THE INTELLIGENTSIA
271
one. The basic point is that people grow under the burden of their
]
responsibilities and shrink if the burden is taken from them. Nechaew
lived for a number of years chained to the wall of a humid cell and
when his comrades succeeded
in
establishing contact and offered to
liberate him, refused because he preferred them to concentrate on
more important tasks. But later, in the emigre atmosphere of Geneva,
he became involved in the most squalid quarrels and died an obscure
nobody. The venerable and justly venerated Russian student heroines
and martyrs were not less hysterical than any character of Huxley's
or Evelyn Waugh's; Lassalle was a snob who got himself killed in
a quixotic duel, Marx a pathologically quarrelsome old sponger,
Bakunin had an incestuous fixation to a sister, was impotent and
died a virgin; Trotsky at a certain period spent
all
his afternoons and
evenings playing
ches~
in the Cafe Central in Vienna-a typical figure
from an Osbert Lancaster Cafe Royal Landscape; Lenin suffered a
traumatic shock when his brother Alexander was hanged-hence his
fanatical hatred of the Bourgeoisie of which, in analytical terms, the
Russian revolution was merely a 'projection'. Neurosis is inherent in
the structure of intelligentsias (I shall come back to this point in a
moment) : history, however, is not interested in a person's motives,
only in his achievements. But why is it that the burden and bliss of
responsibility is given to the intelligentsia in certain periods and in
others not, condemning the latter to barrenness and futility? This is
the question to which the comparison between the early Russians and
Bloomsbury boils down; more precisely to the question of the his–
torical con<>tellation which accounts for the sharing-out of respon–
sibilities.
The answer becomes at once obvious by a comparison of the
two countries' sociological structure. Nineteenth-century Russia had
no Trade Unions, no Labor movement or Co-operatives. Serfdom
was only aboli<>hed in 1862;
in
that drowsy, inert giant-country there
was no gradual transition from patriarchal feudalism to modern
Capitalism; I have spoken to peasants who took aeroplanes for
granted, watching them each day fly over their heads but had never
seen a railway or motor-car; others who had travelled in a car but
wouldn't believe that such a thing as a bicycle existed.
What a paradise for intellectuals with pedagogical yearnings!
When the first of them, the martyrs of Narodnaya Volya, started what
they called 'going among the people' dressed as peasants, preaching
the new gospel, they trod on virgin soil, they found no competition
in the shape of Trade Unions and Labor politicians telling them
to cast off their masquerade and go back to the Bloomsbury of Petro-
