Make way for science! Caprice and charity disappear. Make way for justice!" Kropotkin teaches, with Nietzsche, that the strong individual must win for himself the right to force. In his strength, he may kill the tyrant as he may kill a viper.
"A life for a life."
These incentives of the Russian revolution must be sensed behind the revolutionary deeds if we wish to understand the true nature of the movement. The revolutionary negation of Russia was the offspring of mingled love and loathing.
The loathing often made the Russian revolutionaries blind, blinder than was consistent with the achievement of the revolutionary aim.
The traits that have been previously described as typical of the realists, the roughness of their forms of social intercourse, their laconic speech, their contempt for everything that was not relevant to the ends immediately in view, the cynicism analysed by Pisarev—all these qualities were still more fully developed in terrorist circles. It was natural, for the terrorists were men consecrated to death.
Whatever the faults of the Russian revolutionists and terrorists, it is impossible, in a final survey, to judge them unfavourably. Their ardent devotion to intellectual and political freedom, their self-sacrificing enthusiasm for the folk, their reckless disregard of their personal interests and of their own lives, their fidelity towards their comrades—these are brilliant characteristics, are qualities of the utmost value, which cannot fail to arouse respect and sympathy for individual revolutionists and for the Russian people from which they sprang.[1]
- ↑ In 1894, when two calumniatory articles had been published by the New Review (London) attempting to discredit in the eyes of Europe the whole Russian revolutionary movement, Kennan, in Free Russia, found apt words for the defence: "In the course of my late visit to Russia and Siberia I made the personal acquaintance of more than five hundred men and women who were regarded by the Russian secret police as 'Nihilists.' Some were still at liberty in European Russia, some were in exile in Siberia, and some were in penal servitude at the mines of Kara. Among them all, I did not find a single human being who could be called, by any stretch or licence of language, an Anarchist, nor did I find a single human being who would have approved—still less encouraged—such crimes as those recently committed in Paris and Barcelona. Most of the 'Nihilists' whom I met in Siberia were simply moderate Liberals, and even the members of the extreme and radical fraction of the revolutionary party, known as the 'Terrorists,' declared to me, again and again, as they had already declared to Alexander III in their famous letter of March 10, 1881, that they were fighting merely for a free repre-
