Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/370

344 against which the slavophils were animated by aristocratic prejudices. It was doubtless far from being an ideal institution. Nevertheless the bureaucracy never failed to number among its members intelligent, legally cultured, and liberal officials. To a certain extent the bureaucracy was westernist, in so far as since the days of Peter the administration had sought its models in Europe, and in so far as a university education was essential to the maintenance of the state machine and of the army. If the slavophils opposed bureaucracy, so also did PobědonosčevPobědonoscev [sic]. It need hardly be said that the bureaucracy was instrumental in carrying out the reaction dictated by the court and by the decisive powers in the Russian state.

Gradovskii reproaches westernism for its apotheosis of the state machine. The accusation applies mainly to the conservative westernisers, and in especial to the jurists.

The two parties differed in their valuation and explanation of the mir. The westernisers, led by Čičerin, inclined to regard the mir as an institution of comparatively late development, predominantly administrative in function, fiscal in its aims. But some of the westernisers, the more radical among them, while accepting the slavophil theory of origins, gave the mir and the artel a socialistic significance. The mir, they held, preserved Russia from the growth of a proletariat, and represented the communism desiderated by the socialists.

As regards the liberation of the peasantry, the outlook of the westernisers was more energetic because more distinctively political. Stankevič, indeed, held that serfdom ought first to be abolished, and a constitution subsequently