Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/192

166 criticism of Count Loris-Melikov, the "Asiatic diplomatist," and the Open Letter of the Executive Committee to Alexander III. In the latter document an explanation is given of the death of Alexander II, and his successor is exhorted to put an end to the revolution by granting complete amnesty and by summoning a legislative representative assembly of the entire people.

Concerning Mihailovskii's relationship to the Narodnaja Volja and its executive committee, we are further enlightened by the fact that he was deputed to take part in the negotiations with the "Holy Retinue" which were conducted by Lavrov in 1882.

Mihailovskii subsequently wrote several more essays for publication in clandestine journals, among which was one discussing the suppression of his review in 1884. His political views do not seem to have undergone any further change. But this point cannot be decided until a completer edition of his writings and a collection of his letters are available. In the works belonging to the close of the eighties and subsequent years he is partly engaged in his struggle with the Marxists. In a letter of July 1898 to Rusanov (Kudrin), who had been a refugee, he deplored the effects of the refugee movement by which Russia was deprived of her young people. Mihailovskii was inclined to regard this loss as responsible for the prevailing mental chaos and for the spread of Marxism. The end would doubtless come before long. Either liberal tendencies would gain the victory at court, or else "we shall return to the terror with its indefinite consequences (though I regard the results of the terror in the seventies as definite enough)." Rusanov's explanation of Mihailovskii's allusion to the indefinite consequences of terrorism was that the terrorist movement did not "march consistently forward towards a definite end." In 1901, again, it seemed to Mihailovskii that the return to terrorism was inevitable. "I cannot myself take part in it, and I cannot recommend it to others, but it must come sooner or later."

We see that Mihailovskii vacillated from the first between theory and practice, between sociology and politics, between constitutionalism and revolutionism. He condemns the terrorist revolution; in his moral system there is no place