Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/316

290 war and the growth of revolutionary sentiment at this epoch impelled Aksakov more and more towards the right, and after the assassination of Alexander  he became fiercely embittered against Europe. To Aksakov the deed of March 13th was a bloody confirmation of slavophil doctrine, for the terrorist atrocity was in his view an inevitable outcome of the idea of the Roman coercive state which Peter had transplanted from Europe into Russia.

It would be inaccurate to regard this declaration of Aksakov as nothing more than a complaint against the Petrine state and the bureaucracy. The complete argument here involved contains the fundamental conception of slavophilism and must therefore be briefly capitulated.

It is found in the speech which Aksakov delivered on April 10, 1881, before the St. Petersburg Slavic Society after a solemn requiem for Alexander II. He accused the intelligentsia of treason to their own nationality, describing the assassination of the tsar as a crime against the primitive Russian idea and primitive Russian institutions. By these, he said, the tsar was intimately associated with the people, being their father leader, and sole representative. He condemned nihilism, which had now taken the form of terrorism, censoring it not merely as anarchism, for he included in a general condemnation all the liberal political endeavours of the west. Aksakov's formula ran as follows: "Nihilism = anarchism = revolution = socialism = constitutionalism = liberalism = westernism."

The Roman state founded upon force (the "outer" truth of Konstantin Aksakov) is the very opposite of Christianity, being not simply unchristian but positively atheistic, devoid of spiritual leadership and without belief. The western nations adopted and continued the Roman state, and Peter likewise adopted it. But Christ cannot simply cease to be Christ; he will carry on the struggle against the god who has been enthroned in his place; he will do this both inwardly and in social life; he will rebel against the Christian principle which permeates all historically extant societies; hence the lot of every Christian society which severs itself from Christ must inevitably be rebellion and revolution. A society which has thus made revolution a principle of development stumbles from revolution to revolution, arrives at anarchy, and ultimately achieves complete self-negation and self-slaughter. The man of the present denies God and erects his own reason