The Soviet Union

The Soviet Mind

The Soviet Union and Isaiah Berlin were nearly precisely coeval – Berlin’s birth in 1909 preceded the Bolshevik Revolution by eight years, and he outlived the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 by six years. Despite the fact that he visited the Soviet Union only three times after his family left Russia in 1920, the Soviet world was a formidable presence in his intellectual life, particularly as he engaged with members of the repressed Russian intelligentsia, most notably Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, Boris Pasternak, Dmitry Shostakovich and Andrey Sakharov.

The Soviet Union’s political, cultural and intellectual values were anathema to Berlin. The ideal at the heart of Soviet civilisation demanded the submission of the individual to the idealised promise of the collective future. An authoritarian clique, and what Berlin termed an ‘artificial dialectic’ – a terrible and sustained tension, created by deliberately unpredictable oscillation between revolutionary fervour and consolidation – held sway, and a vast bureaucratic state and a powerful secret police enforced the government’s will. A propagandistic discourse influenced all Soviet lives, promoting the idealistic reshaping of the individual, the bounties of collective endeavour, and paranoia about enemies internal and external. The freedoms required for the true flourishing of the arts and sciences – and of individuals to their fullest capacities – were absent.

The contrast between this world and Berlin’s philosophy, inspired as it was by Alexander Herzen’s pluralism, became particularly acute when Berlin met prominent members of Russia’s intelligentsia. In 1945 he was seconded to the British Embassy in Moscow. It was his first visit to Russia since 1920. At the writers’ colony of Peredelkino, just outside Moscow, Berlin met Boris Pasternak, who gave him a draft of Doctor Zhivago, twelve years before it was finally published in Italy. In November Berlin returned to Leningrad, where he had seen the 1917 revolutions, and met there Anna Akhmatova. The Russian poet was ‘immensely dignified’ and talked to him all night, reciting her then unfinished Poem without a Hero, of which Berlin wrote: ‘Even then I realised that I was listening to a work of genius.’ For Berlin, the figures of Pasternak and Akhmatova were signs of the creative life that people in the Soviet Union still desperately sought, away from the ‘dead matter provided by most of the approved writers and composers’. For Akhmatova, Berlin became a figure endowed with near-cosmic significance for the meeting of West and East. The connections did not end in 1946: Berlin visited the Soviet Union again in 1956 and 1988, and he also received Akhmatova, Dmitry Shostakovich, and Andrey Sakharov in Oxford, where they received honorary degrees from the University.

Many of Berlin’s writings on the Soviet Union have been collected in The Soviet Mind, including ‘The Survival of the Russian Intelligentsia’ from 1990, in which Berlin concludes:

‘The study of the ideas and activities of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia has occupied me for some years, and to find that, so far from being buried in the past, this movement – as it is still right to call it – has survived and is regaining its health and freedom, is a revelation and a source of great delight to me. […] That evils can, after all, be conquered, that the end of enslavement is in progress, are things of which men can be reasonably proud.’

Despite his pleasure at the survival of the intelligentsia, Berlin knew that ideas never stopped shaping history, and he echoed Napoleon’s mother: the fall of tyranny was all very well, ‘pourvu que ça dure’.