SUMMARY:

Suspicion of Western panaceas has a long history in Russia: these current protesters are continuing a polemic which began in 1855, when Tsar Alexander II signaled his intention to transform Russia from a primitive despotism into some kind of modern state. The great émigré radical thinker Alexander Herzen was soon at loggerheads with the theorists of the emerging Russian liberal movement. Then, as now, the issue was one of transition, in which the questions “Whither Russia?” and “Whither history?” were closely intertwined. Aileen Kelly believes that this early debate is well worth revisiting, both because of its relevance to the current crisis in Russia and because of Herzen’s remarkably prescient insights into the self-deceptions of ideological thought.
Kelly argues that by 1859 Herzen had come to accept the futility of seeking to engage in dialogue with those who believed that Russia’s path of progress had been mapped out in advance, and he declared open war on the Westernizers’ doctrinairism, asserting in his press that the main threat to the commune’s future existence came not from the government but from liberals well versed in political economy and legal theory, and devoted to the principles of Prussian bureaucracy and French centralism. Herzen finally conceded that the dogma-bound Hegelian liberals (the “Russian Germans”, as he called them) were immune to all persuasion; but he continued his efforts with a more subtle and sympathetic opponent: the writer Ivan Turgenev.
The article shows Herzen waging war on two fronts: against the liberals’ denigration of popular aspirations, and against the radicals’ belief that these aspirations coincided with their own exalted ideals. He tells the left that the truth, so far as can be ascertained, is more prosaic – the people want bread and land; and he tells Turgenev that he perfectly understands his horror of the knee-deep mud, droughts, floods and hard labours that face those with faith in Russia’s separate path – a path only dimly glimpsed through a thick fog which may never be dispelled. He holds out no hope that peasant socialism, even if developed with the help of Western science and social theory, will embrace all the civilized values that they both hold dear; its justification is that it is more likely to correspond to the aspirations of the vast mass of the population than an imported system imposed by an elite.
Kelly concludes that our culture still has a deep-seated allegiance to the comforting idea of a single order underlying the diversity of life. The myths and prejudices that nurtured this belief survive in the metaphors commonly used to represent development in nature, history and culture, as movement through time from simple to complex, less to more, primitive to advanced. It is precisely to this phenomenon that Herzen refers in his deconstruction of the discourse of Russian liberalism, and the same ideological bias can be seen in assessments of his own thought by 20th century Western liberal scholars.