ABSTRACT
In 1848, the nationalist ferment that had gathered in a number of European states reached a peak. For the Russian state, the ensuing ‘springtime of nations’, with people up in arms against their states, came as no surprise, but was rather a further confirmation of the sorry state of contemporary ‘false’ Europe, where undisciplined and faithless humans did not obey the timeless virtues of the ancien régime. In foreign affairs, the Russian state reacted by rallying to the side of the Habsburg ruler in his hour of need, and staged a military intervention into Transleithania to crush the Magyar nationalist uprising against him. At home, the state limited political discourse to a minimum. The period of the 1840s, when public political life had been dominated by the conversation of the westernisers and the Slavophiles, was decidedly over. The state did more than tightly circumscribing political space; it also attempted
to bridge the gap between its own position and the romantic nationalist one. As a result, official nationality was, for a limited time, adorned with some romantic nationalist features, as the state attempted to amalgamate itself with the idea of ‘Holy Russia’. This dabbling with romantic nationalism was cut short with the advent of the Crimean War (1853-56), which the Russian state perceived not only as an Anglo-French attack against its sphere of influence, but as a fully fledged war with Europe. Defeat made the state reassess its framework for judging Europe. The idea of Russia as a bulwark of ‘true’ European ideals was not discarded, but was left to one side as the new tsar concentrated on reforming Russia along what he saw as European lines. Thus, while before the Crimean War the state had attempted to tie in romantic nationalism with its own position, in the wake of its defeat it now began to rethink the importance of economic factors for military capabilities. In the process, it made a number of approaches in the direction of westernism. The state’s new thinking sparked some interesting repositionings, among the
romantic nationalists as well as the westernisers. Where the former were concerned,
the military defeat and the state’s loss of interest in romantic nationalism initially made for a period of inaction. Eventually, however, Slavophilism, which had favoured spiritual introspectiveness and Russian aloofness vis-à-vis Europe, gave way to pan-Slavism. Pan-Slavism favoured an active Russian foreign policy towards Russia’s Western borderlands, and did not shy away from the increased tension with Europe that such a policy would necessarily entail. The westernisers, by contrast, had spent the period between the state’s crack-
down in 1848-49 and the defeat in the Crimean War in the political wilderness. As the state began to implement the kind of reform they had been advocating, their expectations intensified. Subsequently, when the reforms proved half-hearted in both conception and implementation, their position radicalised. In the process, the crack that was already apparent in the debate between Botkin and Gertsen about Russia’s need for a bourgeoisie widened into a full split. Two fully fledged positions and an embryonic one emerged: a liberal, a Russian socialist and a Marxist. First, old-style westernisers with a belief in constitutionalism and incrementalism
conglomerated around the new local government organs, the zemstva. They were known among themselves and their opponents as liberals or constitutionalists, and their position will be referred to accordingly. Second, there were those who created a new position, where Russia was to pick and choose from Europe’s experience in order to arrive at a specifically Russian socialism. Eventually, the advocates of this position came to concentrate so much on Russia’s unique historical potential that they could no longer be referred to as westernisers. Instead, there developed a position of ‘Russian socialism’, which, in the course of the 1860s, was further radicalised into a populist position. Although the populists were to become the sworn enemies of the Russian Marxists after 1881, during the period covered in this chapter a number of the people who constituted this position expressed their intellectual debt to Marx. Third, other socialists continued to hold that history was about to churn Russia through exactly the same developmental stages that Europe had already traversed, and then hurl both Europe and Russia into a socialist revolution. Throughout the 1870s, the Marxist hue of this position grew stronger and stronger. It is, therefore, somewhat incongruously and atavistically referred to as the embryonic Marxist position. The state’s reaction to the springtime of nations was immediate. ‘We are’,
Nicholas I exclaimed (using the royal we), ‘ready to meet our enemies, wherever they may appear, and, without sparing ourselves, we will, in an indissoluble union with our Holy Russia defend the honour of the Russian name and the inviolability of our borders’ (Cherniavsky, 1958: 625).1 Such exclamations were, it seems, primarily directed towards the Russian westernisers at home and in exile abroad. Those were enemies who could strike from unsuspected places within, from ‘wherever they may appear’. Accordingly, public political space was limited in a degree surpassing even the limitations implemented in the wake of the Decembrist uprising in 1825. The thoroughness with which the state clamped down can be seen in the fact that it issued a special edict which banned the teaching of Western philosophy in Russian universities.
