tion to his readers; and yet that is almost exactly what some English and American writers do when they discuss Russian affairs and speak of Russian political offenders generally as nihilists. The novelists Korolénko, Máchtet, and Staniukóvich, the critic Mikháilofski, the political economists Lopátin and Chudnófski, the naturalists Kléments and Mikhaiélis, and scores of other political offenders in Russia, are no more nihilists than McCarthy, Morley, and Gladstone are "Fenians"; and it is simply preposterous to call them by that name. It is time, I think, for writers in western Europe and the United States to make some discrimination between the different classes of political offenders in Russia, and to drop altogether the inaccurate and misleading term nihilist. The latter was only a discrediting nickname in the first place, and it has long since lost what little appropriateness it had as a verbal caricature of a transitory social type. If the reader will examine the documents in Appendix C, he will be satisfied, I think, that the men and women with whom the Russian Government has been waging war for the last twenty years are anything but nihilists. He may disapprove their principles and condemn their methods; but he will see the absurdity of describing them as a "small but fanatical party, who are called nihilists because they will accept absolutely nothing, and see happiness only in the destruction of everything existing."[1]
For the purposes of this chapter I shall divide Russian political exiles into three classes as follows.
1. The Liberals. — In this class are included the cool-headed men of moderate opinions, who believe in the gradual extension of the principles of popular self-government; who favor greater freedom of speech and of the press; who strive to restrict the power of bureaucracy; who deprecate the persecution of religious dissenters and of the Jews;
- ↑ "Modern Russia," by Dr. Julius Eckhardt, p. 166. London, 1870.
