Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/138

112 Kvjatkovskii, a member of the Narodnaja Volja, prosecuted in 1880 for participation in the terrorist movement, gave in his speech for the defence the following account of the psychology of the Russian terrorists. While frankly admitting that his party was preparing for a popular revolt he protested against the designation "anarchist." The revolutionary party, he said, recognised the necessity for a government; its opposition was merely to the existing absolutist form of government; it was, therefore not an anarchist party. "I do not propose to maintain that terrorism plays no part in our program. I admit that this is one of our activities. But it occupies only the second or third place in order of importance. We practise it for the protection of our members, but not as a primary means to secure our ends. It is not necessary to have been a tiger from the first and by nature in order to display tigerish qualities. Social conditions exist by which lambs are converted into tigers. Political assassination was evoked by the horrible cruelties practised by the government against the revolutionaries."

The student Balmašev, who in 1902 shot Minister Sypjagin, made a similar answer to the court when he was asked to disclose the names of his helpers and confederates. His sole assistant and fellow conspirator, he declared, had been the government. "I do not deny that in earlier days, at school and at the university, | carried on propaganda against the government, but I never favoured terrorism or the use of forcible methods. Far from it, I was always an advocate of legal order and constitutional procedure. But the Russian ministers convinced me that right and legality do not exist in Russia, that they have been replaced by unpunished illegality, by a regime of arbitrary force, against which force is the only weapon."

Bakunin was not merely the theorist of Russian terrorism, but was in addition the spokesman of the hatred which tsarism had stored up in the minds of the cultured classes, hatred for the church, for religion, for the state, for the Russian theocracy. Kropotkin no less than Bakunin, Kropotkin the anarchistic apostle of humanitarianism, was overflowing, with a like hatred. Again and again the Russian lamb has become a tiger. "Gods pass. Kings pass. The prestige of authority passes. Who shall take the place of gods, kings, and priests, if not the free individual, confident in his own powers? Simple faith vanishes.