Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/314

288 and liberalism. (In Bělinskii's case this is shown by his youthful drama.)

The Petraševcy (1848) are the Russian analogues of the French revolutionary socialists of the same epoch.

The Russians were influenced above all by the teachings of French socialists; but German philosophy, and notably that of Feuerbach, likewise had its effect in promoting the development of political radicalism and socialism. Towards the close of the forties, the ideas of Marx and Lassalle began to be known in Russia.

After the liberation of the peasantry, socialism upon a theoretical basis of materialism became the credo of the intelligentsia. Černyševskii and his positivist realism matured into nihilism. In the secret society of the Narodnaja Volja, revolutionary aspirations secured their most logical elaboration in the form of a deliberate policy of terrorism, It was significant that the little secret societies should have been styled "communes."

Herzen, Bakunin, and Černyševskii regarded the Russian mir as the social unit of the society which was to be renovated by the social revolution, and this view was elaborated into a complete social and economic theory, the narodničestvo. Simultaneously Lavrov and Mihailovskii were endeavouring to found socialism anew as a philosophical system.

This brings us to the eighties, to the decade of reaction following upon the assassination of Alexander II. Even before the momentous March 13, 1881, a split had occurred in the revolutionary camp, and the Marxist social democracy had been organized under the influence of Marx and Engels, the terrorist tendency being greatly weakened, though not entirely destroyed.

A survey of the development of "Russian socialism" (or "Russian communism") since Herzen, cannot fail to convince us that the Russian socialists, like the French and the German socialists, were looking for a new philosophy and a new ethic. Life was to be entirely renovated; society was to be rebuilt upon completely new foundations.

In the domain of theory, this new foundation was to be positivism and materialism, the converse and the negation of official theocracy, Dostoevskii, therefore, had good reason for equating socialism with atheism and for pointing to atheism as the leading tenet of socialism.