The next movement in the struggle with Russian autocracy which stimulated sociological and political thinking is known as the Decembrist movement, named after the military insurrection which took place in Petrograd during December, 1825, at the time of the death of Emperor Alexander I, and the accession of Nicholas I. With the failure of the insurrection the movement was crushed, its leaders were executed or banished, and throughout the reign of Nicholas, autocracy, more severe perhaps than before in Russia, continued its iron rule.

The adherents of the Decembrists were of the military class, mostly army officers. Many of these became acquainted with French liberal ideas during the Napoleonic wars, and on their return home organized societies for the study of the political and social sciences. In the south, Colonel Pestel was the intellectual leader. He devised a constitution for Russia after the model of the French constitution of 1793. In the north, Colonel Muraviev wrote on the subject, favoring the constitutions of the United States and of Spain. Their theory of society in accordance with the time was the contractual, reflecting the English and French individualistic social philosophies. The greatest intellect of the Decembrists was Nicolai Turgeniev. During his long years of exile he wrote his great threevolume work, "La Russie et les Russes ".1

de liberté, que cette liberté, se voit partout dans la seconde époque de nôtre histoire." Sbornik of the Russian Imperial Historical Society, vol. xv, p. 615.

1" Russia and the Russians," says the author, "consist of three rather different parts: the first part acquaints the reader with my public life; these are my personal reminiscences: the second represents the moral, political and social life of Russia; but in the third part I expound my views of the future of this Empire and also of the institutions and reforms which are necessary." Russia and the Russians, vol. i, p. 14. Russian ed., Moscow, 1907.

His views of society and social organizations were strongly influenced by the ideas of Montesquieu and of Adam Smith. He, however, was not a doctrinaire; his political program was evolutionary and practical. His insight into the future social and political development of Russia was prophetic. It followed almost literally the stages he predicted. First, he claimed, it was necessary to abolish serfdom; he advocated the reform of the institutions of 2 justice, education, and representative local government, and finally a national constitution. He was a champion of private property and emphasized individual rights and freedom of conscience.

The Decembrists created no independent system of their own. They stimulated the intellectual class to study the social sciences as a means towards intelligent understanding of the existing social order. The liberalism advocated by the Decembrists was not confined within the secret societies of the Russian military caste. It seems to have permeated even before their time all the intellectual classes, and the masses, although understanding nothing about constitutional government, were nevertheless conscious of the heavy hand of the oppressors and were willing to join any movement which promised relief. Speransky, one of the more farsighted of Russian statesmen, who was able to read the" signs of the time", already in 1809, foresaw the rising storm which discharged itself in the Decembrists' insurrection. In the introduction to his draft of the "Constitution" which he hoped Alexander I would adopt, he

says:

The Russian state is now passing through the second stage of the feudal system, namely, the epoch of autocracy. Undoubtedly, it is tending directly towards freedom. In part this tendency is even more straightforward in Russia than in other countries. The unfailing signs of it are: (1) That

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people lose all esteem for the former objects of their veneration, e. g., for rank and honor. (2) The action of power is so weakened that no measure of government can be put into operation which calls only for moral, and not also for physical constraint. The true reason of this is that at present public opinion is in entire contradiction to the form of government. (3) No partial reform is possible, because no law can exist, if it may any day be overthrown by a gust of arbitrary power. (4) A general discontent is observed, such as can only be explained by a complete change of ideas, and by a repressed but strong desire for a new order of things. For all these reasons we may surely conclude that the actual form of government does not correspond to the state of popular feeling, and that the time has come to change this form and to found a new order of things.1

Alexander I's plans for giving Russia a constitutional government failed of realization and were entirely abandoned after the Napoleonic wars and the reactionary "Holy Alliance", which aroused the Decembrists to plan the forceful overthrow of the autocracy. Nicholas I, who crushed the insurrection, was determined to eradicate liberalism from the Russian Empire. He established a rigid press censorship, and a brutal iron discipline in the army, which was also extended to all the ranks of bureaucracy, and even imposed upon scholars of the Universities.

The intellectual class, forced out of the political life and hence from practical thinking, took either to literature or to abstract thinking and the spinning of schemes for the liberation and regeneration of the Russian nation. The

1 Quoted by Paul Milyoukov in Russia and Its Crisis, Chicago, 1906, p. 175.

2 This censorship crippled the press to such an extent that during the last ten years of Nicholas I's reign (1845-1854) only six newspapers and nineteen (for the most part special) monthlies were permitted to appear in the whole empire.

center of this new intellectual activity became the University of Moscow. In its academic atmosphere the study of German romantic philosophy was diligently pursued and attempts were made to apply it to Russia's national problems. Since Peter the Great, the Russian autocrats had not suspected that the Russian people had an individuality of their own. There was seemingly no national consciousness, no literature, no philosophy, to reflect the mind of the people. Russian authors wrote in imitation of the West. It was thought bad taste to find subject-matter in the life and work of their own people. This tendency changed after the Napoleonic wars. The emotions aroused by bitter conflict which finally was crowned by success, stimulated and strengthened the national consciousness. Poets and novelists were now proud to be Russians and turned their face from the west, which they had aped so long. Moscow became the center of the newly-born nationalism, to which its university sought to give an adequate philosophy. This new Moscovite philosophy became known as Slavophilism, and although emanating from German romanticism, it strove to become exclusive of everything foreign and to develop only strictly national ideas. This exclusiveness against Western culture was, however, not shared by all the Moscovite philosophers, and gradually another trend of thought appeared which wanted to enrich Russian culture by the achievements of Western Europe. It was called Westernism. Like Slavophilism it was at first non-political but in time it became influential in the affairs of the nation, rivaling the Slavophil Nationalists.

The Slavophils were close students of German idealism, especially of Shelling and of the Hegelian philosophy of history. They accepted Hegel's dialectic method, and his a priori concept of an Absolute Reason, which it was believed

incarnated itself in the life of nations. They naturally could not follow Hegel in his conclusion that the "Weltgeist" by way of Greece and Rome had made its final appearance in the Germanic race and with it is completing the cycle of the mystical metempsychosis of the absolute. For this meant that the numerous Slavic races were left out of the historical process with no other mission than slavishly to imitate their fortunate German neighbors and intellectual masters. We may readily understand that the Moscovite philosophers, who gloried in the consciousness that their race had freed Western Europe from the Napoleonic yoke, were not willing that the Slav should play no rôle in the future development of the races. They, therefore, asserted that the people of the west are in a state of decay, and that the Weltgeist has to make another step to complete the cycle of evolution. They also asserted that the Slavic, preeminently the Russian people, are predestined to be the final bearers of the torch of enlightenment for the human race. One of the Slavophils writes:

Western Europe presents a strange, saddening spectacle. Opinion struggles against opinion, power against power, throne against throne. Science, art and religion, the three motors of social life, have lost their force. We venture to make the assertion which to many at present may seem strange, but which will be in a few years only too evident: Western Europe is on the high road to ruin! We Russians, on the contrary, are young and fresh and have taken no part in the crimes of Europe. We have a great mission to fulfill. Our name is already inscribed on the tablets of victory; the victories of science, art and faith await us on the ruins of tottering Europe! 1

1 Prince Odoevsky. Quoted by Wallace, Russia, new ed., New York, 1912, p. 410.