p As early as the beginning of the fifties A.I. Herzen, in proving the inevitability of the socialist revolution in the West, set rising Russian democracy the

p Ever-alarming and new question

p which since then

p So many restless heads has wearied...
So many sufferings has brought

p and which provided the ocassion, incidentally, for our " controversy with the Narodnaya Volya party" too.

p "Must Russia pass through all the phases of European development, or will her life proceed according to other laws? "  [129•**  he asks in his "Letters to Linton".^^93^^

p "I absolutely deny the necessity for these repetitions,” the famous writer hastens to answer. "We may have to pass through the difficult and painful trials of the historical development of our predecessors, but in the same way as the embryo passes through all the lower degrees of zoological existence before birth. The finished labour and the result obtained become the general possession of all who understand—such is the mutual guarantee of progress, the birthright of mankind.... Every school-child must himself find the solution of Euclid’s theorems, but what a difference there is between the work of Euclid, who discovered them, and the work of the pupil of today! " ... "Russia has been through her embryo-genesis in the European class. The nobility and the government in our country represent the European state in the Slav state. We have been through all the phases of political education, from German constitutionalism and English bureaucratic monarchy to the worship of the year 130 1793.... The Russian people need not begin that hard work again. Why should they shed their blood to achieve those semi-solutions that we have already reached and whose only importance was that through them we arrived at other questions, at new strivings? We went through that work for the people—we have paid for it with the gallows, casemates and banishment, with the ruin and the intolerable life which we are living!

p The connecting link, the bridge by which the Russian people can reach socialism, Herzen saw, of course, in the village commune and the peculiarities of way of life that go with it. "Strictly speaking, the Russian people began to be acknowledged,” he says, "only after the 1830 Revolution. People saw with astonishment that the Russians, though indifferent, incapable of tackling any political questions, were nearer to the new social system by their way of life than all the European peoples....” "To retain the village commune and give freedom to the individual, to extend the self-government of the village and volost to the towns and the whole state, maintaining national unity—such is the question of Russia’s future, i.e., the question of the very antinomy whose solution occupies and worries minds in the West."  [130•* 

p It is true that doubts occasionally arose in his mind about the Russian people’s exceptional nearness "to the new social system”. In the same “Letter” he asks Linton: "Perhaps you will reply that in this the Russian people resembles some Asian peoples; perhaps you will draw attention to the rural communes of the Hindus, which have a fair resemblance to ours? " But, without rejecting the Russian people’s unflattering resemblance to "some Asian peoples”, he nevertheless saw what seemed to him very substantial differences between them. "It is not the commune ownership system which keeps the Asian peoples in stagnation, but their exceptional clan spirit, their inability to emerge from patriarchalism, to free themselves from the tribe; we are not in such a position. The Slav peoples ... are endowed with great impressionability, they easily assimilate the languages, morals, customs, art and technique of other peoples. They can acclimatise themselves equally well on the shores of the Arctic and on the Black Sea coast.” This "great impressionability”, enabling the Slavs to "emerge from patriarchalism, to free themselves from the tribe”, solved the whole question, Herzen thinks. His authority was so great, and the shortened road to socialism which he suggested was so tempting that the Russian intelligentsia in the early sixties was little inclined to be sceptical of his suggested solution of the "social antinomy”, and apparently 131 gave no thought at all to the question of just what places that historical short cut lay through and who would lead the Russian people—"indifferent, incapable of tackling any political questions"—along it. The important thing for the intelligentsia was first of all to find some philosophical sanction for their radical strivings, and they were satisfied for a start with the abstract consideration that no philosophy in the world could force them to be reconciled to bourgeois “semi-solutions”.

But that abstract consideration was naturally not sufficient to outline a practical mode of action or to elaborate any at all suitable methods of fighting their environment. The data for the solution of this new problem had to be sought outside the philosophy of history, even if it were more rigorous and scientific than Herzen’s philosophy. Between its abstract formulae and the concrete requirements of social life there was a gap which could be filled only by a whole series of new and increasingly particular formulae, requiring in turn knowledge of a whole series of increasingly complicated phenomena. By the way, philosophy in this case indirectly rendered Russian thought the service of acquainting it with the dialectical method and teaching it the truth—so often forgotten later on—that in social life "everything flows”, "everything changes”, and that the phenomena of that life can be understood only in motion, in the process of arising, developing and disappearing.