Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/554



HESE studies might well be entitled "The Russian Revolution," for since the days of Peter, Russia has been in a chronic condition of revolution, and the problem of the revolution is one of the leading interests of all philosophers of history and statesmen in Russia. We may indeed say that the problem of revolution is preeminently the problem of Russia.

In Russia, as well as in Europe, the French revolution gave rise to the development of modern philosophy of history and modern sociology (§ 46). Since the time of the great revolution, the problem of revolution has in Russia been a standing item upon the agenda, practically no less than theoretically. The reaction under Alexander I and Nicholas I, definitely directed against the revolution, forced Russian thinkers into two opposing camps, that of the revolutionaries and that of the antirevolutionaries. The revolutionary trend began with Pestel and Radiščev; the succession was continued by Bělinskii, Herzen, Bakunin, Černyševskii, Dobroljubov, and the nihilists, the terrorists, and especially the Narodnaja Volja, Lavrov and Mihailovskii, and finally the revolutionary exponents of socialism and anarchism (the Marxists on the one hand, and Kropotkin on the other).

The right wing is represented by the official policy, which was reduced by Count Uvarov to the simple formula of Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, and which made an impression upon Puškin, and yet more markedly upon Gogol. The slavophils did their utmost to give this formula a philosophic content, but the philosophy speedily became dissipated into