The New Europe/Volume 5/Forerunners of the Russian Revolution (1)

by Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk

Forerunners of the Russian Revolution

[For over half a century past new and mysterious forces have been simmering in Russia, and the Slav has been preparing his contribution to the theory of social upheaval. Yet while the literary genius of a Tolstoi and a Dostoievski has won the admiration and attention, if not the comprehension, of the West, the forerunners of that New Russia which is rising before our puzzled eyes have passed neglected and unknown, or have been dismissed as dangerous and subversive. The names of Černiševski, Pisarev, Lavrov, Mihailovski, are a sealed book to us; even Herzen and Bakunin are at best mere names. Nihilists and Anarchists are known from the pages of “shilling shockers,” but their motives and reasoned philosophy have never been made accessible to us. The word “Bolševik” has acquired a sinister meaning to our public during the last few months, but absolutely nothing is known of the historical development of Socialism in Russia or of the Social Revolutionary movement—in other words, of the currents and tendencies which produced the fall of Tsarism last March and all that has followed from it. In these circumstances it is a positive disaster that one of the great books of the century—Professor Masaryk’s “Russia and Europe” should be virtually inaccessible to this country, and, what is even worse, available as a vade mecum to the all-too-well-informed directors of German policy. With a profound historical and philosophical mastery of his subject and with an astonishing wealth of detail, the great Slav scholar analyses the many obscure currents of Russian thought which are now reacting upon Europe no less surely than the French Encyclopædia in the late eighteenth century. In accordance with a long overdue promise we propose in this and subsequent numbers to extract some of the most notable and illuminating passages of his book.]

(I) BAKUNIN

Bakunin^[1] can only be understood as the product and the victim of Russian conditions under Nicholas I. Brought up from childhood in the memories of the Decabrists, he found his way to Europe, drank very deep of Hegel’s philosophy, and was driven towards revolution by the Hegelian Left and Proudhon. The period before 1848 and the year 1848 itself provided him with all kinds of revolutionary employment, for he thought it would be possible to realise everywhere his ideal of free humanity by taking part in the revolution. His experiences in European and Russian prisons and in Siberia strengthened him in his hatred of the existing order, and he became a revolutionary by profession. The world—in concreto Russia, but Europe also with its civilisation and institutions—roused him to fury: his head was full of revolutionary ideas and plans.

These plans and ideas were not worked out. For Bakunin method and order existed neither in practice nor in theory. A genius, but only half educated, and that not merely through his own fault, an egoist to the point of naïveté, he would never admit the question, whether after all he, too, in his own person might not share the responsibility for the general misery. He looked for every evil and its roots only outside himself. Bakunin felt this old order and its supports, even Nature, the world, God, as personal insults and provocations: and in this mood he spent his life in wild efforts to turn the whole world upside down according to his own idea. Without the faintest conception of how the new world was to be formed, without real knowledge of the old world, Bakunin revelled in the cosmopolitan ideas of the true agitator. Working in hiding, now in England, now in France, then again in Belgium and Germany, then in Italy and Switzerland, he could not find anywhere the point from which to heave the world off its hinges. And so he fell a prey to revolutionary unrest and nervousness, mistook his agitation for action, and lost all sense of reality and all measure for judging the actions of others.

He loves ideas, not men, says Byelinski of Bakunin. Men were to this man of half ideas and half-deeds always mere means to an end. Half ideas and half deeds: Bakunin scarcely ever finished any literary work, and never set himself any practical task at which he worked with persistence and stedfastness. If Herzen called history an improvisation, then there must be improvisors of life, and Bakunin was one of these.

Bakunin tried several times to find a philosophical basis for the revolution. In his chief work the moving force of the individual and of history is found in three principles—animalism, thought and revolt: Man has a natural need for revolt, a revolutionary instinct. . . . In the programme of the “Alliance Internationale de la Démocratie socialiste” (1873) Bakunin also produced an ethical theory of revolution, which is no less characteristic than his “instinct” theory.

Starting from a materialistic determinism, Bakunin denies the freedom of the will, in order to be able to deny law, and, in particular, criminal law. The individual is the “involuntary” product of the natural and social milieu, out of which criminals and kings alike arise! Criminals and kings are thus equally free from blame, for they are the natural product of one and the same society. In order to be able to punish criminals, society relies on the necessity for individual responsibility. But this theory originates in theology, that blend of absurdity and hypocrisy. The individual is neither punishable nor responsible.

The objection that even according to this theory, not only the criminal, but also the judge and the executioner are the “natural” product of the same society, does not occur to Bakunin. Nor has he worried himself as to why only kings, as the supreme heads, should be removed, if they are the innocent victims of their society.

Bakunin derives all immorality from political, social and economic inequality; but this inequality prevails only in the transition period, and will disappear as a result of Universal Revolution, that is, of simultaneous social, philosophical, economic and political revolution. In this transition period only Society has the right, out of self-preservation, to kill the criminals whom it itself produces; but the right to judge and to condemn it does not possess. Naturally by this right to kill, Bakunin is thinking of the assassinations and mass executions of the Revolution; hence, this right to kill and assassinate is really no right at all, but a “natural fact,” sad but unavoidable. He states plainly that this “natural fact” will not be in any way moral, but simply natural; the idea of justice only holds good in the transition period, and is a negative idea, according to which the social problem and ideal will be posed though only brotherhood and real equality will ever positively solve it. He further admits that “natural” murders will not even be useful, so long as existing oppressors are replaced by new ones. He condemns the Jacobins and the Blanquists, because they dream of a bloody revolution against men, whereas the final Universal Revolution must be directed against the “organisation of things” and of “social positions.” This radical revolution must destroy private property and the State, and might spare men, in so far as that does not injure itself. Bakunin is not afraid to call this radical revolution Anarchy—“the complete expression of the life of the people”—out of which Equality will grow; but for that very reason every form of authority must be destroyed, whether it be called Church, Monarchy, Constitutional State, bourgeois Republic or revolutionary Dictatorship. This entirely new revolutionary state (so there has to be a state after all!) “will be the new fatherland, the alliance of the Universal Revolution against the Alliance of all reactions.”

Such is in its principles Bakunin’s justly notorious “Philosophy of the Deed,” built up on the old confusion of determinism with fatalism, which denies ethical responsibility. On the one hand Bakunin would save individual freedom, on the other it is irksome to him. He hides himself behind the positivist Spanish wall of “natural facts.” In his apostrophes to the Russian youth he defends in the same way the “attentats” of Karakozov, representing them as the “natural” and “epidemic” passion of youth; but because he feels the awkwardness of this apology he demands that “these individual deeds” should grow more frequent, until they become “deeds of the collective masses.” The work will get steadily easier, in proportion as the panic spreads in that section of society which is doomed to destruction. The unspoilt youth must realise, so Bakunin harangues, that it is far more humane to stab and strangle dozens, even hundreds of hateful beings, than to share with them in systematic legal murder. Hence he preaches the sacred war of annihilation against all evil by all possible means: “poison, dagger, &c.—the revolution sanctifies everything in this struggle.” The true revolutionary knows neither scruples nor doubts, he has nothing to repent. “Repentance is good enough if it can alter and improve something: but if that is not the case, then it is not only useless but actually harmful.” Bakunin energetically attacks those who demand of “the men of to-day” a precise plan of future construction: it suffices to have a cloudy idea of the opposite of the loathsome machinery of present-day civilisation. The aim is only tearing down, “pandestruction”: “in the case of adherents of the cause of practical revolution we regard all speculations about this nebulous future as criminal, since they only serve as obstacles to the cause of destruction as such.” Bakunin attacks contemporary literature, which consists merely of denunciators and flatterers, hired by despotism to defend the old order in literature and science, and inventing the lie of a positive plan for the future. Certainly, he adds, there are honest, even Socialist dreamers, who spin plans for a better life, but that, too, is only the same loathsome stuff, because they build their pictures of the future out of the material of existing detestable conditions. “We desire that now the Deed should lead the Word. . . .”

How absurd, scholastic, sophistical, nay positively Jesuitic, this Humanism of Anarchy is, is obvious enough to any thinking man . . . Bakunin in this Philosophy of the Deed permitted not merely revolution of the masses, but also murder and expropriation of the individual, as means of producing a general panic, and in terrorism he saw an educational means to revolution.

As Tsar of the Secret League, Bakunin was irresponsible, quite according to his Russian model and so he had a horror of plans for the future. It is true that such plans are easily made, if they are merely a collection of wishes: but from one who for his reforms actually arrogates the right to kill, we must first of all demand a very detailed and conscientious analysis of social institutions and their shortcomings, and then a similar analysis of historical development, in order to be able with some degree of probability to risk some conclusion as regards future development. Marx was not quite just to Bakunin in details, but was quite right in condemning his preference for blind risk. Meanwhile, Bakunin’s great deeds are insignificant enough, when “pandestruction” is converted into deeds. He recommended continual small risings and conspiracies, peasants’ and workmen’s unrest, and indeed revolts and disturbances of all kinds, in order to keep up revolutionary feeling and prepare for the final catastrophe. This is what he and his followers called “par-le-fait-isme.”

Bakunin’s individualism ends with a negation of individuality, with absolutism. He wanted “An-archy” (treating the word thus etymologically) as the annihilation of all authority. He conceived the struggle à outrance on the lines of the robber chiefs of popular legend, and in 1869 declared brigandage to be one of the most honourable forms of Russian state life. “We need something else [than a constitution]: storm and life and a world without laws and, therefore, free,” he cried in 1848. And in the same way we read in the secret statutes of 1869 that the international brother must combine intelligence, energy, honour, and secrecy with “revolutionary passion;” in short, “must have the devil in his body.” Bakunin had this devil and nourished him on feelings of revenge. It is natural that the régime of Nicholas I. should awake such feelings, but hatred and revenge cause blindness, and victorious battles cannot be waged with such blindness of feeling. Marx and his followers, and even Liberals like Ruge, accused Bakunin of nationalist Panslavism, and, therefore, called him illogical. Even to-day many historians of Socialism keep asking whether he was not after all a Russian agent, as the Marxists often maintain. Now it is true that Bakunin, even in 1862, thought of the Tsar as a possible executor of his plans; but Proudhon indulged in similar illusions regarding Napoleon, while Mickiewicz and others sometimes hoped to convert their powerful enemies. Herzen shared these hopes, and to him Bakunin told this plan, which was, of course, the very opposite of “from below.” It was not political and nationalist Panslavism, but Slavophil Messianism, which Bakunin shared with Herzen; but, unlike the latter, he laid stress more on its Slav than its Russian side. This was due to the fact that Bakunin came into personal contact with the Polish, Czech, and Southern Slav revolutionaries.

The Marxists and other German opponents of Bakunin are right in saying that he was wrong in his estimate of the capacity of the Slavs for revolution; but, otherwise, his Slav programme was not more national than that of Marx and the Liberals. Marx demands a German-Polish-Magyar union against the Slavs, and preaches hatred of the Russians, Czechs and Croats. Bakunin, in his appeal to the Slavs (1848), which Marx criticises so sharply, summons them to declare for the Magyars against Windischgrätz.^[2] In the same way Bakunin is for the Poles and also for the Germans—for the people, not for Germany’s despots. The real difference is that Bakunin was Russian, while Marx, Engels, Ruge and others were German. That the Marxists long afterwards, and even to-day, have German national feelings and antipathy towards the Slavs I have already proved in my book on “The Foundations of Marxism.” Nor is any fresh proof needed, in view of the present national struggles inside Social Democracy.

This view, which is certainly not Chauvinistic, Bakunin never changed. He simply was a Russian, and as such wanted the Russians and the Slavs to be included in the revolutionary family of peoples. In 1848 he took part in the Prague rising, in 1863 he wanted to help the Poles; he took his part in the first revolutionary Russian organisations. He believed in the revolutionary power of the Slavs. His preference for the Poles was due to the general enthusiasm which then prevailed for Poland, to his acquaintance with Poles in Europe and Siberia, and to the fact that he had a Polish wife. For the Czechs and Ukrainians Bakunin was won by the programme of federation put forward by them in 1848. Bakunin came from a State of mixed language, in which several nationalities were struggling for national linguistic rights; hence the contrast between the centralising State and the idea of nationality was clearer and more living with him than with Marx. On this distinction between State and people Bakunin laid special emphasis at the congress held in 1848 in Bern by the League of Peace and Freedom. That he did not attack Panslavism from the nationalist side is proved by the fact that he did not accept the Czech programme without criticism; in contrast to Palacky and Rieger, he wanted to go with the Magyars against Austria. Besides, he wanted to include the Roumanians in his Slav federation, since he thought of the destruction, not merely of Austria, but also of Turkey. In all these plans there were differences of outlook and estimate of the political situation between Bakunin and Marx or the German Radicals, but this cannot be traced to Slav Chauvinism.

Finally, Bakunin, just as Herzen, looked upon the Russian people as the born people of the social revolution. In support of this view he quoted the existence and importance of the Mir. According to Russian popular ideas, the whole land belongs to the people alone, that is, to the whole mass of real workers, who till it with their own hands and it is just this idea which, according to him, contains in itself all social revolutions of the past and future. He also held that the Slavs, in particular the Great Russians, were the least war-like of peoples, and that they therefore aimed at no conquests, but set their sole and passionate desire upon the free and collective exploitation of the soil. The Russians, so his fantasy argued, are socialist by instinct and revolutionary by nature, and therefore the Russians will initiate the confederation of the world.

THOMAS G. MASARYK

 

---

---

 

1. Michael Bakunin, born in 1814 of a wealthy Russian family, educated in Italy (doctorate at Turin); officer, 1833–4; translated Hegel; went in 1840 to Berlin, in contact with the Hegelians; then in Paris with Proudhon and Slav political exiles, but expelled; took part in Revolution of 1848 in Paris, Prague and Dresden; sentenced to death, but sentence commuted; handed over first to Austria, then to Russia; imprisoned in Peter and Paul, 1851–7, sent to Siberia and escaped; helped Polish rising in 1863; founded secret “international brotherhood” in Italy, 1864, and Alliance Internationale de la Démocratie socialiste in Switzerland, 1868; in the Commune at Lyon, 1871. Long feud with Marx ended in his exclusion from the Internationale in 1872; left the Féderation Jurassienne in 1872; died at Bern, 1876. Followers of Marx and Bakunin reached agreement at Gent in 1877.—(Œuvres, 7 vols., Paris, 1907.)
2. The queller of the revolution in Prague in 1848.