Page:George Pitt-Rivers - The World Significance of the Russian Revolution (1920).pdf/22

 6 the same new forces (i.e., mammonism and industrialism) there set in a revolutionary movement which went by the name of Nihilism, of which Tchernishefski, the novelist, was the leader, and Dobrolinboff, a writer, Micailoff, a professor, Bakunin, Prince Kropotkin, Sophia Perovskaia, a pupil of Dobrolinboff, who like Kropotkin belonged to the higher nobility of Russia, and a host of other neuro-pathic "intellectuals," and Anarchists, such as Hertzen and Ogareff, who published their propaganda from London, were henchmen.

By 1862 the movement had spread with marvellous rapidity among the morbid and neurotic elements of the literary and student classes, who were as concerned in their anarchical principles to prove their contempt of all control by growing their hair long, neglecting their persons and by an utter chaos and lack of any order in their sexual and matrimonial relations, as they were to promote bloodshed and revolution among the working populations of the towns. In spite of the extensive propaganda campaign in the towns and villages, in spite of the growing inefficiency of an effete bureaucracy tending always to assimilate the ideas and values of Western "Liberalism-cum-Commercialism," they met with little or no response from the agricultural masses, who indeed have small liking for either anarchy or communism—least of all when they have tasted either!

All this, of course, is well known history, but the complete collapse of the Nihilist movement after the assassination of Alexander II. in 1881, when for a brief spell a better and stronger administrative awoke from the former reign of lethargy and incompetence, serves to illustrate the facts so often ignored, which have an equal