REVOLUTIONARY NIHILISM AND THE REACTION
The Reform-enthusiasm Becomes Unpractical and Culminates in Nihilism--Nihilism, the Distorted Reflection of Academic Western Socialism--Russia Well Prepared for Reception of Ultra-Socialist Virus--Social Reorganisation According to Latest Results of Science--Positivist Theory--Leniency of Press-censure--Chief Representatives of New Movement--Government Becomes Alarmed--
Repressive Measures--Reaction in the Public--The Term Nihilist Invented--The Nihilist and His Theory--Further Repressive Measures--
Attitude of Landed Proprietors--Foundation of a Liberal Party--
Liberalism Checked by Polish Insurrection--Practical Reform Continued--An Attempt at Regicide Forms a Turning-point of Government's Policy--Change in Educational System--Decline of Nihilism.
The rapidly increasing enthusiasm for reform did not confine itself to practical measures such as the emancipation of the serfs, the creation of local self-government, and the thorough reorganisation of the law-courts and legal procedure. In the younger section of the educated classes, and especially among the students of the universities and technical colleges, it produced a feverish intellectual excitement and wild aspirations which culminated in what is commonly known as Nihilism.
In a preceding chapter I pointed out that during the last two centuries all the important intellectual movements in Western Europe have been reflected in Russia, and that these reflections have generally been what may fairly be termed exaggerated and distorted reproductions of the originals. Roughly speaking, the Nihilist movement in Russia may be described as the exaggerated, distorted reflection of the earlier Socialist movements of the West; but it has local peculiarities and local colouring which deserve attention.
See Chapter XXVI.
The Russian educated classes had been well prepared by their past history for the reception and rapid development of the Socialist virus. For a century and a half the country had been subjected to a series of drastic changes, administrative and social, by the energetic action of the Autocratic Power, with little spontaneous co-operation on the part of the people. In a nation with such a history, Socialistic ideas naturally found favour, because all Socialist systems until quite recent times were founded on the assumption that political and social progress must be the result not of slow natural development, but rather of philosophic speculation, legislative wisdom, and administrative energy.
This assumption lay at the bottom of the reform enthusiasm in St.
Petersburg at the commencement of Alexander II.'s reign. Russia might be radically transformed, it was thought, politically and socially, according to abstract scientific principles, in the space of a few years, and be thereby raised to the level of West-European civilisation, or even higher. The older nations had for centuries groped in darkness, or stumbled along in the faint light of practical experience, and consequently their progress had been slow and uncertain. For Russia there was no necessity to follow such devious, unexplored paths. She ought to profit by the experience of her elder sisters, and avoid the errors into which they had fallen. Nor was it difficult to ascertain what these errors were, because they had been discovered, examined and explained by the most eminent thinkers of France and England, and efficient remedies had been prescribed. Russian reformers had merely to study and apply the conclusions at which these eminent authorities had arrived, and their task would be greatly facilitated by the fact that they could operate on virgin soil, untrammelled by the feudal traditions, religious superstitions, metaphysical conceptions, romantic illusions, aristocratic prejudices, and similar obstacles to social and political progress which existed in Western Europe.
Such was the extraordinary intellectual atmosphere in which the Russian educated classes lived during the early years of the sixties. On the "men with aspirations," who had longed in vain for more light and more public activity under the obscurantist, repressive regime of the preceding reign, it had an intoxicating effect. The more excitable and sanguine amongst them now believed seriously that they had discovered a convenient short-cut to national prosperity, and that for Russia a grandiose social and political millennium was at hand.*
I was not myself in St. Petersburg at that period, but on arriving a few years afterwards I became intimately acquainted with men and women who had lived through it, and who still retained much of their early enthusiasm.