Russian revolutionary democracy
러시아 혁명적 민주주의
Russian revolutionary democracy was a current of the radical intelligentsia of the mid-nineteenth-century Russian Empire that sought to overthrow autocracy and serfdom by revolution and build a just, democratic society. It combined an anti-serfdom peasant revolution with utopian socialism and on several questions opposed both Westernisers and Slavophiles. Arising in the 1830s–1840s and peaking in the 1860s, it is represented by Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Ogarev of Kolokol, the critic Vissarion Belinsky, Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobrolyubov of Sovremennik, and Dmitry Pisarev of Russkoye Slovo. The name grouping them owes much to Lenin, who called them forerunners of Russian Social Democracy; Soviet scholarship long separated them sharply from the later Narodniks. From the late 1860s the current passed into revolutionary Narodism.
In depth
Definition and name
Russian revolutionary democracy was a current of thought in the Russian Empire that sought to create a socially just and democratic society through revolution. It combined the idea of an anti-serfdom peasant revolution with utopian socialism and on several questions stood against the two other main currents of the time, Westernism and Slavophilism. It arose in the 1830s and 1840s and peaked in the 1860s; its main bearers were the intelligentsia, above all radical youth.
The name that groups these figures into one lineage owes much to Lenin, who called Herzen, Belinsky, Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky forerunners of Russian Social Democracy. In "In Memory of Herzen", written in 1912 for the centenary of Herzen's birth, Lenin distinguished three generations and three classes active in the Russian revolution: first the nobles and landlords, the Decembrists and Herzen, a narrow group far removed from the people; then the revolutionary raznochintsy, "from Chernyshevsky to the heroes of Narodnaya Volya", who took up the revolutionary agitation Herzen had begun; and finally the proletariat at the head of the masses. Lenin held that Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov and Serno-Solovyevich had been right to reproach Herzen for his vacillation between democracy and liberalism, but wrote that the democrat in Herzen nonetheless gained the upper hand.
Circles and émigré publishing
Among the ideological preconditions of revolutionary democracy were the Decembrist movement and especially the ideas recorded in Pavel Pestel's Russkaya Pravda: overthrow of autocracy by armed uprising, a republic, the abolition of serfdom. Under Nicholas I, as censorship tightened, philosophical thought developed in narrow circles such as those of Stankevich, of Herzen and Ogarev, and of the Petrashevtsy. Herzen and Ogarev, deeply impressed as boys by the news of the Decembrist uprising of 1825, swore on the Sparrow Hills to fight for freedom.
Around 1840 the critic Vissarion Belinsky broke with "reconciliation" with reality and embraced socialism, which he called "the idea of ideas". He set the standard that literature must serve social interests and expose social problems. His open letter to Gogol, written at Salzbrunn in July 1847, circulated in Russia as forbidden manuscript copies and could be published legally only after the revolution of 1905. Herzen, who left Russia for good the same year, took part in the Paris demonstration of 13 June 1849 and, after years in exile, founded the Free Russian Press in London. He published the almanac Polyarnaya Zvezda from 1855 and, with Ogarev, who came to London in 1856, the newspaper Kolokol from 1857. Kolokol's influence peaked in the years before the emancipation of the serfs, when it was read regularly in the Winter Palace, but its support for the Polish uprising of 1863 sharply reduced its circulation; by then Herzen was too revolutionary for liberals and too moderate for radicals.
Sovremennik and the generation of the sixties
Chernyshevsky joined Sovremennik early in 1854 and in 1855–1862 effectively led it together with Nikolai Nekrasov and Dobrolyubov, turning it into a tribune of revolutionary democracy to the protest of liberal writers such as Turgenev. Dobrolyubov, head of its critical and bibliographical section from 1857, developed "real criticism", which used literary works as an occasion to discuss pressing social questions. The new generation of the 1860s, the shestidesyatniki, replaced the "superfluous man" with the "new man" of the revolutionaries and the nihilist movement and based its ethics on "rational egoism". Dmitry Pisarev joined Russkoye Slovo in December 1860 and soon became its intellectual leader.
In articles of 1858–1859 Chernyshevsky argued for the immediate emancipation of the peasants with land and without any redemption payments, preserving communal land tenure as a path to socialist land use. When the emancipation was proclaimed in 1861, revolutionary democrats saw it as a new bondage: the proclamation "To the Landlords' Peasants from Their Well-Wishers", attributed to Chernyshevsky, said only the names had changed, and Kolokol no. 105 wrote that the peasants had not understood that the emancipation was a deception. On 7 July 1862 Chernyshevsky was arrested on the charge of writing that proclamation and confined in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where he wrote the novel What Is to Be Done?, published in Sovremennik in 1863. In 1864 he was sentenced to fourteen years of penal labour, reduced by Alexander II to seven, but spent more than twenty years in prison, penal labour and exile. Pisarev was held in the same fortress from July 1862 to November 1866 for an article calling for the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty. Sovremennik was closed in 1866, and from 1868 Nekrasov and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin led Otechestvennye Zapiski.
The passage to Narodism and neighbouring currents
From the late 1860s the rhetoric of the revolutionary democrats turned into revolutionary Narodism. Herzen held that Russia could reach socialism through the peasant commune, bypassing capitalism, and called his views "Russian socialism". The ideas of Mikhail Bakunin, Pyotr Tkachev and Pyotr Lavrov consolidated the theoretical basis of the new current, followed by the Chaikovtsy and Nechayevtsy, Zemlya i Volya and Narodnaya Volya. In 1870 Ogarev and Sergei Nechayev issued six more numbers of Kolokol. The Soviet historian B. P. Kozmin held that despite deep ideological differences the revolutionaries of the sixties and their successors were alike bearers of Narodnik ideology, a form of utopian socialism peculiar to agrarian countries, and noted that a sharp division between revolutionary democrats and Narodniks had long prevailed.
Herzen combined Westernism and Slavophilism in his own way, rejecting liberalism in the first and conservatism and great-power chauvinism in the second. Lenin regarded Herzen as the founder of "Russian" socialism and of Narodism, and criticised his doctrine — which saw socialism in the emancipation of the peasants with land and in communal land tenure — as containing "not a grain of socialism". At the same time, according to Krupskaya, Lenin was very fond of Pisarev and took his portrait with him into exile at Shushenskoye.