Page:TheNewEuropeV2.djvu/370

 by the Tsar may be gauged by the completeness with which all classes, particularly the peasants, but also the aristocracy, were subjugated.

2. Although Tsar Peter developed and organised this system of absolutism, the fact that he had to face Western civilised enemies made him accept European culture to a much greater extent than his predecessors, and thus he became the Europeaniser of Russia. Though his Europeanisation was directed only towards practical ends, principally military and naval, he was obliged to introduce European technology and sciences. Peter’s successors had to follow his example; the Court of Petrograd and the aristocracy accepted European civilisation to such a degree that Russia (which meant the Court and the aristocracy), at the end of the eighteenth century, had become Romanised—French became the language of the highest society, while Voltaire and Diderot were the friends of Catherine II. At the same time Frederick the Great paid his tribute to Voltaire, and French became the language of his circle. In Vienna and among the Austrian aristocracy French prevailed to such a degree that German poets were translated into French in order to be accessible to “society.”

Russia became Europeanised, but, at the same time, her own political influence in Europe became more and more marked. A Russian army fought in the West for the first time in 1734, and the French Revolution and Napoleon forced the Russian armies to take up their permanent abode in Europe. But side by side with this process of Europeanisation, another phase of development was manifested in Russia. Having crushed the Tartars and occupied Siberia, she became an Asiatic and Asiaticised power. Russia, in fact, unites within herself the qualities both of Europe and of Asia.

The French Revolution caused a great reaction, not only in Russia but in the whole of Europe; at the same time, national feeling was aroused in Russia by contact with the West, against which it ranged itself in opposition. French ideas and culture were banished; Voltaireism was succeeded by the system of Metternich and the policy of the Holy Alliance. Shunning Voltaire and Rousseau, the Russians adopted Schelling and Hegel, and for them Hegel became the “A.B.C. of the Revolution.” The left wing of Hegel, Feuerbach, with his reduction of religion to sociomorphism, became the teacher