The Icon and the Axe

rand adroTr^rs nf ???????? fellow provincials^ so to speak, who had come to Paris, the Mecca of revolution in the late forties. Trigjuaccepted Pr"iHhj^rjX£^planaticjrthat the debacle of 1848-9 resulted from the failure of tbe revolutionaries to link themselves "mrreservedly with the elemental power of the people. They, and Russian radical thought generally, had"

continued to hopeffiat socialist transformation might yet be accomplished on French soil through a working-class movement led by Proudhon i.bjiLthsy^ gradually began to place their hopes for change in the unspoiled Russian people! *""

This transfer_of hopesjrom West to East became complete in 1871

after Bismarck's Germany defeated France in the Frrmm-PriJssian W?r"and "a repubUc_yyithout ideals" came into being over the ruins of the Paris Commune. France was now a center of fashions rather than "the lighthouse of the world"; it had become, in the title of Mikhailovsky's famous essay of October, 1871, the land of "Darwinism and the Operettas of Offenbach." All of Europe is now ruled by jungle laws of the survival of the fittest and a culture whose highest symbol is the cancan; and Mikhailovsky pointedly ends his piece with the phrase novus rerurn mihi nascitur ordo.

s~\r\

The new order of things as envisaged by the main line of populist thought as it developed from Herzen and Chernyshevsky through to Lavrov, Mikhailovsky, and Shelgunov was a unique Russian variant of the general European phenomenon of moralistic, "utopian" socialism. The populists believed in "subjective socialism" to be brought about by mormldeals rather thalT'^'ooTective socialism" th"at~is created irrespective~of human ~.*a

1. 1 ne 1 urn to social 1 nougni

theories about revolutionary organization and economic determinism gained almost no suggortamong Russians during the populis^rj^JJiojagh^^^ioraT outrage of his denuncmtionj3fj^a|›kalisr^

PoplffisTsocialism did not involve just a reconstitution of society on the

communal modHl)TThe^peaSarit obshchina, but a creative development of

the obshchina form itself TrTorder to guarantee the full dewlgpment of the

human personality, hferzen stressed the need for assuring indjvidualrights

within the new socialist society, Chernyshevsky the need for maintaining

individual incentives, and Mikhailovsky the need for preventing dehuman

izing overspecialization. For all of JhemJhe_full d^y^lo^mMjtjo£4luman

personality was^mjBdjnskj^sjvor^than the fate of the

whole world/^Mikhailovsky described all of history as an endless "struggle for individuality" and describejjfcejcoming' golden age_as one of "subjective anthropocentrism." Nicholas Chaikovsky, whose circle in St. Petersburg was the real center of the populist movement, thought that he was founding a "religion of humanity" and included in his group several members of a "God-manhood sect" which taught that each individual was literally destined to become a god.42

The populists professed to accept industrial development but wished  to_preservaJhg_ more moral type ofsocietv_foundJn^the commune, while  m°v'ngj£jfog j?.J^S££E££5f civilization which scienu^c progress was bring-  ing into beings Indeed, thefirst ofthe mass "movementstojhepeople" in  1871-3 was direcgj^^el^'/ia^i^»^at^ie urbanworkers jjfjit. Peters-  burg, who were thniightJ-oJinHjfbf^key to the future and be particularly^  capable of "mental andjrjpral development." This movement to the people  appealed to intellectuals in other cities, who formed groups loosely affiliated  with the Chaikovtsy in many major cities of the empire. This initial effort  to educate urban workers and evangelize them with the new belief in the  inevitability of progress involved many of the Russian radicals who were  to become well known in the West through prolific later writings in exile:  Peter Kropotkin and Serge Kravchinsky (Stepniak). Disillusioned with the  lack of response to their teachings among the working class, the Chaikovtsy  concluded that they must go instead to the peasantry, which still dominated  the thinking of the Russian masses. Accordingly, they suddenly found  thei»sdy£^cjughtjupin the "mad summer" of JJ amp;7A.. one of the most ^  fan^stic..^ad^unprecedented~lociiT~ movements of the entire nineteenth

century.*~ ' ~~--.-- -¦-

,~ Suddenly, without any central leadership or direction, more than two

thou^aj3dj^e^2nd_a_number oFolderj5eople and aristocrats were swept' awaybyas£irit_of self-renunciation. In almost every province of European Russia, young intellectuals dressed_asj›easants and set out from the cities

to live among them, join in their daily life, and bring to them the good news'""" that a new age was dawning. Rich landowners_gaye_ away their possessions or agreeTTto jet .students use their estates for social propaganda and experi-ment; agnostic Jews had themsejyes~b~aptised~asOrthgdox in order to be moje at one with the peasantry; women joined in the exodus in order to.

*haH12g|""jjyJn ^' hopFf! ???| suffering 43