Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/60

34 development; and he even recognised that the mir represents a primitive stage of development. He believed, none the less, that Russia could be socialised upon the foundation of the mir and the artel.

The mir, however primitive, is for Černyševskii a means by which Russia is to be safeguarded from proletarianisation; and despite his scepticism concerning the peasant and the latter's capabilities, he esteems the mir most highly. He believes that Siberia, where the populace in general is in comfortable circumstances, must by the "democrat" be ranked higher than England, where the poverty of the majority is extreme. Černyševskii pays little regard to the position of the industrial worker, the proletarian. To him the mužik is still the genuine man of the people. He continually employs the term prostoljudin, which signifies "man of the common people."

These views explain why at a later date Černyševskii continued to speak so warmly of the mir, saying in an apostrophe to youth in his letter to Herzen, "Give your lives to maintain equal rights in the soil, give your lives for the principle of the village community." He demanded that the state should protect the mir. In his later and more revolutionary phase, he was opposed to private ownership of any kind, not excepting private ownership of land, though he had previously expressed his gratification at the acquisition of land by the peasants.

Černyševskii subsequently came to regard the mir and its agrarian communism from the outlook of the associative designs of European socialists, just as he came to regard the artel as the basis of the future productive cooperatives. In these matters his views contrasted with those of the slavophils and of Herzen.

Černyševskii's account of the transition from the primitive communism of the mir to the communism of the future society resembles that given by Herzen. Society, like the individual can overleap one or several stages of development, evolution being thus accelerated. Černyševskii appeals to a general law of evolution, in accordance with which the terminal stage is a return to the initial stage. He compares the primitive rope bridge with the modern suspension bridge. The latter is constructed upon the same principle as the former and is yet entirely different; similar will it be with the communism of the future, Russia need not develop "organically," need