made this stand out even more sharply, was that the intelligentsia was opposed directly by senior and middle-range bureaucrats who often came from similar social backgrounds and educational establishments. But most of the state dignitaries were increasingly at a loss as to how to deal with the new times: with `subjects' who expressed `opinions', merchants who were not humble, peasants who wandered around, cities that `exploded', Jews who resided in Petersburg, Finns who claimed autonomy, but especially so with the highbrows who spent their time denouncing the rightful authorities and even the Most Sacred Person of His Imperial Majesty. In the latter part of the nineteenth century the state was increasingly challenged by disruptive forces and at their core the spontaneous processes associated with capitalism and the conscious revolt of the intelligentsia.

As a silent background and a potential arbiter to the unequal duel in which intellectual fireworks and personal sacrifice of Russia's brightest young men and women faced the crass obstinacy and the seemingly overwhelming strength of those who ruled Russia, stood the Russian plebeian masses. It was the struggle for their hearts and minds that formed the crux of the political history of the Russian tsardom and was to define its abrupt end in 1917.

In 1862, a sequence of five Unaddressed Letters was written in Russia. Their dramatic significance lies as much in their symbolism and setting as in their content. Despite the title, and indeed accentuated by it, was the fact that the addressee was manifestly known. It was the Emperor and the Autocrat of all Russia, Alexander II, `the Emancipator', at the Winter Palace. The sender's address was nearly as famous and as symbolic. It was the Peter and Paul fortress-prison of Petersburg that held Russia's most dangerous political criminals. The author was Nikolai Chernyshevskii, Russia's `man of conscience' and foremost writer on politics, economics and aesthetics. A self- taught, dour and stubborn man of extensive knowledge, little savoir-vivre and unbending moral convictions, he well represented the raznochintsy, the first generation of Western- educated Russians not to come from the nobility. (Typical of many of them, Chemy- shevskii was a cleric's son from a provincial town, i.e. Saratov, of past and future revolutionary fame.) He was careful not to break any laws and did not belong to any political organization. He used his pen to oppose with the full strength of his convictions the way Russian society and state functioned and, despite the harsh hand of the censor, attacked it time and time again, clearly if indirectly, in the journal he edited -- the Contemporary (Sovremennik).

Despite remaining within the law, Chernyshevskii was arrested and spent two years of preliminary confinement in the fortress. While his judges struggled with the regrettable lack of proof of actual law-breaking, he wrote his Unaddressed Letters and a didactic novel entitled What is to be Done? about new men and women, on which generations of Russian intelligentsia were to be educated. He was eventually convicted of high treason and sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor in Siberia, never to regain his freedom. With fine understanding of the symbolism of the occasion, his judges sentenced him also to a `civil execution': on a grey morning he was taken out of prison to have a sword broken over his head by a hangman, signifying loss of all rights and privileges, and then transported directly to Siberia. The Unaddressed Letters were banned by the censor as were (following his sentence) most of his writings, but they circulated hand-to-hand inside and outside Russia. In 1873 another rebel, writer and social theorist, unknown to Chernyshevskii, read the Unaddressed Letters in his English exile and was sufficiently impressed to have the first of them personally translated and to promote their publication. The translator's name was Karl Marx, and with as keen a recognition of the man's worth as that of the judges in Petersburg he was to refer to Chernyshevskii admiringly in the second edition of Capital in 1872 as `that great Russian scholar and critic' [38; 42].

The significance of the Unaddressed Letters is, however, not only that of the charged symbolism of their political setting. Their theoretical content has stood remarkably well the test of time. There were two major components. The bulk of the argument was a systematic denunciation of the way 1861 emancipation reform was carried out, making clear how little it actually resolved the peasant's plight, how much it was hedged and twisted by the bureaucracy and why it would eventually lead to a plebeian revolt against all the Russian upper classes stood for, good and bad alike. Second, the opening Letter addressed the general social context of the debate and of the political conflict in contemporary Russia. It recognized a fundamental socio-political division of the Russians into three groupings very different in size. A remarkably apt anticipation of political divisions of Russia half a century later, Chernyshevskii's insights were also deeply relevant for other countries and for generations to follow. He had this to say to the tsar: “You are displeased with us: Let that be as you choose: no one can command their feelings, and we are not seeking your approval. Our aim is a different one, which you probably have as well: to be of service to the Russian common people (narod). Consequently, you must not expect real gratitude from us, nor must we from you, for our respective labors. A judge of them does exist, outside your numerically restricted circle, and outside even our circle which, though far more numerous than yours, still represents only a negligible fraction of the tens of millions of people whose welfare we and you would like to promote. If this judge knew all the facts of the case and could deliver an assessment of your labor and ours, any explanations between you and us would be superfluous. Regrettably, this is not the case. You, he knows by name; yet being completely alien to your mental universe and your milieu, he certainly does not know your thoughts or the motives, which guide your actions. Us, he does not know even by name. ...You tell the people: you must proceed like this. We tell it: you must proceed like that. But in the people's midst, almost everyone is slumbering. .. .The truth is equally bitter for you and for us. The people does not consider that anything really useful to it has resulted from anyone's concern about it. We all, separating ourselves from the people under some name or other -- under the name of the authorities, or under the name of this or that privileged stratum; we all, assuming we have some particular interests distinct from the objects of popular aspiration -- whether interests of diplomatic and military power, or interests of controlling internal affairs, or interests of our personal wealth, or interests of enlightenment; we all feel vaguely what kind of outcome flows from this complexion of the people's view. When people come to think: `I cannot expect any help in my affairs from anyone else at all', they will certainly and speedily draw the conclusions that they must get down to running their affairs themselves. All individuals and social strata separate from the people tremble, at this anticipated outcome”.

The five Letters of terse prose analyzing and condemning the inadequacies of the 1861 emancipation of Russia's serfs were concluded as follows: “I am aware, dear sir, that I have broken the rules of propriety in thrusting myself with my explanations upon a man who had in no way asked me for them; so it will be no surprise to you if I do not adhere to those rules at the conclusion of my correspondence either, and do not sign in the customary way “always at your service” or “your most humble servant” but sign simply N. Chernyshevskii”. Within a year he was serving his sentence of hard labor for life in Siberia.

Chernyshevskii's text as well as his life story represented a new political map and a new type of dissent. His text described and analyzed a social world twice divided. First, it was split into the politically mute plebeian world (the `common people' -- narod) as against the extremely thin layer of polite society, the educated, the potential rank-holders, those better off who could also write to each other and dance with each other at social occasions, those who counted. They were well separated from the plebeian mass by a protective wall of the army, the police lower ranks, the lower clerks, clerics and bailiffs, the NCOs of Russian society. Second, those better off and educated in the Western sense were divided in turn by their own images and standards as much as by their formal status, into, on the one hand, the official Russia of top rank- holders (sanovniki) and of the upper-class `world' (svet) (i.e. the tsar's closest social environment). On the other hand, (but partly overlapping) stood those whom the Russians called `society', that is, those with claim or pretence to spiritual depth, to the understanding of social relations, and appreciation of science, of arts and of progress -- the public opinion of the day, critical of `official Russia'. The raznochintsy played an increasingly important role in that milieu but frequently they were children of `the empire's first estate' of the nobility. These people, or at least the politically more conscious of them, came to be referred to increasingly as intelligentsiya. They were particularly sensitive to the leading men of ideas (poveliteli dum) of every generation: its poets, its writers, its theorists, its secular moralists and its dreamers. It was the moral leadership of this group that in the 1850s and 1860s sat heavily on the shoulders of Chernyshevskii as well as of Hertzen, Belinskii and a few more, making them consequently hated and adored. It was for that honor that Chernyshevskii paid by his life sentence in Siberia. The gendarmes and bureaucrats who had Chernyshevskii sentenced were right in sensing a new and powerful threat.

Russia has had its share of `old dissent', which in essence belonged to the days of Muscovy and the commencement of the empire. There were centuries of plebeian struggle in defense of the `old rights', that is, the partly imagined and partly true memories of times when a commoner was free of servitude and bondage. The encroachment of officers and nobles, clerks and clerics, the whole Draconian and crushing power of the state, had been resisted generation after generation in a long sequence of battles and some major peasant and Cossack wars, which were all eventually lost. Since the death by torture of Pugachev and his main followers in 1774, the `official Russia', that is, the state and the church, the bureaucrats and the nobles, had for a period of 125 years ruled the ocean of under-dogs with relatively few ripples. The imperial wars and conquests had derailed some of the class conflicts, channeling into nationalist moulds the energy of protest, but also added new groups of those who were not Russian to the camp of resistance. Their struggles for ethnic rights spanned the `old' and the `new' dissent and were at times allied to both. They also failed or, at least, so it seemed by the end of the nineteenth century.

Europe knew another type of `old dissent', for a time much more productive of actual political results and social transformation than the plebeian struggle and the peasant wars. The dominant class of warriors and/or squires confronted kings and dignitaries in a constant tug of war over power and privileges. They have often lost when royal mercenaries (usually with the help of the burghers), reduced the nobles to submission. At times, it was the nobles who reduced kings to the status of figurative heads of state, the `first among equals' of the nobility social estate. Deputies of nobility elected kings and imposed treaties in Poland and Hungary. Since the early Romanovs such ideas constituted treason and were effectively curbed in the tsardom of all Russias. Its Zemskii sobor, an assembly of deputies of `estates', had disappeared from the scene by the seventeenth century. The municipal freedoms expressed in veche had been reduced even earlier. The boyars and the dvoryane of the Moscovite grand dukes were from inception courtiers and servitors rather than princelings or a `nation' of an organized and autonomous social estate, claiming its rights and liberties. Their `class organizations' established by Catherine Il's Charter of Nobility were disjointed and limited in scope.

The new type of dissent was initiated by men of knowledge, of ideas and of moral values, that is, those who, as a Russian contemporary would put it, `had a soul'. To `have a soul' was to seek justice and to accept values higher than obedience to the state authorities. The knowledge and ideas in question were new in texture by being secular, general rather than pragmatic, dealing with humans rather than with `things'. Those men were without exception stimulated (at times negatively) by the writings, views and moods of Europe (i.e. not Russia). Not quite children of the Renaissance, because the Reformation and the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century were not realized in Russia, they were, figuratively speaking, their `nephews', that is, the once-removed kinsmen related via the European social philosophy of Enlightenment as expressed in particular in the nineteenth-century writings of Schelling, Hegel, Fourier and Feuerbach.

The voice of the new dissent was first heard under the long rule of Catherine II, which saw also the Charter of Nobility and the execution of Pugachev. Its first lonely harbinger was, arguably, Alexander Radischev. As in the case of Chernyshevskii, his biography aptly represented the general political context of the Russian tsardom of his day. An enlightened nobleman who had studied at the University of Leipzig and travelled extensively abroad, and a state official afterwards, he published in 1790 a volume entitled Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow which followed in form a contemporary European fashion. The book offered a bitterly eloquent critique of serfdom and of the management of the country on all levels. It was passed by the censor but enraged the Empress who, according to her secretary's memoirs, “has most graciously commented that he is a rebel, worse than Pugachev” [10. P. 78]. Radischev was tried and sentenced to execution, which was eventually commuted to life exile in Siberia. Permitted to return after Catherine's death, he was appointed to one of many committees considering administrative reforms but rapidly ran afoul of its chairman. Threatened by renewed imprisonment if he did not `learn how to behave', he committed suicide in 1802.

During the nineteenth century, the new dissent recorded several more `firsts'. In the 1820s came Russia's first attempt to active `modernizing' reforms by a military coup d'йtat. The 1812 march to Paris in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars had left a powerful impression on the young officers -- in those days, Russia'a foremost group of educated nobility. The high hopes for major reforms under Alexander I were disappointed. As a result, a variety of secret societies sprang up. Most of their members were army men. Their creed, size and cohesion differed, but uniformly they craved for constitutional government and the abolition of serf-dom (The social reforms envisaged by members of the secret societies varied from the radical and centralist (often referred to as `Jacobine') program of P. Pestel', who led the movement in the south, to the milder suggestions of N. Muraviev, the leader of the secret societies in Petersburg). Klyuchevskii has caught well a particular intelligentsia aspect of their mental outlook: “whereas .. .fathers have been Russians educated to become Frenchmen, the father's sons were French- educated men longing to become Russian” [25. P. 172].