Tsarist Russia 707France, and the German states as a model for Russia to emulate. In con
trast, Slavophiles cherished the specificity of Russia's defining institutions:
the Orthodox Church, the village commune (the mir), and even tsardom
itself. They argued that Russia could avoid the traumas of Western indus
trial development because in the village it already possessed the basis for a
future socialist society. The peasant commune, with a variety of communal
buildings (a wind or water mill, a grain supply store, tavern, and a work
shop), enabled peasants to adapt their lives to unbelievably difficult condi
tions imposed by nature, the state, and the lords. The mir seemed to
provide both a moral vision and revolutionary potential.
Vissarion Belinsky (1811-1848) and Alexander Herzen (1812-1870)
forcefully made the case that Russia had to follow the example of the West
to emerge from backwardness. Belinsky, the son of a doctor, had been
expelled from university for writing an article denouncing serfdom. When
the writer Nikolay Gogol (1809-1852) refused to criticize the autocracy,
Belinsky circulated his Letter to Gogol (1847), which helped define the
Westernizer position by blasting Gogols respect for “orthodoxy, autocracy,
and nationality,” the dominant triad of the Russian Empire: “Advocate of the
knout [whip], apostle of ignorance, champion of obscurantism and reac
tionary mysticism, eulogist of Tartar customs—what are you doing? Look at
what is beneath your feet; you are standing at the brink of an abyss.”
Herzen, a landowner’s son, had vowed to carry on the work of the
Decembrist martyrs. Arrested and exiled for participation in a student dis
cussion group, Herzen traveled to France. Returning to Moscow in 1840,
he espoused the French Jacobin and socialist tradition and the belief in the
inevitability of progress. In From the
Other Shore (1855), written in vol
untary exile in Paris after the Revo
lution of 1848, Herzen expressed
confidence that Russia, even while
following the lead of the West, would
take its own path to socialism.
Socialism could be easily established
in Russia because the village com
mune already existed as a community
of social equals in the face of auto
cratic and noble exploitation. Herzen
implored Russian officials to strug
gle for peaceful liberal reform.
Interestingly enough, both radical
reformers and the men of the tsarist
state shared a suspicion of Western
“bourgeois” political and social life.
The Slavophile current of reformism
thus had much more in common Alexander Herzen.