Russian anarchism, taking the form of astatism and apolitism, is the revolutionary struggle against absolutism.
Tsarist absolutism works injury to the state. The political refugee is in practice forced to adopt an astatist outlook, for the foreign state in which he dwells, even though it grants him asylum, remains foreign, and is not felt by him to be his state and recognised as such. Absolutism enforces apolitism upon the subject who is granted no rights, upon the man for whom public activity and initiative are rendered impossible. Moreover, in rural districts and in small provincial towns the Russian state is almost out of sight. Political life is concentrated in large towns and in western Russia. In eastern Russia, and still more in Asiatic Russia, the state seems to be non-existent, and in practice an official anarchism prevails, which is explicable by the deficiency in state servants and soldiers. The main forces of the state are concentrated in western Russia. Again, the Russian state differs from the western state because the former in many places does not possess the requisite number of officials.
Finally, the revolutionary lives in his own narrow circle, which becomes for him a model of the social institutions of the future. Owing to the inadequacy of communications in Russia, there is forced upon the individual autonomous organisations a kind of free federation by tacit consent.
These concrete conditions largely explain why, as has been shown, the Russian lamb has grown to become a tiger.
The inadequacy of the Russian state church has given rise to the so-called ethical anarchism, which is in fact anti-ecclesiastical anarchism. Here, of course, we think of Tolstoi.
But the opponents of religion in general, the atheists, those who contrast most strongly with the ethical anarchists, must likewise be classed as anarchists in so far as for them atheism is the metaphysical basis of anarchism.
Anarchism has recently come into contact with certain religious and above all mystical currents, so that there now exists a "mystical anarchism."[1]
- ↑ Some reference must be made to attempts at the practical realisation of religious and ethical anarchism. There have been many colonies established by the adherents of Tolstoi, but they have been shortlived. An interesting attempt of the kind was one initiated in 1836 by certain intellectuals, who founded the colony of Krinica on the Black Sea. The founders wished to allow individuality to develope without any coercion either religious or political,
