against which the slavophils were animated by aristocratic prejudices. It was doubtless far from being an ideal institution. Nevertheless the bureaucracy never failed to number among its members intelligent, legally cultured, and liberal officials. To a certain extent the bureaucracy was westernist, in so far as since the days of Peter the administration had sought its models in Europe, and in so far as a university education was essential to the maintenance of the state machine and of the army. If the slavophils opposed bureaucracy, so also did Pobědonosčev. It need hardly be said that the bureaucracy was instrumental in carrying out the reaction dictated by the court and by the decisive powers in the Russian state.
Gradovskii reproaches westernism for its apotheosis of the state machine. The accusation applies mainly to the conservative westernisers, and in especial to the jurists.
The two parties differed in their valuation and explanation of the mir. The westernisers, led by Čičerin, inclined to regard the mir as an institution of comparatively late development, predominantly administrative in function, fiscal in its aims. But some of the westernisers, the more radical among them, while accepting the slavophil theory of origins, gave the mir and the artel a socialistic significance. The mir, they held, preserved Russia from the growth of a proletariat, and represented the communism desiderated by the socialists.[1]
As regards the liberation of the peasantry, the outlook of the westernisers was more energetic because more distinctively political. Stankevič, indeed, held that serfdom ought first to be abolished, and a constitution subsequently
- ↑ In the grey primeval age, says Čičerin, the mir may indeed have been patriarchal, but during historic times it was produced by political organisation from above. The commune was a fiscal organ of the state, each commune, as a whole, guaranteeing the payment of a definite sum in taxes. The state of Kiev originated in the conquests of the Variag Norsemen, the soil becoming, as in the west, the Conqueror's private property. Čičerin's article, Survey of the Historical Development of the Peasant Community in Russia, was published in 1856. As early as 1851, Běljaev, writing in opposition to Čičerin, had endeavoured to adduce historical justification for the slavophil view. Solov'ev the historian, writing in 1856, endeavoured to mediate, and so did Kavelin the jurist, and many others. Čičerin, like the slavophils, agreed with Haxthausen, who held that the mir was a patriarchal expansion of the family. The institution had disappeared before the Muscovite epoch, but had been revived in the eighteenth century under the impulsion of the Petrine poll tax. Haxthausen extolled the mir as a means for preserving Russia from proletarianism.
