Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/177

Rh When, therefore, at the beginning of the seventies the members of the intelligentsia originated the movement "towards the people," among whom they lived as teachers, writers, workmen, etc., and when they began their practical propaganda of enlightenment, they found the soil prepared. It is an error to assert that the stimulating activities of these narodniki had no effect.

Thus the Russian mužik, no less than the intellectual, had his crisis to traverse; and in the case of the peasant it was natural that this crisis should manifest itself chiefly in the domain of religion. The oppositional influence of the raskol has never ceased, but of late there has been superadded the influence of European Protestantism, which has begun to affect large masses of the peasantry. During the sixties stundism became diffused in the south; during the seventies came stundobantism (now neo-stundism); other and analogous religious movements arose among the common people. In St. Petersburg, Lord Radstock and above all Paškov secured adherents. The religious aims of Tolstoi gathered all these tendencies to a single focus as it were, and for Tolstoi as for so many others the mužik was teacher.

Thus did the religious rationalism of the mužik take its place beside the positivism and nihilism of the intelligentsia. In his novel Pavel Rudenko, the Stundist, Stepniak (Kravčinskii) gives an accurate picture of this association, describing the way in which the believing stundist mužik makes common cause with the revolutionary student.

N the political field, during the reign of Alexander II, progressively minded persons aimed at the inauguration of a constitution.

This idea was in conformity with decabrist tradition, which had been vigorously maintained by such refugee journalists as N. Turgenev and Herzen. As we have learned, in Russia as elsewhere, revolutionary political hopes were awakened by the year 1848, and were not destroyed by subsequent reaction. On the contrary, the desire for popular representation was stimulated by European example, for at the end of the fifties even reactionary Austria had to accept constitutionalism. The net result of 1848 was to teach the Russians that not the