62730627-Fire-in-the-Minds-of-Men-By-James-H-Billington by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: deu
Format: epub
Published: 2011-06-27T05:34:06+00:00

The Bomb: Russian Violence

gentsia, populism, terrorism, and anarchism. Each word had been used

before elsewhere, but acquired through Russian usage both a new

meaning and a new world-wide currency. Taken together the five terms

suggest uncompromising, total opposition to the status quo. They may

be said to have replaced in practice ( even as they pretended to serve

in theory) the revolutionary idea of the earlier, Francocentric period :

liberty, equality, and fraternity.

The Slogans of the Sixties

Nihilism

Youth movements begin with a "revolution of rising expectation" during an age of political reform. The original revolutionary student movement had arisen in Germany a half century earlier out of hopes raised by the reforms in Prussia. American student revolts a century later

were to grow out of the renewed sense of political possibility generated

by the Kennedy era and the civil-rights movement. In like manner,

exaggerated youthful expectations of change under Alexander II ledperhaps inevitably-to disillusionment deepening into despair once his reforms came to be seen as partial and incomplete.

The sense of being a unique generation usually feeds not only on

exaggerated expectations of reform, but also on identification with a

political leader who seems to represent a charismatic agent of change.

Perhaps the first self-conscious student generation in revolt were the

Sturm und Drang poets and pamphleteers of the 1 770s in Germany.

Their glorification of the will in opposition to convention was in many

ways subtly shaped by the model of Frederick the Great, who defied

both Prussian tradition and the European balance of power. The original revolutionaries of the early nineteenth century were young officers and students whose imagination had been aroused by Napoleon; and he

continued to inspire romantic rebels throughout the century.

Mazzini's Young Italy and Young Europe introduced in the early 1 83os

the romantic notion that youth as such should rebel against what Fazy

called "gerontocracy." Once again, hopes were raised ( by the Revolution of I 830 ) only to be dashed by the failure of revolution to spread, and by the subsequent return in Belgium and France of "revolutionary" new monarchs to conservative ways. The vitalistic idea that the young generation itself should complete an artificially arrested reform

program kept revolutionary enthusiasm alive among Poles and Italians

during the "springtime of nations" leading up to 1 848.

But the assertion of generational identity among young Russians in

the 1 86os had a new ideological quality.9 They had no desire to complete the program of concrete reforms begun by Alexander II. They 390

THE RisE OF THE SociAL REvoLUTIONARIES

rejected the entire traditional society- and indeed all else s ave their

own newly discovered evangelical faith in scientific method. Total negation was born in part out of disgust with the incompetence of old Russia that had led to humiliating defeat during the Crimean War, and

in part out of long-repressed resentment against the pretension and

antirationalism of Romanov Russia. The uniqueness of Russia had been

asserted with extravagant pride in the doctrine of official n ationality

in 1 833 and identified with social conservatism as Russia crushed

revolutions in Poland of 1 83 1 and in Hungary of 1 849. After defeat in

the Crimea, young people wanted

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