Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/496

470 it became revolutionary and terrorist. The younger generation of the sixties and seventies gave ear to Bakunin, not to Herzen. During 1872 and 1873 there were in Switzerland, and notably at Zurich, hundreds of Russian students, many of whom became Bakuninists, and transplanted Bakuninism to Russia.

Peculiar is the combination that has been effected between Russian realism and Bakunin's unrealism. Pisarev's "destructive criticism" has become pandestruction; the nihilistic word has become the revolutionary deed; to an increasing extent "word and deed" is the revolutionary slogan.

In contradistinction to Herzen, Bakunin conceived nihilism, not as Byronic revolt but as Blanquist revolt. He defended the nihilists against Herzen's attacks; defended their practical activities, while admitting that they were guilty of vacillations, contradictions, and even scandalous and foul abominations. For Bakunin these aberrations were no more than the inevitable accompaniments of inchoate conditions. He regarded them as proofs that the younger generation was striving to construct the new morality. Though he belonged to the older generation, Bakunin numbered himself among those who were seeking the new morality, and indeed he behaved himself to have deﬁnitively formulated it.

Nevertheless Bakuninist tactics did not find application in Russia, if we except Nečaev's attempt and the peasant revolt in the Chigirin district.

In the theoretical ﬁeld Bakunin did little to further the formulation either of socialism or of anarchism, but his example was suggestive to theorists as well as to practical men. It is not difficult to understand why such writers as Kropotkin, Čerkezov, etc., honour Bakunin as their teacher; Turgenev, too, was much preoccupied by Bakunin's ideas. As a man Bakunin was good-natured, but simple, frivolous. and undisciplined. Consistently desiring to realise his ideals, he did not shrink from the risks of action, and was ever willing to set his life upon a cast; this deserves recognition when we contrast him with his two opponents, the hesitating Herzen and the