ized superstitions of a barbaric age. It was, in
fact, a venerable institution which certain men wished to perpetuate
not so much from self-interest as from a blind veneration for its age
and traditions. To them even the interests of the people were of far
less importance than the maintenance of this anachronism in its
absoluteness. Where the German rulers had the intelligence to divert
opposing forces and even to utilize them to their own benefit, the
Russian autocrats fought them and attempted to suppress them.

The chief of those forces which oppose autocracies are, naturally, the
growing intelligence of the people and the resulting knowledge of
conditions in other countries which they acquire. Realizing this fact,
at least, the Russian rulers were bitterly opposed to popular
education and made every effort to suppress the craving of the common
people for knowledge of any kind.

These facts considered, it is not surprising that the first
revolutionary movements in Russia should have been generated among the
educated classes, even among the aristocracy itself. As far back as a
century ago a revolutionary society was formed among the young army
officers who had participated in the Napoleonic Wars, and who, in
their contact with the French, imbibed some of the latters' democratic
ideas, though they were then fighting them. Failing in their efforts
to impregnate these ideas among the czar and his ruling clique, they
finally, in 1825, resorted to armed violence, with disastrous results.
Nicholas I had just ascended the throne, and with furious energy he
set about stamping out the disaffection which these officers had
spread in his army, and for the time being he was successful.

CHAPTER LXXI

THE RISE OF NIHILISM

The first agitators for democracy among the civil population were the
Nihilists, those long-haired, mysterious individuals whose
bomb-throwing propensities and dark plottings have furnished so many
Western fiction writers with material for romances. The Nihilists, so
well described as a type in Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons," were the
sons and daughters of the landed aristocracy, the provincial gentry,
who went abroad and studied in foreign universities, or, studying at
home, imbibed revolutionary ideas through foreign literature. Coming
together in small groups, they began to formulate ideas of their own
especially adapted to Russian conditions. At first these ideas were of
a nonpolitical character