Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/86

 counsels of Mme de Krüdener, who used her influence to persuade him to employ his power as a Messiah — the beginning of the Slav messianism as later represented by the Poles — in praying for the salvation of mankind. The Russians desired neither the one nor the other of these formulae. Nicholas the First, the man for whom « no important person existed in Russia other than him to whom he spoke and then only for as long as he spoke to him », turned Russia into an armed camp with himself as generalissimo. If his son, Alexander the Second, freed the peasant from years-long existence under the communism of the mir, it was not under the pressure of any Russian popular movement (the Nihilists who assassinated him were students and other young men bred to western ideas), but to satisfy the requirements of the age. Alexander the Third reverted to what seemed to him to be the true Muscovite tradition, but Pobiedonossev the retrograde could not, any more than Katkov the Slavophile, be considered an exponent of the Russian nation, his theoretical despotism descending directly from that of mediaeval Byzantium. The « peace-maker of Europe », Nicholas the Second, was the product of his occidental education, untroubled by the voices which, more and more clamorous, could be heard crying from the depths.

Bolshevism dawned for these inchoate masses, at first in whatever manner it particularly appealed to them. All that is foreign will disappear: pedantic Marxism, the new bureaucracy, the ridiculously belligerent irreligion which imagines that religion can be set up and as easily put down by mere decrees, the hero-worship of the chiefs of the movement, the mummified idol of Lenin. But the local form, the soviets themselves, will remain because centuries of Russian history, which sought them unavailing, have gone to their making.