ISAIAH BERLIN
13
day we, too, will rise. One day the sun will shine on our side of the
street.
Krauze:
When did this preoccupation with progress begin? It wasn't with
the Bolsheviks. . . .
Berlin:
It
began much earlier. Alexander Herzen, for instance, who was
eighteen in the forties, wondered what stage Russia had reached–
although he ends by rejecting this, he ends by saying, "History has no
libretto." Bakunin also did not
think
that history had a libretto. But
other thinkers certainly supposed there was an order. So Granovsky, a
famous liberal professor at the University of Moscow, thought that
there was an objective series of stages of development: not a precise
one, nevertheless an order; so did the elder Soloviev, the historian–
and they tried to explain, in general terms, what it was. With the
decay of the orthodox faith among the educated, salvation was sought
in History with a capital "H." As an antidote to despair of the possi–
bility of an effective opposition to the crushing political system, to the
reign of injustice, poverty, squalor, there is a clinging to the objective
movement of history-the stages through which all societies must
inexorably pass. Let me give you an example of what I mean:
Chernyshevsky, who is a populist, talks in this way. He said (and
Herzen said it before him, and Chaadaev said it before that) that we,
Russians, are moving along the same path as the West, but perhaps
we do not have to go through the hell of the Industrial Revolution;
maybe we can profit by the results of the Western industrial develop–
ment without going through the agonies of the awful tunnel d1at the
West had to pass through-but, having profited more or less pain–
lessly by the fruits of Western progress, we shall then be ready to
march side by side with the West towards the bright progressive
future.
Or again, there is a very typical argument in the nineteenth cen–
tury between the neo-Jacobin Tkachev and the semigradualist popu–
list Lavrov, who was influenced by Marx. Tkachev, in effect, said:
We must make a revolution now, we must have a
Puisch.
The peasants
are a reactionary class, and will resist revolutionary change; we have
to do it for them but not with them. If we don't do this,
if
we
try
to
wait till the majority is with us, then what has happened in the West
will
happen in
Russia-embourgeoisement
will gradually occur. Where
are the cadres of the revolutionaries to come from today? From
among frustrated doctors, lawyers, agricultural experts who are not
given the chance to develop their skills.
If
the tsarist government has
