Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/470

444 and indifferentism, not scepticism, is the true unbelief. This liberal unbelief clings to the church in which it has ceased to believe just as the tsar clings to the church.

HE social revolutionaries' reply to Signposts appeared contemporaneously with that of the liberals, and was entitled Signposts as Signs of the Time (1910), an apt name. Signposts was stigmatised as the most reactionary volume that had been issued from the press for many years, and Struve and his associates were taxed with falseness and equivocation. In points of detail the comprehensive work contained much that was good, but the main issue (the religious problem) was left unconsidered. Speaking generally we may say that the social revolutionary "anti-signposts" were directed to the wrong quarter. From the social revolutionary camp there was issued almost simultancously a critique of revisionism which was enormously superior to Signposts in respect of its analytic depth.

In January 1909 "Russkaja Mysl" (Russian Thought), a Moscow review edited by Struve, began the publication of a novel entitled The Pale Horse. The work takes the form of a diary extending from March 6th to October 5th of a single year. The author, V. Ropšin, was a man previously unknown. The implication of the title is conveyed by the first of the two mottoes: " and behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death " (Revelation vi. 8). Neither this motto nor the other, "But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes" (1 John ii. 11), can be regarded as attractive to the ordinary reader, for they suggest that the novel is to be a contribution to the prevalent mysticism, to the apocalyptic mysticism of Merežkovskii and similar religious decadents. But the opening pages arrest our attention. We learn that the diary is kept by the leader of a terrorist group of five persons who are to assassinate the governor of a provincial town. A terrorist