wrote the Slavophile Khomyakov, welcoming the humiliation of his country in the Crimean War as a just punishment for its evils and a hope of its repentance and purification. In this he became the prototype of that apparent contradiction in terms, patriotic defeatism, which thenceforth was to characterize a good part of the intelligentsia.

When their efforts to rouse the people remained unanswered and their first attempts to shake the autocracy ended in deeper reaction, they came to be tortured by a sense of their own powerlessness, or they became more reckless in the scope of their dreams. Thought and feeling accumulated potential like a dammed-up stream. Over and over again they solved in agonizing theory the problems they were forbidden to touch in practice. They constructed grand systems, vast as Russia, embracing the whole of humanity. Their awareness of Russia's backwardness and lack of liberty mingled with their sense of Russia's grandeur, expansive force and imperial strength. That Slavic messianism which, after the fall of the Eternal City on the Tiber and the Eternal City on the Bosphorus, had seen in Moscow a "Third and Last Rome," now took on a new, radical form. Even as they envied Western Europe they rejected it. The gospel that was destined to save and transform Russia would exalt that which made backward Russia different from and superior to the West; would make Russia capable of saving Europe from the evil which her critics saw in her; would give Russia the leading role in the salvation and transformation of the world.

Onward to the Next!