Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/520

504 THE WORD NIHILIST.

If the reader has read attentively the foregoing documents, he must see, I think, how inappropriate the word nihilist is when applied to the Russian revolutionists, or even to the terrorists. If the authors of these documents are not nihilists, then there are no nihilists in Russia; and the wild-eyed iconoclast whose philosophy is "the flat negation of all faith and hope, whether in the social, political, or spiritual order," and who is "called nihilist because he will accept nothing and only sees happiness in the destruction of everything existing," is a purely imaginary being. Outside of certain books, he has no more reality than the conventional devil with horns, tail, and a three-tined pitchfork.

An intelligent Russian, who occupied a prominent position in the revolutionary party, and who, at one time, was a member, I think, of the Executive Committee, refers to the misuse in Europe of the word nihilist as follows:

The militant section of the intelligéntsia [the educated or intelligent class], that which I call the revolutionary, has, in Europe, received the strange name of nihilist. The title proves that the most erroneous notions on the subject of Russian revolutionists are current outside Russia. If, in fact, Europe understood the Russian revolutionary movement, and that which is going on among the intelligéntsia, this word would certainly not have been used any more than it is in Russia. The name, indeed, is only used among us in a bad sense, and only by persons capable of saying, "The anarchist party has at last attained to power in England — Mr. Labouchere is Prime Minister." In Russia there are journals capable of writing such a phrase, but if, relying on a telegram of this description, I were to call Mr. Labouchere an anarchist, it would prove only one thing — that I was totally ignorant as to who Mr. Labouchere is, and of what anarchism consists. The name of nihilist arose in Russia under those merely passing and fortuitous circumstances which accompanied the initial movement of the intelligent class at the beginning of the reign of Alexander II. Russia had just escaped from the yoke of the reign of Nicholas, and was preparing to throw off that of serfdom. Ideas, having burst their chains, began to work feverishly. All Russia cursed the past and leaned out toward the future. ... All men began reasoning, criticizing, denying, inquiring. ... The tendency toward democratic ideas manifested itself occasionally by the most exaggerated aversion to everything that was aristocratic, to everything that smacked of the nobility, and consequently to all the