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Two years after the disaster of the
Decembrist Uprising (and just a little over a year after the executions
of the leaders), in the summer of 1827, two young boys, Aleksandr
Herzen, then fifteen-years-old (1812-1870), and Nikolai Ogarev, thirteen-years-old
(1813-1877), stood on the hill pictured above and swore an oath to avenge
the Decembrists. As recalled later by Herzen (My Past and Thoughts,
vol.1, p. 69),
Flushed and breathless, we stood there mopping our faces. The sun was
setting, the cupolas glittered, beneath the hill the city extended
farther then the eye could reach; a fresh breeze blew on our faces, we
stood leaning against each other and, suddenly embracing, vowed in
sight of all Moscow to sacrifice our lives to the struggle we had
chosen.
That's pretty amazing to me.
Both Herzen and Ogarev along with their friend Mikhail Bakunin
(1814-1876) eventually played a central role in the intellectual
developments in
Russia in the 1830s and 1840s that led Pavel Annenkov (1814-1887) to
term that time as an
"Extraordinary Decade" in his memoirs. Later Isaiah Berlin, the
British intellectual historian, wrote of this period in Russian
history as "The Remarkable Decade."
Slavophiles
The
Slavophiles were champions of the Russian Orthodox church and the autocracy,
and they believed that Russia was wrong to follow the path of other
European countries--The Slavophiles tended to viscerally denounce Peter
the Great's effort at making Russia into a "European"
country.--Instead, Russia should follow its own unique, and, of course,
superior, Slavic, Russian path. According to the Slavophiles, the village
community, or commune, (mir or obshchina), and the legendary popular assembly, the zemskii
sobor, were the key features of Russian civilization. (This was,
to say the least, a somewhat idealized version of some institutions that
never quite lived up to their democratic pretensions). The mir,
in particular, was said to possess the Slavic characteristic of sobornost'
(СОБОРНОСТЬ)
which
could be loosely translated as "togetherness" or "community
togetherness spirit." Most of the Slavophiles viewed the village
commune as the embodiment of this sobornost' and imagined the
beauty of the life of the Russian peasant living in this harmonious
"community togetherness spirit." (The reality was far different.
Who, in their right mind, ever wanted to be a serf? Certainly not
any Russian peasants.)
You should realize that the Slavophile viewpoint
was heavily influenced by concepts borrowed from Romanticism,
especially ideas about how wonderful the life lived close to nature could be.
Finally, while the Slavophiles tended to support the autocracy, they
also supported the emancipation of the serfs and
freedoms of speech and press. Key figures in the movement
included Aleksei Khomiakov (1804-1860)--Khomiakov once wrote that the
Westernizers were "sick
Russians, afflicted by a foreign disease more deadly than syphilis." (www.benadorassociates.com/article/10110)--Konstantin Aksakov
(1817-1860), a Russian literary critic, and his brother, Ivan Aksakov
(1823-1886), also a littérateur and later publicist for the ideas
of the Slavophiles; and Ivan Kirevskii (1806-1856).
Conservatives
Let's draw a fine line between Slavophiles and Conservatives with the distinction being that
Conservatives were staunch supporters of the tsarist regime whereas Slavophiles did advocate
some changes in the tsarist regime. The Conservatives
would have included Sergei Uvarov,
minister of education for Tsar Nicholas I, and the originator of the
ideology of Official Nationality. Some historians may quibble, but
I would also consider to be conservative intellectuals and defenders of the
autocracy: Mikhail Pogodin (1800–1875), professor of Russian
history at the University of Moscow and co-publisher of the
journal Moskvitianin (The Muscovite), and
Stepan Shevyrev (1806-1864), professor of Russian
literature at the University of Moscow and the other co-publisher of
the Moskvitianin.
Westernizers
The
Westernizers believed that Russia's future depended
on continuing the path of Westernization begun by Peter the
Great. Russia needed to adopt Western technology, ideas and, most
importantly, liberal government. For the most part, the Westernizers
tended to be rationalistic in looking at Russia's history and future as
opposed to the emotional and mystical ideas of the Slavophiles. The
Westerners also saw Russia as part and parcel of a future, liberal
Europe. There was little room for the Orthodox church--usually
seen as a backward, corrupt and superstitious institution--in the views
of the Westernizers (and there was even less space for the autocracy.).
In time, many of this group became socialists and political
radicals.
The Westernizers included
Herzen, Ogarev and many others including Bakunin, who went on to launch
a
revolutionary career that would see him cross swords with Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels over the purpose of organizing workers.
Eventually, Bakunin became one of the founders of anarchism ("The
passion
for destruction is a creative passion.")--Interestingly, he saw the Russian peasant
commune, once it had been freed of the shackles imposed by the tsarist regime,
as a future organizing principle of society. Other key
Westernizers were Piotr Chaadaev (1794-1856), who had been declared
insane by the tsarist government for his critique of Russia (See his Apology
of a Madman, Aпология сумасшедшего, 1837), Vissarion
Belinskii and
Timofei Granovsky (1813-1855),
professor of history at Moscow University, who used his lectures on
Medieval European history to show the advantages of Western development
over what had happened in Russian history.
Liberals
Ok,
since I made a slight distinction between Slavophiles and
Conservatives, I'm now going to make a similar distinction between
Westernizers and Liberals with the distinction being that the
Westerners tended to advocate some degree of radical Western change (or
even socialist prescriptions) whereas the Liberals tended to be more
moderate in advocating, gradual, legalistic, constitutional
change. The best example of a Russian moderate liberal of the
1840s would be Konstantin Kavelin (1818-1885)--True, he did most of his
work in the 1850s and later drifted towards the right.
So,
the 1840s were a remarkable decade that witnessed an intellectual
vitality
spanning the ideological spectrum and expressed in many artistic fields
too (philosophy, music, literature, poetry, painting, etc). In
many respects, Russians were now the equals of their European
counterparts in most of these areas of intellectual and cultural
endeavor.
The Sparrow Hills overlooking Moscow are a popular wedding photography point. This is also the site where Moscow University is now located. (My photos of the downtown MGU buildings near the Kremlin were
lost some years ago in a washing machine incident.).
Some recommended books
- Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (1965)
- Aleksandr Herzen, From the Other Shore (1847-48)
- Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (1977)
- Andrei Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought (1975)
- Priscilla Roosevelt, Apostle of Russian Liberalism: Timofei Granovsky (1986)
- James Edie, et al, Russian Philosophy, volume 1 (1965)
- Nicholas Riasanovsky, Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles: A Study of Romantic Ideology (1952)
- Herbert Bowman, Vissarion Belinskii: A Study in the Origins of Social Criticism in Russia (1969)
- Taras Shevchenko, Poetical Works translated by C. Andrusyshen and Watson Kirkconnell (1964)
- Edward Chmielewski, Tribune of the Slavophiles: Konstantin Aksakov (1962)
Some recommended websites
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