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THE SOCIALISM OF TO-DAY. 
When Alexander II. decreed the abolition of serfdom in 
1861, Bakunin was in hopes that he was going to be the Tsar 
of the peasants, Zemsky Tsar, a name which he gave him in 
the Kolokol. Alexander was to break with the traditions of 
Peter the Great, who had introduced into holy Russia the 
hateful institutions of the West, and to substitute for them the 
equal laws of the Slavs. “ Unhappily,” said he, “ Alexander 
is German, and as such he will never understand the Russia 
of the peasants, Zemskuiu Rossiu.” In a pamphlet entitled 
Romanoff, Pugatcheff, or Pestel (1862), he says, “Whom shall 
we follow? Romanoff, that is to say, Alexander II.; Pugatcheff, 
that is to say, a military chief, such as he who directed the 
insurrection of the Cossacks against Catherine ; or Pestel, that 
is to say, a conspirator who would have killed the Emperor ? ” 
Pestel was one of the leaders of the conspiracy against 
Nicholas I., in 1825. He was arrested and hung. Bakunin 
explains with savage enthusiasm the programme of Panslavism. 
“ Oh ! war against the Germans,” he cries, “ is a good work 
and one indispensable for the Slavs. We must restore liberty 
to our brothers of Poland, of Lithuania, and of the Ukraine, 
and march in a body to the deliverance of the Slavs, who groan 
under the yoke of Teutons and Turks. Alliance with Italy, 
Hungary, Roumania, and Greece against Prussia, Austria, and 
Turkey. Realization of the cherished dream of all Slavs : the 
constitution of the grand free Panslavic Federation.” At this 
time Bakunin was still imbued with the narrow idea of 
nationalities. It was afterwards that he rose to the higher 
conception of the suppression of States, to be henceforth re 
placed by the amorphism of federal autonomous Communes. 
Still hatred for the Germans was, so to speak, in his blood. 
It was never extinguished, and, in particular, it disclosed itself, 
bitter and implacable, in the struggle with Marx. It was 
Bakunin who took the lead in the International from 1870, and 
when it lost all its influence, through the divisions of parties, it 
was the Bakunist Alliance that organized in Europe the propa 
ganda of revolutionary Socialism. 
It is in the two countries where the working classes are best 
organized for the struggle, England and Germany, that the