The Icon and the Axe

This restless ethical passion was to dominate the new and sleepless century. Indeed, the new bondage of the Soviet era was to be built in part out of attitudes of humorless puritanism and ethical fanaticism that the later Tolstoy shared with the revolutionary tradition. Tolstoy, however, rejected revolution,18 and died like a lonely sectarian pilgrim in search of truth. The admonition "life is not a joke"19 in his last letter to his wife is strikingly similar to the last entry in Ivanov's notebooks: "It is not permissible to joke with God."20 The icon for his peculiar faith was the famous canvas "What Is Truth?" in which his friend Nicholas Ge portrayed a harried Christ before an imposing and imperious Pilate. The paintings and drawings by Ilya Repin of the aging Tolstoy in peasant garb on his estate served as the last icons of a dying faith that inspired awe but not imitation. There was no desire to be "very like" the late Tolstoy. His links were with the past, and his ideas developed in a world largely out of touch with the urban and industrial Russia that was coming into being.

During Tolstoy's last years, which were the early years of Nicholas II's reign, a number of fresh ideas took root among the more cosmopolitan and better-educated populace.21 The 1890's began the richly creative final period of imperial culture known variously as "the Russian Renaissance" and "the silver age." There was a kind of renaissance quality to the variety and virtuosity of new accomplishment. If silver is less precious than gold, it nonetheless enjoys wider circulation. Never before had the high culture of art and theater, of politics and ideology, involved so many people.

Reduced to its essence, the silver age may be said to have presented Russia of the 1890's with three new and very different perspectives: constitutional liberalism, dialectical materialism, and transcendental idealism. Each of these schools of thought sought to relieve the general air of Chekhovian despondency that was settling over much of Russia; each sought to break sharply with the confining reactionary rule of Pobedonostsev and the atmosphere of Russian particularism that had been characteristic of

populist and Pan-Slav alike. Each school of thought benefited from renewed cultural and diplomatic contact with Western Europe and related its ideas to those of Europe as a whole. The leading figure in each new movement of ideas-the liberal Miliukov, the Marxist Plekhanov, and the idealist Solov'ev-was born in the fifties and nurtured on the optimistic Comtian view of history. Each had participated in the radical unrest of the populist era, but had found the populist ideology inadequate and sought to provide a new antidote for the confusion and pessimism of the late imperial period.

Constitutional Liberalism

The first broadly based liberal movement in Russia dates from the'j

1890's. Only then did proponents of moderate reform, constitutional rule,

and increased civil liberties acquire a nationwide platform and an intellectual

respectability comparable to that which had long been enjoyed by more

extreme positions to the right and left. Suddenly in the new atmosphere of

the late 1890's a number of forces rapidly came together and coalesced

under the banners of "liberation" and "zemstvo constitutionalism" into a f

nationwide political movement that found expression in the formation of I

the Constitutional rJemocraJic (Cadet) party in 1905.'

The interesting question for those brought up in the liberal democratic tradition of the West is: Why was constitutional liberalism so late in coming to Russia? Basically, of course, the reason lies in the different pattern followed in Russian social and economic development. Russia remained I until the very end of the nineteenth century a relatively backward society \ still dominated by religious habit and a traditional agricultural economy. J The intelligentsia had fused elements of religious utopianism and of aristocratic snobbery into an attitude of contempt for such partial measures as constitutional reform and representative government. The very term "liberal-1 ism" was in disrepute throughout the nineteenth century; and the genuinely I liberal movement of the late century carefully avoided using the label "liberal" in its official titles.

The Russian bourgeoisie had not developed the same interest in political and civil liberties as the bourgeoisie of Western Europe. As late as 1895, the liberal Herald of Europe explained the absence of bourgeois liberalism in Russia by the lack of "a bourgeoisie in the West European sense of the word." Much of the native Russian business class was more interested f in commerce than manufacture, and thus was attached to an essentially \ conservative, agrarian way of life. Russian entrepreneurs seemed generally