Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/139

Rh Make way for science! Caprice and charity disappear. Make way for justice!" Kropotkin teaches, with Nietzsche, that the strong individual must win for himself the right to force. In his strength, he may kill the tyrant as he may kill a viper.

"A life for a life."

These incentives of the Russian revolution must be sensed behind the revolutionary deeds if we wish to understand the true nature of the movement. The revolutionary negation of Russia was the offspring of mingled love and loathing.

The loathing often made the Russian revolutionaries blind, blinder than was consistent with the achievement of the revolutionary aim.

The traits that have been previously described as typical of the realists, the roughness of their forms of social intercourse, their laconic speech, their contempt for everything that was not relevant to the ends immediately in view, the cynicism analysed by Pisarev—all these qualities were still more fully developed in terrorist circles. It was natural, for the terrorists were men consecrated to death.

Whatever the faults of the Russian revolutionists and terrorists, it is impossible, in a final survey, to judge them unfavourably. Their ardent devotion to intellectual and political freedom, their self-sacrificing enthusiasm for the folk, their reckless disregard of their personal interests and of their own lives, their fidelity towards their comrades—these are brilliant characteristics, are qualities of the utmost value, which cannot fail to arouse respect and sympathy for individual revolutionists and for the Russian people from which they sprang.

Rh