Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/484

458 trouble is that he collaborates in this stupidity, and demands that others should collaborate. Nevertheless when he writes thus he can no longer be conceiving revolt as a primordial mental energy.

ARX and the Marxists, and some of the liberals as well (Ruge, and others). accused Bakunin of nationalist panslavism, and reproached him therefore with being illogical. Even today many of the historians of socialism continue to puzzle their brains over the question whether (as was frequently maintained in Marxist circles) Bakunin did not become a Russian agent towards the close of his career.

It is true that in 1862 Bakunin continued to wonder whether the tsar would not carry out his plans for him, and we have just read that Alexander II seemed to him preferable as a leader to Pugačev and Pestel. Proudhon entertained similar illusions regarding Napoleon III. Mickiewicz, again, and many others based their hopes at times upon the thought of their most powerful enemies' conversion. Herzen cherished like aspirations, and Bakunin shared such a plan with Herzen, a plan which is certainly opposed to the idea of effecting change "from below upwards."

The views common to Bakunin and Herzen were not the expression of political and nationalistic panslavism, but were derived from slavophil messianism. In contradistinction with Herzen, Bakunin laid stress rather upon Slav than upon Russian messianism. The difference is explicable from the consideration that Bakunin had come into personal contact with other Slav revolutionaries—Poles, Czechs, and southern Slavs.

Marx and the Marxists, and also Ruge and other of the German opponents of Bakunin, are right in considering that Bakunin overestimated the revolutionary capacity of the Slavs. In other respects, however, Bakunin's Slavist program was no more nationalist than that of Marx and the liberals. Marx preposed an antislav combination on the part of Germans, Poles, and Magyars, preaching russophobia, czechophobia, and croatophobia. Bakunin, on the other hand, in the Appeal to the Slavs (1848) which was so strongly criticised by Marx, invited the Slavs to espouse the cause of the Magyars against Windischgrätz. In like manner Bakunin was for the Poles and also for the Germans (the people of Germany, not the