Colonel V. A. Pashkov and the Late Nineteenth-Century Protestant Movement in Russia, Jan M. Surer, 1999

Herzen saw "everyone who had studied at Russian universities in the 1850's and 1860's as creators, and members, of a new social stratum of people alienated by their university experience from all the traditional estates, classes, and other socio- legal groups spawned by the Russian autocracy." 22 It was this new class which sought to achieve more fully the social equality gradually becoming a reality around them. 20 Manning, pp. 10; 14. 21 As with the subject of the gentry's economic fate after emancipation, there is disagreement regarding the plight of the peasants. For a brief discussion of this disagreement from a revisionist perspective, see Paul Gregory, "Rents, Land Prices and Economic Theory; The Russian Agrarian Crisis," in L. Edmondson and Peter Waldron, eds.. Economy and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union. 1860-1930 . St. Martin's Press, 1992, pp. 6-23. 22 A. Herzen, quoted in C. Timberlake, "Introduction; Religious Pluralism, the Spread of Revolutionary Ideas, and the Church-State Relationship in Tsarist Russia," in Timberlake, ed., Religious and Secular Forces , p. 19. 21 A morally idealistic sense that a just and beneficial economic order could be devised infused the early. . .. revolutionaries of various hues. This issue had been one of the fruits of the philosophical searchings of the 1830's and 1840's, by means of which young students such as Vissarion Belinsky, Alexander Herzen, and N. G. Chernyshevsky hoped to find a total philosophical system, a total truth, that could resolve both practical and metaphysical questions. Their quest for a new basis for society was also an expression of their dissatisfaction with the autocratic regime of Nicholas I (1825-1855) and with the institution of serfdom. Drawing inspiration from such diverse Western philosophers and socialists as Schelling, Hegel, Saint-Simon, and Fourier, they looked to various versions of socialism as ideal systems of social organization. Furthermore, some of these Western thinkers invested intellectuals with a mission of enlightenment which only enhanced the attraction of their ideas. Alan Kimball sums up well the enduring appeal of these new thought systems: Herzen's savants were inspired more directly by Saint-Simon than were subsequent generations of intelliaenty . But the Saint-Simonian spirit pierced through factions and decades.... The Saint-Simonian spirit inspired wholesome welcome of the modern world, the next stage of human maturity, up from aristocratism and militarism to egalitarian humanitarianism and peaceful productivity. It promised leadership for savants.... Their position resulted from what they did, not from birth or privilege, not from soslovie or chin. The Saint- Simonian spirit thus promised the triumph of savants over aristocrats, bureaucrats, and clergy.... It promised the triumph of the future over the moribund past. Most thrilling, it promised the triumph of creativity and qu