e Slavophils often indulged in
the wildest exaggerations, condemning everything foreign and praising
everything Russian. When in this mood they saw in the history of the
West nothing but violence, slavery, and egotism, and in that of their
own country free-will, liberty, and peace. The fact that Russia did not
possess free political institutions was adduced as a precious fruit of
that spirit of Christian resignation and self-sacrifice which places
the Russian at such an immeasurable height above the proud, selfish
European; and because Russia possessed few of the comforts and
conveniences of common life, the West was accused of having made comfort
its God! We need not, however, dwell on these puerilities, which only
gained for their authors the reputation of being ignorant, narrow-minded
men, imbued with a hatred of enlightenment and desirous of leading their
country back to its primitive barbarism. What the Slavophils really
condemned, at least in their calmer moments, was not European culture,
but the uncritical, indiscriminate adoption of it by their countrymen.
Their tirades against foreign culture must appear excusable when we
remember that many Russians of the upper ranks could speak and write
French more correctly than their native language, and that even the
great national poet Pushkin was not ashamed to confess--what was not
true, and a mere piece of affectation--that "the language of Europe" was
more familiar to him than his mother-tongue!

The Slavophil doctrine, though it made a great noise in the world, never
found many adherents. The society of St. Petersburg regarded it as one
of those harmless provincial eccentricities which are always to be found
in Moscow. In the modern capital, with its foreign name, its streets
and squares on the European model, its palaces and churches in the
Renaissance style, and its passionate love of everything French, any
attempt to resuscitate the old Boyaric times would have been eminently
ridiculous. Indeed, hostility to St. Petersburg and to "the Petersburg
period of Russian history" is one of the characteristic traits of
genuine Slavophilism. In Moscow the doctrine found a more appropriate
home. There the ancient churches, with the tombs of Grand Princes and
holy martyrs, the palace in which the Tsars of Muscovy had lived, the
Kremlin which had resisted--not always successfully--the attacks of
savage Tartars and heretical Poles, the venerable Icons that had many a
time pro