or in the foreign lands to which they had fled for refuge. I must confess that it arouses in me a strange emotion to read the poems or the political writings of the decabrists who paid for their bold views on the scaffold (Rylěev, Pestel, etc.); and still more remarkable is the impression aroused by the works of those who were personally engaged in the work of political assassination, or who furnished the leading inspiration to some terrorist outrage involving the deaths of large numbers of persons.
In 1889, Stepniak's novel The Career of a Nihilist was published. In 1878, the author had in the open street stabbed General Mezencev, chief of the secret police, and Stepniak's experiences in the service of the revolutionary secret society formed the topic of the novel, which Georg Brandes and Prince Kropotkin commended to the European public. The work affords considerable insight into the psychology and ethics of the nihilist revolutionary.
From the first, the revolution, whether theoretical or political, had no base of support among the masses, for these or at any rate the peasants, were opposed to it down to a quite recent date. For a long time the Russian revolutionary idea was restricted to a small circle and to isolated individuals so that the revolutionary thinker and the revolutionary propagandist lived a life apart. The revolutionary circle had a world of its own, and formed a state within the state.
Moreover, the revolutionaries were isolated through the inadequate development of means of communication in a country of vast extent, and the movement therefore lacked living continuity, so that in one town after another the work was ever being begun anew by some little circle. Hence the Russian terrorist revolution was episodic and desultory, the work of unknown leaders, many of whom resided in Europe. The movement, it is true, was diffused throughout Russia, but there was no direct communication between the different circles and individualities; the nihilists acted independently, though, being exposed to the same influences, they worked everywhere much in the same manner. There thus came into existence a kind of muted harmony.
The Russian revolution, like Russian revolutionary literature, was at the outset the work of persons of aristocratic birth, and this circumstance influenced its character. For in the first place the aristocrat, though theoretically a socialist
