How to Think in Russian
Mikhailovsky and Russian Populism. By James 1-1. Billington. (O.U.P., 30s.) WITH the bankruptcy of ideology, even in its central fortresses, ideas proper are coming back into their own. The tabula rasa, on which the totalitarians wished to create a brand-new society and system of beliefs, was never obtained. It proved impossible to destroy the adverse influence of Russian history and Russian literature. When Khrushchev recently denounced the young writers of Molodaya Gvardiya for 'nihilism,' the editors boldly retorted, before being sacked, that nihilist had once been a proud title. Yes, and the genera- tion after the nihilists is even more of a challenge to present conformism. In this context the period of the last great conflict between the Russian intel- ligentsia and the Russian autocracy is taking on a new freshness. Just as the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 took place under the national and demo- cratic slogans of 1848 and to the music of the 'Marseillaise,' the present movement in Russia Can. up a good deal of the spirit of the epoch of Populism. Mikhailovsky, with his pragmatic idealism, was a central figure in this period—not so much for the value of his own thought as for his un- sectarian position. He was trusted by all and responsive (always short of fanaticism) to every revulsion against the alternate hypocrites and °PPressors whose way of action forms that other tradition on which the present rulers base them- lei Nes.
One of the few writers prominent in the recent rotten liberal' upsurge to produce a printable recantation was the poetess Margarita Aliger. Yet even there she made the illuminating confession : I ant sometimes inclined to substitute moral-
thetic considerations for political ones.' This is
to state, as the Kremlin denies, that these are autonomous spheres which may sometimes con- flizt. Mikhailovsky was able to publish and be sympathetic terms with all the great writers whose works, available in large editions in
present-day Russia, still constitute the complete, though usually unexplicit, alternative to totalitar- ian ideology—the anarchist Tolstoy, the liberal Turgenev; and the religious Dostoievsky (though some of the latter's works are, indeed, rather hard to come by in modern Moscow). Different though they are, it is what they have in common that is the tap-root of Mikhailovsky's Populism, as of all Russian movements towards truth and justice.
There are an extravagantly large number of works of scholarship in English about the intel- lectual and political movements and prominent individuals of the latter half of the nineteenth century in Russia, but it is rare to find one which combines scholarship and lucidity in such a read- able fashion as Dr. Billington's. If you want to make an effort to understand the Russian back- ground, and some of the whys and wherefores of the great ground-swell of 'revisionism' which is once again flooding in to undermine the impres- sive sandcastles of orthodoxy, you could hardly do better than start here.
J. E. M. ARDEN
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