community, the social and democratic Russian republic would take the form of a federative union of the village communities.
Federation was to be free, and therefore the "brother" Poles and Lithuanians could form independent states should they be unwilling to enter the Russian federation.
Herzen was wrong in describing the proclamation as unrussian. Not merely may we consider Sten'ka Razin and Pugačev to have been its forerunners, but it likewise embodies the ideas of Pestel, from whom the authors learned, as well as from Černyševskii and Bakunin.
The influence of the French socialists is likewise discernible, and perhaps also that of Marx.
The proclamation is unquestionably obscure in point of political outlook, as regards ways and means; this becomes obvious in its appeal to the people, to the "millions" of the old believers, to the army and its officers, to the Poles and the peasants, and above all to young men ("our main hope").
Analogous in its outlook was the proclamation To the Younger Generation, which has hitherto been ascribed to Mihailov, who was sentenced on this account and sent to Siberia. In actual fact the proclamation was written by Šelgunov.[1]
The proclamation represents the younger members "of all classes" as successors of the decabrists, animadverts against the pitiful economists "of the German text books" and against narrow-minded individualism, and repudiates the attempt to make an England out of Russia. In support of Herzen's and Černyševskii's doctrine that Russia could skip certain stages of European development, we read: "Who can maintain that we must necessarily walk in the footsteps of Europe, in the footsteps of a Saxony, an England, or a France? The Gneists, Bastiats, Mohls, Raus, and Roschers, serve up to us masses of excrement, desiring to make the refuse of dead centuries into laws for the future. Such laws may do for them, but we shall find another law for ourselves. It is not merely that we can find something new, but it is essential that we do so. Our life is guided by principles utterly unknown to Europeans." Quite after the manner of Čaadaev and Herzen, the Russians
- ↑ In the year 1873, Dostoevskii referred to a proclamation, To the Younger Generation, which he had shown to Černyševskii, and concerning which Černyševskii had expressed an adverse opinion. If Dostoevskii's statement that this proclamation was quite short is accurate, it cannot have been the one usually attributed to Mihailov.
