To remedy these evils, Count Dimitri Tolstoy, who was regarded as a pillar of Conservatism, was appointed Minister of Public Instruction, with the mission of protecting the young generation against pernicious ideas, and eradicating from the schools, colleges, and universities all revolutionary tendencies. He determined to introduce more discipline into all the educational establishments and to supplant to a certain extent the superficial study of natural science by the thorough study of the classics—that is to say, Latin and Greek. This scheme, which became known before it was actually put into execution, produced a storm of discontent in the young generation. Discipline at that time was regarded as an antiquated and useless remnant of patriarchal tyranny, and young men who were impatient to take part in social reorganisation resented being treated as naughty schoolboys. To them it seemed that the Latin grammar was an ingenious instrument for stultifying youthful intelligence, destroying intellectual development, and checking political progress. Ingenious speculations about the possible organisation of the working classes and grandiose views of the future of humanity are so much more interesting and agreeable than the rules of Latin syntax and the Greek irregular verbs!
Count Tolstoy could congratulate himself on the efficacy of his administration, for from the time of his appointment there was a lull in the political excitement. During three or four years there was only one political trial, and that an insignificant one; whereas there had been twenty between 1861 and 1864, and all more or less important. I am not at all sure, however, that the educational reform which created much momentary irritation and discontent had anything to do with the improvement in the situation. In any case, there were other and more potent causes at work. The excitement was too intense to be long-lived, and the fashionable theories too fanciful to stand the wear and tear of everyday life. They evaporated, therefore, with amazing rapidity when the leaders of the movement had disappeared—Tchernishevski and others by exile, and Dobrolubof and Pissaref by death—and when among the less prominent representatives of the younger generation many succumbed to the sobering influences of time and experience or drifted into lucrative professions. Besides this, the reactionary currents were making themselves felt, especially since the attempt on the life of the Emperor. So long as these had been confined to the official world they had not much affected the literature, except externally through the Press-censure, but when they permeated the reading public their influence was much stronger. Whatever the cause, there is no doubt that, in the last years of the sixties, there was a subsidence of excitement and enthusiasm and the peculiar intellectual phenomenon which had been nicknamed Nihilism was supposed to be a thing of the past. In reality the movement of which Nihilism was a prominent manifestation had merely lost something of its academic character and was entering on a new stage of development.
CHAPTER XXXV
SOCIALIST PROPAGANDA, REVOLUTIONARY AGITATION, AND TERRORISM
Closer Relations with Western Socialism—Attempts to Influence the Masses—Bakunin and Lavroff—"Going in among the People"—The Missionaries of Revolutionary Socialism—Distinction between Propaganda and Agitation—Revolutionary Pamphlets for the Common People—Aims and Motives of the Propagandists—Failure of Propaganda—Energetic Repression—Fruitless Attempts at Agitation—Proposal to Combine with Liberals—Genesis of Terrorism—My Personal Relations with the Revolutionists—Shadowers and Shadowed—A Series of Terrorist Crimes—A Revolutionist Congress—Unsuccessful Attempts to Assassinate the Tsar—Ineffectual Attempt at Conciliation by Loris Melikof—Assassination of Alexander II.—The Executive Committee Shows Itself Unpractical—Widespread Indignation and Severe Repression—Temporary Collapse of the Revolutionary Movement—A New Revolutionary Movement in Sight.
Count Tolstoy's educational reform had one effect which was not anticipated: it brought the revolutionists into closer contact with Western Socialism. Many students, finding their position in Russia uncomfortable, determined to go abroad and continue their studies in foreign universities, where they would be free from the inconveniences of police supervision and Press-censure. Those of the female sex had an additional motive to emigrate, because they could not complete their studies in Russia, but they had more difficulty in carrying out their intention, because parents naturally disliked the idea of their daughters going abroad to lead a Bohemian life, and they very often obstinately refused to give their consent. In such cases the persistent daughter found herself in a dilemma. Though she might run away from her family and possibly earn her own living, she could not cross the frontier without a passport, and without the parental sanction a passport could not be obtained. Of course she might marry and get the consent of her husband, but most of the young ladies objected to the trammels of matrimony. Occasionally the problem was solved by means of a fictitious marriage, and when a young man could not be found to co-operate voluntarily in the arrangement, the Terrorist methods, which the revolutionists adopted a few years later for other purposes, might be employed. I have heard of at least one case in which an ardent female devotee of medical science threatened to shoot a student who was going abroad if he did not submit to the matrimonial ceremony and allow her to accompany him to the frontier as his official wife!
Strange as this story may seem, it contains nothing inherently improbable. At that time the energetic young ladies of the Nihilist school were not to be diverted from their purpose by trifling obstacles. We shall meet some of them hereafter, displaying great courage and tenacity in revolutionary activity. One of them, for example, attempted to murder the Prefect of St. Petersburg; and another, a young person of considerable refinement and great personal charm, gave the signal for the assassination of Alexander II. and expiated her crime on the scaffold without the least sign of repentance.
Most of the studious emigres of both sexes went to Zurich, where female students were admitted to the medical classes. Here they made the acquaintance of noted Socialists from various countries who had settled in Switzerland, and being in search of panaceas for social regeneration, they naturally fell under their influence, at the same time they read with avidity the works of Proudhon, Lassalle, Buchner, Marx, Flerovski, Pfeiffer, and other writers of "advanced opinions."
Among the apostles of socialism living at that time in Switzerland they found a sympathetic fellow-countryman in the famous Anarchist, Bakunin, who had succeeded in escaping from Siberia. His ideal was the immediate overthrow of all existing Governments, the destruction of all administrative organisation, the abolition of all bourgeois institutions, and the establishment of an entirely new order of things on the basis of a free federation of productive Communes, in which all the land should be distributed among those capable of tilling it and the instruments of production confided to co-operative associations. Efforts to obtain mere political reforms, even of the most radical type, were regarded by him with contempt as miserable palliatives, which could be of no real, permanent benefit to the masses, and might be positively injurious by prolonging the present era of bourgeois domination.