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THE SPIRIT OF RUSSIA

energy. The most emphatic and effective revolutionary propaganda was carried on in the towns and above all in the capital; this, too, was a necessary outcome of the revolutionary aim, which was to abolish the monarchy, to get rid of the dynasty, and to do away with the highest organs of the government.

In proportion as the urban proletariat became recognised as a distinct class, did the Marxist ideas of the class struggle and of economic determinism secure general recognition.

From this point of view, we recognise that terrorism was a guerilla warfare of intelligentsia versus absolutism. The struggle has been frequently represented as nothing more than a students' movement, but the view is erroneous. Apart from the consideration that the total number of students was at this time inconsiderable, among students revolutionists were certainly in the minority. Students of both sexes participated in propaganda by deed and functioned also as teachers and agitators; but by the end of the seventies the majority of terrorists were members of the working class, and even in the leadership of the movement these latter competed with the intellectuals.

Precise statistics of the terrorist movement are still lacking, and we do not even know how many revolutionary groups existed. In a retently published history of the Narodnaja Volja it is asserted that the members were few in number and that the executive committee was quite a small body. This may be true, but it does not lessen the significance of the radical and terrorist movement. The government and the police considered the Narodnaja Volja the chief enemy, and fought the organisation with all the means at their disposal. There can be no doubt that the terrorist revolution was rendered possible solely by the understanding, sympathy, and support it secured among wide liberal strata of the urban population and the intelligentsia, and even among the bureaucracy.

In Russia at that epoch there were few indications of a spontaneous folk-movement in the social direction. The most distinctive manifestation of a social movement occurred in the year 1881, after the death of Alexander II, in the form of the vigorous antisemitic movement which took place in the south and in the west. At any rate, by adherents both of the Narodnaja Volja and of the Černyi Pereděl, the pogroms were regarded as the beginnings of a movement which, while