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Book Review of The Soviet Mind, by Isaiah Berlin
Reviewed by Geoffrey Riklin
20 April 2004

This book provides a riveting, well-written account of a former Russian citizen's trip back to Russia in 1945 under communism, discussing the politics of the people at the time, and an analysis of Marxism and revolution under Stalin.

Isaiah Berlin was a gift from the gods. The greatest intellectual historian of the Twentieth Century, his depth of learning was amazing and was paired with a tremendous gift for explaining complicated subjects in a straightforward manner. These qualities make his writings a pleasure to read.

Berlin is usually lumped into the liberal camp, but this pigeon-holing tells us nothing. His primary purpose was to fight tyranny in any form, to understand the intellectual sources of repression, explore their strengths and weaknesses, and then cut them to pieces. This led him to a huge variety of influential figures, from Machiavelli to Voltaire to Marx, among many others. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Riga in 1909, Berlin as a boy witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution. His parents had the good sense and luck to flee to England in 1920, and were able to resume a comfortable life. Berlin eventually went off to Oxford, and spent most of his life at that university. He had little interest in writing books, his preferred medium being the essay. Over the course of many decades his writings wound up scattered among countless publications. Berlin died in 1997, and his literary executor, Henry Hardy, is collecting these essays and grouping them into books. The latest effort is entitled The Soviet Mind, and has been published by the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Having grown up with Russian as one of his languages, Berlin took a very strong interest in the Soviet Union and the fate of the arts and the artists under the Bolshevik reign. The essays in this volume range from accounts of his meetings with writers like Boris Pasternak and the great poet Anna Akhmatova, to Stalin's technique of promoting revolutionary fervor, to the consequences of Stalin's purges, and ultimately to the state of the Soviet intellectual and artistic scene in the mid-50s, a few years after Stalin's death.

In 1945, Berlin visited the Soviet Union for the first time since his childhood, and some people told him he was the first foreigner they had seen since 1917. He recounts some of the currents that led to the creation of the Bolshevik state in the first place, and the battles that then ensued. He notes that the "[a]bsorbed and inexhaustible preoccupation with social and moral questions is perhaps the most arresting single characteristic of Russian art and thought as a whole" and that after the Revolution this led to a battle between the instinctive artistic rebels who wished to do as they pleased, and those who felt it was more important to harness art to advancing the purposes of the Revolution. [p 2] By 1928 Stalin had settled this question, and it was the latter group that won. Until about that year there had been tremendous artistic ferment, much of it anti-Western in one way or another, but with Stalin having solidified his hold on power, that ferment ended quickly. By 1934 the situation was very dangerous, and Stalin began his massive slaughters in 1936. (The deliberate starvation of the Ukrainians had begun earlier, but from the Russian perspective that was a somewhat peripheral event.)

In 1939, when Stalin scaled the purges back, "Russian literature and thought emerged... like an area devastated by war, with some splendid buildings still relatively intact, but standing solitary amid stretches of ruined and devastated country." [p 6] Then came the war, and Stalin and his minions changed from preaching a form of Marxism to preaching the virtues of Mother Russia. By 1945, the line was to trumpet the glories of all that was Russian and to disavow Western influences. In that latter year, Berlin saw that "[o]ver the entire scene of Russian literature there broods a curious air of total stillness, with not a breath of wind to ruffle the waters." [p 15] Russian literature had become monumentally priggish. The orthodox Soviet hero was "brave, puritanical, simple, noble, altruistic, entirely devoted to the service of his country." [p 16]

One of the saddest stories that Berlin recounts is that of Osip Mandel'shtam, a poet of great ability who could not keep silent. "One evening early in the Revolution he was sitting in a cafe and there was the notorious Socialist Revolutionary terrorist Blyumkin ... at that time an official of the Cheka [the first version of the KGB] ... drunkenly copying the names of men and women to be executed on to blank forms already signed by the head of the secret police. Mandel'shtam suddenly threw himself at him, seized the lists, tore them to pieces before the stupefied onlookers, then ran out and disappeared. On this occasion he was saved by Trotsky's sister." [p 44] In 1934 Mandel'shtam wrote and shared an anti-Stalin poem, and died in a concentration camp in 1938. The book reproduces two photos of the poet, one in 1922 in which he looks like quite the young heartthrob, the other a mug shot from '38, in which he looks like a "broken, tormented, dying old tramp." [p 47] Writes Berlin: "He welcomed the Revolution, but in the 1930s he compromised less than anyone, so far as is known." [ p 46]

Berlin's style is extraordinary. Consider the following: "Under the worst moments of tsarist oppression there did, after all, exist some areas of wholly free expression; moreover, one could always be silent. This was altered by Stalin. No areas were excluded from the Party's directives; and to refuse to say what had been ordered was insubordination and led to punishment. 'Inner emigration' requires the possibility of the use of one's mind and means of expression at least in neutral ways. But if one's chances of sheer survival have been made dependent on continuous active support of principles or policies which may seem absurd or morally abhorrent; and if, moreover, the whole of one's mental capacity is taxed by the perpetual need to chart one's course in fatally dangerous waters, to manoeuvre from position to position, while one's moral fiber is tested by the need to bow one's head low not to one but to many capricious, unpredictably changing divinities, so that the least inattention, slackness or error costs one dear -- then there is less and less possibility of thinking one's own thoughts, or of escaping into an inner citadel in which one can remain secretly heterodox and independent and know what one believes." [p 149]

Berlin had the great luck to meet both Akhmatova and Pasternak on several occasions. Pasternak, the author of Doctor Zhivago, regarded Russia as a "slave ship, and the Party men were overseers who whipped the rowers." [p 64] In these meetings Berlin brought news from the West: "It was like speaking to the victims of a shipwreck on a desert island, cut off for decades from civilization. All they heard they received as new, exciting, and delightful." [p 69] Why did they not seek to escape? "The thought of emigration was hateful to both." [78] In one of these meetings Pasternak gave Berlin a copy of Doctor Zhivago, which Berlin read in a single night and morning (all 600 pages of it!) and regards as a work of genius. Pasternak's family was afraid of what might happen if it were published, and they prevailed on Berlin to remonstrate with Pasternak, to try to convince him not to publish it. Berlin did, and Pasternak was gravely perturbed and rejected the advice.

Berlin also writes about how the Soviet view of the world evolved after the war. Berlin believed that the primary reason for Russia's mistrust of the West was that they felt threatened by their own inferiority. "[W]ith the possible exception of Turgenev, there is no great Russian writer who did not suffer from xenophobia, amounting at times to acute hatred of the West." [p 90] In his conversations with Bolshevik officials, Berlin found that they believed that Britain achieved world empire by adhering to a "long-term, Machiavellian plan" [p 90-91] and that as a result they continued to think that everything the British and Americans did was the result of some carefully formulated plot, and therefore "the [Russian rulers] do not believe a word we say." Furthermore, if the West talked soft to them it was dismissed as a trick, and if the West talked tough to them it merely annoyed them without frightening them. [p 96] He observed that in the 1940s, the Russian rulers continued to believe in the principles of the Revolution and the mere existence of other systems made them nervous.

One of the most interesting essays is entitled "The Artificial Dialectic," and it is characteristic of Berlin that he is able to explain this point in a manner that is easy to understand. He observes that Revolutions start out with a burst of enthusiasm that leads to all sorts of excesses and then burn themselves out. Stalin's most original contribution was his technique for avoiding this problem. He understood that heresy hunts place power in the hands of fanatics whose task will never end. To unleash the attack dogs will cause a great disruption in society, but if you call them off at the right time people will feel relief and praise the leader for his wisdom. If terror is pushed too far, people become numb and they shut up, and then the regime can no longer gauge the public mood. The ability to monitor the public's temper is essential, "much as an animal-breeder depends on his ability to predict, within limits, the behavior of his stock." A way must then be found to "keep the population on the run" while employing means short of full-scale terror. The best method is to keep changing the party line, especially on relatively minor points. The people who find themselves on the wrong side of the line are then purged, but most people remain safe. So, for example, Stalin suddenly changed the line on linguistics and on the Jews. Hardly any Soviets had anything to do with linguistics and most knew no Jews, so the majority would be spared any hardship as long as they demonstrated their loyalties by altering their statements to fit the new reality.

These sudden changes constitute the "artificial dialectic" in contrast with the real dialectic (as elaborated by Hegel and Marx, among others) which treats the rise and fall of classes, class conflicts, the march of history. Berlin observes that this system is "as mechanically powerful and comprehensive an instrument for the management of human beings -- for simultaneously breaking their wills and developing their maximum capacities for organized material production -- as any dreamt of by the most ruthless and megalomaniac capitalist exploiter. For it springs out of an even greater contempt for the freedoms and ideals of mankind than that which Dostoevsky endowed his Grand Inquisitor; and being dominant over the lives of some 800 million human beings, is the most important, most inhuman and still the most imperfectly understood phenomenon of our times." [pp 106-118]

When Berlin returned to the Soviet Union in 1956, he found an atmosphere that had changed significantly. The people he met displayed a "deep lack of interest in political issues." [p 123] They paid little attention to Marxism except in a primitive form. Mainly they were interested in their personal lives and felt powerless over everything else. The gulf between the governors and the governed was immense, and the leaders were a "tough, ruthless, militantly nationalistic group of proletarian roughnecks ... they resent refinement, civilized behavior, the intelligentsia ... The ideologists of the governing class ... repeat the set pieces which they have learned by heart..." [pp123-128] Berlin concluded that there were virtually no convinced Marxists left in the USSR. So what kept the system going? The rulers "seem agreed that Communist language and a certain amount of Communist doctrine are the only cement that can bind the constituent parts of the Soviet Union, and that to modify these too greatly would endanger the stability of the system and make their own position excessively precarious." [ 162] This left the Soviet Union of the post-Stalin era a nation with "[b]ullying and half-cynical Marxist philistines at the top," a few decent but "deeply intimidated and politically passive" people in the middle, and a lot of decent and honest but "intellectually starved, non-Marxist semi-literates consumed with unquenchable curiosity" at the bottom. [p 165] Remarkably, when Communism collapsed, Berlin encountered many young Russians who had the attributes of the old intelligentsia: moral character, integrity, and a sensitive imagination. [pp 166-169]

This remarkable volume is superb. Berlin's great powers of observation combine with his great knowledge and literary gifts to provide us with a fascinating series of insights. Some of his experiences were unique. Even a reader who is only casually interested in the history of Russia will be fascinated. Every day the media present us with lumps of coal, and to find a real diamond is a delight.


Geoffrey Riklin is a writer living in Detroit. A graduate of the University of Michigan, he also attended the London School of Economics, and has lived recently in Chile and Spain.

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