Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/313



E now come to the concluding section of the second portion of this study, of our sketch of Russian philosophy of history and of Russian philosophy of religion, and have to expound the leading social and political trends and mass movements—Marxist social democracy, the narodničestvo, the social revolutionary movement, modern anarchism, and liberalism. From the nature of the case, the individualities of men of letters and of leaders will be less conspicuous than in the preceding studies, for we are now concerned mainly with general trends and currents.

We begin with Marxism and social democracy. Socialism is as old in Russia as in Europe. The socialist ideas of Europe always secured their earliest adherents in Russia.

The humanitarians at the close of the eighteenth and at the opening of the nineteenth century, those who advocated the liberation of the peasantry, had a political and indeed a democratic conception of their humanitarian doctrine, and this was especially noteworthy in Pestel. During the forties, socialist doctrine, if it was not the actual cause of the severance between radicals and liberals, at least made that severance more conspicuous and more definite. Bělinskii, Herzen, and Bakunin on the left, and Granovskii on the right, were characteristic representatives of the distinction between socialism