In the Name of the People, by Adam Ulam

...The political docility of the liberals, who let others do their work for them, was one thing...

...There is the Ukranian peasant who lectures a Jewish narodnik to forget his foolish egalitarianism and become a doctor...

...For this endless cycle of frustration, Ulam spares the government least of all: Had it better understood the need to make itself legitimate in the eyes of the new classes, the cycle might have been broken...

...Lest the reader find need to speculate as to his point of view, Johnson writes a prologue which concludes: So the Christian, according to my understanding, should not be inhibited in the smallest degree from following the line of truth...

...At all events, I have sought to present the facts of Christian history as truthfully and nakedly as I am able, and to leave the rest to the reader...

...Herzen was afraid (however implausible it may seem in retrospect) that Tsarism itself would become the new Khan...

...In a sense, Greeley seems to see Catholicism largely as a vehicle for the maintenance of the well-being of Catholic ethnicity...

...Their acceptance of terror and revolutionary vengeance, rather than of steady integration and unpleasant compromises, was quite another...

...From this observation, and with a sense that all ideologies may really obscure human experience, Solzhenitsyn derives his disdain of Western politics—which is almost always based on one ideology or another...

...And national comparisons wounded not only Russia's pride but also its international position...

...Ulam finds that all three succumbed to predictable if fatal temptations: the autocracy and the revolutionaries, to the idea that force could somehow substitute for programmatic political direction...

...the liberals, to a guilt-ridden sense that the revolutionaries were made of sterner stuff than they, and that their methods—in the name of the people, after all—were beyond reproach, even heroic...

...indeed, he is positively bound to follow it...

...This is not to say that The American Catholic should be passed up...

...For this reason they could more plausibly feel they had nothing to fear from violence...

...To be sure, Greeley might be able to use his social-scientific techniques to reach more "pragmatic" conclusions than the Vatican...

...The first was a sheepish awareness that if matters were left in their hands there would probably never be a revolution at all...

...Certainly the titanic debate between the African bishop and his British opponent, Pelagius, ranged over issues which should be debated throughout all the years of the Church...

...in fact, freer than the non-Christian, who is pre-committed by his own rejection...

...Aware that many desired only to replace the Tsarist structure with a new and more efficient centralized state, Herzen was presciently describing Russia's dictatorship to come...

...In the Name of the People portrays antagonists who truly deserved each other, for the conspirators had an equally empty view of Russia's problems, and of how they would govern...

...To the contrary, the book represents some of the best research by one of America's leading authorities on ethnicity...

...On a different note, we have the suspense of the plot to kill Alexander II, which succeeded on the very day he authorized reforms (about which he privately conceded, "I do not hide from myself that it is the first step toward a constitution...

...of slavery and oppression supported by all the discoveries of technology and science...

...Paradoxically, the very progress Russia was making out of her backwardness seemed one more reason to oppose the regime...

...The assassination deferred reform for a generation and permanently destroyed the regime's already shaky composure...

...In Russia, in contrast to Germany, the revolutionary danger was not seen by liberals as stemming from a different social class...

...Unlike Bismarck, or Brezhnev, for that matter, the Russian autocracy was denied the revivifying effects of nationalism...

...The key to Johnson's impressive and informed reading of the record is found in his frequent allusions to Augustine...

...It was in its handling of violence that the regime undermined itself most...

...What, then, determines which way a knee jerks...

...If they fail to preserve the power to make people believe, they will have to rely on the power to make them obey...

...As long as Greeley is studied for his treatment of the Catholic ethnic, and not for his analysis of Catholicism, his readers should have few grounds for disappointment...

...Certain conspirators actually seemed to nurse electoral ambitions for a future constitutional system, but in the prevailing atmosphere they hid them, for their fellows detested such Western ideas...

...Not content to let outbursts pass, the Tsar's men chose to make "examples," and usually made martyrs...

...Likewise, the government veered occasionally toward reform (most dramatically, justbefore Alexander's murder), but always allowed itself to be panicked by the next act of revolutionary violence...

...After all, it is just not Church policy to reach consensus by counting hands or by assessing costs and benefits...

...ing forces: the "preposterously unreasonable" autocracy, the conspiratorial groups of madmen and fanatics, and the liberals of Russia's educated classes...

...At best, there might be only a morally uncomfortable accomodation in which reforms were not claimed as a matter of right and the regime suffered no retribution...

...As the pace of economic progress elsewhere in Europe quickened, Russia's material backwardness produced increasing irritation and impatience...

...Both sides failed to make violence comprehensible...

...By contrast, what little we have of Pelagius and his immediate heirs Johnson finds straightforward and classical...

...The book's main achievement lies in its analysis of a political triangle of contendStephen Sestanovich is a graduate student in government at Harvard...

...Nevertheless, one doubts that this kind of debate is truly meaningful within the context of Catholicism...

...Ulam seems to sympathize with the restive confidence ofthe liberals that only freedom could exploit Russia's energies: " [I]n the late 19th century freedom and power went hand in hand....Russia for all her enormous resources remained backward and relatively weak because her people were unfree...

...In explaining their resistance to co-optation, Ulam does not settle merely for an analysis—though his is very shrewd —of the educated Russians' frame of mind...

...Yet between prologue and epilogue, the reader is provided with a litany of events so generally deplorable in Johnson's view that he can only wonder what it would have taken to oblige Johnson to conclude that the chronicle is in no degree edifying...

...and there is Nechayev (the possessed terrorist immortalized by Dostoevsky) who warns Bakunin's publisher to stop hounding him to finish that Marx translation, or else...

...But perhaps Greeley is laying the blame in the wrong place...

...For too many ordinary people an ideology, which was in some ways appealing, legitimized horrors for which there can be no excuse...

...If all our progress takes place only through the government we will give the world an unprecedented example of an autocracy armed with all the achievement of freedom...

...But until he is willing to admit that the Church can (and should) operate on more expansive grounds than expediency alone, it is doubtful that he and the Holy See will be speaking the same language...

...The Russian liberals' attitude, that there were no enemies a gauche, is of course a familiar one...

...BOOK REVIEW A History of Christianity Paul Johnson / Atheneum / $13.95 Eric Dean Those who have difficulty remembering anything but the scantest and most sardonic references to religion in the pages of the New Statesman can only find themselves bemused over the phenomenon of Malcolm Muggeridge as the lion of recent religious broadcasting and publishing...

...With this fear in mind, he was loath to condemn the conspirators...

...To be sure, much that was held against Tsarism was not its fault, or could not be quickly remedied...

...German liberals may also have been embarrassed by their acceptance of bullying, but they learned to The American Spectator December 1977 33 live with it and learned to condemn violence...

...Thus, the Second Vatican Council earns Greeley's approval since it represented a progressive advance for the Church and since it was—according to his figures—well received by American Catholics...

...Though—as is true for Johnson—one may 34 The American Spectator December 1977...

...In contrast, he condemns the subsequent papal encyclical on birth control, Humanae Vitae, as anexample of inept leadership since it was poorly received, since it precipitated a decline in contributions to the Church, and since few people took it seriously anyway...

...Yet this approach lets the government off the hook...

...A fairly persuasive case could be made for viewing the problem in sociological terms...

...We have much of Augustine's writing, and doubtless one could wish that he had sometimes avoided forms of expression which seem unfortunately obsessed with sexuality...

...The harshness that is then required further whittles belief, and gives an opening to those more skilled in both forms of power and—worse yet—ready to use them...

...This, however, is Ulam's point: No modern regime is so secure or so embattled that it can afford to ignore the importance of legitimizing itself...

...On the other hand, Greeley may be right, and the papal encyclical may represent a foolhardy attempt to return to an unenlightened past...

...Only political programs and principles can do this, can make violence work, whether to protect or destroy an existing order...

...After all, Bismarck at this time was showing that bourgeois docility could be pointed in a very different direction...

...Second, the liberals felt embarrassment at how rapidly they were joining the upper-class ranks...

...His implication is that many different kinds of regimes, even traditional ones, can acquire legitimacy, but they must work at it...

...In Solzhenitsyn's view, Soviet doctrine must answer for the suffering his nation has endured...

...However, what others might judge to be both an inevitable and a perennial debate within Christianity seems to Johnson to stem principally from the character of Augustine, and his argument is more than a little tinged by—if not British sympathies—a concern for the underdog...

...The failure is interesting because it was avoidable...

...An excellent, almost effortless writer, Ulam is able throughout to make the most of low-comedy revolutionary shenanigans while communicating the palpable tragedy of this period...

...BOOK REVIEW In the Name of the People: Prophets and Conspirators in Prerevolutionary Russia Adam Ulam / Viking Press / $12.50 Stephen Sestanovich Adam Ulam's new book, In the Name of the People, examines the revolutionary opposition to the Russian autocracy in the 1860s and 1870s, when Russia was experiencing a cultural revolution not unlike our own of recent years, complete with rising student enrollments, declining sexual mores, and political confusion...

...It is an enormously entertaining book, both extremely funny and highly dramatic...

...In this case it had roots in two kinds of guilt...

...Ulam argues that at this time there was probably more social mobility in Russia for peasants, priests' sons, and Jews than in Britain...

...This would be Genghis Khan having at his disposal telegraphs, steamships, railways...

...Now, furthering one's confusion, comes erstwhile New Statesman editor Paul Johnson with A History of Christianity...

...In this way Ulam attaches an amendment to the dislike of political ideologies so evident in Solzhenitsyn...

...What many of Greeley's critics find exasperating about his work is the ambiguous role which he assigns to religion, and it is often quite difficult to tell from his writings that Greeley the sociologist is also Father Greeley, the Roman Catholic priest...

...The government," says Ulam, "tended to use repression as if it were an end in itself rather than an auxiliary and subordinate means for preserving a viable social and political order...

...One might ask, however, whether Pelagius' denial of original sin should convince us entirely on points for style...

...Not surprisingly, perhaps, Johnson's epilogue brings in the verdict that, because the history of the Christian era "has reflected the effort to rise above our human frailties...the chronicle of Christianity is an edifying one...

...Consider this statement by Alexander Herzen, who dominated the opposition in the first years of Alexander II's reign and who undertook the great task of undermining the Russian attachment to state power...

...He should be, Eric Dean is professor of religion and philosophy, and chairman of the Division of Humanities at Wabash College in Indiana...

...Greeley's findings on America's Catholics—though still incomplete since they fail to include Spanish-speaking Catholics—are undoubtedly the most definitive to date, and they should prove to be devastating in confrontation with the prevailing myths of the poverty of the Catholic spirit...

...Ulam points out the exceptions in his picture of Russia's mindless turmoil...

...It could be that the Vatican Council's interpreters created illusions of a religious reformation which was simply never meant to be, and that Humanae Vitae set Catholicism back on the right course...

...Ulam shows that the orientation of the liberals resulted instead from a genuine political failure of the regime, ascribable to its "suicidal" and "sclerotic" inability to gain for itself even the shreds of legitimacy...

...Accordingly, the Church's efficacy is measured in terms of the popular support accorded its programs...

...The force of this famous observation went in two directions...

...In fact, both sides fmally failed for the same reason: Struggling with each other was too absorbing, and its easy accomplishments (locking this fellow up, knocking that fellow off) were not the same as political success...

...Instead, the regime was "unable to inspire fear [or] to enlist support...

...Yet if his argument was a caution to revolutionaries, it was also an appeal for revolution...