Outline of Russian Slavophile & Westerner Ideals

Differences Between Two 19th Century Russian Schools of Thought

Feb 4, 2010Kathleen Duffy

The Russian intelligentsia of the 1840s either longed for Western progress or idealised the peasantry. The opposing idealists were known as Westerners and Slavophiles.

Complexity and innovation characterised Western Europe in the nineteenth century. The rise of a new middle class ensured a ferment of ideas, a burst of technological progress. This was not so in Russia where the Slavophiles and Westerners embodied the painful ideological struggle of contradictory ideals.

Russia was an autocracy, ruled by Nicholas I who, mindful of the Decembrist revolt, was fearful of Western revolutionary ideas taking hold in Russia. He therefore deliberately held back his country’s progression.

Russian Intelligentsia Isolated From Western Progress

Whilst Western Europe and America developed their industries and transport systems at breakneck speed, utilising the great energy and resourcefulness of their middle class entrepreneurs, Russia languished in backwardness.

This era of censorship and repression forced Russia’s intelligentsia to turn in upon itself. Unable to act politically, isolated from the intellectual debates established in the West, they filled the vacuum of alienation with intense speculation about the future of Russia and her relationship with the West.

Which Way for Russia - East or West?

By the beginning of the 1840s the debate about Russia’s future had become the question of whether Russia should aspire to Western ideals, or reject them in favour of their country’s attributes, perceived as uniquely and spiritually Russian.

This debate between the so-called Westerners and Slavophiles, had up until then been a vague unity of ideas with much in common. In such a heightened atmosphere of intellectual frustration, it developed into a full scale schism.

The Russian Slavophiles

The following points illustrate the Slavophile attitude to the East-West debate:

The Slavophiles looked back to the period before Peter the Great, to a romanticised medieval Russia, where a paternal Tsar had kept a loving eye on his ‘children’.
Their belief in the virtues of the ‘common folk’ and the uniqueness of Russia’s historical development was bound up with the stability of the Orthodox Church as opposed to the fragmented Protestantism of the West.
In addition, the peasant ‘obschina’ (commune) embodied, they believed, a unique spirit of communal life.
To the Slavophiles Peter the Great had betrayed Russia by attempting to introduce Western values into the harmony of Russia’s superior society. As a result, the Russian state had become bureaucratised and soulless, repressing the peasantry through serfdom.
The romanticised image of pre-Petrine peasant life arguably suited the Slavophile land-owning mentality. They themselves depended on serfdom.
Slavophiles made concessions to capitalism by advocating the development of trade, industry, banking and agricultural machinery.
They saw the abolition of serfdom ‘from above’ as a necessary prerequisite so that peasants could own their own communities.
However, they had no desire to abolish the autocracy but merely to rid it of its authoritarian element which, they felt, left no space for the spiritual development of the people.

The Russian Westerners

Westerners however, were more likely to take the following approach:

The Westerners saw Peter the Great as a symbol of liberation. By building St Petersburg and hacking a window into Europe he had allowed the light of European reason to flood through to the Russian intelligentsia.
The Westerners desired the development of Russian capitalism and, with it, the establishment of a middle class. They felt this class would facilitate the establishment of a bourgeoise parliamentary system.
Like the Slavophiles, the Westerners wanted the abolition of serfdom, but saw the peasantry as small, private landowners who would compensate the landlords by redemption payments.
Westerners rejected nationalism as the starting point for change in Russia.
Instead they envisaged a society no longer based on religious superstition, but humanistic and enlightened.
French socialist ideas would be adapted to the Russian situation in order to avoid the chaos of Western laissez-faire capitalism.
The autocratic state would be overthrown or coerced into becoming a federal republic on the American model.

Later, exiles such as Herzen would try to compromise witn a blend of both the Slavophile and Westerner ideals.

The Importance of the Slavophile and Westerner Debate

The speed with which Europe was advancing, both intellectually and technologically, forced the Russian intelligentsia to confront the future.

To this extent the debate between the Slavophiles and the Westerners was a step forward from an inward-looking, self-absorbed and isolated class of young intellectuals to one still frustrated, but anxious to look outwards and to play a part in the future of Russia, whether it looked to the West or to the East.

Russian Revolutionary Populist Movement of 1870s

Aug 13, 2010Kathleen Duffy

In Russia in the 1870s, a group of young intellectuals from the nobility, known as the Populists, descended on the countryside to live with the peasantry.

In Russia in the 1870s a new generation of intellectual radicals emerged. Disillusioned by the failure of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the poverty of European workers resulting from the rise of industrial capitalism, the Populists as they became known, turned to the peasantry as a source of revolutionary hope.

The Origins of the Populist Movement in Russia

Belief in the agrarian community as the base for a new society can be traced back to the Decembrists’ uprising of 1825. These radical officers were willing to sacrifice their privileges in order to free the peasantry. But the tactic of individuals abandoning their former lifestyles to actually live with the peasantry as the Populists did, was a new ideology.

The Populists emerged in St. Petersburg in the last years of the 1860s. They were influenced mainly by selective reading of Karl Marx, Alexander Herzen, and Chernyshevsky’s novel, What Is To Be Done?

The Aims of the Populist Movement in Russia

The Populists wanted to transfer the technological advantages of European capitalism onto Russian soil, but without the rise of what they perceived as a corrupt bourgeoisie. They therefore saw the peasant community as the foundation for socialism, not the working class.

Populists believed that the peasantry was instinctively socialist. They hoped to radicalise them into violently removing the Tsar from power, thus freeing Russia from industrial and technological stagnation.

The Failure of the Populist Movement in Russia

In what has been described as ‘the mad summer’ of 1874, the sons and daughters of the nobility invaded the Russian countryside. However, a combination of elements was to prove the downfall of the movement and alienate the Populists from the very people they were hoping to convert.

Apart from the differences of class which put the peasantry on their guard, there was a serious misinterpretation of the role of historical progress.
The Populists believed that all the technological advantages unleashed by Western capitalism could be transposed to Russia's agrarian communities, avoiding the rise of a bourgeois class and keeping the traditions of the village community intact.
The Populists had a romanticised ideal of peasant life. Rousseau’s redundant idea of the ‘noble savage', was resurrected. But life in the harsh, agrarian communities had many unforeseen drawbacks.
Emancipation of the peasantry in 1861 had substituted one set of hardships for another. Although the peasant commune had been retained this was merely so that the traditional tie would ensure the state received their financial and military obligations.
The Emancipation turned sections of the better off peasantry into land-owners and with this would come the mentality of the self-interested petty-bourgeois. Thus the foundations of bourgeois capitalism were already laid in the peasant communes. The idea of the dignity of the peasant and the superiority of life in the village was rapidly fading.

On a personal level, the Populists were met with suspicion and often betrayed to the police by the peasantry. They were refused sleeping accommodation because they were so shabbily dressed and those who had learned a trade were unable to find work.

They came up against impenetrable cultural and ideological barriers. Peasants by nature had to be practical rather than ideological. But by far the greatest stumbling block was a deep belief by the peasantry that the ‘Tsar-father’ had their deepest interests at heart.

Legacy of the Populist Movement in Russia

The bravery and sincerity of the Populists arguably cannot be disputed. However, they refused to acknowledge the inevitability of Western-style capitalism in Russia. Also, they attempted to leap a stage of history thus dragging the redundancy of the past into a future which could not accommodate them. In addition, they believed that they could impose reforms from above .

Not until Bloody Sunday, January 9th, 1905 would the people, through their own direct, personal experience, realise that they were ‘fatherless’ and as a result, would have to take control of their own future.