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Under the auspices of the History Club, Professor Paul Milyoukov, the Russian historian, yesterday afternoon delivered and interesting address in Sanders Theatre, on "The Origins of Russian Socialism." President Eliot, in introducing the speaker, made brief mention of Professor Milyoukov's personal experiences, and spoke of the fortunate opportunity given to hearing this subject directly from a man who had suffered so much for his convictions.
In dealing with the first and least violent stage of the Russian socialistic movement, which, of all political events of the nineteenth century is most closely connected with the French Revolution of 1848, Professor Milyoukov explained the theories and influence of three great leaders of that period--Herzen, the powerful writer and deep thinker, his impulsive friend Bakoonin, and the novelist Tourguenev. Herzen, an aristocrat by birth, but later a "repentant nobleman," ashamed of his own high position, maintained the attitude of the early nihilists. He sympathized with those independents who could not take for their own the worn out moralities, laws, customs and traditions of a long-established society. In his positive belief he made three demands; freedom of individuals from corporal punishment, freedom of peasants from servitude, and freedom of the press from censorship.
Tourguenev's ideas were a little more radical, and he expressed them more openly, when, in speaking of one of his greatest novels, he said that it indicated the struggle between tame, well-fostered, domestic animals, and the gray, half-starved wolves of the country. He referred to the struggle of democracy and aristocracy.
This attitude, which is a step in advance of that set forth by Herzen, was the ground from which Bakoonin's theories started. Bakoonin formed a most important link between the merely intellectual movement of the '40's and the revolutionary period of the '60's; he transmitted the legacy of Herzen's comparatively anarchistic socialism to the first Russian outbreaks in later years. There now arose a most important question--was the mere emancipation of the poorer classes to act as a stepping-stone to the realization of the most radical socialistic aspirations of these people? The discussion of this question brings us to an era in which the struggle is still undecided
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