The Icon and the Axe

Through the more radical program of Miliukov, the constitutional democrats had succeeded in gaining new appeal among the intellectuals and in overcoming the indifference to political reform that had been characteristic of the populists. The liberals were aided in this task by chastened, non-revolutionary elements in the populist camp. Mikhailovsky pointed the way for this more moderate populism. After refusing to collaborate with the zemstvo constitutionalists in 1878, he began to argue-on the very pages of the People's Will journal of the late seventies-that socialists should reconsider their traditional hostility toward Russian liberals. His "Political Letters of a Socialist" recognized that political reforms and constitutional liberties might facilitate the non-violent transformation of society envisaged by the evolutionary populists. A number of influential populists also assigned increased priority to political reform in the emigre journal of the late eighties, Self-Government. The "People's Justice" organization of 1893-4 committed Mikhailovsky and some three thousand other populist sympathizers inside Russia to the proposition that abolition of autocratic government in Russia was-in the words of one of their pamphlets-"the pressing question" of present-day Russian life. The liberal movement adopted many of the folk rites of populism in order to broaden their intellectual appeal. Banquets, circle discussion meetings, commemorative gatherings, and illegal publications abroad were all utilized by the new generation of liberals as they had been by earlier radicals. Many populists and Marxists, who sought to advance their socialist objectives through practical political activity rather than illegal revolutionary agitation, formed tactical alliances with the constitutional liberals in the late imperial period. Nevertheless, the constitutional democratic cause in Russia was handicapped by the split among non-revolutionary reformers between radical and conservative impulses. In order to gain the support of many intellectuals, minority groups, and populist sympathizers it was necessary to combine socialist and egalitarian proposals with constitutional reforms. Such proposals, however, alienated many provincial aristocrats and entrepreneurs. Many of those who had originally joined in the cry for constitutional reform and representative government at the turn of the century were willing to settle for the extension of civil liberties, the approval of a consultative national duma and the constitution of October, 1905. These "Octobrists" dominated the third and fourth dumas with an essentially conservative emphasis on historical continuity and the danger of revolution. Even this cautious group showed signs of vitality, however. Octobrists, aristocratic zemstvo elements, and members of various splinter groups between the

Cadets and the Octobrists played the leading role in forming the remarkable ; "village city" (zemgor) committees which helped finance the Russian war effort in 1915. The very divisions within the liberal camp in the early years of the twentieth century indicated, moreover, a certain vigor. Men of differing philosophic and economic outlooks sought to ally themselves with the traditions of constitutional democracy. Although the Cadets were unable to make their party the forum for all this diversified liberal sentiment, they were not nearly as timid and confused in the face of mounting chaos during the war as many other elements in Russian society. The Cadets were, indeed, the only major political group with a counter-program to that of the Bolsheviks in the critical years of revolution and civil war. The Cadets were both determined reformers and clear foes of totalitarian elements within the reforming camp.

In his elaborate post-mortems on the Revolution, Miliukov suggested that the abstract utopianism of the intelligentsia was a contributory factor to the success of Bolshevism. Criticism of the intelligentsia had been a constant theme in the writings of the ill-fated constitutional liberals of imperial Russia. In contrast to populists on the left and Pan-Slavs on the right, liberals stressed the importance of learning from the West and recognizing the rights and sanctity of the individual. But they generally favored a creative adaptation of Western liberal values to Russian conditions, not merely a slavish imitation. Kavelin, one* of the original Westernizers of the forties and an articulate aristocratic liberal throughout the rest of the century, was typical in his insistence that Russians avoid taking over "outmoded forms in which Europe itself no longer believes."28 He was as prophetically perceptive as Dostoevsky in his memorandum of 1866, depicting the revolutionary paths into which the intelligentsia was drifting; yet he also had the courage to challenge the confusion between universal values and Russian national characteristics in Dostoevsky's Pushkin speech of 1880.