Our imperial system and our gentry have no roots and they know it. They had prepared to take the last rites in 1862 and came to life only when the Petersburg fire, Katkov's slander, and the Polish uprising came to their rescue. The people love the tsar as the representative of defense and justice (a common factor in all undeveloped peoples); they do not love the emperor. The tsar for them is an ideal, and the emperor is the antichrist. Imperial power is maintained by the military and by the bureaucracy, i.e., by machines. The military will beat anyone on orders, without distinction, and the bureaucracy will copy out and fulfill the will of the leadership without argument. That kind of government cannot be felled with an axe, but at the first spring warmth it will melt into the life of the people and drown in it.
We were firmly convinced of the latter. The landowning class was being wiped out before our eyes, and, like vanishing pictures, was turning pale and being transformed into various pale deformities. The Russian imperial system has external political goals of self-preservation and it has tremendous power, but it has no principles; the same can be said of the environment surrounding it, and this has been the case since Peter himself. Between the day Nicholas died and his funeral, the court and the general staff were able to turn themselves into liberals "superficially, hypocritically." But who said that before this they were deep and sincere absolutists?
The Russian government was on the path to some kind of transformation, but, having taken fright, sharply turned off it. Our primary mistake was a mistake in timing, and, more than that, in imagining all the conditions and forces we forgot one of the most powerful forces—the force of stupidity. The old ways used it to gain strength.
The emancipation of the serfs, the grumbling of the landowners, the mood of society, of journalism, and of certain government circles... all of this inexorably led to the first step, i.e., the creation of a duma or an assembly. The experiences of the Moscow and Petersburg nobility obviously demonstrate this, but, as befits landowners, they were too late. When they raised their voices, the sovereign had been crowned a second time in all his autocracy by European threats and popular ovations.
We did not foresee the power of popular reaction. The animated spirit of 1612 and 1812 was only raised at a time of genuine danger to the fatherland; there was none this time but there was a desire for some kind of demonstration, and the mute made use of their tongues.
We looked upon the reaction as a day's misfortune and proceeded foremost with an analysis and consideration of the economic and administrative coup in the very spirit and direction of Russian socialism.
Keeping in the forefront the right to land, we advocated the development of elected self-government from the village to district, from the district to the region, and from the region to the province—we went no further, and did not need to—on the one hand, we pointed to the disgrace of personal arbitrariness, of the military-bureaucratic governance of the country, the excesses of the seraglio, and landowner brutality; on the other hand, we pointed to the assembly that could be seen in the distance, which would be chosen by a free alliance of provinces to discuss the land question.
One of the most difficult questions—not by its content but by the incorrigibility of prejudices defending the opposing view—was the question of "communal ownership of land."
[. . .] By Russian socialism we mean socialism that proceeds from the land and from the peasant way of life, from the factual allotment and existing repartition of fields, from communal possession and communal gov- ernance—and we advance together with the workers' cooperatives toward that economic justice for which socialism strives in general and which is affirmed by science.
This title is all the more necessary because, alongside our doctrine, a purely Western socialist doctrine has developed—with great talent and understanding—namely in Petersburg. This division is completely natural, stemming from the concept itself, and constitutes no kind of antagonism. We wound up complementing each other.
The first representatives of social ideas in Petersburg were the Petra- shevtsy. They were even tried as "Fourierists." Behind them stood the strong personality of Chernyshevsky. He did not belong to any one social doctrine, but offered a profound social idea and a deep criticism of the contemporary order. Standing alone, a head taller than all the others, amidst the ferment in Petersburg over issues and forces, amidst the chronic vices and the incipient gnawing of conscience, amidst the youthful wish to live differently and to break loose from the usual filth and untruth, Chernyshevsky decided to grab the helm and try to point out to those who were thirsting and striving what they should do. [. . .]
Chernyshevsky's propaganda was an answer to current suffering, a word of comfort and hope to those who were perishing in the harsh grip of life. It showed them a way out. It set a tone for literature and drew a line between the actual young Russia and the one that pretended to be that Russia, a bit liberal, while still slightly bureaucratic and serf-owning. Its ideals lay in joint labor, in the organization of workshops, and not in an empty hall in which the Sobakeviches and Nozdrevs18 would play at being "bourgeois gentry" and landowners in opposition.
The tremendous success of the social doctrine among the younger generation, and the school that it stimulated, led not only to literary echoes and outlets, but the beginnings of practical applications with historical significance. The emancipation of the serfs with an acknowledgment of their right to land, with the preservation of the commune and the conversion to socialism by young and active minds which had not yet been corrupted by life nor confused by doctrinaire thought, served as irrefutable proof of the benefits of our continual faith in the character of Russian development.
At the same time we followed step by step the debates inside the editorial commission and the introduction of the Statutes of February i9th; we examined the statutes themselves, as we sought to introduce to the rural revolution institutions closest to our views, while in Petersburg, Moscow, and even the provinces, phalanxes of young people were preaching in word and deed the general theory of socialism, of which the rural question presented itself as a particular case. [. . .]
The serf reform, with all its contradictions and incompleteness, immediately led to its own economic, administrative, and judicial consequences, with the introduction of the zemstvo19 institutions, the new court system, etc. These were syllogisms, which were impossible to avoid.
All the reforms, beginning with emancipation, were not only incomplete but were deliberately distorted. In not one of them could be found that breadth and candor, that passion for destruction and creation with which great men and great revolutions have done their breaking down and building up; in all of them the worthlessness and bankruptcy of the old government of edicts and arbitrary rule could be recognized; but all of them contained an embryo, whose development was delayed, and perhaps deformed, but which was alive. [. . .]
Until the year i863 we were still trying, despite the muddy spring roads at home, to follow the unwieldy old government carriage, and the louder we rang the bell, the more it lost its way. If the coachmen did not listen, the crowd surrounding them listened and, heaping abuse on us, did a portion of what we had been talking about. Then they went deaf as well. Since then energetic speech has had to yield for a time to cries of denunciation and indignation, which provoked a society wallowing in blood and filth, along with a shallow, heartless, and faithless government.