*SPOILERS INCLUDED*
I have just finished reading Dostoevsky’s Demons for the second time. A conviction that has been drummed into me from my time doing A-Level English Literature is that you can never truly ‘get’ a novel until you have read it more than once. It took several re-readings for me to appreciate the poetic genius of Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, such that I now rate him over E.M. Forster and his Passage to India – the two novels that were assigned to us for study and examination. The first time I read Demons, much of the plot flew over my head. It doesn’t flow as well as Crime and Punishment, the other Dostoevsky book I’ve read. It is arguably too long, with too many characters, all striving to be memorable. But despite being a chaotic jumble, the novel does come together in the end. The plot centres around a gang of revolutionary students, whose rejection of official Russia in favour of revolutionary ideas leads to their downfall and the corruption and degradation of the entire community in which they live. We are introduced to a host of fascinating and depraved characters. The most important in the entire book is Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin, a mysterious young troublemaker and freethinker, who, though not part of the revolutionary circle, experiments with these dangerous ideas, yet shies back from drawing the logical conclusion – that is, until the very tragic end. Almost 50 years before the Russian Revolution occurred, Dostoevsky predicts its likely outcome. This, from a Russian nationalist and defender of Tsarist autocracy, and a ‘renegade’ from the revolutionary politics of his youth no less, should give the lie to the idea that only Marxists have true foresight into the future, despite what Alan Woods and his lackeys in the IMT claim. Dostoevsky was inspired to write the novel by the murder in 1869 of a student named Ivan Ivanov by the famous Russian revolutionary Sergei Nechaev and his circle. Ivanov was a former member of the group who had chosen to defect, and was killed for fear he would inform. With this work, Dostoevsky would launch a biting critique of the revolutionary ideologies that he foresaw would lead Russia to ruin if pursued to their logical conclusions.
In the book, I saw so many parallels between my own experience as a member of a revolutionary organisation, and that of the characters. The character I identified with the most is the character most like Dostoevsky himself, the pitiful Shatov, who is also modelled on the unfortunate Ivanov. Shatov, during a spell abroad in America, breaks with the revolutionary circle led by the wily and fanatical Pyotr Stepanovich Verhovensky, and becomes a Russian nationalist and Slavophile under the influence of Stavrogin (who simultaneously encourages another character, Kirillov, to become a nihilist). In one scene, Stavrogin warns Shatov that he may be killed for breaking with his fellows, as they do not trust him to leave quietly. Shatov responds defiantly:
“I’m not afraid of them! I’ve broken with them.”
“I declared honestly that I disagree with them in everything! It’s my right, my right of conscience and thought…I won’t have it! There is no power that could…”
Shatov, like myself and so many other cult members in real life, experiences in America a weakening of the ‘milieu control’ of the group. No longer in the proximity of other cult members, he is finally free to think more critically about his former convictions, and, with Stavrogin’s help, to free himself of them. Dostoevsky himself had an identical experience in real life. He was exiled for ten years between 1850 and 1859, four of those spent in a Siberian labour camp, after being arrested for taking part in a literary circle that discussed revolutionary ideas. During this time, he appears to have abandoned his former convictions, becoming a devout believer and defender of Russian traditions. Dostoevsky was the original ‘renegade’ that people such as Lenin and Trotsky spoke so contemptuously of – those liberals and socialists who drew back from the logical conclusions of their ideas, and went over to the camp of reaction. As Dostoevsky wrote to a friend about the novel, “What I’m writing is a tendentious piece, I want to speak out rather more forcefully. Here the nihilists and the Westerners will begin howling about me that I’m a retrograde! Well, to hell with them, but I’ll say everything to the last word!”
Shatov is not a perfect character. In some ways he is rather pathetic. His strength of will in breaking with the false cause of revolutionary nihilism is admirable, but his cringing attempts to become a devout Orthodox Christian, when he doesn’t even truly believe in God (as Stavrogin forces him to admit), are less so. (His very name in Russian means ‘to vacillate’.) He is not the only character in the novel who strives to believe in a higher being even when he lacks real conviction. He is a ‘believer in belief’, so they say. He also vacillates about whether or not to denounce his fellows, and in the end, is murdered by them after they trick him into doing one last errand on behalf of the society before setting him free. His murder is the climax of the story. He represents the psychological difficulty of breaking with a high-control group and declaring one’s independence. In the end, one still has some affection for those we left behind – affection that can lead us back into the grasp of the group. This Hamlet-like indecision also affects another character who considers defecting – Liputin – who loathes the sect leader, Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, and his domineering attitude, but is so frightened by what he perceives as Verkhovensky’s power (a fear buttressed by the convenient and mysterious murder of Fedka the convict, who is in Verkhovensky’s employ) that he goes along with the plot to kill Shatov.
Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, the despotic head of the revolutionary circle, who is modeled on Nechaev, reminded me very much of my own branch secretary in Socialist Appeal, Thomas. Pyotr Stepanovich has an unshakeable belief in his ideology, and thinks of himself as more cunning than he actually is. The gang of revolutionaries he has gathered around him are all inferior to him intellectually, but unreliable and vacillating. Nevertheless, Pyotr Stepanovich is convinced that through the murder of Shatov, they will all be further bound to him and will be easy to manipulate. One is reminded of how Lenin and Stalin, in building the totalitarian Bolshevik regime, sought to bind their comrades to them by making them complicit in the murder of millions. In one scene, where he is in conversation with his friend Stavrogin, Pyotr Stepanovich gives a powerful explanation of how a political cult is constructed:
“…what first of all affects them terribly is a uniform. There’s nothing stronger than a uniform. I purposely invent ranks and positions: I have secretaries, secret stool pigeons, treasurers, chairmen, registrars, their adjuncts–it’s all very much liked and has caught on splendidly. Then the next force, naturally, is sentimentality. You know, with us socialism spreads mostly through sentimentality. But the trouble here is with these biting lieutenants; you get burned every so often. Then come the out-and-out crooks; well, they can be nice folk, very profitable on occasion, but they take up a lot of time, require constant surveillance. Well, and finally the main force–the cement that bonds it all–is shame at one’s own opinion. There is a real force! And who was it that worked, who was the ‘sweetie’ that labored so that there isn’t a single idea of one’s own left in anyone’s head! They consider it shameful.”
“…I tell you, I can get them to go through fire, if I just yell at them that they’re not liberal enough. Fools reproach me for having hoodwinked everyone here with my central committee and ‘numerous branches’. You yourself once reproached me with that, but where is there any hoodwinking: the central committee is you and me, and there can be as many branches as they like.”
“…Here you’re counting off on your fingers what forces make up a circle? All this officialdom and sentimentality–it’s good glue, but there’s one thing better still: get four members of a circle to bump off a fifth on the pretense of his being an informer, and with this shed blood you’ll immediately tie them together in a single knot. They’ll become your slaves, they won’t dare rebel or call you to accounts. Ha, ha, ha!”
This is a brilliant description of how Trotskyist organisations are structured. It was certainly true in the IMT. A particularly nice touch is how Pyotr Stepanovich boasts that he has tricked his subordinates into thinking that they are part of a wider organisation with branches all across Russia, affiliated to the Internationale (no doubt based on Marx’s own, which was reaching its end just as Dostoevsky was writing). It reminds me of how in the IMT we would boast of our numbers and worldwide outreach, when in fact the national sections had pitiful membership figures and were practically unknown in their respective countries. Introducing this grandiose attitude into the membership is a very good way of conning them into thinking that their efforts are having a real-world impact.
The too-clever-by-half Verkhovensky finds out the hard way that the murder of Shatov is not sufficient to bind the other revolutionaries to him, because they all end up blabbing when apprehended by the authorities at the end of the book. We see that at least some of the characters start to have second thoughts leading up to the murder, and try to reason with Verkhovensky, to no avail. In the end, their consciences are stronger than their adherence to a fanatical ideology. It was certainly true with me. The traumatised Virginsky, faced with the logical conclusion of his ideology, continuously exclaims: “This is not it, this is not it! No, this is not it at all!” Dostoevsky shows where the revolutionary idealism of 19th-century Russia was heading – murderous totalitarianism. One of the revolutionaries, Shigalyov, explains to a gathering of fellow radicals how his own research has led him to this very denouement:
“Having devoted my energy to studying the question of the social organization of the future society which is to replace the present, I have come to the conclusion that all creators of social systems from ancient times to our year 187- have been dreamers, tale-tellers, fools who contradicted themselves and understood precisely nothing of natural science or of that strange animal known as man. Plato, Rousseau, Fourier, aluminium columns – all this is fit perhaps for sparrows but not for human society. But since the future social form is necessary precisely now, when we are all finally going to act, so as to stop any further thinking about it, I am suggesting my own system of word organization. Here it is!” he struck the notebook.
…”I got entangled in my own data, and my conclusion directly contradicts the original idea from which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that apart from my solution of the social formula, there can be no other.”
…”Yes, I kept arriving at despair; nevertheless, everything expounded in my book is irreplaceable, and there is no other way out; no one can invent anything.”
The arrogance with which Shigalyov dismisses centuries of philosophical thought before him reminds of me of none other than Eugen Dühring, whom Friedrich Engels lampooned in a famous polemic of 1877-1878. It also reminds me of a similar anti-intellectualism on the part of Gyorgy Lukacs, who rubbished every philosopher who had come after Marx as an unreconstructed reactionary. But this anti-intellectualism was also inherent to my own experiences in the IMT. Shigalyov’s conclusions, which lead him to the opposite of what he started out advocating, remind me of the way in which future Russian revolutionaries, like Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, would defend the one-party state and terror as the perfect incarnation of working-class power and indispensable to the creation of a truly free society, free of bourgeois corruption. Trotsky infamously argued in Terrorism and Communism that in the transition to the new society, the power of the state must become greater than it ever has been before in order to smash the class enemy, so as to wither away before the socialist paradise of the future. He could have been quoting Shigalyov verbatim. Unsurprisingly, Lenin hated Dostoevsky and regarded him as a loathsome reactionary (Stalin and Trotsky appreciated him more). Lenin even went so far as to refuse to read Demons – no doubt he would have recognised himself and his comrades in it, and this was too much to bear.
The interesting thing about Shigalyov is that, when faced with actually having to put his convictions into practice and murder Shatov at the behest of the revolutionary circle, he backs out and walks back home – but without warning the approaching Shatov that he is going to be murdered. If only the leaders of the Russian Communist Party had been more like Shigalyov and had backed away from the horrors of forced collectivisation and the purges when they still had the chance.
A central theme in the book is the tension between the young and the old, specifically the young nihilists like Pyotr Stepanovich and his circle, and the older intellectuals, nobles and state officials who are held responsible by Dostoevsky for encouraging them. Pyotr Stepanovich’s father, Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, is an academic of strong liberal convictions who indulges his son and his comrades in their misbehaviour, as does his aristocratic friend Varvara Petrovna (the mother of Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin) and her rival, Yulia Mihailovna, and Yulia Mihailvona’s weak-willed husband, the provincial governor von Lembke. Dostoevsky seeks to show how the Russian intellectuals of the first half of the century, with their delegitimisation of Russian culture, history and traditions in favour of Western ideas, paved the way for the nihilistic horrors that would be perpetrated by the following generations. For Dostoevsky, liberal idealism is a gateway drug to nihilism. In one scene, von Lembke compares more moderate radicals like himself with the extremists like Pyotr Stepanovich, and argues that the relationship between them is like that between Whigs and Tories in 18th-century England. For von Lembke, it is the duty of people like him, who are in a position of authority, to encourage the young radicals to condemn everything that is backward in the old Russia, but stop them from going too far. The painful moral of Demons is that radical ideas, once unleashed, cannot be reined in, but go on to destroy everything and everyone. The book is a condemnation of those members of the Russian ruling class who cynically used their interest in progressive ideas as a status symbol, to virtue-signal and display their progressive leanings, and how the corruption of the elite lays the foundation for the wholesale destruction of all of society.
The character of Stepan Trofimovich, who encapsulates these tensions more than any other character, is the most pitiful in the entire book. He is depicted as an emotionally unstable man-child who cannot discipline his own son, and whose behaviour serves to corrupt the younger generation. He is also the archetype of what Lenin derided as the cowardly liberal intellectual, who shies away from the logical conclusion of his own ideas. The book depicts him as rushing to the authorities as soon as it seems like he might be arrested in connection with some revolutionary outrage, and pleading his innocence. Towards the end of the book, he realises his own personal responsibility for the rise of nihilistic ideas among the new generation, and publicly denounces and renounces his cursed progeny at a literary fete organised by Yulia Mihailovna for the purposes of bringing together the old and the new generation of radicals, in the hope of increasing her own power and prestige. He abandons his aristocratic lifestyle and wanders into the countryside to be among the humble and godly peasantry, and, like Shatov, rediscovers his lapsed Christian faith. He is a sort of ‘anti-hero’, who finds redemption by returning to his roots as a Russian patriot and Orthodox believer, just as Dostoevsky did. Personally I found his character more ridiculous than any other, but I admired his one moment of glory when he denounced the wayward youth at Yulia Mihailovna’s fete, and defended art and culture as superior to cold rationalism. At the end of the book, the dying Stepan Trofimovich explains to a devout peasant woman the meaning of Luke 8:32-36 from the Bible, which gives the book its title. We learn that the demon-possessed man is Russia, that the ‘demons’ are revolutionary ideas, and that the ‘demons’ will enter into the ‘swine’ represented by individuals like Pyotr Stepanovich and co, who will destroy themselves and purify the land. The fratricidal bloodletting among different revolutionary factions during the Russian Civil War, Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, and the eventual collapse of the USSR in 1991 (succeeded by Putin’s Russian nationalist regime) make this part of the book seem almost prophetic.
I have mixed views about the message of the novel. Whilst Dostoevsky’s depiction of the Russian revolutionaries of his time is very accurate and farsighted, we should be under no illusions. Dostoevsky’s own agenda was not exactly benign. Russian national-chauvinism is hardly preferable as an alternative to the revolutionary nihilism that Dostoevsky portrayed in his book. Dostoevsky himself was a Russian nationalist, defender of the Tsarist autocracy and an anti-Semite. A renegade from revolution, he went to the opposite extreme, and became a loyal advocate of the most tyrannical and backward regime in the whole of Europe. He is a sort of 19th-century Solzhenitsyn. Whilst I admire his powerful psychological portrait of the Russian revolutionary tradition, and his biting criticisms of said tradition and where it was heading, I can’t go along with his broader, more reactionary agenda – to rehabilitate Tsarism, Orthodox Christianity and Russian imperialism. There are parallels with Burke, in that Dostoevsky, like his Anglo-Irish forebear, exposed the dangers of abstract intellectualism, disconnected and deracinated from historical reality, unmoored from tradition and entirely negative in character. However, Dostoevsky, like Burke, never once asked himself what it was about the Ancien Regime that pushed people to such extremes. Had pre-revolutionary France not been such a bloated, inegalitarian, ineffectual mess, the likes of Robespierre would never have risen to prominence. Likewise, if Tsarist Russia had not been such a backward, intellectually intolerant, priest-ridden, anti-Semitic hellhole, the likes of Lenin would not have arisen as its necessary product. Counterposing an idealised, noble Christian Russia to murderous revolutionary fanaticism simply will not do, for Tsarism had its own legacy of bloody fanaticism, genocide, oppression and intellectual stultification that created its mirror image in violent revolutionary ideology. The Russian peasantry, depicted by Dostoevsky in this work as being in worshipful awe of authority and aristocracy, are the same peasants who angrily set upon the estates of their landlords during the 1917 revolution, beat and killed them, and seized the land for themselves. They were not influenced by revolutionary agitation to do this – indeed, decades of revolutionary agitation among the peasantry had failed to have any effect. They did it because they had reached their own conclusions about the unjust nature of the old order – an order Dostoevsky foolishly prostituted his intellect and conscience to defend.
We are seeing, in Ukraine right now, the logical conclusions of Dostoevsky’s own ideology being applied in practice. Putin hasn’t come anywhere near Lenin’s death count, but that probably has more to do with the fact that the Enlightenment rationalism that Dostoevsky so disdained has restrained even the very worst actors, like Putin, from carrying out the kinds of grotesque mass murders that happened in the past. For one thing, science and progress have given us nuclear weapons, meaning that the likelihood of the entire planet being destroyed is higher than that of Putin achieving his goals of rebuilding the Russian Empire – something that should deter even Putin, fanatical as he may be, from doing even worse things than he is doing now. The rape and killing of Ukrainians is no more moral being done in the name of the Russian Orthodox Church than it was when the Red Army, under the banner of revolutionary socialism, was doing it. The Tsarist autocracy was undoubtedly better than what came later, but the sickening sentimentality of clinging to God and Tsar as an escape from the horrors of the menacing revolutionary future is repulsive to me. I think Dostoevsky’s observations about Western liberalism resulting in revolutionary despotism, however accurate they may have been for Russia, cannot be true for the rest of us, who have been lucky enough to gain freedom and emancipate ourselves from despotism through liberal ideas, without plunging into Bolshevik tyranny. Part of that is because the Tsarist despotism doesn’t have an equivalent in Western history, which left a space within which moderate progressives could triumph over nihilists and communists.
The view Dostoevsky advances is simple – deny God, reject religion and reject nationhood in favour of cold reason and logic and individual freedom, and we are doomed to end up at a nihilistic position, in which we either kill ourselves (as Kirillov and Stavrogin do in the book) or kill our fellow man in the bid to create a new world. I reject this false dichotomy. Yes, there are all sorts of risks involved in rejecting the old ways. Nietzsche, in talking about the ‘death of God’, discussed the risks of nihilism. But, even accepting that the rejection of the old ideas entails the risk that worse ones will replace it, I still think, like Nietzsche, that the risk is worth it. For sure, millions have died as a result of atheistic ideologies of progress in the 20th century alone – ideologies which sought to replace Christianity, ideologies that Dostoevsky correctly realised were dangerous. But to say that rejecting Christianity in favour of Enlightenment rationalism necessarily leads us in this direction is self-evidently absurd. Aside from the fact that religious despotisms like Dostoevsky’s beloved Tsardom have been responsible for their own many millions of dead, there are plenty of examples of Enlightenment liberalism creating flourishing, successful societies, that have not descended into hellscapes like Bolshevik Russia or France during the Terror.
Dostoevsky does not accept that one can reject both Tsarism and theocracy on the one hand, and revolutionary fanaticism on the other. There is no room for a middle ground. As the references in the novel to the Laodiceans from the Bible show, Dostoevsky believes that his fellow Russians must either stand with the truth of Christ, which also means fidelity to the social order, or completely with revolutionary atheism, with all its nihilistic consequences, but the two cannot be reconciled. The character of Stepan Trofimovich epitomises the failure to reconcile the more moderate liberal idealists of his generation with the fanatical nihilism of the younger generation, with Stepan Trofimovich ultimately deciding to abandon his old ideas altogether. History has proven Dostoevsky false – atheistic humanism and the belief that reason and science can make the world a better place have not led us to destruction, but have allowed us to rise above the mire and muck of feudal backwardness and religious superstition. Liberalism is not a gateway drug to the rejection of all values – there are secular alternatives readily available. In assigning blame for the disaster that was the Russian Revolution, we cannot put all the blame on the revolutionary dissidents of the 1840s, but must put a good deal of blame upon the Tsarist autocracy and its suppression of civil society and even moderate criticism – a mistake that their Prussian neighbours did not make, which is why Germany in 1918 became a liberal democracy and not a communist dictatorship. We should also consider whether the ill-fated alliance of liberal ‘Westerners’ with their nihilistic children could have been avoided had the Tsardom not terminated the reform process after Alexander II’s assassination in 1881, or started these reforms even earlier.
Demons is a cautionary tale, a brilliant but flawed work, which reflects the author’s reactionary politics, but warns us of the dangers of ideological fanaticism – a lesson that two and a half years of being in a political cult has been branded upon my consciousness.