Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/137

Rh a world that is lawless and therefore free," wrote Bakunin. To him and to Herzen, the revolutionary seemed successor to the Cossack. It is certainly true of the revolutionary and of the Russian intellectual, that he has in him something of the nomad. He may perhaps be regarded as a combination of the monk and the Cossack or of the monk and the pilgrim.

The Russian terrorist cannot withdraw his hand from the plough, however much he may wish to do so; he has no place under the government and official society, unless he becomes an inert tool in the hands of his former enemies. In certain instances, a revolutionary author and leader may openly go over to the opposite side, as happened in the case of Tihomirov, but it was impossible for an ex-revolutionist to resume a quiet working life in Russia. Whenever the Russian revolutionary movement became stagnant, the champions of that movement sought a field for their activities in foreign lands. Men like Stepniak took part in the Herzegovina rising and in the Benevento revolt; others were active in the Paris commune. Bakunin was the prototype of Turgenev's Rudin.

If we are to form a just estimate of the Russian terrorist, we must take into account the way in which tsarism fought him.

The outlook of absolutism towards revolutionary valour cannot but remind us to some extent of John the Terrible. The tyranny exercised over literature and over academic freedoms was all the more intolerable in Russia, because in these respects liberty had already for the most part been secured elsewhere in Europe, and because such liberty could not be kept out of Russia, unless the tsarist censorship should attempt to gag the whole of Europe. None the less the impossible was attempted. Forcibly and brutally Russian absolutism stamped on every movement towards freedom. Each revolutionary outrage had to be atoned for by the sacrifice of countless victims on the scaffold, in fortresses, and in Siberia. The revolutionists fell sick and died by hundreds in the fetid gaols. Many of them, unquestionably, were perfectly innocent. Numbers became insane. Many terminated their protracted martyrdom by suicide, often in some unprecedented manner, as by the hunger strike. Even more inhuman than the cruelty was the depravity of the bureaucracy, the arbitrary infliction of corporal punishment upon political prisoners, and all the brutality to which the official tyrants were prone. Cases of the violation of nihilist girls and women are on record.