Publicists of Katkov's Line against the Left Radicalism (Second Half of the 1880s)

Abstract

M. N. Katkov considered assisting the authorities in the fight against the revolution to be one of the main tasks of the conservative press. Initially, Katkov believed Russian nihilism to be a consequence of the Polish intrigue. But first attempts of revolutionaries to kill Alexander II showed that the revolution is of an inward nature. By the end of the 1860s, the theme of the Polish intrigue fades away from the antinihilistic discourse. Both Katkov and his staff were looking for the roots of the revolution within Russian society itself. At the turn of the 1870s – 1880s, anti-revolutionary pamphlets written by N. A. Lyubimov, N. N. Golitsyna, P. P. Tsitovich, M. F. De-Poulet had a great resonance. But there were pamphlets of a different kind in this period. One of them was Review of the Social-Revolutionary Movement in Russia by S. S. Tatischev. The publication was not intended for the general public, and this gave the author some freedom (in particular, he recognized the validity of some theses stated by the ideologists of socialism), but he regarded Russian nihilists as misfits. I. F. Cyon’s approach was similar. Since mid-1870’s Cyon lived abroad, thus he, too, had an opportunity to see Russian revolutionism within the European context. The establishment of the republic in France had only proved, in his opinion, all the feebleness of the Left. Equally contemptuous of the French republicans was Katkov’s main correspondent in Paris, N. V. Shcherban. In his correspondence he drew a vivid panorama of the revolutionary events of the early 1870s. In 1887, he published his pamphlet entitled Political Debauchery, attacking both Narodnaya Volya with their theoreticians and Marxist ideas penetrating into the Russian revolutionary milieu. Relying on the materials of the émigré press, Shcherban convincingly demonstrated the weakness of the theory of revolutionary nihilism.