A View from Warsaw

...That mere phrase, "at what cost," is almost as good as another book in the context of Eastern European history...

...Though Lenin is duly acknowledged, it is Georgy Plekhanov who appears as the major figure in the transition from Populism to Marxism, as he certainly was, and I have not read a fairer presentation of Plekhanov's thought and historical importance...

...Literature, though of course it existed for its own sake, also became a vehicle for forbidden thought obliquely expressed and tended to be shaped by the social convictions individual writers sustained with varying degrees of intensity...

...But it is difficult to make clear distinctions between Russian social thought and programs of action, just as it is difficult to make distinctions between social thought and Russian literature...

...Thus Walicki has been unable to keep political programs, or the actions that ensue from them, entirely out of his book...

...Concrete political programs are not discussed unless such discussion is required for an understanding of the development of social philosophy...

...How this was achieved, and at what cost, is, however, a subject for another book...

...Walicki's book is therefore a full and satisfying survey, well populated with personalities, events and ideas...

...It has been a carefully graded society where an intrusive political police supervised the actions of all classes and a literary censorship sought to keep out of print anything that might encourage disaffection toward the regime or heresy toward the Orthodox Church...

...And he goes on to say: "The following chapters only deal with those aspects of Russian social thought that have important philosophical implications...

...the new rulers who would emerge from the crisis of European and Russian civilization would be neither 'liberal' nor 'mild.' If further imitation of the West were to bring about a revolution in Russia, that revolution would ultimately set up 'a regime whose strictness will surpass anything we have seen so far.'" There is no comment...

...That A History of Russian Thought ends in 1900 gives an unusual perspective to Russian Marxism...

...A great deal of the history of Russian thought is indeed incomprehensible without an understanding of the socio-political background it arose in, whether it was a matter of revolutionary or Liberal or reactionary ways of thinking...

...But what is perhaps of greatest interest is the way Walicki, without any comment that can be interpreted as partisan, demonstrates the continuing tendency toward a totalitarian position that emerged among Russian social theoreticians of both Left and Right under the Tsarist regime...

...It is all the more diversified because he does not allow his own viewpoint (which is not even easily placeable) or the demands of any current kind of Marxist orthodoxy to prevent him from giving due attention to thinkers outside the present approved Russian tradition...

...The authority of the revolutionary party running the revolutionary state should replace for the Russian people the authority of its 'mythical Tsar.'" It is left for the reader to recognize that what Tkachev demanded was actually brought into being by the Bolsheviks...

...The three have always been closely intermingled, because from the days of Ivan the Terrible, Russia has had something of the character of a totalitarian state...

...A History of Russian Thought is a fine and courageous work in an old tradition...

...It is surprising how many of the great names of Russian literature, from Fonvizin in the later 18th century down to Blok in the early 20th, appear in this book, and how many of them, like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, play major roles as simpers of Russian thought...

...Thus it gives us not merely a fascinating presentation of the intellectual ambiance of Russia in the era before the revolutionary 20th century, but also, by implication at least, a very revealing view of the intellectual situation in Poland today...

...This is the case whether they are conservative and pro-Tsarist reactionaries like Danilevsky and Leontiev, or radicals of an unapproved kind, like the anarchists and especially Bakunin, whose personal struggle within the First International against Marx has prevented him from receiving in Russia the degree of rehabilitation that came to Tolstoy and even to Kropotkin...

...Again, when he discusses the theories of Tkachev, the pioneer thinker among Russian totalitarian revolutionists, Walicki remarks without comment: "The revolutionary party, Tkachev concluded, should take over and strengthen the absolute power of the Russian state in order to turn it into a powerful instrument of revolutionary dictatorship and utilize it for a thorough transformation of all aspects of society...

...The uprising of the Decembrists, and the assassinations??successful and unsuccessful??of the Narodnaya Volya find their places in his narrative, as do the fates of these forerunners of the Revolution and of less harshly punished groups of Socialists, like the Pet-rashevtsy, of whom Dostoevsky was one...

...And the effect of his book, which is as informative as it is provocative of thought, is enhanced by the fluency of the English translation by Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka...

...Nor is it possible, as it is in Western traditions, to draw a clear line between philosophy and literature...

...Within this proto-totalitarian structure that attempted to blend all aspects of life into an ordered unity, the intelligentsia was forced to create its own continuum in which philosophy served the needs of social criticism and so led often to political action...

...What makes it of particular interest is the fact that it comes from an Eastern European country yet presents a picture of Russian philosophical developments that shows wide and open sympathies of a kind hard to imagine finding expression within Russia itself...

...For example, in discussing Konstantin Leon-tiev he remarks: "In his catastrophic vision of the future Leontiev found only one thing to console him: The hated liberals, he was convinced, would never triumph...

...The reader is left to decide for himself whether Leontiev prophesied correctly, and should the reader, like the author, be a Pole, we have little doubt what that unvoiced decision will be...

...Perhaps it is of greater significance??given the context in which he writes??that he does not find it necessary to make more than passing and rather aloof bows to Marx and Lenin, and that he is willing and able to look with a fair-minded objectivity at figures in Russian revolutionary history who have been under a cloud of disapproval in the USSR ever since 1917...

...Walicki gives a fair record of Bakunin's thought from his early Hegelian period down to his final stage of revolutionary anarchism, and points out that the accusations the Marxists used to expel him from the International were not entirely just...

...Walicki simply notes Tkachev's sympathy with Marx, and quietly observes the Bolsheviks' affinity with Tkachev...

...1 am not suggesting that Professor Walicki in any overt way criticizes the present Soviet regime or the philosophy it claims to project...

...Finally, there are the concluding remarks: Lenin "realized the Populist dream of a direct transition from the overthrow of the Tsarist autocracy to the building of socialism...

...In introducing his book, Walicki remarks: "It seems to me that the philosophical aspects of Russian intellectual history are, relatively, the most neglected by American historians (probably because most of them lack special philosophical training...

...Consequently, any history of Russian ideas becomes, to a much greater degree than the histories of ideas in Western countries, a general account with philosophic overtones...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock Author, "The Writer and Politics," "Anarchism" and "The Canadians" In any circumstances Andrzej Wal-icki's book would be interesting and very useful, for it covers virtually all the significant Russian thinkers from the age of Catherine the Great down to the eve of the 1905 Revolution...

...As was true of writers in the days of the Tsars, Professor Walicki knows when to pause and let the reader supply the missing words, the missing comparison...