Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/353

Rh conservatism was at home in "the darksome room of the peasant."

Their theocratic standpoint made it impossible for the slavophils to appraise the various social forces in a sufficiently concrete manner. Preferring to deal with the abstract concept of folk or nation, they failed to secure clear understanding of Russia's economic and social position.

It is true that the slavophils were keenly interested in the peasant and his liberation. Interest in the question was so acute and so widespread that the slavophil messianists could not fail to give it their attention. Most of the slavophils favoured the liberation of the "peasantry, but very few of them conceived this liberation in a genuinely liberal sense. Kirěevskii did not discuss liberation in any of his public utterances, but referred to the matter in his letters. Homjakov wrote about it on one occasion. Shortly after the Crimean war, Samarin, advocating the abolition of serfdom, wrote, "We succumbed through our own feebleness, and not owing to the objective force of the league of western powers." When public discussion of the question became possible after the accession of Alexander II, the slavophil organ "Russkaja Besěda," a periodical issued during the years 1856 to 1860, published in 1885 and 1859 a supplement edited by Košilev and entitled "Selskojo Blagoustroistvo" (rural wellbeing).

Slavophilism and its religious quietism, the idea of the political social order and fraternity of Old Russian social institutions, prevented the philosophical founders of the doctrine from realising the social significance of the liberation of the peasantry. Homjakov and Ivan Aksakov, no less than Kirěevskii, would not hear a word of English political economy. Aksakov, desiring to keep alive the genuinely Russian sense of benevolence, desired also and for this end to maintain the existence of the poor. In his view, the western system of poor relief was a politico-economical device and was not moral at all; it you asked for an example of a practical man and a good political economist, he would mention Judas.