[Footnote 225:  See Wallace’s Russia, 2 vols.; Russia under the Tzars, by “Stepniak,” vol. ii. chap. xxix.; also two lectures on Russian affairs by Prof.  Vinogradoff, in Lectures on the History of the Nineteenth Century (Camb. 1902).]

At that time, too, a band of writers, of whom the novelist Turgenieff is the best known, were extolling the triumphs of scientific research and the benefits of Western democracy.  He it was who adapted to scientific or ethical use the word “Nihilism” (already in use in France to designate Prudhon’s theories), so as to represent the revolt of the individual against the religious creed and patriarchal customs of old Russia.  “The fundamental principle of Nihilism,” says “Stepniak,” “was absolute individualism.  It was the negation, in the name of individual liberty, of all the obligations imposed upon the individual by society, by family life, and by religion[226].”

[Footnote 226:  Underground Russia, by “Stepniak,” Introduction, p. 4.  Or, as Turgenieff phrased it in one of his novels:  “a Nihilist is a man who submits to no authority, who accepts not a single principle upon faith merely, however high such a principle may stand in the eyes of men.”  In short, a Nihilist was an extreme individualist and rationalist.]

For a time these disciples of Darwin and Herbert Spencer were satisfied with academic protests against autocracy; but the uselessness of such methods soon became manifest; the influence of professors and philosophic Epicureans could never permeate the masses of Russia and stir them to their dull depths.  What “the intellectuals” needed was a creed which would appeal to the many.

This they gained mainly from Bakunin.  He had pointed the way to what seemed a practical policy, the ownership of the soil of Russia by the Mirs, the communes of her myriad villages.  As to methods, he advocated a propaganda of violence.  “Go among the people,” he said, and convert them to your aims.  The example of the Paris Communists in 1871 enforced his pleas; and in the subsequent years thousands of students, many of them of the highest families, quietly left their homes, donned the peasants’ garb, smirched their faces, tarred their hands, and went into the villages or the factories in the hope of stirring up the thick sedimentary deposit of the Russian system[227].  In many cases their utmost efforts ended in failure, the tragi-comedy of which is finely set forth in Turgenieff’s Virgin Soil.  Still more frequently their goal proved to be—­Siberia.  But these young men and women did not toil for nought.  Their efforts hastened the absorption of philosophic Nihilism in the creed of Prudhon and Bakunin.  The Nihilist of Turgenieff’s day had been a hedonist of the clubs, or a harmless weaver of scientific Utopias; the Nihilist of the new age was that most dangerous of men, a desperado girt with a fighting creed.

[Footnote 227:  Russia in Revolution, by G.H.  Perriss, pp. 204-206, 210-214; Arnaudo, I Nihilismo (Turin, 1879).  See, too, the chapters added by Sir D.M.  Wallace to the new edition of his work Russia (1905).]