GARY SAUL MORSON - Pig and People: The rise and fall of the first Russian populists.
The populists’ efforts to “go to the people” failed utterly. Far from embracing their revolutionary ideology, the peasants turned their worshippers in to the police. In despair, many populists established the Russian terrorist movement. If Russian history demonstrates anything, it is that nothing causes more evil than the attempt to abolish it altogether. The scarlet flower blooms in the Gulag. To this day the idea persists that the Russian people, especially the simple rural ones, somehow carry the moral solution to all the world’s ills. Under what Dostoyevsky called their “alluvial barbarism” lies the purest spirituality. For Russians, faith in the people’s virtue is equalled only by another belief: in the moral glory of Russian literature. That belief is warranted.
Russian populism (narodnichestvo, from narod, the people) began in the 1870s. The narodniks dominated Russian thought for two decades, and their successors, the Socialist Revolutionaries, became the country’s most influential political party until the Bolshevik coup. The importance of Russian populism lies less in its programs than in its ethos, a guilty idealism that can teach us a lot today - not only about populism itself but also about the clash of any idealism with recalcitrant reality.
Russian populism (narodnichestvo, from narod, the people) began in the 1870s. The narodniks dominated Russian thought for two decades, and their successors, the Socialist Revolutionaries, became the country’s most influential political party until the Bolshevik coup. The importance of Russian populism lies less in its programs than in its ethos, a guilty idealism that can teach us a lot today - not only about populism itself but also about the clash of any idealism with recalcitrant reality.
Vsevolod Garshin
(painted by Ilya Repin in 1884) wrote with deep compassion and
without sentimentality
Russia’s greatest
writers, painters, and composers all reflected on, if they did not participate
in, what one historian called “the
agony of populist art.” “Agony” is the right word to describe a movement whose
greatest artists drank themselves to death, committed suicide, or went insane.
Russians’ natural extremism makes the problems inherent in all idealistic
movements especially visible.
Jolting from one
panacea for evil to another, Russian intellectuals at last arrived at worship
of “the people,” a term usually meaning the peasants, who constituted the
overwhelming majority of the population. Today, the word “populist” is often
used as a term of abuse disparaging boorish, mindless followers of a demagogue,
but “narodnik,” though originally pejorative, was soon adopted by the populists
themselves to indicate their reverence for the Russian people’s innate wisdom. To argue for a policy it was common not to demonstrate its effectiveness but to
show that it was supported by “the people,” as if the people could not be
wrong. In Anna Karenina,
everyone is shocked when Levin, Tolstoy’s hero, rejects this whole way of thinking.
“That word ‘people,’” he says, “is so vague.”
Any ideal worth adopting had to explain the meaning of life. In one of his best stories, “On the Road,” Chekhov reflected on such idealism by telling the story of Grigory Likharev, who finds himself snowed in at an inn on Christmas Eve. There he encounters a noblewoman, Madame Ilovaiskaya, on her way to her father and brother, who without her wouldn’t take basic care of themselves. She listens with rapt attention to the charismatic Likharev’s account of his lifelong embrace of one set of beliefs after another.
Today, the word ‘populist’ is often used as a term of abuse disparaging boorish, mindless followers of a demagogue. But the early Russian populists described themselves that way to indicate their reverence for the people’s—that is, the peasants’—innate wisdom. Likharev always lives “on the road,” journeying from place to place to preach idea after idea. Some people, he explains, possess a talent for faith, a special faculty of the spirit that compels them to believe totally in one thing or another. “This faculty is present in Russians in its highest degree. Russian life presents us with an uninterrupted succession of convictions and aspirations and, if you care to know, it has not yet the faintest notion of lack of faith or skepticism. If a Russian does not believe in God, it means he believes in something else.”.. read more:
