CHAPTER I

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND


I

For almost a full century Russia has been the theater of a great
revolutionary movement. In the light of Russian history we read with
cynical amusement that in 1848, when all Europe was in a revolutionary
ferment, a German economist confidently predicted that revolutionary
agitation could not live in the peculiar soil of Russian civilization.
August Franz von Haxthausen was in many respects a competent and even a
profound student of Russian politics, but he was wrong in his belief that
the amount of rural communism existing in Russia, particularly the _mir_,
would make it impossible for storms of revolutionary agitation to arise and
stir the national life.

As a matter of historical fact, the ferment of revolution had appeared in
the land of the Czars long before the German economist made his remarkably
ill-judged forecast. At the end of the Napoleonic wars many young officers
of the Russian army returned to their native land full of revolutionary
ideas and ideals acquired in France, Italy, and Germany, and intent upon
action. At first their intention was simply to make an appeal to Alexander
I to grant self-government to Russia, which at one time he had seemed
disposed to do. Soon they found themselves engaged in a secret conspiratory
movement having for its object the overthrow of Czarism. The story of the
failure of these romanticists, the manner in which the abortive attempt at
revolution in December, 1825, was suppressed, and how the leaders were