are described as backward in their development, but are said to be competent for this very reason to undergo a different evolution, non-economic and peculiar to themselves. "Therein lies our salvation," that we are backward in our development. The Russian bourgeoisie, manufactured by Catherine II, is to be swept away, for the bourgeois are nothing but peasants, only peasants without land.
In addition to these proclamations, addresses to the tsar and to the general public were circulated. Such addresses were sometimes issued by radicals, but still more by liberals and especially by some of the liberal zemstvos. For example, the Tver zemstvo issued a document of this character in 1862. Secretly printed addresses were likewise circulated for propaganda purposes. As far as political demands are concerned, these writings ask for nothing more than constitutionalist reforms.[1]
ii. Bakunin is of leading importance in connection with the further development of the revolutionary movement. It is therefore necessary to consider a Bakuninist program, and we will choose for this purpose the program of the year 1868, as formulated in the "Narodnoe Dělo" (The People's Cause) Bakunin's Genevese organ. Herein the liberation of the mind is proclaimed as the basis of social and political freedom; the belief in God and immortality and in "idealism of any kind" is proscribed, the spread of atheism and materialism being announted as definite party aims; religion is said to produce slaves, to paralyse the energies, and to prevent the realisation of natural rights and true happiness.
The economic condition of the people is affirmed to be the "corner stone," and this economic condition is said "to explain political existence"—thus runs a somewhat obscure formulation of economic materialism. In essence the state is based upon conquest, upon the right of inheritance, upon the patria potestas of the husband and father, and upon the religious consecration of all these principles. The necessary outcome of the existence of such a state is the slavery of the working majority and the dominion of the exploiting minority, of the so-called cultured class. For the abolition of these
- ↑ There should be mentioned in this connection the plan for an address to the tsar, written wholly or partly by Černyševskii and outlined in a proclamation issued by the secret society Velikorus' (1861). In 1862, Herzen and Ogarev drafted such a document, which was condemned by Turgenev. It was never circulated.
