Forgotten Liberals

...They were the "fathers" of Tur-genev's novel, Fathers and Sons...

...There is no finer tribute to a great teacher than the scholarly achievements of his former students...

...It would be invidious to pick out particular essays for praise when the whole book commands the attention of every student of Russian history...

...A good example of how an early Russian moderate liberal (who later shifted to moderate conservatism) felt and reacted during a "grand tour" of Europe is furnished by the abridged version of the letters of N. M. Karamzin.* He moved about from country to country, talking with scholars and scientists, and setting down impressions as they appeared to him in 1789-90...

...Actually, liberal trends existed even under the iron despotism of Nicholas I and are reflected in the writings of men like Stankevich and Granovsky and very strongly in some of the novels of Turgenev...

...By the end of the 19th century, the groups which supplied recruits for liberalism had grown considerably...

...But it was their fate, and Russia's tragedy, to be ground between the two millstones of a brutal autocracy and a still more brutal, because more fanatical, revolutionary dictatorship...

...The early Russian liberals came mainly" from the country gentry...

...Many liberals found a field of action in the zemstvos, the organs of provincial and local self-government set up by Alexander II in 1864...

...But one which no one should skip is Philip Mosely's admirable sketch of the life and career of the man to whom the whole symposium is dedicated—Michael Karpovich...

...Later to be official historian of Russia by appointment of Tsar Alexander I, Karamzin in his letters gives the impression of being an attractive young man...

...but with an idealistic sense of obligation to serve the people...

...He makes the very useful point that Tsarism, although capriciously tyrannical, was not totalitarian and therefore failed to force conformity on all public organizations, newspapers, magazines, etc...

...The country around Geneva is beautiful, the city fine...

...Russia had made considerable economic and educational progress...

...Its eclipse under the Soviet regime has conveyed the impression that no such movement ever existed, that there was only a duel to the death between a reactionary autocracy and extreme revolutionaries...

...He was greatly influenced by the cult of virtue and simplicity which was fashionable at the time and received something of a shock from the French Revolution and the chain of wars which it unleashed...

...A look at the serious, humane, intelligent faces of the leaders of Russian liberalism—men like Milyukov, Prokopovich, Struve, Rodichev, Petrunkevich and the brothers Dol-gorukov—is enough to make one regret that they did not take over leadership when the autocracy collapsed...

...With my letters of introduction, I have an entry into the best homes...

...The "sons" were of a different type, socially and psychologically—rougher in manner, more sweeping in their ideas of reform, dogmatic and self-assured...

...These men would have been morally incapable of operating a Cheka, setting up a huge slave-labor system, or "liquidating" whole classes...

...What more is there to ask for...

...Switzerland seems to have had a special appeal for him: "There is probably no other city in Europe where you will find such sound morals and such piety as in Zurich...

...The way of life of the Genevese is easy and agreeable...

...He was under the spell of Rousseau and made a special pilgrimage to the scenes in Heloise which are laid on Lake Geneva...

...In the new liberal movement, which found expression in the Union of Liberation and later in the Kadet party, one found representatives of the country gentry and even the nobility, together with lawyers, doctors, professors and journalists...

...A new study1 by Russian-horn and -educated George Fischer, a professor at Bran-deis University, fills the gap in awareness of Russian liberalism and traces the movement through three phases of evolution...

...This is the tribute which Professor Michael Karpovich, who retired from the Harvard faculty last year with an almost legendary reputation for lucid and inspiring lectures on Russian history and literature, has received in Russian Thought and Politics,3 Here a score of Karpovich's former students, many of them now outstanding scholars in their own right, contribute essays on a wide variety of Russian themes, from Karamzin's conception of the nature of Russian autocracy to the methods by which the Bolsheviks, through violence and fraud, deprived the Socialist Revolutionaries of their grip on the loyalty of the peasants...

...Fischer gives an accurate picture, supported by documents and personal reminiscences, of what these men stood for and aimed at, of their reaction—sometimes patriotic, sometimes defeatist—to the Russo-Japanese War, and of their part in the early phases of the 1905 Revolution...