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The New Europe]
[27 December 1917

FORERUNNERS OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

but absolutely nothing is known of the historical development of Socialism in Russia or of the Social Revolutionary movement—in other words, of the currents and tendencies which produced the fall of Tsarism last March and all that has followed from it.

In these circumstances it is a positive disaster that one of the great books of the century—Professor Masaryk’s “Russia and Europe” should be virtually inaccessible to this country, and, what is even worse, available as a vade mecum to the all-too-well-informed directors of German policy. With a profound historical and philosophical mastery of his subject and with an astonishing wealth of detail, the great Slav scholar analyses the many obscure currents of Russian thought which are now reacting upon Europe no less surely than the French Encyclopædia in the late eighteenth century. In accordance with a long overdue promise we propose in this and subsequent numbers to extract some of the most notable and illuminating passages of his book.]

(I) BAKUNIN

Bakunin[1] can only be understood as the product and the victim of Russian conditions under Nicholas I. Brought up from childhood in the memories of the Decabrists, he found his way to Europe, drank very deep of Hegel’s philosophy, and was driven towards revolution by the Hegelian Left and Proudhon. The period before 1848 and the year 1848 itself provided him with all kinds of revolutionary employment, for he thought it would be possible to realise everywhere his ideal of free humanity by taking part in the revolution. His experiences in European and Russian prisons and in Siberia strengthened him in his hatred of the existing order, and he became a revolutionary by profession. The world—in concreto Russia, but Europe also with its civilisation and institutions—roused him to fury: his head was full of revolutionary ideas and plans.

  1. Michael Bakunin, born in 1814 of a wealthy Russian family, educated in Italy (doctorate at Turin); officer, 1833–4; translated Hegel; went in 1840 to Berlin, in contact with the Hegelians; then in Paris with Proudhon and Slav political exiles, but expelled; took part in Revolution of 1848 in Paris, Prague and Dresden; sentenced to death, but sentence commuted; handed over first to Austria, then to Russia; imprisoned in Peter and Paul, 1851–7, sent to Siberia and escaped; helped Polish rising in 1863; founded secret “international brotherhood” in Italy, 1864, and Alliance Internationale de la Démocratie socialiste in Switzerland, 1868; in the Commune at Lyon, 1871. Long feud with Marx ended in his exclusion from the Internationale in 1872; left the Féderation Jurassienne in 1872; died at Bern, 1876. Followers of Marx and Bakunin reached agreement at Gent in 1877.—(Œuvres, 7 vols., Paris, 1907.)

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