Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/354

328 The reactionary party among the nobility, agitating against the liberation of the peasantry, took occasion in their periodical "Věst'" to denounce the slavophils as Russian Saint-Simonians. This was gross exaggeration, for the slavophils vigorously opposed socialism as unrussian. Homjakov and his friends counterposed socialism with the Russian mir and the Russian artel, but these institutions were conceived ethically and religiously, not economically and socially. In the mir they saw a means for averting the proletarianisation of the masses, and thus based upon the mir as against French socialism their agrarian hopes for the undisturbed development of Russia. For the slavophils the Russian mir was a foundation established by Christian love, was the foundation of the social organisation of the entire Russian people, which thus became a great family under the patriarchal leadership of the tsar. But we must not on this account speak of the slavophils as "Christian socialists."

In this idealisation of the mir, the slavophils were supported by Haxthausen, who was then studying Russian agrarian conditions on the spot.

Speaking generally, the slavophils continued to cherish Rousseauist agrarianism. Kirěevskii contemned towns and urban civilisation, sharply contrasting with European civilisation the Old Russian Orthodox and religious civilisation, speaking of the latter as characteristically rural. Kirěevskii, too, was hostile to the growth of manufacturing industry, which was fostered by the state, and his followers remained faithful to